21,030 research outputs found
OA advocate Stevan Harnad withdraws support for RCUK policy
No full textWhen on July 16th Research Councils UK (RCUK) published its updated Policy on Access to Research Outputs the Open Access (OA) movement greeted the news with enthusiasm. This was hardly surprising: unlike the recommendations in the controversial Finch Report (published a month earlier), RCUK stressed that it continues to view both gold OA publishing and green OA self-archiving as equal partners in any OA policy. One of the first to applaud the new policy was long-standing OA advocate, and self-styled archivangelist, Stevan Harnad. The minute the report was published a relieved Harnad began flooding mailing lists with messages congratulating RCUK on coming up with a policy that not only defied Finch, but was stronger than its current OA policy. But as Harnad set about talking up the policy, and seeking to win over sceptics and doubters, he himself began to have doubts. And eventually he was driven to the conclusion that he had no option but to withdraw his support for the RCUK policy — which he now characterises as “autistic”, and a “foolish, wasteful and counterproductive step backwards”. How has what at first sight seemed so desirable rapidly become something terrible? Curious to find out, I contacted Harnad. Below I publish the email interview that emerged from our conversation
On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution
No full textJerry Fodor argues that Darwin was wrong about "natural selection" because (1) it is only a tautology rather than a scientific law that can support counterfactuals ("If X had happened, Y would have happened") and because (2) only minds can select. Hence Darwin's analogy with "artificial selection" by animal breeders was misleading and evolutionary explanation is nothing but post-hoc historical narrative. I argue that Darwin was right on all counts. Until Darwin's "tautology," it had been believed that either (a) God had created all organisms as they are, or (b) organisms had always been as they are. Darwin revealed instead that (c) organisms have heritable traits that evolved across time through random variation, with survival and reproduction in (changing) environments determining (mindlessly) which variants were successfully transmitted to the next generation. This not only provided the (true) alternative (c), but also the methodology for investigating which traits had been adaptive, how and why; it also led to the discovery of the genetic mechanism of the encoding, variation and evolution of heritable traits. Fodor also draws erroneous conclusions from the analogy between Darwinian evolution and Skinnerian reinforcement learning. Fodor's skepticism about both evolution and learning may be motivated by an overgeneralization of Chomsky's "poverty of the stimulus argument" -- from the origin of Universal Grammar (UG) to the origin of the "concepts" underlying word meaning, which, Fodor thinks, must be "endogenous," rather than evolved or learned
Richard Dorson (interview)
No full textThis interview is included in the American Folklore Society Oral History Project held at the Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. In this item, Richard M. Dorson is interviewed by Richard Reuss at the American Folklore Society annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee for the American Folklore Society Oral History Project. Biography/History note: Richard M. Dorson, folklorist, author, and educator, was born in New York City in 1916 and died in 1981. He earned his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University and taught at Harvard and Michigan State University before becoming professor of history and folklore at Indiana University where he founded its Folklore Institute in 1963 and became the first director and first chair of the Folklore Department at Indiana University in 1978. This collection consists of 1 sound tape reel (40 min.) : analog, 7 1/2 ips, 2 track, mono. ; 7 in. It was originally recorded on November 2, 1973 at the American Folklore Society annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee by Richard Reuss on a Sony audiocassette. This is a first-generation copy
OA advocate Stevan Harnad withdraws support for RCUK policy
No full textWhen on July 16th Research Councils UK (RCUK) published its updated Policy on Access to Research Outputs the Open Access (OA) movement greeted the news with enthusiasm. This was hardly surprising: unlike the recommendations in the controversial Finch Report (published a month earlier), RCUK stressed that it continues to view both gold OA publishing and green OA self-archiving as equal partners in any OA policy. One of the first to applaud the new policy was long-standing OA advocate, and self-styled archivangelist, Stevan Harnad. The minute the report was published a relieved Harnad began flooding mailing lists with messages congratulating RCUK on coming up with a policy that not only defied Finch, but was stronger than its current OA policy. But as Harnad set about talking up the policy, and seeking to win over sceptics and doubters, he himself began to have doubts. And eventually he was driven to the conclusion that he had no option but to withdraw his support for the RCUK policy — which he now characterises as “autistic”, and a “foolish, wasteful and counterproductive step backwards”. How has what at first sight seemed so desirable rapidly become something terrible? Curious to find out, I contacted Harnad. Below I publish the email interview that emerged from our conversation
Folder 9: Schwiderski, Richard Craig v. State of Texas 2, 1979-1984
No full textPhotocopy of a section of an article written by New York author Richard Reeves and titled 'Too Late to Kill the Messenger' and dated 1979, and argues for the role of media during violent situations
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Publisher wheeling and dealing: open access via national and global McNopoly?
No full textComments on: Open Access in the UK: Reinventing the Big Deal (Journalist Richard Poynder interview of publisher Jan Velterop
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
No full textWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Minds, Brains and Turing
No full textTuring set the agenda for (what would eventually be called) the cognitive sciences. He said, essentially, that cognition is as cognition does (or, more accurately, as cognition is capable of doing): Explain the causal basis of cognitive capacity and you’ve explained cognition. Test your explanation by designing a machine that can do everything a normal human cognizer can do – and do it so veridically that human cognizers cannot tell its performance apart from a real human cognizer’s – and you really cannot ask for anything more. Or can you? Neither Turing modelling nor any other kind of computational r dynamical modelling will explain how or why cognizers feel
Green OA Self-Archiving Needs a Lobbying Organisation
No full textSome university libraries and administrations think OA is all about journal affordability, digital preservation, digital curation (IRs) and interoperability (OAI). Some OA publishers think OA is all about conversion to Gold OA and the funding of Gold OA fees (CERN, etc.). Some copyright reformers think OA is all about reforming copyright law. And some traditional publishers lobby against Green OA mandates (and sometimes also against Gold OA) as a threat to their industry. There exists no recognized theme associated with Green OA self-archiving, no Green OA-specific interest group that is invited to represent Green OA at OA events. Richard Poynder, Napoleon Miradon and others have mooted the idea of a Green OA lobby. Creating such a lobby would be an excellent and timely idea and an appropriate reflection of the European and American petitions demonstrating the growing worldwide support for mandating Green OA
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