Nothing wrong with the sentence grammatically or semantically (stylistically is a different matter).

Try reading when undrunk. Or after finishing school ;-)

Yeah, a lot of science funders mandate and/or facilitate open access publishing. The problem is that most of this goes to 'hybrid' journals, which means that the university still needs to pay a subscription to the journal. This leads to the publisher being paid twice (by the taxman): once for publishing (APC), and once for the subscription. It also means there is still no free and open "database" of public knowledge. The current "plan S" goes further than this requiring publication is fully open access journals)

(interestingly, the association of Dutch Universities (VSNU) reached a deal with the big publishers a while ago that allowed Dutch researchers to publish open access for free, in return for keeping our subscriptions to their journals)

You're right that it costs money to archive, index, screen (and for journals, type-set and proofread) articles. However, the costs are now really low compared to the printing-press days, and the opportunity cost of keeping the articles behind a pay wall are big.

I'm a scientist at a good research university, so I can access almost all articles anyways through our university subscriptions. However, I very often get stuff from sci-hub just because its easier than dealing with proxies, logging on, etc. But worst of all, I can't do automatic text analysis of all our articles to e.g. write my own alerts, detect trends, search articles, do systematic review, write a machine learning system for filtering relevant articles, etc etc;

Now, the publishers of course try to offer these kinds of services to stay relevant, but (1) no publisher has all the journals, as there is still competition; and (2) as a scientist I think it's really problematic to rely on someone else's black box to decide what 'relevance' means.

So, I fully agree with the principle that science should be open because it was taxpayer funded and the current system just forks over money to Elsevier but for me the opportunities for improving the scientific process once all articles are openly available are at least as important.

Same here: most journals originated with our international scientific associations, but got into the hands of international publishers because of the difficulty of publishing and distributing when most of this happened. Impactful journals are generally relatively old as it takes time to build a reputation, so most were established before online publishing and open access were things.

Most of the real work is indeed done without cost to the journal: researching, writing, reviewing, deciding, (substance) editing. The remainder (copy-editing, type setting, indexing/archiving) is indeed done by the journal/publisher, and these costs need to be recouped somehow.

Example: I'm in the process of starting a community-owned open access journal. Renting a server and installing OJS (open journal systems, an FOSS submission management system) is probably around 100$ per year. Our publisher (a university press) does the type setting and indexing/archiving for us for 250$ per article, which is their cost (they don't make a profit). Of course that also pays for a bit of overhead on their side.

So, we can either charge and APC of 250$ per article (which is one tenth of what some commercial journals ask), but we are currently trying to get sponsored by academic institutions: if each chips in 1000$ per year, we quickly have enough funding to allow us to waive the APC (which will help attract submissions, especially while we are still building our reputation / need to get indexed etc).

Why is this comment marked troll?

I am a European left-wing public transportation enthousiast, and I completely agree with the question/premise.

NY has an incredibly high and dense population. The bedrock makes tunneling easy, and the lack of space makes undeground transportation a sensible option. Fares of $2.75 are not ridiculously cheap (e.g. Tokyo fares start at $1.50; London at $3.50; paris $2). So why aren't they making money?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... gives an interesting overview of the profitability of metro systems, expressed in % of cost met by fares (so >100% is profitable, 100% is subsidized). Hong Kong metro, which is not entirely incomparable, somehow is very profitable with mostly cheaper tickets and excellent service. Amsterdam metro, a much smaller place and much more difficult to tunnel, is subsidized but has 88% fare recovery. New York's metro fares cover less than half (47%) of costs.

It's a fair question to ask why that is? Material too old? Too large influence of local politicians to keep unprofitable routes going? Too few people pay the fare?
 

Note that for the Netherlands, fees are only "low" (2k a year) for EU students. Non-EU students are not subsidized and pay full fees (determined by the institution rather than the government). This is generally around 10k a year, so still low by US standards, but shockingly high by German standards...

As a corollary, tuition has gone up to a level that is nonsensical for the purposes of education. In the Netherlands the real cost of university is about 10k euro per year (of which the taxpayer pays about 80%), depending on study programme (bachelors are cheaper than masters because of scale; medicine is more expensive than history; etc). Now, the global top-10 universiteit are not in the Netherlands, but a number of Dutch universities are in the top-100.

10k a year is something you can save for, or even something you can earn on the side if you are OK with working hard. 60k a year for 3-4 years is not something you can save for as a young person, and not something you can earn waiting tables next to your study. So (unless you have a rich parent) your choices as loans or financial aid.

Of course, what you are paying for is exclusivity, brand name recognition, and an elite network. These might be worth those kinds of sums, especially if you have dreams of grandeur; but if your ambition is a happy middle class life I think going into 6 figure debt is not going to be worth it.

Or someone who assumes that the stock market will crash quickly, which will force the Fed to lower interest rates again, which will mean almost all asset classes will lose value over the coming month.

Not OP, but I'm pretty sure the answer is 'yes': the whole point is that it is not 299,792,458.00, or 299,792,458.000, but *exactly* 299,792,458, so with as many zeroes after it as you wish that are actually significant.

I was talking with a professor of computer science about whether senior scientists still have time to do actual programming themselves. He told me he programs in a high-level programming language called phd...

Also remember this article is about Israel. Haifa to Eilat is 450km, and there's pretty much nothing longer you could drive. Any two places excluding the Negev desert you can do round trip, including e.g. Haifa to Beersheba. The borders to Lebanon and Syria are closed. Theoretically you can drive to Jordan and Egypt, but almost no one ever does. So, while in the US 300 miles might not be all one ever drives in a day, in Israel I'm pretty sure it covers most use cases :)

From https://www.theguardian.com/fo...: (with a nice infographic :) )

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And finally, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...:

I couldn't find good statistics on energy costs of mining and transporting coal, pumping up and refining oil, and pumping up gas but I'm sure they're on the wiki somewhere :). Also, no idea of the energy cost of assembling the batteries vs an ICE but I would assume over the total lifetime of the car it should be negligible.

In any case, the most "optimistic" comparison (from the EV point of view) it gets total fossil-to-wheels efficiency of .6*.8=48%. The most pessimistic is .37*.8=30%. The former figure is lower than total ICE efficiency, while the latter figure is comparable. The statistics from the Guardian link above (which have the ICE use 3.7 times the energy per distance traveled) seems to be close to the 20% vs 80% comparison.

All in all, there does seem evidence for assuming that an EV will get better total energy efficiency, but it will be more like 1.5-2x as efficiency and not an order of magnitude better. Of course, an EV fleet gives better options for generating power - ICEs can only use fossil fuels or biofuels (which are problematic in many cases), while EVs can use anything that generates electricity. Especially solar seems a good idea for Israel.

Living in Europe (and having lived in HK) I'm afraid this is mostly true. Public transportation is almost never optimal because it does not follow the optimal route and doesn't stop where you need it to and/or stops where you don't need it to. Advantages are of course lower energy use per person-mile and less effort required while riding.

I take it as a mark of civilization that I have public transport options available to me, both trams to get around town and trains to go to neighbouring towns, but in my commute I cherish my private transportation. In my case, that's 30 minutes on a bike, which is most of my regular exercise*. The nice thing is that e-bikes (going up to 30 mph now) are making a bike commute a more plausible alternative for people living up to say 20 miles out.

However, a perfect form of transportation for non-local travel is some form of electric self-driving car powered by fairy dust. Until that time, public cars and public transport both have drawbacks...

* and yes it's fine in winter too, the poster somewhere above is just a sissy :)

Programming, motherfucker, do you speak it?

They claim to value: Responding to change

They really value: Instability and plausible deniability

We fucking do: Programming, motherfucker!