February 03, 2020
Bibtex2mediawiki converter
February 02, 2020
Vlogs of phd students at youtube
Some phd students have created vlogs at youtube in which they are telling to the public what the life at the campus is and how complicate it is to write a thesis. The main reason why these students are doing so is because they want to share a phd lifestyle with the world. So a phd vlog can be interpreted as some kind of success story which is telling a plot.
This is a good starting point into the direction of open science, but what the readership is really interested in, is if the phd student exposes not only his personal life, but the phd livestyle in general. A possible attempt towards that direction was made by Lawrence Bacow, which is the 29th president of harvard university.
Similar to a normal phd student, he has choosen the youtube platform to tell the public something about his life on the campus. But instead of telling a success story, Mr. Bacow has a quite different story to offer:
Larry Bacow, Harvard University President: The future of higher education | LIVE STREAM, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkd5sLbYCHI
What he is telling the public and other phd students as well is that higher education in general has no future. Most of the colleges and universities will close in the near future and the result looks sad, very similar the dystopia from the movie “Back to the future II”.
I'm not sure, if the president of Harvard has analyzed the economic situation of his university and other colleges correct, so perhaps he was only interested in getting more views. The video has a high quality and it make sense to take a look. Perhaps it make sense to explain, that Open Science is not the same as closing all the academic publishers and shutdown all the colleges. Open Science means, that the university life will become more relevant for larger part of the society, and that more people can attend higher education.
This is a good starting point into the direction of open science, but what the readership is really interested in, is if the phd student exposes not only his personal life, but the phd livestyle in general. A possible attempt towards that direction was made by Lawrence Bacow, which is the 29th president of harvard university.
Similar to a normal phd student, he has choosen the youtube platform to tell the public something about his life on the campus. But instead of telling a success story, Mr. Bacow has a quite different story to offer:
Larry Bacow, Harvard University President: The future of higher education | LIVE STREAM, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkd5sLbYCHI
What he is telling the public and other phd students as well is that higher education in general has no future. Most of the colleges and universities will close in the near future and the result looks sad, very similar the dystopia from the movie “Back to the future II”.
I'm not sure, if the president of Harvard has analyzed the economic situation of his university and other colleges correct, so perhaps he was only interested in getting more views. The video has a high quality and it make sense to take a look. Perhaps it make sense to explain, that Open Science is not the same as closing all the academic publishers and shutdown all the colleges. Open Science means, that the university life will become more relevant for larger part of the society, and that more people can attend higher education.
February 01, 2020
Data recovery with photorec
In some internet forums, the extundelete tool is often recommended to rescue data from a harddrive. I have tested out the tool, but it struggles for a LVM2 logical container which is the standard in Fedora Linux. The better idea is to use the photorec tool.
1. dd bs=4M if=/dev/partition of=backup.img
2. sudo photorec backup.img
The good news is, that the photorec is recognizing an .img file which contains of a LVM2 volume easily. Then, the user has to specify in the option menu on which harddrive he likes to store all the recovered data and then it will take many hours until the workflow is complete. The directory is populated with many files which are recovered by the software. Right now, the photorec tool is the most advanced program in the Internet fur such a purpose. According to the documentation it is working also with NTFS drives from Windows, but i have only tried out to recover data from a ext4 drive with a lvm2 volume.
The only disadvantage is, that the date/time is not correct of the file, so it's a bit complicated to identify to the correct file. Also all the directory names are gone. But it's better than nothing
1. dd bs=4M if=/dev/partition of=backup.img
2. sudo photorec backup.img
The good news is, that the photorec is recognizing an .img file which contains of a LVM2 volume easily. Then, the user has to specify in the option menu on which harddrive he likes to store all the recovered data and then it will take many hours until the workflow is complete. The directory is populated with many files which are recovered by the software. Right now, the photorec tool is the most advanced program in the Internet fur such a purpose. According to the documentation it is working also with NTFS drives from Windows, but i have only tried out to recover data from a ext4 drive with a lvm2 volume.
The only disadvantage is, that the date/time is not correct of the file, so it's a bit complicated to identify to the correct file. Also all the directory names are gone. But it's better than nothing
Can Artificial Intelligence fix peer review?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07245-9 A nature article is describing current effort to use AI for improving the peer review system. The most surprising answer is, that AI is indeed the best practice method in doing so. There are two main reasons for this:
1. By formalizing the peer review process into a computer software, it can be reproduced more easier. That means, even if the created peer review software isn't used in reality, but normal human peer reviewer are monitoring a manuscript it make sense to program the software, because this will make more clear what peer review is about.
2. Large part of the peer review process, for example plagiarism checks can be realized with computer programs very well. That means, the AI is able to do a basic incoming control.
So let us describe what an AI peer review system is doing. The first and most important incoming check is to verify the identity of the user. That means, an online peer review platform whould allow only professors and phd student to submit a paper, but not other people. It's interesting to know, that such an identity checkup has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence itself, but how peer review works. Peer review is about 10 million scientists worldwide who are able to submit a paper to a journal, while normal authors are not allowed in doing so.
Sure, a non-scientist can create with LaTeX a paper too, but he won't get a peer review for it. That means, all the papers in the world were written by experts but not by amateurs. Sure, it's possible to imagine a moderated preprint server in which everybody is allowed to upload content. Similar to zenodo. But Zenodo isn't a peer review platform but it's a self-publishing system.
The funny thing is, that academic peer review and be member of the population of 10 million researchers in the world is the same. That means, all the peer review papers in the world are created by phd students who can proove that they are really phd students but not amateurs. The hypothesis is, that escpecially an automated AI based incoming check won't change the situation, but it would replicate the working of the current system.
Or let me explain it the other way around. An automated peer review system doesn't open up the ivory tower for new users, but it holds non-scientists outside of the publication chain.
How important is the identity in peer review?
The surprising fact around peer review is, that the process isn't formalized yet. One possible attempt in doing is to introduce artificial Intelligence. This will result into the question, how exactly a software should work who is doing the peer review process autonomously.
The first aspect of peer review is, that it's never about the document itself, but it's about the researcher's identity. Perhaps it make sense to describe the situation in detail. Suppose, peer review is equal to anonymous peer review. Then, the workflow is the following:
10 human users with unknown names are submitting pdf documents to a website. The papers are evaluated by the peer reviewers, if the content is plagiarized, if the research topic is new and if the mistakes are made. Then the peer reviewers will reject 5 of the papers, and the remaining 5 papers are peer reviewed.
The funny thing is, that such a pipeline is the opposite of the reality. The reason is, that in the fictional example, the assumption was, that paper itself, but not the identity of the users is important. A more realistic peer review works with the following principle:
All the 10 users are validated. 5 of them have a phd title and as a result their papers get accepted, while 5 of them have no phd title and their paper gets rejected. Even if the non-phd students have written a more interesting paper, they have no chance to get accepted. Basically spoken an automated peer review software is doing an identity check if the submitting user has a phd title. If not, he gets rejected.
1. By formalizing the peer review process into a computer software, it can be reproduced more easier. That means, even if the created peer review software isn't used in reality, but normal human peer reviewer are monitoring a manuscript it make sense to program the software, because this will make more clear what peer review is about.
2. Large part of the peer review process, for example plagiarism checks can be realized with computer programs very well. That means, the AI is able to do a basic incoming control.
So let us describe what an AI peer review system is doing. The first and most important incoming check is to verify the identity of the user. That means, an online peer review platform whould allow only professors and phd student to submit a paper, but not other people. It's interesting to know, that such an identity checkup has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence itself, but how peer review works. Peer review is about 10 million scientists worldwide who are able to submit a paper to a journal, while normal authors are not allowed in doing so.
Sure, a non-scientist can create with LaTeX a paper too, but he won't get a peer review for it. That means, all the papers in the world were written by experts but not by amateurs. Sure, it's possible to imagine a moderated preprint server in which everybody is allowed to upload content. Similar to zenodo. But Zenodo isn't a peer review platform but it's a self-publishing system.
The funny thing is, that academic peer review and be member of the population of 10 million researchers in the world is the same. That means, all the peer review papers in the world are created by phd students who can proove that they are really phd students but not amateurs. The hypothesis is, that escpecially an automated AI based incoming check won't change the situation, but it would replicate the working of the current system.
Or let me explain it the other way around. An automated peer review system doesn't open up the ivory tower for new users, but it holds non-scientists outside of the publication chain.
How important is the identity in peer review?
The surprising fact around peer review is, that the process isn't formalized yet. One possible attempt in doing is to introduce artificial Intelligence. This will result into the question, how exactly a software should work who is doing the peer review process autonomously.
The first aspect of peer review is, that it's never about the document itself, but it's about the researcher's identity. Perhaps it make sense to describe the situation in detail. Suppose, peer review is equal to anonymous peer review. Then, the workflow is the following:
10 human users with unknown names are submitting pdf documents to a website. The papers are evaluated by the peer reviewers, if the content is plagiarized, if the research topic is new and if the mistakes are made. Then the peer reviewers will reject 5 of the papers, and the remaining 5 papers are peer reviewed.
The funny thing is, that such a pipeline is the opposite of the reality. The reason is, that in the fictional example, the assumption was, that paper itself, but not the identity of the users is important. A more realistic peer review works with the following principle:
All the 10 users are validated. 5 of them have a phd title and as a result their papers get accepted, while 5 of them have no phd title and their paper gets rejected. Even if the non-phd students have written a more interesting paper, they have no chance to get accepted. Basically spoken an automated peer review software is doing an identity check if the submitting user has a phd title. If not, he gets rejected.
January 31, 2020
Telling the story about the serial crisis from the opposite perspective
The serial crisis was mainly told from the perspective of libraries. The plot in short is, that the large capitalist companies like Elsevier have increased the price for the academic journals, and the poor libraries don't know how to pay. What was ignored is the financial situation of the academic publishers itself.
Let us take first a look into mainstream publishing companies. Newspapers like the New york times, and book publishers Penguin Random House have reached it's height decades ago. That means, the business model of selling printed information is outdated and was replaced by the business model of internet company. The result is, that the product of a printed book can't be sold anymore.
Academic publishers have the same problem. In the past, they were focussed on a single product which was the printed academic journal. There was a high demand for this product and the companies have made a big profit. With the upraising of the internet, the demand for printed academic journals has become lower. As a result, the economical situation of academic publishers is bad: I've found at least two reports about bankruptcy and near bankruptcy of academic publishers:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Publishers-Bankruptcy-Filing/140103
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/02/swets-bankruptcy-will-cost-libraries-time-money
Ironically, the libraries and the students are in the strong position, but the academic publishers are in the weak position. The simple fact is, that the printed academic journal is a product from the past, and if a publishing house is focussed on this single product, the probability is high, that it economic outlook is negative. Sure, large companies like Elsevier and Springer are in a good position. They have recognized early, that they must change their bushiness model into the direction of electronic distribution. But many smaller academic publishers doesn't have the ressources for doing so. They will run into bankruptcy or they will merge with larger companies. Basically spoken, all the publishing companies are under pressure.
Let us investigate what an academic publishing house is doing from the economic perspective. It has customer who are paying money for the journals. This is in most cases a research library. This money is take to create printed journals which includes printing, typesetting, technical peer review, grammar review and marketing. If the customer of the academic publishing houses has a smaller demand, the publishing house can't finance it's costs anymore and it will run into bankruptcy. That means, the research library is not the victim of the serial crisis, but it's the academic publisher who is under pressure.
Let us take first a look into mainstream publishing companies. Newspapers like the New york times, and book publishers Penguin Random House have reached it's height decades ago. That means, the business model of selling printed information is outdated and was replaced by the business model of internet company. The result is, that the product of a printed book can't be sold anymore.
Academic publishers have the same problem. In the past, they were focussed on a single product which was the printed academic journal. There was a high demand for this product and the companies have made a big profit. With the upraising of the internet, the demand for printed academic journals has become lower. As a result, the economical situation of academic publishers is bad: I've found at least two reports about bankruptcy and near bankruptcy of academic publishers:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Publishers-Bankruptcy-Filing/140103
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/02/swets-bankruptcy-will-cost-libraries-time-money
Ironically, the libraries and the students are in the strong position, but the academic publishers are in the weak position. The simple fact is, that the printed academic journal is a product from the past, and if a publishing house is focussed on this single product, the probability is high, that it economic outlook is negative. Sure, large companies like Elsevier and Springer are in a good position. They have recognized early, that they must change their bushiness model into the direction of electronic distribution. But many smaller academic publishers doesn't have the ressources for doing so. They will run into bankruptcy or they will merge with larger companies. Basically spoken, all the publishing companies are under pressure.
Let us investigate what an academic publishing house is doing from the economic perspective. It has customer who are paying money for the journals. This is in most cases a research library. This money is take to create printed journals which includes printing, typesetting, technical peer review, grammar review and marketing. If the customer of the academic publishing houses has a smaller demand, the publishing house can't finance it's costs anymore and it will run into bankruptcy. That means, the research library is not the victim of the serial crisis, but it's the academic publisher who is under pressure.
January 29, 2020
Showing Javascript in Blogger.com
According to a stackoverflow post https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6449733/how-can-i-add-javascript-inside-blogger it's possible to embedded Javascript code into a blogger.com blogpost. I have tried it out, and it works great.
https://trollheaven.blogspot.com/2020/01/javascript-test.html
What is shown in the blogpost is a canvas element for drawing pictures, plus a simple form to enter text. I'm not sure, what the limits are but it seems, that basic Javascript programs are running great in the blogging software.
https://trollheaven.blogspot.com/2020/01/javascript-test.html
What is shown in the blogpost is a canvas element for drawing pictures, plus a simple form to enter text. I'm not sure, what the limits are but it seems, that basic Javascript programs are running great in the blogging software.
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