1,141 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2017
    1. Their proposal would tax carbon emissions at $40 a ton to start and would be paid by oil refineries and other fossil fuel companies that would pass costs on to consumers with higher gas and electricity prices. The money raised would be returned to Americans through dividend checks; a family of four would get about $2,000 a year to start. This would help people adjust to higher energy prices and give them an incentive to reduce consumption or switch to renewable sources of energy.

      Interesting idea.

    1. He formed a committee of students, faculty members, and alumni to establish guidelines on renaming campus buildings. A report outlining the committee’s recommendations was released in December.

      It should have been clear then, that the name was going to change.

    1. We will be collecting ORCID iDs from workshop participants and connecting these activities to their ORCID record. We will be embedding ORCID iDs and DOIs in our blog posts, presentations, and white papers. We are participating in a broad community effort on organization identifiers.

      Great news!

    2. We have two big milestones coming up in 2017: celebrating ORCID Pi Day (our 3,141,593rd registrant - coming soon!) and the fifth anniversary of the ORCID Registry launch in October.

      Big days, to be sure!

    1. Unfortunately two mentors I had very early on in my business life had interest in my business for their own benefit, whether it be to use our services for free or at a discount or to potentially buy my business.

      Definitely a no no when it comes to mentoring!

    1. And, like most foreign-born physicians, Tauseef came on a J1 visa. That meant after training he had two options: return to Pakistan or work for three years in an area the U.S. government has identified as having a provider shortage.

      There is a huge demand in rural areas for doctors.

    1. Photos of the comet show that over the past month, it has unexpectedly lost its tail of gas and dust. The images also show that it sports a distinct green hue. As the comet nears the sun, heat vaporizes ices on its surface, which releases pockets of carbon-based gases. These compounds tend to glow green as they are bombarded by sunlight in the near vacuum of space.

      Fascinating!

    1. In recent years, federal regulators shopping undercover have found about 1 in 4 funeral homes break the rule and fail to disclose price information.

      I wonder if they will disclose prices if you tell them that you know about the rule?

    2. "And she said that she had spent pretty much all day on the phone and on the Internet, simply trying to price funeral services, and she couldn't do it. She actually just couldn't get a straight answer about what products and services were being offered and how much they cost."

      Inexcusable!

    3. The Houston-based firm claims 16 percent of the $19 billion North American death care market, which includes the U.S. and Canada. Company documents say it has 24,000 employees and is the largest owner of funeral homes and cemeteries in the world.

      Wow, this seems like it would be unfair competition.

    4. In a months-long investigation into pricing and marketing in the funeral business, also known as the death care industry, NPR spoke with funeral directors, consumers and regulators. We collected price information from around the country and visited providers. We found a confusing, unhelpful system that seems designed to be impenetrable by average consumers, who must make costly decisions at a time of grief and financial stress.

      This is just shameful and should not be allowed to stand.

    1. Tibbits has pioneered the field of 4D printing — that is, using 3D printers to create material that then transforms into a predetermined shape (TED Talk: The emergence of 4D printing).

      I've never heard of 4D printing!

    2. At MIT’s International Design Center, Self-Assembly Lab founder Skylar Tibbits, co-director Jared Laucks and their team are inventing smart materials that can automatically take shape in useful — and sometimes surprising — ways.

      This would be a fun project to work on!

    1. The organization noted that the President’s order “had a significant disproportionate effect on international travel,” which accounts for 12.7 percent of U.S. business travel.

      Always wondered about this figure.

    1. Ms. Cabral, the archaeologist who has spent years studying Rego Grande, said that evidence of large settlements remains elusive, in contrast with other sites in the Amazon like Kuhikugu, at the headwaters of the Xingu River, where researchers have drawn parallels to the legends surrounding the mythical Lost City of Z, long an irresistible lure for explorers and adventurers.

      Learning about these "lost places" is so cool!

    2. After conducting radiocarbon testing and carrying out measurements during the winter solstice, scholars in the field of archaeoastronomy determined that an indigenous culture arranged the megaliths into an astronomical observatory about 1,000 years ago, or five centuries before the European conquest of the Americas began.

      I'm amazed that I never heard about this!

    1. Then in the 1980s, ranchers cleared land to raise cattle, uncovering the true extent of the earthworks in the process. More than 450 of these geoglyphs are concentrated within Acre State in Brazil.

      I guess that's one positive of clearing the land...

    1. While Industrial Light & Magic was started to generate special effects for “Star Wars,” the visual effects studio is now the largest in the motion picture industry, working not only with Lucasfilm but also with studios across the globe.)

      The largest, wow!

    1. Where should we draw the ethical and moral lines? Will CRISPR mean people are making designer babies and eliminating genetic diseases, and is that acceptable? We can wipe out whole species, like the mosquitos that carry the malaria parasite. But should we?

      All good questions.

    1. Here is what we are supposed to do: rebut every single lie. Insist moreover that each lie is retracted — and journalists in press conferences should back up their colleagues with repeated follow-ups if Spicer tries to duck the plain truth. Do not allow them to move on to another question.

      This would infuriate them to the point where they would likely end the press conference.

    1. In his spare time, the documentary photographer had been scraping information on Airbnb listings across the city and displaying them in interactive maps on his website, InsideAirbnb.com.

      Quite an undertaking!

    1. One way of tackling the issue is by using First Draft’s platform called Check, a live, open-source site where organizations can add any disputed content, whether it’s a video, image or fake-news site, and the members will assign a verifiable status.

      Hypothes.is would make a great tool for this effort.

    1. We will continue to work with Tapper and NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations in 2017, which promises to be a busy year as the Republican president and Congress look to make major changes in U.S. policy on climate change, fracking, renewable energy and other issues that SciCheck has been following for over two years.

      Interesting.

    1. So, they descended on a coastal retreat called Asilomar, a name that became synonymous with the guidelines they laid down at this meeting—a strict ethical framework meant to ensure that biotechnology didn’t unleash the apocalypse.

      Good policy.

    1. To get there, you can provide some dedicated spaces, or even memberships, for a car-sharing service (six points). Furnish the basement with a fleet of bicycles for residents (one point). Set up a shuttle service to the closest train or bus station (14 points), or stick a handy screen with real-time transit schedules in the lobby (one point). Dedicating space to on-site childcare earns you two points, since it means fewer parents driving to drop off and pick up the kiddos.

      Interesting incentives.

    1. Peer review' was a term borrowed from the procedures that government agencies used to decide who would receive financial support for scientific and medical research. When 'referee systems' turned into 'peer review', the process became a mighty public symbol of the claim that these powerful and expensive investigators of the natural world had procedures for regulating themselves and for producing consensus, even though some observers quietly wondered whether scientific referees were up to this grand calling.

      Where the term peer review comes from!

    2. The struggle between Whewell and Lubbock represented two distinct visions of what a referee might be. Whewell was the authoritative generalist, glancing down on the landscape of knowledge. He was unconcerned with — and probably not in a position to critique — the details. Such referees were, according to the Royal Society's president, “Elevated by their character and reputation above the influence of personal feelings of rivalry or petty jealousy”4. Lubbock was a younger specialist, Airy's equal. This allowed him to take a fine-tooth comb to Airy's arguments; it also put him in the position of reviewing a direct competitor.

      Two versions of what a review is.

    3. (The temptation to conflate these practices with modern referee systems has led to the stubborn myth that the origins of the scientific referee can be traced back as far as the seventeenth century.)

      Oh, I guess not then.

    1. Despite many editors being unpaid or poorly remunerated for their work, plant scientist Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva believes they “should be held accountable” if authors are made to wait for an “excessive or unreasonable amount of time” before a decision is made on their research.

      How would this be enforced exactly?

    1. Rumors are undeniably resilient, but they are far easier to trace, track, and debunk now than they were when Franklin Roosevelt or Al Smith was running for president.

      Very true. If people note that they were debunked.

    1. We’ll be able to directly image Earth-like exoplanets, including Proxima b, out to somewhere between 15–30 light years distant. Jupiter-like planets will be visible out to more like 300 light years.

      Cannot wait!

    2. the three other famous ones — the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), the European Extremely Large Telescope (EELT) and Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL) — have either suffered major setbacks or been cancelled entirely.

      Maybe because of their names...

    3. Until we start manufacturing mirrors in zero-gravity, we’ve had two options: cast a single mirror up to the maximum size you can manufacture it — around 8 meters — or build a large number of smaller segments and stitch them together.

      I had no idea that there was a maximum size for mirrors!

    1. Elkins-Tanton has estimated the value of the asteroid’s iron content alone at approximately $10,000 quadrillion. That’s to say nothing of the gold, copper, and platinum to be found.

      Whoa! This is the kind of wealth that drives the sci-fi expeditions to space. Think Alien or Avatar.

    2. 16 Psyche may be a piece of an ancient protoplanet once as big as Mars, which shattered into pieces over billions of years, due to bombardments and collisions with other bodies, a common occurrence after the birth of our solar system. Today, it’s sort of an astronomical fossil.

      I'd love to learn more about these protoplanets.

    1. For all the talk of AI, it always seems that gossip is faster than progress. But it could be that within this century, we will fully realize the visions science fiction has promised us, says Dr. Ben Goertzel – for better or worse.

      Interesting timeline.

    1. Over time, the provision of researcher workflows might even result in direct to consumer business models, offering either a complete solution for unaffiliated users, added value sales to users with institutional affiliations, or ultimately a complete solution.

      Interesting to ponder.

    2. In this respect, I will be interested to see whether EBSCO will offer products in support of reference (such as the chat products where OCLC has a business), one of the few components missing from offering a fairly complete researcher workflow.

      Interesting gap.

    3. Open access advocates might be concerned about some of these directions, but my sense is that many of these scientists and librarians remain largely focused on trying to compete with, or at least influence, scientific publishing.

      Yes.

    4. One’s data and notes are stored and deposited in systems that, even if they allow ready export, are difficult if not impossible to utilize outside the original environment.

      This is why interoperability should be a key selling point.

    1. Imagine searching for “401k matching” and instead of just receiving relevant messages or files, you also get a list of people in HR that can answer your question, or a list of channels for your query where you might be able to find the information you are looking for, or even a list of commonly asked questions relevant to that topic with links to the channel where each one was answered.

      This would be good.

    1. vast arrays of information that they produce and collect in the process of conducting their research and engage in idiosyncratic practices for organizing and storing their information.

      Hypothesis activity pages could solve this...

    1. Even so, URLs address only a small part of a larger infinity of resources: words and phrases in texts, regions within images, segments of audio and video. Web annotation enables us to address that larger infinity.

      This is so important to understand.

    1. Because the robot built a model of itself that was distinct from its real physical body, he suggested that its creators had – perhaps inadvertently – given it a sense of self.

      Interesting way to think about it.

    1. The American Dream Academy, which offers its two-hour morning and evening classes in both Spanish and English, aims to bridge that gap. It teaches parents how to navigate the educational system, demystifying standards, assessments, and educational tracks, and to negotiate the often intimidating process of applying for college and student aid. It offers tips on communicating with teachers, counselors, and principals, and shows parents how to create a supportive home learning environment and build their child’s self-esteem.

      This seems like a really cool program that could benefit students all across the country.

    1. In the humanities, the real value lies in the argument and this is found in the published article. This is very different to science, where most often the paper describes the experimental finding and it is in this finding that the value lies.

      Important distinction.

    2. Sarah Bond, in an interesting article in Forbes, entitled “Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account At Academia.Edu”, urges readers to delete their Academia.edu account. She suspects its motivations, pointing out it is not a real .edu, with no educational affiliations and motivated strictly by profit.

      Should go and read this.

    1. It’s about whether we’re abiding by the principles we claim as being core to our profession—in particular, those principles related to intellectual freedom, the public good, and service.

      The mission of the library.

    2. Where the library is the copyright holder, the library is completely within its rights to require patrons to ask permission before making use of the documents in question that goes beyond fair use.

      This is what I'm used to from my research.

    1. After a brief training session, participants spent six hours archiving environmental data from government websites, including those of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Interior Department.

      A worthwhile effort.

    2. An anonymous donor has provided storage on Amazon servers, and the information can be searched from a website at the University of Pennsylvania called Data Refuge. Though the Federal Records Act theoretically protects government data from deletion, scientists who rely on it say would rather be safe than sorry.

      Data refuge.

    3. researchers realize that their own aloofness may largely be to blame for public disregard for the evidence on issues like climate change or vaccine safety.

      I could see this interpretation.

    1. A smart Twitter user who follows researchers and practicing scientists could, using Nuzzel, easily and swiftly pick up on the hot articles that engender excitement.

      Very useful!

    2. using Nuzzel, I could still immediately understand the importance of Crossref’s content to my network of professionals and use that to gauge whether I ought to be reading it as well.

      Interesting.

  2. Jan 2017
    1. the recent fascination with MOOCs.

      Contrary to popular belief, MOOCs are thriving, but of course they haven't displaced traditional education. For those experimenting with them, it is better that they are not under constant scrutiny. No experimenter needs that kind of pressure.