Avaktavyam

I can’t find a German-English dictionary for my Palm. Yes, there are some out there but those normally recommended in academia are not available for the Palm.

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J’exprime mes doutes face à cette idée.

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Aiee! Students are suing to be named valedictorian!. I wonder when we’ll start seeing people suing to get literary and scientific prizes or research grants. I can just imagine: “Physicist sues NSF for wrongful rejection of grant request.” Maybe he can also get his dad to beat up the NSF’s dad while he’s at it.

What we’re talking about are not people suing for gross lack of fairness in the selection process but people who were not able to clearly get ahead of the other students, that were actually in a tie or even scored a little lower than other students, and in the end had to rely on lawsuits to get things to go their way. I’ve been in the position of being ranked second by a process that involved some arbitrariness and, yes, it’s disapointing and sometimes you’ve got to wonder about the fairness of the system (and that opens a big can of worms) but I must say that I don’t find the decision of launching a legal battle particularly endearing. Especially for an honor as useless as valedictorian.

Larry Lessig points out the case of the HSRC (Human Sciences Research Council) in South Africa. They offer content for free on the net, and we’re talking about complete books here, but also offer print versions for those who want it. Apparently, making their books available for free has increased the sales of the printed versions.

Unfortunately, the HSRC does not seem to offer books directly related to my research interests. If it did however, its authors would benefit from an advantage of visibility over those of their colleagues that are not available for free on the web. I’m speaking intuitively here, but I think plain visibility is half the battle when it comes to ensure the propagation of one’s research (the other half being the quality of the work itself). If no one sees a treatise, no one will read it. The harder it is to get – because it costs money to obtain, because forms must be filled to get it, because it requires a trip to the library, etc – the less visible it is.

The gazelles are rising, are the dinosaurs taking notice?

Roland Piquepaille wonders whether we should worry about the possibility of hundred of thousands of fake computer science papers sitting online. I don’t think we need to worry that much. I address this from the larger issue of fake scholarly papers rather than just computer science.

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David’s comments prompt more discussion on how the Palm may or may not be used in a scholarly setting. The vague focus of this entry is offline reading of documents on the Palm.

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Ramblings and rejoicing that the Dutch are releasing their research for free. I explain, with some details, why I’m happy about this. I give the example of Questia as a case of bad publishing.
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The good and the bad about owning a Palm Zire 72… specifically how scholarly uses are not well supported yet.

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