Sinabro

Perhaps we should considerably reduce the power of copyright in academic journals (via Slashdot), but we should do it through reasoned discourse, not mindless fear-mongering:

We’ve discussed a few times over the years how copyright gets in the way of academic work. Journals (who get all of their writing and reviewing totally for free) insist on holding the copyright for those works in many cases. I’ve even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn’t even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim. It leads to wacky situations where academics either ignore the fact that the journals they published in hold the copyright on their work, or they’re forced to jump through hoops to retain certain rights.

Oh, please. Data is not copyrighted. I am fairly sure they are not even copyrightable in most cases, even though a particular presentation of the data might be, especially if it shows some evidence of creativity. One must be either fairly stupid or have a really horrible legal department to get an idea that data in a published journal article is copyrighted and cannot re-use or even cite the data (who wouldn’t want citation? citation increases the impact factor of the journal) without “re-doing the experiment”. (Say, how does one know whether the “new data” is from new experiment or the old one? Aren’t they supposed to be the same within experimental error?)

Of course, I can only speak for the situation in physics, but I am fairly sure the situation is as bleak as presented in this page, at least not in natural sciences. APS (which does retain copyright) and Nature (which does not retain copyright) both allow the author to do pretty much whatever they want with the author-formatted preprints of the article. The allowances are less on the journal-produced, professional versions of the article, but that’s understandable (that particular copy represents the combined effort of the author and editor) and does not have that much impact on open access as long as one doesn’t mind the amateurish document formatting by many scientists (just look at arXiv.org).

On the whole, I do think copyright in U.S. does need to be reformed, and particularly so in academic journal publishing (textbooks have … different goals so it’s not so clear whether academic textbooks should be treated any differently from other books). But we will gain nothing by inciting unreasonable fear in the sheeple and eroding our own credibility. After all, don’t we believe that our cause is strong enough to prevail when we present the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (as well as it can be determined from data and statistics, anyway) to the public?

President Obama seems to think that we can end the nuclear era by simply “leading by example”, cutting our stockpile and hoping that others would follow.

How is this exactly supposed to work? When you are held up by a robber, do you fall prostrate on the ground and hope the robber will do the same?

The real solution to nuclear weapons lies in science. What science has wrought, science will destroy. The real end to nukes will only come with technology designed to neutralize it.

So, what can neutralize nukes? In the past, projects such as “Star Wars” focused on the delivery system. But that can easily be bypassed with development of some other delivery system (such as a well-shielded suitcase nuke).

What if we could target the radioactive elements, such as U-235 itself? Nuclear weapon, by design, consists of sub-critical pieces of radioactive elements. What if we could induce decay of these elements while they remain as sub-critical pieces? If we could do something like this by methods that work from long distance (I don’t know … maybe some kind of gamma ray or X-ray bombardment?), we could decimate the nuclear stockpile of other nations as we reduce our own. We can diffuse nuclear bombs that future terrorists may carry.

But then, I’m not a particle physicist, so maybe I’m just rambling and saying things that make absolutely no sense physically.

Call me a crack pot, but why does it sound like to me, that Hawking radiation is a way to get around the second law of thermodynamics?

This is the scenario I’m thinking of: if you have a moderately sized black hole, if Hawking radiation does exist, it will radiate its mass (hence energy) away in the form of that radiation. So, if we did have a black hole, we can, periodically drop a cold, room-temperature object (i.e. things with no more free energy) into that black hole, which, like furnace, will provide a high-temperature radiation. But unlike a furnace, this is a total mass-to-energy conversion.

This sounds too good to be true. What am I missing here?

Here’s an interesting item from my email:

CAREER PLANNING

SUSANNA GORDON (MA '89, PhD '93)

Tuesday November 13
12:30 PM to 1:30 PM
XXX Xxx XxXxxxx
(pizza and drinks served at 12:15)
Susanna Gordon is the Manager of the Systems Studies Department at Sandia
National Laboratories, a developer of science-based technologies that support
national security. Gordon has played an integral role in improving airport
preparedness against chemical and biological attacks and other
counter-terrorism programs. She will share with us her thoughts on research
and the many opportunities within Homeland Security.

Science-based technology? Geez! I wonder, is it to distinguish it from Faith-based technology that TSA is so proudly employing? I don’t think I need to listen any more.