Whoah. I used to fantasize, but I know so little about building and what little experience I have was so dependent on getting precise new materials that I figured it was totally impractical. I'm almost more interested in his life story leading up to this than the thing itself, though the things itself is truly amazing.
This is fantastic, not only what the guy is doing, but the houses as well
It is. The houses are awesome, but good god, what a great load of work.
max
['One of a kind in more than one way.']
Work and creativity. I have a free attitude, but miserable taste or aptitude.
Three poor examples:
The dogs get excited when they hear us drive into the garage, so a wooden door is totally scratched up. Tuesday night I said:"Let's paint it blue." She said no.
2) The kitchen linoleum had some holes. I patched it with three squares from home depot, none of them matching the existing floor or each other. She let that pass.
3) Everyone, everyone in my neighborhood has wooden slat fences. There is not a single one with paint on it. WTF? I am not going to do the "Sierra Nevadas at Sunset", but I would just like to slosh some green, blue, & white & mixes up there. I am scared of how trashy or careless it would look.
On topic and subject:wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. The assymetries and serendipity are wonderful.
I was just thinking:"What about an old unretouched engine block in the front yard" but then I thought:"But it would always remind me that I put an old engine block in my front yard." There is a big rock there that somebody else dropped and that I mow around.
I get so tired of looking at reflections of myself, my choices, my preferences. "I made/chose/bought this twenty years ago and it looks great" is just so boring. almost a horror.
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Not to derail a promising thread, but I've just been forwarded an email from the principal at my wife's school to the effect that thanks to complaints from parents, Obama's speech to schools on Tuesday will not be broadcast at any schools in her district.
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What if they get even more complaints from parents castigating them for not broadcasting the speech?
Remember the good old days, before all this cult of personality stuff?
"I've been recycling all my life, and it never occurred to me to recycle a door," said Esther Herklotz, Huntsville's superintendent of solid waste.
Really? Maybe my incredulity comes from knowing a lot of people who did renovations themselves on the cheap, but how can this never have occurred to her?
And yes, very cool houses. They remind me a bit of the
City Museum in St. Louis, built out of all sorts of random things. Rollers from factories, old parts of buildings. The outside walls of the restrooms there are made of steel containers used to ship lab rats.
10: The complaints are presumably from parents concerned about the possibility that the speech would be broadcast; the prohibition has not yet been publicized (but I have just passed on the email to the education reporter at the Oregonian). Even if other parents protested in favor of the broadcast, I doubt it would do much good. This is a district where, as I've mentioned previously, official mention of Halloween is prohibited because of complaints from a few Christian fundamentalist parents whose children react to any mention of demons and witches by curling up in the fetal position. Also, the district is question is Lake Oswego, an affluent suburb also known as Lake No-Negro, which suggests another reason for the reaction to the speech.
I don't think it's possible to mobilize in favor of something, only against something.
The kids are going to have to find out that black people exist sometime, McQueen.
18: Not in Oregon they're not.
What an awesome story. I want to send the guy a donation, even if his business is for-profit.
Actually, I kind of want to take the article to the local excuse for a redevelopment agency, but I don't think it would lead to the kind of change I'm hoping for.
It's totally interesting. I do think it's sad that people with bad credit aren't allowed to redeem themselves, though.
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Overheard at the Y. One of the fitness staff while working out before his shift was describing a fight he'd got in with somebody over health reform. He'd argued, in semi-jest, that universal healthcare wasn't possible in a capitalist society and that you needed to move to a socialist one if you wanted it.
Actually, he said, he thought that everyone should have healthcare but that he thought we couldn't afford it now and bringing all those millions of uninsured into the system would make it harder to see a doctor. "It's already hard enough to find a primary care doctor around here...."
He said, "I've been one of those insured, and I did fine. I got basic care through MassHealth." Oh the cognitive dissonance is killing me.
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All right, if we're going to talk about healthcare reform, can anybody get access to this study? Of course it's in one of those locked-down journals (SSIR) that I can't get access to.
Research: Medicare Saves Lives
For decades, Americans have squabbled over whether the government should expand Medicare, maintain its current scope, or cut it altogether. But their debates have suffered for lack of an answer to one vital question: Does Medicare make a difference?
A new study shows that Medicare indeed makes a difference for seriously ill patients--and that difference is the one between life and death. Following the fates of more than 400,000 people admitted to California hospitals through their emergency departments, a team of economists finds that patients who are just over 65 years old--and thus eligible for Medicare--are...
22: Maybe neb can get it for you; the UC's don't seem to have a subscription. (Or I'm misusing our VPN, but I don't think so.)
No subscription for me either, or at least none that interfaces well with the library's proxy server. Seems plausible that Stanford would have one, though.
22: Do you happen to know what issue that was in? I found a database that I have access to that claims to have all issues since 2003, but a search for "Medicare" doesn't turn that one up.
Witt, I've got access to the journal, but I don't see the actual citation. Am I being blind? Which issue are we looking for?
17: That explains lots about the inability of the left to actually get anything done. It didn't used to be true though.
It's the latest issue; I think August 2009.
That link doesn't appear to have a citation.
The most recent issue is Summer 2009. And it's not in that.
ProQuest doesn't know about that issue yet, apparently.
The latest issue I have access to is "Summer 2009; Vol. 7, Iss. 3", but nothing about Medicare appears in the Table of Contents.
Fall 2009 isn't in the archive I have access to.
I think it's not been uploaded yet, but if you go to Witt's link and click on "Articles" it shows as being part of the Fall 2009 issue.
Aren't we all so helpful?
You could try emailing Alana Conner: conner dot alana at gmail dot com.
You guys are utterly charming me in your wonderful efforts. I don't care if we never find the article;* I'm sitting here smiling and it's 11 hours into my workday.
*Actually I do, and even more than that, I wish that the authors had put their work out there in a more accessible forum. But still.
I would go to the actual library and scan it, but unfortunately we don't have a print subscription at my branch either. (I spend so much damn time there that it's not like it would add anything to my work.)
I could maybe scan it tomorrow, if I have a free hour and don't forget.
The linked article, by Alana Conner, is based on a study "Does Medicare Save Libes?" by Card, Dobkin, and Maestas. The study is available in preprint form on Carlos Dobkin's website, which is the first Google result for his full name.
/delurk
I see everyone else has found the journal in ABI/INFORM (which I'm surprised UC no longer has - budget cuts?). I don't see the most recent issue either.
1. If I needed yet another career idea, I would make myself into a marketing consultant for researchers. Ye gods and little fishes, but these people are bad at self-promotion. An unprecedented study by economists of a vitally important and nationally contentious issue, on a scale big enough to actually have some meaning...and AFAICT neither the authors nor their institutions have issued a press release, referred to it on their personal websites, or otherwise made any attempt to get this out in front of the public.
2. Where is Emerson and his rant when I need him? The stupid journal costs $40 to subscribe to. What, am I supposed to pay that every time an interesting and relevant abstract comes across my desk? I'll be broke in ten days.
On previous: Yay bostaurus! Thank you oodles.
45: They've recently changed Melvyl quite drastically and I still haven't gotten my bearings with it. Quite possible that I just missed it.
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I don't want to talk about healthcare or politics. I just want to have FUN!
Berube says Hallogallo is like the best cab song ever. Or something. It may be the best song ever. You should just repeat this all the rest of the night, really really loud. You can imagine dancing with me, tho not in a cab.
It's nice to find something in common with Berube. I am going to be nicer about him for a while, because of his med...never mind.
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47: I missed it too, on the UC campus library's list I can still access.
OK, one last rant.
1. The paper is funded by MY TAX DOLLARS (National Institute on Aging). Wasn't Obama going to do something about open access to taxpayer-funded research?
2. The study was completed in June 2008. It's been sitting around for A YEAR while the country tears itself apart over healthcare reform?
Seriously, when I get grouchy about academics who call me for help, this is why. If you want free help from me, for the love of heaven be conscientious about getting the fruits of your labor out to the human beings who made your work possible.
Mysterious delurker wins the thread!
I wish I were more of a healthcare policy wonk. Today I had to figure out how to respond to a colleague who was saying "ten years ago when I lived in China, we had government-run health care and it was inefficient! and when I had to get a green card in the US, it was inefficient! so clearly any public option will be bad, and I don't want it to drive my private insurance company out of business." And all I could do was speak in vague generalities because I don't have any statistics at my fingertips.
because I don't have any statistics at my fingertips
There are no statistics, only hypotheticals.
and when I had to get a green card in the US, it was inefficient!
You could tell him/her that the USCIS is a fee-funded agency (that is, Congress doesn't give them a line item in the budget*), so if they're worried about government inefficiency, they should make sure that the government-funded program in question is actually funded by the government.
*They did get some money once, but it was an exception.
If you want free help from me tenure, for the love of heaven be conscientious about getting the fruits of your labor out to the human beings who made your work possible in the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals.
I have been informed, repeatedly, that researchers' work product is not in any circumstances to be made available to the public until and unless the researchers choose to publish it.
54: Getting papers into the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals doesn't preclude making them freely available on the web to everyone as soon as they are finished. I don't really understand why all fields haven't adopted an arxiv-like model, but I guess there's strong cultural inertia at work.
Witt, Policy for NIH-funded new publications. email if you need a hookup for an older article.
IIRC, Nature experimented briefly with the arxiv model a few years ago, but it didn't take off. I don't think there was a good reason for the failure other than community discomfort with a strange new approach. Frustrating.
Getting papers into the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals doesn't preclude making them freely available on the web to everyone as soon as they are finished. I don't really understand why all fields haven't adopted an arxiv-like model, but I guess there's strong cultural inertia at work.
I believe the publishers of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals may have something to do with it.
Witt's totally right, though, and it's something that drives me crazy (though in a rather different context).
I believe the publishers of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals may have something to do with it.
And academics couldn't just start their own, parallel journals (with names like Physical Review Shmetters and Shmethics) because they wouldn't know, if that happened, which ones were prestigious.
(Couldn't they tell by inspecting the contents? It is to laugh!)
62: Well, Physical Review Letters is one journal that has no problem with people posting their work on arxiv before submitting for publication. I'm pretty sure people have done the same with Nature articles, but no one I know would ever think of publishing in Nature, so I don't have any examples at hand.
but no one I know would ever think of publishing in Nature
No one I know in physics who uses arxiv, that is.
Also, "publishers of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals may have something to do with it" isn't satisfactory. The journals in physics do accommodate the arxiv, because some subfields of physics use it. But other subfields haven't adopted that model, and publish at least part of the time in the same journals. So it can't all be blamed on the journals. At least part of the time, the option is open to researchers and they choose to stick with the traditional ways.
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http://www.hilarylister.com/A96C9/Home.aspx
About the thirteen-year-old, I may have under-valued the traditional British desire to be messing about in boats in lethal seas.
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Fine, whatever; sub Shmature in for Physical Review Shmetters: you get the point.
62.last: Indeed. Effective status signaling systems disproportionately place the costs and effort on the senders rather than the receivers. And compared to other byproducts of social status games, advances in scientific knowledge are pretty fucking great.
Researchers, as a rule, suck at making sensible choices about publishing. Elsevier should have shriveled up and died for want of submissions a long time ago.
Certainly the journals aren't all of the problem, as the situation in physics shows, but the mere fact that the physics situation is so unusual speaks, I think, to the effectiveness of any efforts they might make (even passively by not promoting alternatives) to maintain the status quo.
Which is to say, while I don't know that the publishers are actively fighting to preserve the status quo, I can't help but think that they play a big role in the continued marginality of open access. I mean, the incentives facing them are pretty obvious.
Oh, and to the original topic, those houses are fantastic.
72: In the original sense of the word.
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66:I was reading about Medieval Scottish castles, last week I think, and that part of Lister's route that went through the middle of Scotland just fascinated me. All I remember is the importance of that...valley. Wasn't called that
Is Loch Ness connected by canals?
Ignore this.
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70, 71: The journals are part of the problem, I just suspect that the bigger part of the problem is resistance to change. It's easy for me to say, but it really shouldn't be that hard. You put your papers on the internet. Then you try to get them published, and if the publisher complains that your papers on the internet, you tell them to go fuck themselves and publish somewhere else.
You put your papers on the internet. Then you try to get them published, and if the publisher complains that your papers on the internet, you tell them to go fuck themselves and publish somewhere else.
Right. This is "green" open access. And it certainly can work. I'm not strongly committed to the idea that the publishers are a major obstacle here, especially since the people who have been actively promoting it tend to emphasize what you're talking about here regarding resistance to change and such. But I will note that there's been a hell of a lot of consolidation in academic publishing in the past few years, and in some fields pulling this trick a few times could potentially leave you with no journal willing to publish your work at all.
Hey, thanks, lw. Much appreciated.
My critique of the status quo isn't even as far down the road as wishing researchers would release unpublished data. Rather, it's a sense of deep frustration and unhappiness that despite repeated, specific, sometimes near-painless suggestions for how they can spread the results of their work more broadly after publication, the culture of so many fields just flat-out discourages it.
I used to attribute this to inertia and conservatism. A decade-plus and several hundred interactions later, I'm ready to attribute a certain portion of it to entitlement, snobbery, and the active prioritization of proprietary, secret information over the public good.
Obviously I've got my own axe to ground, and I'm not at all free of bias. But it remains incredible to me the number of universities that resist even posting the titles of theses and dissertations in their online catalogs, much less letting members of the public actually see them. I cannot understand how a school of public health can support intriguing, potentially valuable research and then go to such lengths to prevent it from having any influence on the real world. That's not even counting the fact that some members of the "public" being prevented from seeing it often gave their time and personal history freely to inform the research in question.
I've tried to reason my way through all of the possible explanations: student thinks they will publish it somewhere else some day; university thinks they will be sued if someone mis-uses the findings; university IRB is scared that they didn't properly obscure the personal data of participants; university is afraid that donors will find out the kind of subversive topics they're allowing students to research; university or researcher is concerned that someone else will steal the research topic or content and get funding/credit instead....
If there's a good reason for these practices, I'm ignorant of it.
(Gosh, I really am turning into Emerson Jr. here, huh? Curmudgeonhood, here I am!)
I've encountered this mainly in archaeology, of course, where Mike Smith writes about open access a lot. Definitely worth a look.
student thinks they will publish it somewhere else some day
I suspect this is the only reason of the list you give that could possibly account for the practice. The rest are so narrowly focused on particular disciplines that, while they may be factors in some unusual cases, couldn't possibly account for how widespread it is in general.
I think there's a bill in Congress to crush the public access to PubMed articles. I remember it being all over some blogs a few months ago and I think the uproar has stalled it, but I don't think it's dead.
78: There's some fascinating stuff there. It's especially interesting to me to see the various objections he's responding to, since I've never really been exposed to the anti-open access point of view.
81: I figured you'd like it. He doesn't post that often, but checking on his site from time to time is really worth it.
For what it's worth, Anthony Grafton, who I think is generally worth reading on almost anything he writes about, is skeptical about free access to journals.
I'm not sure that (partly) ad-supported online journals are out of the question. Print journals often have ads.
It's interesting to see all of the open-access conversation that is going on. I haven't thought enough, and don't have enough background knowledge, to have a clear opinion about a lot of these issues, so it's helpful to have these links.
The part I do feel strongly about, as outlined above, really has to do with theses and dissertations that maybe (probably?) will never get turned into articles or books. It seems like such a slam-dunk obviousness to me that for a long time I kept thinking I must just have a blind spot. Nothing could be that obvious and yet not common.
The part I do feel strongly about, as outlined above, really has to do with theses and dissertations that maybe (probably?) will never get turned into articles or books.
Yeah, this is a real problem, and I don't know what the deal is. (Maybe the real academics can weigh in.) It's something that confronts me a lot in my reading on southwestern archaeology, which contains a lot of citations to unpublished dissertations and masters theses.
It was apparently a big step when they started requiring dissertations to be submitted for microfilming. Before that, if a dissertation hadn't been published it could be really hard, as opposed to mildly difficult, to get a hold of it. Master's theses and such are still often only available on site, checked out with photo ID (at least of the early 2000s, when I "checked out" a couple at one university).
I think copyright is a big hurdle because an unpublished work isn't subject to the same rules for distribution as published work. I'm just guessing here. Even now, when microfilmed dissertations are online, it can still be difficult to get a copy without ordering a print version/reel of one's own if the dissertation wasn't filed with your institution.
I've heard stories about a couple of unpublished dissertations that are legendary for having been the nearly-plagiarized sources for later influential work. Assuming that's not apocryphal, I doubt that would have happened if it had been easier for people to see the original dissertations. How ironic.
is skeptical about free access to journals.
Well, the journals don't have to be free, as long as the articles are freely available elsewhere. As he discusses. I think fears that free access to articles will kill journals are overblown. It hasn't happened to any journals yet, despite two decades of free online preprints on arxiv.
But if it does eventually kill the journals, so what? Journals provide two things: publication, and peer review. (And all the work for both of those is done by researchers.) If free online publication kills journals, there's no real loss, provided we can come up with an acceptable new framework for peer review. That seems like a solvable problem.
mildly difficult
I'm not picking a fight here, because I'm going to bed. But let the record reflect that in my experience, if one has no institutional affiliation and is not in the city where the university is located, it is much, much more than "mildly difficult" to get a hold of an unpublished dissertation.
"I think copyright is a big hurdle because an unpublished work isn't subject to the same rules for distribution as published work."
One of the things that confuses me about this is that, post-liberalization of copyright, a dissertation seems to be published -- not *broadly*, but much more than things that I (and my drooling leet internet buds) assume are copyright by default.
90: It's relative. Of course it's extremely difficult now without an affiliation (though you can usually buy one if it's microfilmed, so the issue is price). It used to be that way for everyone.
91: I think, still guessing, that publication via microfilm does make it easier to distribute. But older dissertations are probably like orphan works now.
I don't really have any idea how one would obtain a copy of my dissertation. I had to submit it to some sort of online archiving thing, but I don't think it's publicly available. It was just a compilation of a few papers, though, so there's no reason for anyone to want it.
Something like 3-5 people bought my Dad's dissertation through UMI (which ProQuest seems to have taken over), who did the microfilm thing. I guess they either got printouts or reels.
I don't know your name, essear, but you could try here if you really want to see if you can find your diss.
Yes, looks like ProQuest/UMI is what I had to submit to. Apparently they have an "OpenAccess" option that means subscribers to their databases can get the dissertation online, but it still isn't publicly available, and they charge an extra fee. Not very satisfactory, really. But as I said, in my case there was no reason to want to make the dissertation available (if there was any original material in it, I would have put it on arxiv anyway).
It does look like a bit of a racket monopoly. It appears the going rate for unbound copies mailed to you is $43.00. Cheaper than flying to the institution for the physical copy and manually copying it yourself, I guess. You don't seem to be able to get even the abstract without an affiliation (but you can search some of the database by title/author/keyword). Supposedly, the Library of Congress is the only place where you can get access to everything in the database (and can copy it to a USB drive), or so I was told at an information session a few years ago.
BELGIAN EDUCATION POLICY IN THE CONGO, 1945-1960 by GINGRICH, NEWTON LEROY Ph.D., Tulane University, 1971, 307 pages; AAT 7203881
Only $41.00 pdf!
re: 74
Yeah, there's canals connecting bits of the 'Great Glen' that runs all the way across. It's an ancient geological fault, which is why the lochs run across it that way.
re: open access, etc.
In philosophy there's now http://philpapers.org/ which is very useful. More generally, Oxford now has an online archive and more recent D.Phil (aka PhD) theses are required to be lodged there.
So any future academic theses produced by the university will be accessible, whether published or not. I think quite a few other institutions now have similar models.
89
But if it does eventually kill the journals, so what? Journals provide two things: publication, and peer review. (And all the work for both of those is done by researchers.) If free online publication kills journals, there's no real loss, provided we can come up with an acceptable new framework for peer review. That seems like a solvable problem.
I am not even convinced that peer review is that important.
What can a qualified editor of a print journal do to facilitate peer review that a qualified owner of a web site can't?
There are really two things; the nihil obstat and the imprimatur (ok, really, I just wanted to use both those terms)—that is, peer review establishes, at a minimum, that the thing can be published, but the fact that's it's published here and not there is something else again (granted, the peer review standards will also vary with the journal, or so I assume). The thing is, neither of those things requires a journal at all, just an editorial board and reviewers. All the actual papers could be hosted or distributed some other way, with (say) authenticated notices of who has granted it an imprimatur. (I feel the technocrat in me emerging!)
If Grafton is worried about maintaining both efficiency and quality, I have just the solution: relax both the efficiency and, generally, publication requirements for tenure (and more broadly norms about publication for advancement). Then there'll be fewer things to vet in the first place, and professors who would otherwise have to devote a large chunk of time to cranking out papers will have more time available to referee! Everyone wins, except Elsevier.
Kotsko on not handing his dissertation out willy-nilly:
Within the academic system as it actually exists, however, sending out the most important thing I've ever written-a document whose publication (or whose role as a seed of future published documents) will prove to be absolutely essential to my career advancement-to whatever stranger comes along is an imprudent move, to say the least. Plagiarism, whether intentional or not, really does happen, and recourse is hard to come by.
Before Witt's 77, it hadn't occurred to me that thesis and dissertation accessibility might be a persistent thorn in anyone's side. That's probably because, just like in essear's field, in my field theses seem to be almost vestigal. Everyone publishes their work in article form during or shortly after grad school (having a submission-ready ms. is often a graduation requirement), and so the thesis is typically the same material bound together or in slightly different form.
As for the rest of academic publishing, I know I've blathered here before on the subject, so I'll try not to repeat. A more recent observation of mine is that PLoS One doesn't seem to be gaining much a huge amount of traction in this field. No one seems ready to say "fuck the impact factors, we'll figure out what's important by reading the papers" yet, despite protestations to the contrary. We all still want as much journal-name-derived prestige as we can get.
I certainly wouldn't say that this field is one that "just flat-out discourages" the wide dissemination of our work after publication. Everyone is pro-OA, and seems to be aware of the NIH requirements to submit to PubMed Central. Access issues just get sidelined in favor of trying to get your paper in the most prestigious journal possible. And really, now that submission to PMC is a requirement, rather than just a request, "worrying about access issues" would nowadays mean worrying about whether the public can access the prettily formatted version of your article (which would mean you'd have to go for an OA journal), and whether you want to be able to be able to put your ms. on the internet before publication (which would mean only submitting to journals that didn't consider that "prior publication"). I haven't done a survey lately, but I think that ever more journals are dropping preprint server prohibitions. No one does it, though, because no one in the field looks at preprint servers, because no one does it.
As for putting stuff on personal webpages, people would probably be glad to do it, but no one really updates their personal webpages. Not a priority.
And even some non-OA are opening up their archives. E.g., the archives from 1997 to 12 months ago of the J. Neurophysiol are yours for the taking! Have at it, folks!
Everyone wins, except Elsevier.
The best of all possible outcomes. But you reinforce my point that "an editorial board and reviewers" can in principle select, moderate and distribute papers (why traditional papers only?) via any medium they damn well want to, without affecting the standard to which they aspire. So the remaining question is why they don't.
So the remaining question is why they don't.
Because everyone would have to agree simultaneously that publication on the website those editors and reviewers worked for was just as prestigious—and mattered just as much for promotion, tenure, and grant renewal purposes—as publication in one of the current "prestige journals". I believe it's what they call a collective action problem.
When PLoS Biol (a prominent OA journal) was launched, IIRC they seemed to have recognized this, as there were print and web campaigns where a bunch of prestigious faculty names were listed next to the words "We Choose PLoS", or something. I.e, "the cool kids are hanging over at this new place; it's o.k." And as far as the goal of creating a prestigious new journal goes, it has worked, as PB's Impact Factor is quite high. But that doesn't mean that Science and the Nature Publishing Group journals are no longer cool. Great career benefits still accrue from publishing in one of those.
If you wanted to crush Elsevier (the real demon), you'd have to make it seem like a genuine moral failing to publish in one of their journals, and you'd again have to convince everyone of this simultaneously. Otherwise people will defect and publish in Cell and get the corresponding benefits. It happened before my time here, but I've heard that there were attempts made by senior faculty at this university to organize a submission boycott of the prestige Elsevier journals, but such an effort clearly didn't last, if it ever went very far.
There are some attempts in the humanities to do this.
The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, for example, is an online, peer-reviewed open access journal (run out of USC?) and which seems to be of a decently high standard, with a serious editorial board, etc.
101 I am not even convinced that peer review is that important.
I'm actually in complete agreement with this, especially given some of the referee responses I've gotten from people who seem to stop reading at page two and do nothing but complain and demand that their papers be cited, but it's remarkably difficult to convince people that peer review is not the heart and soul of the scientific (or, more generally, academic) process.
What Witt said in 90. Most schools in the US encourage/require graduates to send the dissertation to UMI. But some schools forbid it. Hopkins is one such. I wanted to read a dissertation there and couldn't get past the security guard at the library. Community of scholars my ass.
109: I didn't realize that things were that bad.
I think there's a bill in Congress to crush the public access to PubMed articles. I remember it being all over some blogs a few months ago and I think the uproar has stalled it, but I don't think it's dead.
This would piss me off so much. Personally, I'd blame the doctors who don't want their patients to be informed for that. I'm only joking. Well, half-joking.
Please excuse my ignorance, but why is Elsevier so bad? I mean, how is it worse than other prestigious applications?
Search Crooked Timber -- they had a scandal recently where they were publishing things that looked like journals, but were non-peer reviewed industry-sponsored research. Like, a company would come up with some papers they wanted to use in their publicity, and they'd pay Elsevier to publish them as an issue of the Journal Of Plausibly Named Ad-Hoc Studies.
Two relevant Crooked Timber posts. From the latter:
Finally, I am quite attracted to the idea of registering disapproval when one cites to work that has been published in Elsevier journals. Some boilerplate language along the lines of:
Timewaster(2009) finds x to be the case. Although these results were reported in a journal published by Elsevier, the company responsible for deliberately publishing pseudo-journals such as The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that these particular findings are problematic.
Also, a division of Reed Elsevier used to run arms fairs, but they were pressured into stopping this a couple of years ago.
And of course the whole sacrificing baby seals in Satanic rituals thing.
It's not a coincidence that it contains all the letters 'e', 'v', 'i', and 'l', after all.
Elsevier makes it either very difficult or impossible for libraries to subscribe to only some of their journals. Elsevier cheerfully creates many journals with extremely low impact factor, by getting as many senior editors for each as is possible, each of whom will then insist that their U's library subscribe to this crap journal which they edit. Many commercial publishers use the same editor-subscriber model to get revenue out of libraries, but Elsevier's pricing and bundling are especially predatory.
In light of 116, I feel compelled to note for the lurkers that 115 is unfortunately not a joke.
105: well, sure. I'm on your side here.
116 was a joke? It sounded plausible.
Err, "application" should have been "publication."
Just saw your comments re: my article, "Medicare Saves Lives," in the Fall 2009 Stanford Social Innovation Review. I reprint that article in full here:
For decades, Americans have squabbled over whether the government should expand Medicare, maintain its current scope, or cut it altogether. But their debates have suffered for lack of an answer to one vital question: Does Medicare make a difference?
A new study shows that Medicare indeed makes a difference for seriously ill patients--and that difference is the one between life and death. Following the fates of more than 400,000 people admitted to California hospitals through their emergency departments, a team of economists finds that patients who are just over 65 years old--and thus eligible for Medicare--are 20 percent less likely to die within a week of admission than are their slightly younger counterparts who do not yet qualify for the government insurance.
"Until this paper, no one thought that health insurance of any kind affected something as straightforward as death rates," says David Card, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the study's lead author. "Fact is, if you show up at the hospital without insurance, they'll take you in and give you fairly decent treatment."
But the Medicare-eligible set seems to get somewhat better treatment, Card and his colleagues find. Their study reveals that patients between 65 and 70 have more procedures and higher bills than do patients between 60 and 64, hinting that Medicare-aged patients are receiving more care. This closer attention may give Medicare recipients an edge on surviving their trip to the ER, Card says.
Card's study also suggests that Medicare recipients fare better than not only the uninsured, but also the privately insured. "A lot of people do not have very good insurance," he explains. In addition, hospital staff must sometimes waste valuable time untangling what exactly a particular insurance company will cover for a particular patient before delivering aid. "But hospitals don't have to call up to find out what Medicare can do," he notes.
For their study, Card and his coauthors took advantage of the fact that some 80 percent of Americans enroll in Medicare within a few days of their 65th birthdays. As a result, the researchers could apply a sophisticated statistical test that compares the outcomes of people on either side of the Medicare-age line--that is, people ages 60 to 64 vs. people ages 65 to 70.
To make sure that these two groups were equally sick, the researchers restricted their study to people who reported to hospital emergency departments with strokes, heart attacks, respiratory failure, and other life-threatening illnesses. "These events bring people to the ER regardless of their insurance coverage," Card says. The team then examined which of these very sick people survived a day, a week, a month, and other time intervals up to two years. Their findings demonstrate that even nine months later, 20 percent more Medicareaged patients than younger patients were still alive.
