And also definition of 'socialisation'. When I was a late teen, I spent most of my time online chatting with friends on IM and IRC. It was my way of keeping in touch with friends after school, and wasn't limited by who could borrow the car or whether the mall was closed at midnight. We could chat about whatever it was we were interested in at the, whilst simultaneously play games or surfing the web or doing a dozen other things. I'm sure that facebook (for all its faults) is filling that same void for modern teens. I'll wager they're being more social and having more interactions than every before... it's just that their parents don't see it because they're not part of that world.

It's more a case of regaining entry after being locked out of your own house, rather than someone else breaking in.

I concur. One low-quality copy ought to do it.

Everyone knows that copy infringement is stealing - that means they must have stolen (and therefore possess) that much worth of property and so are perfectly capable of paying such a fine. Obviously.

When importing an ODT into Google Docs, it is converted to a format internal to Google Docs. The blog post explains that in WebODF / ownCloud Documents, conversely, no conversion occurs.

For example, WebODF does not support displaying columns yet, but if you have loaded a document with columns, after saving, the columns will still be there.

Since the document is part of the DOM, you can edit it programmatically with JavaScript. So adding functionality for scientific citations is as easy as any website programming. You can do it the clean way and use operations, or you can change the DOM directly. (The latter is not advised in collaborative mode.) So yes, integrating with Zotero, should not be hard.

Adding WebODF into a workflow for collaboratively writing research proposals could be useful. One author adds 'fancy' stuff in e.g. LibreOffice and the other contributors make corrections and additions in a web version of the document.

The server side can be really simple. In a real-time collaboration scenario, there needs to be conflict resolution. The code for that is implemented in JavaScript as well and, in the case of ownCloud Documents, runs in the clients.

Each change to the document is sent as a numbered operation to the server. If a change with the same number has already arrived, the latest changes are sent back to the client. The client then modifies/rebases the original change on top of the new changes and send the change again.

The server stores each individual numbered change for the document as well as snapshots of the document for certain revisions. With some work, one could even store the change (audit trail) inside the document.

AbiCollab certainly precedes by many years. WebODF is newer and has two advantages of AbiCollab.net.

First, WebODF runs just in a browser with no need to install it locally. It runs completely on a webpage. That's why it can by integrated into any web-based workflow. E.g. a user could generate a document by filling in a questionnaire and edit a document afterwards with WebODF.

Second, there is no document conversion. A document that is loaded into LibreOffice, AbiWord, OpenOffice, or Microsoft Office, edited and saved again, will be significantly different from the original document. Features may be lost or saved differently. Since WebODF just loads the ODF XML into the DOM and saves back the DOM, the document is unchanged, except for the places that have been edited. This is even true when the documents contains features, e.g. xforms, that are not supported yet.

Actually, it's the other way around. Take the Loch Ness Monster, for example. It can be clearly and obviously proven to exist: catch one, point to it and say "See, there it is!" It's very obvious proof. However, I cannot similarly disprove its existence: I cannot point to the absence of the monster and say "See, there it is not!" Perhaps the monster is just somewhere else you haven't yet looked?

I would say these are exactly the sorts of questions we should be asking, and they should be able to answer.

Yes - and it can also make you very sick at the same time. People have starved themselves to death whilst remaining obese.

To simply say "eat less, you'll lose weight!" makes as much sense as saying "just remove all the microorganisms from your blood stream, and you'll be cured!" Simple, right? Whilst technically correct, unfortunately it is not at all a useful suggestion. The sooner people stop deluding themselves with trivial knee-jerk responses that tacitly blame the patient, the sooner we can make progress to finding an actual solution for a real problem. Remember: if it was that easy, nobody would be fat.

Your personal physiology is identical to everyone elses', and so what worked for you will also work for every single other person on earth? Great! Spread the news! With this astounding insight, the obesity epidemic will be cured in no time!

Wait? What's that? You mean the metabolic pathways for storing and releasing energy are complex and very different from person to person? You mean that the body actively fights to retain fat stores when less energy is available resulting in crippling pain, headaches, listlessness, inability to cocentrate and insomnia? You mean to say that obesity is caused by numerous interrelated factors that each require corrective action in concert to be effective? It even says so in TFA? Well shucks!

Who'd have thought an illness that 100 million people are unable to cope with might actually be difficult to cure?? No, no! That can't be it. Let's just say they're lazy gluttonous porkchops so we don't have to find solutions to a difficult problem. So much easier for us to sleep well at night.

The problem here is one of correlation vs causation. Someone is not always right simply because they are the 'expert'; likewise, someone is not always wrong simply because they are a layperson. However, when it comes to knowing what you're talking about, there is a strong dependence on experience and familiarity with the subject matter. The vast majority of the time we might expect that an expert who devotes all of their efforts to studying a problem will have some advantage over those who engage with a topic briefly. That is why we value expertise in the first place. It does sometimes happen that experts get it wrong while laypeople get it right, but it's pretty unusual.

My post-doc was the most grueling and difficult thing I've ever done. Two and a half years of crushingly long days, hard deadlines and uncertain future. I guess I got my faculty job out of it (and traded up to the same thing again for another 5 years before tenure review)... so I guess it's worth it?

Now I'm left wondering if tenure is even worth the struggle at the end. Bear in mind, tenure in Australia is not a "secure job for life" as people in the US seem to think it is. We're actually having a lot of difficulty convincing newly minted grads to come and do PhDs when they see all the junior faculty are deeply bitter, cynical and exhausted. But hey, I build robots for a living, so I tell myself when I see those same grads getting jobs that pay more than mine does with zero years experience..