The market for the distribution of peer-reviewed academic journals fascinates me. It is ripe for disruption.
More often than not, the content that gets published is created by the same institutions that are forced to pay for Elsevier's services. Elsevier acts as the middleman. Institutions pay academics to produce journal articles. After production and peer-review, ownership of the scholarly work is transferred over to a publisher. The institution must then pay to reacquire the same content they helped produce. In the past this made sense as distribution involved printing and mailing thousands of pages worth of journal articles. Nowadays everything is digital, which negates the publisher's purpose.
Is really ripe for disruption? I would think that if it was very ripe that the arXiv would serve a broader purpose than it currently does.
The problem is a social one -- academics want to post their work to well respected journals, because the respect is the currency that their future career advancement runs on.
A market is ripe for disruption when every stakeholder except the entrenched competition wants the product to be different AND that difference is readily available through low-cost solutions.
Typically the new, low-cost solutions that haven't already been tried, are only recently available through new technology.
Given the maturity of the market and the social nature of the business, (even considering how squeaky clean arXiv's brand is versus Paypal's) I think the same people who aren't very excited about putting arXiv papers on their CV are those who would never dream of taking their money out of a big, traditional bank.
As an aside, what increasingly bugs me is the number of programmers who seem to have bought the urban myth that "An green apple" is grammatically correct, and have proceeded to pepper their project documentation with awkward and incorrect statements.
A comment on the issue[1]:
There is a bizarre urban legend of sorts that you're "supposed to" use "an" if the head noun in the noun phrase it determines begins with a vowel sound, rather than the first word in the noun phrase, giving rise to claims that "an green apple" is somehow "technically" correct. Here is a blog post of someone who seems to have gotten this idea. And here is the discussion on Language Log about that blog post.
In any case, the rule is that you use "an" if the next word begins with a vowel sound. Vowel sound is crucial here because many words that begin with vowel letters do not begin with vowel sounds (e.g. user) and vice versa (e.g. hour).
This makes it a kind of sandhi rule for "intrusive N" in English for indefinite articles, avoiding hiatus between the article and the following word.
It is worth noting that Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky are the fathers of modern-day behavioral economics. Their biggest contribution is called Prospect Theory. It goes against everything they teach you in Econ 101 -- the expected utility theory is wrong.
Kahneman won a noble prize in Economics for his work. Sadly, Tversky passed away in 1996 before he could be awarded.
> It goes against everything they teach you in Econ 101 -- the expected utility theory is wrong.
I was rather under the impression that prospect theory was descriptive and not normative. Prospect theory ain't gonna save you and your hyperbolic discounting from being money-pumped, and one of the interesting bits of Ainslie's book, IIRC, was discussing how economic incentives and penalties did shift people closer to normatively-correct discounting and away from preference reversals.
This is a great example why understanding Math is important. It can even help you understand psychological aspects like, why we make the choices we make.
This. I too am VERY interested. My email is andre at garrigo dot net. Please send me any info that I may need to proceed with this. I already live in SF and work for a tech startup, but I am always interested in learning.
It should be a good time. We hope to get a few programmers, designers, artists and anyone else in the area who's interested in meeting like-minded people.
Tonight we will hold an icebreaker. We will also be forming teams. Tomorrow night marks the end of the hackathon. We will have presentations and vote on an audience favorite.
No, that's pure coincidence :) Just seeing the thread now...
The domain was transferred 12 days ago and you have received an email informing you about the successful transfer. Sedo was only sending you a reminder to change the domain owner.
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- Go to class, pay attention, take notes and ask questions.
- Go to TA sections and office hours. Come with questions.
- Do the homework with time (ie not an hour before it's due).
- Start studying for exams 2-3 weeks before the exam date.
But most importantly, you really have to want to get A's. Motivation is key. While your friends are out partying and getting drunk you need to be in the library. Sounds terrible, but that's the point. There is a tradeoff. I just graduated with a B+ average. I know I could have done better, but having a social life was important to me. (Also working for Techmeme took up a considerable amount of my time).
lol. You sound like a professor. Sadly, that is the way to (hopefully) get high marks and waste a great deal of time. There are lots of ways, many of which are completely legitimate and many which are questionable.
Case and point freshman year when you are joining fraternities. Pick one that has a few A+ students in your degree path. All (well most) fraternities keep old notes, quizes, papers, and tests on hand for new brothers. That and if there are brothers who are good students in your degree path, you'll have help at almost any time of day. Sure other people do it too, but frats are a sure bet.
That's just one method. There are plenty of others that work as well.
More often than not, the content that gets published is created by the same institutions that are forced to pay for Elsevier's services. Elsevier acts as the middleman. Institutions pay academics to produce journal articles. After production and peer-review, ownership of the scholarly work is transferred over to a publisher. The institution must then pay to reacquire the same content they helped produce. In the past this made sense as distribution involved printing and mailing thousands of pages worth of journal articles. Nowadays everything is digital, which negates the publisher's purpose.
There is a burgeoning movement toward open access journals. More info on the subject available here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis