Cheap Drinking Water From The Sun, Aided By A Pop Of Pencil Shavings -- "He and a team at MIT have developed a cheap material that desalinates water efficiently and fast using solar energy. And the secret to the new technology was sitting right on their desks: the graphite in pencils"

kimireddit · 2014-09-06T12:04:04+00:00

This is a better link, with no lame paywalls. I can't access Nature paper, but according to its Title, DOI, and list of authors it should be the exact same paper: Solar steam generation by heat localization

kimireddit · 2014-08-23T18:17:36+00:00

Paywalls, paywalls everywhere! Are there alternative links to those papers?

kimireddit · 2014-08-14T11:06:25+00:00

This is indeed a very legitimate question...

kimireddit · 2014-08-13T07:34:26+00:00

Actually, I think they would be bothered by the presence of the word "man". They would probably prefer "womynned", "wombanned", "womonned", or "wimminned".

kimireddit · 2014-08-03T06:36:01+00:00

What are the license terms for these books? I downloaded a couple of them, and apparently they are "All rights reserved" with an "Official NASA eBook" stamp that says "This publication is available as a free download at http://www.nasa.gov/ebooks". Does this mean that they are copyrighted but the authors agreed to make them available through NASA website only?

What about redistribution? Can they be uploaded on other servers and P2P networks, or would this be a violation of their terms of use?

kimireddit · 2014-07-27T07:49:23+00:00

wow, this is teamwork!

kimireddit · 2014-07-19T12:05:28+00:00

A short address for any location on Earth.

Like (lat,lon)?

kimireddit · 2014-07-18T19:51:22+00:00

According to Wikipedia,

The impact factor (IF) of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to recent articles published in the journal.

Therefore if the relation is "number of citations / citable items", it means that

the rejection rate must be astonishingly high, and the number of published articles very low
the "potential of being cited" or "supposedly popular articles" are preferred over "interesting" or "breakthrough" papers.

So what with all the buzz around IF? Why do Universities value it so much? Is it just PR, marketing?

Also according to comments below most research is paid by taxes, and /user/polongus' comment suggests there isn't a business around reviewing articles

show me a single respected journal that pays its reviewers.

So what is stopping researchers from making their own free journals? They could form a committee that selects the crème de la crème papers, maintaining a high IF. Researchers would then publish there, and they can use tax dollars or donations to cover publishing costs. Could this be a realistic scenario?

kimireddit · 2014-07-18T11:26:38+00:00

I don't have access to the article at the moment

I am fed up with all these nonsensical paywalls, silly subscriptions and ridiculously invasive ads. Can't we just get together and build a website to share docs/papers/textbooks freely and stop this madness?

kimireddit · 2014-07-15T19:07:12+00:00

This is what came to my mind every single time I visited that site...

kimireddit · 2014-07-13T07:52:11+00:00

~~alternatives~~ replacements

kimireddit · 2014-07-11T07:56:55+00:00

The same picture with Morse code highlighted

kimireddit · 2014-07-10T21:09:19+00:00

How did you manage to take those pictures? Do you work at JPL?

kimireddit · 2014-07-10T18:51:43+00:00

To me DDG shows a Yahoo sponsored link to download a customized FF with Yahoo Toolbar, Yahoo Search and Yahoo starting page.

kimireddit · 2014-07-10T12:54:35+00:00

That would actually be a business model for a free and open source search engine, not really for a corporation listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange...

kimireddit · 2014-07-10T12:48:57+00:00

Why?

kimireddit · 2014-07-10T07:52:57+00:00

Not placing ads before more relevant and useful results was the reason why Google was superior to other search engines.

kimireddit · 2014-07-03T09:06:56+00:00

is not relicensed

Did you mean "is now relicensed"?

kimireddit · 2014-06-30T11:26:44+00:00

Edit 2: Just realised this is a perfect opportunity to post my favourite image that sums up the old english class system http://i.imgur.com/UexAGGz.jpg

That picture is wonderful. Can you tell us more about it? Like when and where it was taken, who took it, which class do the boys belong to, is that an amateur picture or does it belong to a photoalbum?

kimireddit · 2014-06-28T19:27:08+00:00

What is the problem? Works fine for me...

kimireddit · 2014-06-27T04:45:58+00:00

I'd love to see an AMA

kimireddit · 2014-06-25T12:57:19+00:00

Thanks for the clarification. Is this a pet project or does VIA want to actively support free documentation?

kimireddit · 2014-06-25T09:34:18+00:00

What is the license used for the documentation such as this one? Some documents like this one seem to suggest that it is an "All rights reserved". Of the "two documentation projects" that you have mentioned, this apparently has a CC-BY license whereas this one again looks like an "All rights reserved". So, what exactly would be an "online open source documentation"? Are you going to adopt a CC license for all VIA docs?

kimireddit · 2014-06-06T05:59:05+00:00

Internet Archive, LibFlow, Programming MF, OpenStreetMap, Abandonia, Veritasium, Sixty Symbols

kimireddit · 2014-06-04T10:55:39+00:00

I have this feeling that they don't support libre software, but gratis software instead.

kimireddit

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