I had not seen peerj, it looks better than some of the others, and their $99 fee is encouraging, even if optimistic - what happens when the work load gets large, which can happen if they atttract many authors.. There are other journals of easy access and low editorial standard, which is the 'them' I referred to. By the use of a pool of reviewers peerj has a shot at kicking the established journals to the curb = good. In so doing peerj will improve the ecology and hopefully the lower grade journals will smarten up and improve or go away.
I am sure the established journals will fight back, with deep pockets - they have literally billions, and may even fully match peerj and other competent free journals for five or ten years to starve them of good papers. Will they do that? When they see the buzzards circling overhead, they will find a motive.
I am very much in favor of journals like peerj, and I have seen the harm the expensive journals in the third and even the second world have done to deprive their scholars of the books and paper they need. I am happy to see that the modern use of the internet and scanners has spread all expensive journals and books to all these less wealthy countries via scanners and e-mails. This is good.
And while I am on that, the MIT free online university and others like the Khan academy need open source texts for free, because the journal publishers also have another empire, usually in cahoots with profs, to publish course books for $200 or more, and to make last years book obsolete and worthless, so a new book is needed.
Course books are needed for all college years and disciplines, fully open source, update online, also free.
Will it happen? Here in Toronto the University DEMANDS each freshman buy all his course books, and provide a receipt, or the y are not admitted to school. The prof gets a kickback and the college bookstore gets a kickback. Ever see how badly the students are victimized?
That is why I say the entire crooked system needs to change.
That means recognized degrees from MIT/Khan/Et al, which means an accreditation system needs to evolve, and be paid for. This will start to chip away at these monopolies.
This will be a war, without bullets, on economic grounds. Google can become the friend of all here
Too many badly reviewed articles are published by them.
A lot of people ignore the collateral functions of the so-called 'peer review' system administered by the publisher.
The publication must be read by someone who knows the subject passable. If his first pass finds it acceptable, he must then select from a number of true experts in these matters (the peers or equals to the writer of the paper). He works for a living as a competent editor for that area of research. The peers he choose are sent a copy of the paper to review and criticize, if not acceptable, the comments are passed back to the author for him to respond. After his responses to fix the flaws, it goes back to the panel and so on until rejected of published. The review mechanism is needed to avoid total BS being published. The publishers have created this nice and profit by it - some say excessively, and I agree. So some way must be found to pay for this. Page fees are the initial solution - the author pays a fee, and this is spread among the experts involved.
As for an Archive, in the USA, the Library of Congress can do this, as long as a proper indexing method is used so that the paper does not become a needle in a haystack. It should be google indexed. Perhaps Google will fund this via ads, because all the biological supply houses will place biological ads, and the same with all the other disciplines.
In fact, this could become a gold mine for Google and at the same time serve PLOS and the research community very well. Large data bases of terabytes of particle data would not be stored, the publisher would grant access to those who wanted to down load it (a precious few will want terabytes of particle data)
So why not someone who has a pipeline to google give them a whistle, they might leap at the chance. It is a natural fit.
Beam divergence is a function of wavelength. There are no efficient generator of microwaves at a high enough frequency to be received by a field of synchronously rectifying 'rectennas.
Bear in mind, and over-spray would warm water, or burn houses and people.
http://www.ehow.com/how_584952...
Streaming was originally set up to allow a 1:1 dialog between the content owner, in both audio and video formats, with the person receiving not permitted to make a copy - Hah, that lasted 11 minutes and now we can copy a stream at will.
So we are left with the relic of streaming, and zero benefit to the content owners or to the buyers (who suffer buffering, etc), and the content owners must marshall the resources to send tens of thousands of streams of the same content, on scattered time phases, which blocks any possible efficiency of scale.
How can this be rectified?
I believe a form of torrent should be made that allocated a unique hash number to each transmitted block, so that the blocks could be seeded to many hosts and when the receiver wants them his torrent program marshalls them in the correct order to play a stream.
In the best case a 1-2 minute buffer would serve, a worst case would need a deeper buffer.
When a client signed up for "The Gladiator", if he was the first to buy, the system would start to stream these sequential blocks, and know where they were. It would also assess the network the data would traverse and present the customer with a screen display that said, "building stream and buffering - stream will play in x seconds", and if nothing changes that x seconds buffer would be deep enough so the client would never break out of the buffer. As more clients came on board, they would also start to stream and also have access to closer and prior streamers and they could use their data in sequence = a smaller buffer time. Overlaid on this is the clients "last mile", on which the depth of his buffer would be determined. He knows his last mile and will accept this.
The content owners have been so screwed over (only in their minds) by torrents that this would need a new name, like "sequential multi cast", or some such to make it palatable to them.
This method might be the saving of the industry. In fact, it seems so obvious that it must have been thought of and be in use already?
Well, if the Aboriginals had a plot description for all of North America, they would have been able to see off those Brits.
The fast talking, slick aliens will come first, looking to steal our DNA codes and loose rocks in the Oort belt, so we need all this stuff well trammelled for when we face them in Galactic Courts
We need to get the ground work done so that IPv8 can be introduced smoothly - the galaxy demands to be properly served...
Yes, another species endangered by the governments.
Tort reform lacking, plane builders are driven out by fake litigation costs.
What do you expect when you elect lawyers to run things they feed their brethren...
Yes, no need for thermal heat, not mobile = de factor low energy, still they whip those cilia around
Well, I think chicken processing waste would have too much blood, cellular contents etc, and might well contribute to a bacterial or dinoflagellate bloom (red tide = toxic).
Finely ground crab shells, shrimp shells and even ground cellulosic waste that had energy content the coral polyps could digest and use would provide energy to process excess inert fines.
Obviously, we do not want to add one problem onto another, so some research into the ramifications of the inert plume and a potential feeding additive to sustain the polyps to see if it can be done.
I see they say they will dump far from the coral areas, have they made any studies of plum migration via currents? Will they stop dumping when a cyclonic storm is gathering? These cyclones thrash to to 10 meters very thoroughly and stir up natural fines - how does the coral deal with these natural fines? Can they find a maximum amount of man made fines the polyps can live with? and make rules and enforce them to save the corals?
There are many questions that need answering before we dump these fines.
A lot depends on the amount of 'fines', very fine particles or clays that float in the water column and can drift for miles. These fines can coat the coral animal (which is busy filtering particles from the water column and eating the organic ones,) If the floating feed changes from 50% organic to 2% organic, the animals internal systems might become fatigued from dumping waste and not getting enough energy to fuel this waste separation - the animal starves.
They might have to place water curtains to constrain the fines, which can only be done in low current areas, or add some flocculating agent to speed-settle the fines.
The good thing is the Aussies claim they will make sure there are no wide ranging fines to foul corals - will they be right? What will happen with a cyclonic storm? Cyclonic storm happen a few times in the year and they fill the water column with waste fines - which the coral deal with - perhaps because storm fines also have organic content. Perhaps the way to assist the coral animal is to add a little extra fine food to 'pay' for the extra work the coral animal has to perform in processing useless fines.?
Yes, I agree, this might come to pass in 50 years by progress in solar.
The only way it will happen by 2030 would be if mankind is facing doom from global warming causes the major countries to send in smart bombs to eliminate all coal and oil/gas fired generation of electricity via military force.
It might come to that.
The world need to start to use super-insulation (as used in Dewar and vacuum bottles) and LED illumination. Buildings equipped this way are heated by human body heat, and need heat exchangers to cool in winter and summer. Solar power can operate the heat exchangers. Air conditioning? The only way is to use thermal averaging with buried salt water tanks in temperate areas. In the tropics, evaporative cooling might work, but these places may not be habitable if we have severe warming unless active air conditioning is used.
Unless we face some unpleasant facts, and deal with them, some of the aspects of the future as portrayed by Modessit in his Ecology based novels may indeed come to pass,
I think nothing is in the air = all underground, and new underground work quite costly. This a rural area, so with large lots and the need for all light, heat, water, power and phone underground from a long time ago, adding cable, data, fiber, etc can be quite costly.
As to their first costs being excessive, I suggest you ask the OP if he has some sort of breakdown on this. There may be some small town corruption going on??
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz
