firehose

For anyone in the publishing industry looking to get rich quick—or, at the very least, turn a profit—the secret to success is in academic publishing. Or, to be more exact, the five for-profit academic publishers that now control more than half of the science research produced worldwide.

According to a new study by researchers at the University of Montreal, 53% of all published research papers in 2013 in the natural and medical sciences were produced by just five publishing companies. That’s up from the 20% that the top five publishers controlled 40 years earlier, in 1973.

The economics are wildly favorable for the publishers, who essentially take the free labor of academics and researchers (the authors and peer-reviewers of scholarly work are unpaid for their contributions), and sell it back to the universities that employ these authors, often at a very high cost.

“It used to make sense when they had to print the journals,” Stefanie Haustein, one of the authors of the University of Montreal study, says of the hefty subscription prices. But the majority of these journals available digitally, production costs have shrunk significantly for the big publishing companies, which have been buying up smaller, stand-alone journals that have not managed the switch from print to digital.

“If they can manage one hundred journals, they can manage a thousand,” Haustein says of the biggest publishing firms. “The only additional thing they need is more server space.”

The big firms mainly sell packaged subscriptions, meaning that universities (the primary market for the publishers) spend millions of dollars buying hundreds of esoteric journals just to gain access to the journals they actually want. This presents a difficult choice for universities: either pay the subscription fees—often at the expense of funding more research—or cut off their researchers from the journals, which function as the marketplace of scholarly debate.

Haustein says the solution may be an all-out paradigm shift in which the scientific community begins to publish content itself, online, and at no cost to the reader. Researchers could, for example, figure out a way to coordinate peer reviews, where a new paper is critiqued and reviewed by other academics in the field (an important step for giving legitimacy to new research), without the help of the big publishing firms.

The question, though, is whether anyone will be brave enough to take the leap.

“If you ask a young researcher to change where they publish, they will say ‘I want a tenure-track job,'” Haustein says.

For now, these two things are very much at odds—because, as Haustein explains, “The whole scientific reward system is still linked to the prestige of the journal.”

What this means is that the big publishing houses are not only the owners of important academic journals, but gatekeepers to success in academia. And that’s a situation crying out for much further study.

Watch this on a smartphone in the YouTube app, then come back here.

To promote its new soccer cleats, Nike has made a virtual reality video of Brazilian soccer phenom Neymar scoring a goal for the national team (something he won’t actually be doing any time soon). Move the video around, and you’ll see Couthino backing up on a defender, and you can follow the arc that a soccer ball travels as Neymar rainbows around the opposition.

In the end, Neymar scores a pretty tame goal—especially by his standards—but you can watch tens of thousands of adoring virtual fans cheer the goal, as if you had been starting for Brazil. This promotional video hints at something potentially bigger than scoring for the Canarinho: The future of virtual reality—at least the near future of it—might be sitting in our pockets.

As Quartz has reported before, companies like Google and GoPro have been laying the foundation for these types of videos to enter the mainstream. Google announced at its developer conference in May that anyone shooting 360-degree video can upload it directly to YouTube, using its stitching system, Jump. The company also announced that its $20 Google Cardboard headset now works with almost any smartphone. Although far more affordable than its Facebook- and Microsoft-owned competitor headsets likely will be, Cardboard still requires that you cover your face with an awkward, bulky box to enjoy its videos. There may come a point where we don’t find this weird, but for now, it certainly still is.

Nike’s video shows us there might be another way with VR. It might not be as immersive as the Oculus Rift experience, but it’s still pretty fun to play with. The idea isn’t new—some of the earliest games for the iPhone, all way back in 2008, made use of the phone’s built-in accelerometers to open up worlds beyond the four-inch screen as the user moved the phone around—but easy access to 360-degree video could change the sort of content we seek out on mobile.

There soon could be a time—especially as the price of cameras like GoPro’s Freedom 360 drop—when we’re capturing immersive videos instead of static ones at the events that matter to us. Instead of seeing the rectangular video from halfway back at a concert, we could see everything the crowd sees, from every angle.

We could capture first dances at weddings that let family members who couldn’t make it feel like they’re on the dance floor. We could feel like we were flying over the scene if we brought a drone into the equation (something which both GoPro and DJI are working on). All these experiences will live in the YouTube app on your smartphone, available wherever you are, not wherever it’s socially acceptable to don a headset.

At the very least, when more people—not just brands’ marketing departments and media companies—start capturing these sorts of moments in VR, future commutes to work will be a lot less dull.

Good morning! It's your daily roundup of college football stuff.

Oregon came from nowhere to become a power, and the transformation didn't reach high gear until Nike overhauled its image. Sports Illustrated's Andy Staples writes about branding in college football, with the multi-uniformed Ducks a frequent example of its importance.

This stuff works, from grabbing the attention of recruits ...

[Four-star recruit Royce Freeman] figured he should begin paying attention to college football. The biggest game the first Saturday of that season featured a team in white jerseys with purple-and-gold trim (LSU) against a team wearing black uniforms with neon-yellow highlights and a matching O on the side of the helmet. "I wanted to see who would win," says Freeman, now a sophomore tailback at Oregon. "The neon team or the regular-colored team." The neon team did not win, but a seed was planted.

... to making faraway prospects familiar with Oregon coaches, to players feeling ownership of what they're wearing on Saturdays, and even to quarterbacks getting to take advantage of vision-friendly color combinations. There's a reason teams across all sports are taking lessons from the Ducks.

Awk-ward. Jim Harbaugh went on Colin Cowherd's radio show, and things went so poorly, the host hung up. Cowherd was trying to get some normal human answers out of Harbaugh, and unfortunately -- or fortunately, if you like awkward interviews --  Harbaugh is not up for talk radio games.

Sounds easy! Bill Connelly's preview of Texas Tech is pretty simple: They seem to have gotten the air raid thing down, they just need to play significantly better defense and have better luck, and they should be alright. See, simple!

Top Dawg, in a bad way. In terms of resources, location, and recruiting, Georgia should be one of the best in the country, year in and year out. However, since they rode Herschel Walker to a championship in 1980, no program in the country has done so little with so much.

LinkedIn, your No. 1 resource for determining the right candidates for Big 12 expansion.

It's (not) Division I football! Believe it or not, America has a national football team that plays against other countries. Believe it or not, our national team coach is Dan Hawkins. He talked with us about what life is like around the little-known international game.

Someone call the fire marshall! Eleven programs averaged more people at home games than they have capacity for at their stadiums, based on these attendance rankings.

Colorado State, Big 12 candidate? An analysis shows CSU's not an awful choice.

Different. Weather is a frequent cause of games being rescheduled, but the Villanova-Penn game this September is being moved because ... the Pope is visiting.

High fashion. Nike unveiled its new set of uniforms for Tennessee, who ditched Adidas for the swoosh back in January. Nike gave them a pretty subdued touch, but did include a pretty wild Smokey third uniform. Two thumbs up.

The SEC's historical big six. Of course Alabama looks the best here, but Florida looks pretty great too.

Smart. A contract extension for Randy Edsall might not sound significant, but it's big for Maryland in one important way: It greatly reduces his buyout, which is helpful for a program with budget issues.

Crootin'! Florida picked up the commitment of four-star 2017 quarterback Jake Allen, and Alligator Army calls it "potentially seismic" for the program.

How to hate your own team, the step-by-step guide that is, yes, written by Notre Dame fans.

Selfie lovers will now be able to snap themselves in the US president's residence, after the White House lifted a decades-old ban on photography.

Here’s a Hot Topic product primed to make ‘90s kids scratch their heads and ask, “What year is it?” Tamagotchis are back.

Rosie the Riveter might have kept the war machine humming, but Bessie the Bartender kept it buzzing.

Nothing makes my little heart go pitter-patter like a new data set. And the new General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) does not disappoint. Let’s go geek out over some data, shall we?

What exactly is GEBCO? It’s a giant, high-resolution map of the ocean seafloor (with some topography thrown in to make land feel better about itself). This whole thing was the brain child of His Serene Highness Prince Albert I of Monaco, who in 1903 decided we needed to map the oceans. I was amazed to learn that up until the early 1990’s these maps were still drawn by hand! Then we realized that computers were actually pretty good at mapping too and first digitized maps came out in 1994, in a handy-dandy set of CD-ROM of course.

But now GEBCO’s all digital and ready to be downloaded at the click of a button from the interwebs. It’s been 6 years since the last update and this one is awesome. The fine folks at GEBCO channeled the data curating acumen of a million librarians to create this bathymetric pièce de résistance. New data sets were added (the Coast of Chile is looking mighty fine if I do say so). Metadata was added (the data that explains the data. Did you use a fancy acoustic system or a rock tied to a rope to get that depth?). They even got classified data from the U.S…..SHHHHH.

And then they did lots of basic statistics. ‘Cause you had better flaunt those stats when you got ’em. The mean depth of the ocean? It’s 3897 m (2.4 miles). Where is 50% of the earth’s surface? Below 3200 m (2 miles). What’s the percentage of the earth covered by water? 71%. But my favorite statistic has to be this one:

~900 ship-years of surveying would be needed to obtain complete multibeam coverage of the world’s oceans.

YES PEOPLE. 900 years. In an ultimate show of carthographic geekery *SWOON*, they even figured out it would take 300 years to map the deep ocean and another 600 to map the shallow water near the coast. But that’s actually not that bad considering there are over 700 high-resolution multibeam mapping systems out there ready to be deployed at any moment. We’ll probably get there sooner than 2915. Although they’ll probably need more than 2 CD-ROMS after mowing the ocean seafloor for all the data….

It’s time people. Time to upgrade that bathymetry. And you can find it all at http://www.gebco.net/ I know that’s what I’m doing this evening.

REFERENCES:

Carpine-Lancre, Jacqueline, et al. “The history of GEBCO 1903-2003: the 100-year story of the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans.” (2003).

Weatherall, P., K. M. Marks, M. Jakobsson, T. Schmitt, S. Tani, J.-E. Arndt, M. Rovere, D. Chayes, V. Ferrini, and R. Wigley (2015), A New Digital Bathymetric Model of the World’s Oceans, Earth and Space Science, 2, doi:10.1002/2015EA000107.

It's amazing how much we all use a website we hate, isn't it? 'Cuz let's face it: a lot of us hate - HATE - Facebook.



And yet, how else can we keep up with all our family, friends, and favorite blogs/artists/interests?

I'm still dependent on FB because I blog for a living, and even with FB censoring Page reach down to a small fraction of my followers, there's STILL no better way to reach people. Because love it or hate it, everyone is on Facebook.

Sadly I have no solutions for my fellow Page managers, since FB is determined to run us all out of business. Here's a snapshot of what I mean:



However, for the rest of you, I DO have one or two tricks up my sleeve. 

See, as a reader, I've finally figured out how to use Facebook to see what I want to see, in the order I want to see it. I have two lists, which I'll show you how to set up and use. The first shows me only the friends' and family updates I'm most interested in - which is less than 50 people - in chronological order.

The second list acts as a quasi-RSS feed, and is my new favorite thing. It shows me, in chronological order, all my favorite websites, artists, cosplayers, humor sites, etc. etc. It's all the good stuff on FB, with none of the bad.

Ever get Facebook fatigue? You know, where you're tired of all the ranting and vague-booking and political sniping? That's the bad stuff I'm talking about. By setting up this new feed list, though, I can surf all the happy stuff in one place. And it's awesome.

So here's how to do it:











 

Following the departure of artist Stjepan Sejic, Tess Fowler and Tamra Bonvillain will join writer Kurtis J. Wiebe on fan-favorite series "Rat Queens."

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Are you interested in golf? Do you feel that friendship is a death cult? Do you want to learn the rules of golf? Golf information might be for you. This brand-new comic strip, starring superstar Tiger Woods, will teach you all the information that you need to know about golf.

(1 of 8) January 17th, 1443

(2 of 8) March 6th, 2088

(3 of 8) June 29th, 1145

(4 of 8) November 23rd, 1557

(5 of 8) May 28th, 3017

(6 of 8) February 2nd, 2006

(7 of 8) December 9th, 6803

(8 of 8) September 15th, 1987

Remember that weird picture of Adam Levine the Lakers posted Tuesday night to try and lure LaMarcus Aldridge to Los Angeles?

Well, they had to take it down. As well as all of the other tweets they posted with the #LAtoLA hashtag. Apparently some of the other teams in the league didn't like them, even though the organization had cleared it with the NBA beforehand.

Per league source, Lakers' #LAtoLA tweets weren't deleted out of sheepishness, but rather by NBA request after other teams complained

— Dave McMenamin (@mcten) July 2, 2015

Lakers, per same league source, cleared the #LAtoLA tweet plan with NBA legal dept beforehand. But still honored request to delete them.

— Dave McMenamin (@mcten) July 2, 2015

Probably for the best. That picture was way too weird.

Here's what some of the other tweets said, per Deadspin:

It's 9:01pm PT and Mitch Kupchak is walking in to meet with @aldridge_12 #LAtoLA [cringeworthy picture of Adam Levine in a backwards Aldridge jersey]

Lakers fans everywhere screaming #LAtoLA pic.twitter.com/yQtFqQ4QXg

It's 9:01pm PT and Mitch Kupchak is walking in to meet with @aldridge_12 #LAtoLA

From Lakers President Jeanie Buss's account:

Please RT #LAtoLA [link to tweet from Lakers account]

“Don’t get hung up on minutia. Finish your prototype, and play it with others. Don’t be afraid to finish — the worst thing that can happen is that your idea needs to be reworked. It’s totally worth it.”

- Michael Murphey of Grim Games

Trans healthcare in this country is abysmal. Most doctors aren’t trained enough to properly handle the unique needs of trans patients. Personally speaking, it’s always a bit of a risk taking on a new primary care physician, simply because I’m never sure if the person I’m going to see knows what to do with me at all. I’m lucky to have found a doctor I can stick with (for now), but many trans people aren’t quite so lucky.

Enter two new health startups: MyTransHealth and Rad Remedy.

MyTransHealth is focused on becoming a place where trans people can seek out doctors with the appropriate knowledge and training to help them. Right now it’s a crapshoot, and there’s no way to know what a doctor’s capable of without an office visit, which is something that can cost a good chunk of money. By putting the right tools in everyone’s hands—doctors and patients—healthcare becomes easier. Isn’t that the point, after all?

In a video on the MyTransHealth website, one of the company’s founders, Robyn Kanner, recounts her own search for a proper therapist to begin her transition. “Transition shouldn’t really be a difficult thing for people,” she said. “It should be one of those things where somebody can walk in and say, ‘Hi, I’m trans, I really need help.’ And that person immediately gets help… What would happen if we could eliminate that gatekeeping for trans people?”

Another startup aiming to alleviate the problems with searching for trans healthcare is Rad Remedy. The major difference between MyTransHealth and Rad Remedy is that MyTransHealth screens providers on basics and such before adding them to the database. Rad Remedy is crowdsourced, though its search seems to be a lot more granular; you can find anything from voice training to top surgery.

On first glance, the search form on their website is reminiscent of Yelp or GrubHub. It sounds weird, but maybe that’s just how simple healthcare should be. The best part is that both of these startups are non-profit. They’re not looking to sell their websites or their databases. They just want to help the trans community.

Doesn’t that deserve some support?

(via The Daily Dot)

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I really tried to convince myself to give it a chance, but Apple Music is just simply awful to use. Everything I would want to do would either take forever or is simply not possible.

Of you’ve ever seen bottles of bubbly labeled California Champagne — perhaps produced by Korbel, Cook’s or André — what you’ve seen is perfectly legal. The loophole that makes these labels legal is the result of a fight that began in the trenches of the first World War, with roots going back to the nineteenth century.

The Tourbillon is a theme park ride built by ABC Rides in Switzerland that twists riders through the air with a set of spinning concentric squares. The ride bears a resemblance to the space travel vehicle seen in the 1997 film Contact, though the ride is presumably incapable of interstellar travel.

photos via Airtimers

via BGR, The Awesomer

Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes is the 3DS Zelda game that has to fill the void until the (maybe) Wii U version surfaces again, and it’s got a whole bunch of multiplayer Link goodness. So with a bunch of different Links running around, there’s no reason there couldn’t be girls, right? WRONG, according to the game’s director.

Yes, despite the fact that there can be several of the character on-screen at a time, letting players choose their gender would just be bananas anarchy. The story was handed down on pre-etched stone tablets at the top of Nintendo mountain and can never be altered. OK, I’m paraphrasing, but that’s not too far off from what game director Hiromasa Shikata told IGN:

There’s this kingdom, an event happens, and the king needs heroes. So, he puts out a call for heroes to gather and one of those is this guy, Link. He sees this audition, basically, “Heroes needed; apply here,” and that’s the start of his adventure.

The story calls for this sort of legend/prophecy where heroes will come together to help solve a problem. And in that, they are male characters. So, because the game is set with that as the story background, you cannot choose a gender; you are a male character.

Because how ridiculous is it to think that a girl might think she could apply to be a hero? Who are we to put such unrealistic ideas into young gamers’ heads? Next they might start thinking of men and women as equal, and society will crumble! Of course the story had to be about boys!

It’s one (sucky) thing not to include a gender option in your game, but to justify it as, “Well that’s the story, so we’re stuck with it!” is so much worse. It’s like the end of Aladdin when the Sultan realizes he can change the rules so everyone can have a happy ending, only if the Sultan had instead said, “I guess you two lovebirds are SOL. If only someone had the power to change things … Well, thanks for saving our asses, Al. See you never.”

But it’s OK, because Shikata has some friends who are women, and they don’t seem to mind!

[J]ust as general information, we do have a lot of female staff members who are playing this game and enjoying it. It doesn’t seem to be a big issue to them. They still are getting emotional investment in this game.

So why even bother trying to give additional options that might attract more players? Women who are Shikata’s employees haven’t called him into question over the lack of gender selection, and they’d have no reason to keep that to themselves, right? Definitely no questionable attitudes to be wary of from someone who tries to justify this decision by saying,

And to be honest, Link isn’t the most masculine of guys in the world, depending on how you want to project yourself into the character.

I feel so reassured.

(via Destructoid)

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Stephen Colbert recently stepped in as the guest host of Only in Monroe, a Michigan public access talk show presented by MPACT. Colbert said he was growing impatient waiting for the theater for his new show, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, to be ready.

That show is scheduled to premiere on CBS on September 8, 2015.

This event probably never happened—but it’s such a cool visual that it has already been immortalized in art. A symbol of the thoughtlessness, the cruelty, and the profligacy of the Romans, this singular execution method was attributed to two different emperors.

Read more...

Oh no. Even so close to American Independence Day , we can't find it in our hearts to gloat about England's loss, as they fell 2-1 to Japan in the dying seconds of the match on Laura Bassett's own goal. Japan advances to face the U.S. in Sunday's final.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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So it’s not likely that writer  Brian K Vaughan will be working for DC Comics any time soon. Or indeed Warner Bros. As if he ever was… time for a geographical analogy.
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I built a catio, y'all. I don’t care if this is the most Portland thing ever, I did it.

OED Word of the Day: opsit, v. Of a couple: to sit up together at night as a recognized part of courtship