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Comment: Re: Bad science (Score 1) 152

There's no claim that health was correlated with the presence of trees.

From the summary of the article::

'Well my basic hypothesis was that trees improve people's health.

Yes - that's the hypothesis, but the evidence to support it doesn't come from an observed correlation between trees and health, as previous people have said that would be confounded will all kinds of other factors which would be impossible to measure. The evidence comes from the observed correlation between the pest and health, which is presumably (and this is big assumption) not confounded with other factors, with the presence of trees as the only possible mediating factor.

Comment: Re: Bad science (Score 3, Insightful) 152

There's no claim that health was correlated with the presence of trees. The claim is that health is correlated with the presence of something that kills the trees, effectively at random (or at least in a way which is uncorrelated with anything that also directly affects human health) making this quite a neat natural experiment. Your arguments about other confounding factors don't hold in this case. look up natural experiments or instrumental variables if you want to know more about the method.

Comment: Re:Researchers don't care about open access (Score 2) 172

by stranger_to_himself (#42820091) Attached to: Researchers Opt To Limit Uses of Open-access Publications

1) Other people's money: Most open access journals I've come across in my field charge >$1000 to let you publish in them (as opposed to traditional journals which generally charge nothing). This is pretty much not an option in the current cash-strapped academic environment, funding bodies don't like to see their money spent on things like this, they want to pay for research.

I don't know about other funding bodies but every project funded by the EU framework program I've been involved with had a budget for dissemination which covers things like conferences, exhibitions and publication of papers and books.

Most charity funders refuse to pay these - also the Medical Research Council as of this year stopped people putting open access fees explicitly into budgets (even though they mandate open access). The universities have to find the money themselves.

Comment: Re:blanket statement: evidence please (Score 4, Interesting) 172

by stranger_to_himself (#42819901) Attached to: Researchers Opt To Limit Uses of Open-access Publications

and what field are you in? Sharing culture varies radically depending on discipline.

Medicine. I agree it's less open that many disciplines. Like I said, I think open access is generally a good thing. But in my vast experience, people actually doing research genuinely don't care, as they know that people at other universities will be able to read their work whether its open or not.

As an aside - a lot of universities are rejecting the 'Gold' open access standard (the author pays version) because it is horrendously expensive for authors (usually 1000-2000 per article). They are instead preferring the 'Green' open access model, where the journal keeps the copyright to the final copyedited version, but lets researchers distribute their own version on a personal or institutional website. This is probably the way of the future because we can't keep paying stupidly high open access publishing fees.

Comment: Re:Shallow cut (Score 1) 172

by stranger_to_himself (#42819843) Attached to: Researchers Opt To Limit Uses of Open-access Publications

This will change once they realize that their number (1) is positively correlated with open access; more easily available equals more read equals more citations equals higher impact.

Well of course. As I said its about impact factor. If and when open access journals get decent impact factors, researchers will be more inclined to use them.

Comment: Re:blanket statement: evidence please (Score 4, Interesting) 172

by stranger_to_himself (#42819635) Attached to: Researchers Opt To Limit Uses of Open-access Publications

Evidence please. Or we're just slinging personal anecdotes here. Which wouldn't get us published in a decent peer-reviewed journal ;-)

Well it is anecdotal, but I've been in literally hundreds of 'which journal should I send my paper to' discussions (I've been doing this a long time), and the factors that come up are (in this order) (1) impact factor (2) readership, ie which society is the journal affiliated with (3) likely success (4) cost of publication. Nobody has ever once said to me "I want to send to journal X because they are open access".

I think most would agree in principle that open access is a good thing, but when it comes to having your work seen, read and acknowledged by the right people it completely goes out the window. This is medical research btw, different fields may differ.

Comment: Researchers don't care about open access (Score 1, Flamebait) 172

by stranger_to_himself (#42819475) Attached to: Researchers Opt To Limit Uses of Open-access Publications

Researchers don't generally care about their papers being open access or not. They use open access journals because they are easy to get published in (they are mostly 'author pays' publications with very low standards) or because their funder mandates it.

Comment: Re:Another law (Score 1) 58

Preventing the release of your own information? Identification by genotype is a very real privacy issue, but what happened here is NOT the fault of researchers. People seeking familial ancestry information, posted some genotype information online PUBLICLY, in the hopes of finding a relative (in this case, fathers, who can be traced by the Y chromosome).

It would have been enough for the subject's family to have posted the genealogy information - the subject may have known nothing about it. Still, you are right its not the fault of the researchers (as its impossible to fully anonymise a dataset while retaining its research usefulness).

Comment: Re:Did Zuckerberg ever have to get past HR? (Score 5, Insightful) 716

by stranger_to_himself (#42169425) Attached to: Just Say No To College

I agree that it would be much more sensible and fair if you were always judged by what you know and not by what title you have, but unfortunately that is not always the case.

I'd also like to judge people on their ability to think, to listen to others, research existing knowledge, to appraise and weight up ideas, and this is a large part of what college teaches. This goes beyond 'knowing stuff' and 'people skills' (although these are undoubtedly important).

Comment: Re:MOD PARENT UP!!! (Score 1) 943

by stranger_to_himself (#42152981) Attached to: Is It Time For the US To Ditch the Dollar Bill?

Which is all well and good until the first asteroid miner brings home a literal gigatonne of gold.

It occurs to me that there's really only three fundamental commodities: Time * People = Happiness. Anything we can produce requires an investment of time by one or more people, whether it's six people spending eight hours sweating away over a forge or one person spending one second pushing a button in an air-conditioned office, and everything we do in life affects our happiness.

This used to be true (ie every cost is really a labour cost) but with increasing scarcity of food/energy/water/real estate etc and and over-supply of labour and machines to do all the work I don't think time*people is your real commodity any more.

What the world *really* needs is a good Automatic Bicycle Sharpener.

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