Links for 2010-08-28

“In 2007, when I was but a wee sophomore at Williams College, ESPN College GameDay visited our campus marking the first and possibly last time they visit a Division III school. I thought that would also be the last Williams College would ever hear from ESPN. Boy, was I wrong, and glad to be. 

It was an ordinary Wednesday (May 4th) when I received a call from Eph Sports Information Director Dick Quinn (DQ) asking if I knew how to get my hands on the Purple Cow mascot outfit, because if I did, then ESPN wanted to fly me to Los Angeles in three days to wear the purple cow suit in a commercial.  The commercial would be for ESPN College GameDay !

DQ asked if I had room in my schedule.  “It just opened up,” I said.  But first we had to locate the costume.”

“[W]hen Galileo Galilei first looked through a good quality telescope and discovered Jupiter’s moons, nobody believed him. Since he was the only person able to make such good telescopes, he actually made and distributed them to other scientists — not just as a profitable sideline, but so that the other scientists could confirm his observations!

One could see this a first step towards “open science”: in order to reproduce Galileo’s observations, astronomers had to have a telescope that only Galileo could make. So Galileo had to make telescopes and send them out, thus allowing others to both reproduce his observations and build upon them.

The story takes on a different aura, however, when you realize that Galileo could have just given out the actual manufacturing instructions for the telescopes, but didn’t. “

“Following a series of embarrassingly backward laws recently enacted in Arizona, Texas governor Rick Perry pledged Wednesday to do everything in his power to reestablish his state as the most regressive in the nation. “I commend Arizona for its commitment to exceedingly draconian social policies, but [Arizona Governor] Jan Brewer should know that we still have some real doozies up our sleeve,””

“Open access has taken on the mantle of a religious crusade. Open access, it seems, is a panacea for all ills, adhered to by faith in the face of any evidence to the contrary. All journals, all publications, should be made freely accessible at the point of consumption, according to their wild-haired, starry-eyed prophets.

To anyone with half a brain, this is ludicrous. Allow me to take the example of [Faculty of 1000] itself, and show you why open access is unsustainable in this instance. It won’t take long.”