Open Access (almost)

The journal Computational Linguistics has opted to join the movement of journals switching to the open access model, where academic articles are viewable in full for free without any membership fees. The idea is that publicly funded research should be available to the public. Anyway, now the punchline. Try to download the full article about this (outside of an academic setting) and you'll find that you can't without a membership account for MIT Press (of course, this is exactly the model we're moving away from, hence why this is only slightly ironic, I think).

Going somewhere?

Marge: But Main Street's still all cracked and broken...
Bart: Sorry, Mom, the mob has spoken!
All: Monorail!
-- The Simpsons, Marge vs. The Monorail

I think this post pinpoints some of the problems with our transportation infrastructure very nicely. Short of the unnecessary Simpsons quote, I don't really have much to add except that I hope this article reaches a wide audience.

Dancing Deer writes back (again)

Those of you following this blog may remember my letter to Dancing Deer (see here and here). The story now has a new ending which is both surprising and happy. The president of Dancing Deer, Trish Karter, has added her two cents on the matter (read her comment here). I think she makes reasonable points in her comments and I very much appreciate hearing from her. Additionally, I'm glad that I was wrong about this whole issue -- it turns out that they ran a study with the intent of determining ways of minimizing petrol in their packaging -- and I would like to apologize to Dancing Deer for any negative press (though I assure them that readers of this blog are few and far between). In any event, I think more than enough digital ink has been spilled over what started as a minor discussion at a weekly tea and we can hopefully lay the issue to rest now.

Food talk

Everything you are doing is wrong.
-- Janosh, Ghostbusters II

Over the summer, I tried to watch a lot of TED talks. I've been meaning to post a list of my favorites (real soon now...). I've also been reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food recently and while I'm only half finished, it has a lot in common with Mark Bittman's TED talk What's wrong with what we eat. Given the similarities, I'll cover both items here (though the book is fresh in my mind so my emphasis will be on it).

Neither author puts much faith in the nutritional authorities in this country. Pollan's book discusses how hard it is to run a nutritional study measuring the Right Things and blames scientific reductionism for giving us misinformation. To accurately study the dietary effects in complex systems like people is likely impossible (or at least extremely challenging with current technology) given the difficulty in actually measuring both the inputs and outputs. Worse, Pollan believes that nutrition science has not succeeded in making us healtheir but in fact has pushed us in the opposite direction -- ever since nutritionists have replaced parents as the authorities, this country has gotten less healthy along many dimensions. To be fair, some amount of this can likely be attributed to corporations like McDonalds and Kraft, but that's another post.

I've always been skeptical of nutrition science given its various flip-flopping studies on foods like chocolate and wine. In any event, my goal here is not to provide a review of these items, but to encourage you to read Pollan's book, or, if you only have 20 minutes and 8 seconds, watch Bittman's talk.

Wait, what?

Marge: I don't understand why we have to build a ray gun to aim at a planet I never even heard of.

Homer: Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
-- "Treehouse of Horror VII" [snpp]

McCain and Obama are looking more and more similar each day! Their automatic image picker seems to have some problems telling the two candidates apart... (seen on huffingtonpost.com, emphasis not in original)

Steal this idea: Scratch paper printer

Somewhat counterintuitively, the Computer Science department at Brown produces a ton of paper (literally a ton if you choose the Right time scale...). A good portion of our printouts only use one side of the paper (though people are generally good about printing things duplex, 2-up, etc.). Much of this scratch paper is recycled immediately while some is put in a scratch paper pile. After trying to reduce our printouts, what we can do to lower our paper usage? Last year, I made a "notebook" out of scratch paper. a folder, and some clips which worked out very nicely for a course. While I like this method and would like to see it done on a large scale, it seems unlikely to reuse much of our scratch paper supply.

One idea that I'd like to investigate is a "scratch paper printer." This would be a printer stocked entirely with scratch paper. There are couple potential issues. The main issue is that I've been told that printers jam more frequently on scratch paper[1]. I want to find out if this is true for all or just some printers. Ideally, we can find a (potentially slower) printer which doesn't jam as much on scratch paper. A lesser issue is keeping the printer stocked since scratch paper doesn't come as easily as store-brought reams, but since this can be done on demand by users, I'm less concerned. Please contact me if you have any comments on this proposal, since I'll put pitching it to the department in the coming future.

[1] It might be interesting to try to design a printer which is more robust to paper jams (steal this idea, please) but beyond what I'm looking for at this point.

These version numbers have version numbers!

This product that was on TV was available for four easy payments of $19.95. I would like a product that was available for three easy payments and one complicated payment. We can't tell you which payment it is, but one of these payments is going to be hard.
-- Mitch Hedburg

Version numbers in Ubuntu Linux can get pretty intense. Here is a list of 13 version numbers from Ubuntu packages in increasingly ridiculous order (that is, order of increasing ridiculous-ness (ridiculousity?)).

1. 15 (just a number, possibly too simple)
2. 1.2-2 (three numbers, reasonably simple)
   
3. 2.6.24.17.19 (standard Linux kernel version number, very simple)
4. 2007-12ubuntu3.1 (year, month, and Ubuntu version)
   
5. 1:8.04+20080630 (version with a full date in it)
6. 3.0.28a-1ubuntu4.3 (version and Ubuntu version)
7. 4.0.1ubuntu5.8.04.1 (package with version and a more complicated Ubuntu version)
8. 4.4.0-1ubuntu4~hardy1 (version with Ubuntu version and Ubuntu distribution subversion)
9. 3:0.cvs20060823-3.1ubuntu4 (version, CVS date, and Ubuntu version)
10. 8.61.dfsg.1~svn8187-0ubuntu3.3 (version, SVN version, and Ubuntu version)
11. 20080508+git20080601-0ubuntu0.8.04 (version and two dates in it -- okay, one is a GIT version number too)
12. 3.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.04.1 (version plus some tags then a complicated Ubuntu version)
    
13. 10.0.1.218+10.0.0.525ubuntu1~hardy1+really9.0.124.0ubuntu2 (no comment)

(document version: 1.2.62.cvs20080713~svn2942~17ubuntu2.43.1.3-5~binonly~rc7:1)