[X] My Assistant

[jrdahlman]

I'm not sure if this topic is substantive enough to be posted under Doug's new rules, but I'll try it.

Computer and hardware pioneer Don Lancaster (still going strong), in his blog on April 2, had an interesting take on the "Gresham's Law" effect that amateur internet posting is having on traditional publishing. For scientists:

But Scholarly Journal Publishers clearly have the most serious problems. If they are to survive at all. Sloppy researcher "A" throws some crap up on the web and instantly delivers zillions of free copies worldwide. Competent researcher "B" pays an outrageous fee to have his peer-review paper published in the distant future in a journal so expensive that their institution's own library cannot afford a copy. Guess who wins?

At the very least, scholarly journal survival demands unlimited free instant access of all abstracts without so such as a registration hassle. Combined with sanely limited quantities of free access to any paper over five years old.

http://www.tinaja.com/whtnu06.asp


I am not a scientist, but clearly there are many on this board. This topic may have been mentioned before, but I'm wondering if any of you have heard anything from the journal publishers themselves? Is this really becoming a problem? Is the market changing or fees rising? Are they getting nervous about the economics of it? Are researchers equally nervous? Not leading questions--I actually don't know.

(One of the amazing things about this board for outsiders is seeing "science being made." The back-and-forth debates between geologists, alternate (plausable!) theories, etc., as opposed to the dry official reports that are finally released. I feel almost like a spy in on closed sessions!)

[dvandorn]

I completely agree with you about the emphasis placed on IQ, Don. The classical IQ test is a test of pattern recognition capability, in my opinion. Since I've always been good at pattern recognition, I usually score between 140 and 160 on IQ tests, depending on how they're organized.

But there are a lot of things that people I know, who have far lower IQ scores, can do that I'm just not good at, at all. I'm good at manipulating systems, but I don't have any artistic talent, that I know of. And while I can pronounce foreign languages quite competently, I have a very hard time thinking in them, and thus only ever get so far (the constant-mental-translation level) when I try to learn them.

I am a natural mimic, and a fair dialectician... maybe that qualifies as an artistic talent...

I think that pattern recognition is a talent, that some people have and others don't. It comes in handy when trying to figure out complex problems, in our real lives as well as in our distractions. But it's only one of the talents that come in handy -- you can be a very generous person, or a very shrewd one, or a very charismatic one, and have great success without what would commonly be considered "high intelligence" (i.e., well-developed pattern recognition skills).

And, like my father always told me, it takes all kinds...

-the other Doug