Stupendous. I have a hard time imagining that this isn't the turning point in the OA battle, at least in the U.S. and certainly in the biomedical sciences. The U.K. already has Wellcome and others with an OA mandate. The mandate (assuming it's enforced or researchers are worried about it being enforced) will encourage the infrastructure of OA and cause spillover effects. By infrastructure here I don't necessarily mean institutional repositories, as those are fairly pervasive at this point at major institutions, but rather largely the knowledge of how to self-archive among researchers. If they have to do it for half their papers and discover that it only takes two minutes (and eventually they find distant colleagues contacting them who never would have otherwise), that dramatically lowers the barriers to doing it for non-mandated (e.g. non-NIH-funded) articles.

--Ari

Nifty mix from CC/Lessig.

Ari

Are leaked BitTorrent releases being used to gain knowledge about show quality? That's funny, because I believe there was a certain Penn professor who had a similar idea years ago that was told he was crazy and didn't know the business.

Failure cascades. Interesting due to its potential to use real video games to do good social science. I think this approach holds more promise than building fake games to do so, because even with large grants you can't compete with the resources put into a commercial game. There's a classic tradeoff between the large volume of difficult-to-interpret data which comes from observational studies vs. small amounts of highly detailed data which comes from experimental studies which seemsrelevant here.

--Ari

Slingbox is adding a fair use sharing feature. Check out the video, about 3/4 of the way in.

Ari

Un^H^Hbelievable.

Ari

Just to clarify the last post, I don't mean "amateur" as a slight. Quite the contrary. In contrast to conaisseur or cogniscenti, the word amateur derives not from knowledge of a discipline but from love of it. In some sense it's a false dichotomy, as the incredible fund of knowledge on the Amateur Telescope Makers list I frequented almost a decade ago makes clear. Given a choice (not that I'm in a position to be doing much auditioning at this point in my life) I'd choose a candidate whose knowledge is driven by passion over one who is simply knowledgeable any day. Dr. Lopez, for one, espouses similar views.

Why bring this up now? I just ran across a great post about amateurism in chess.

--Ari