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Author Topic: Impending Doom Thread  (Read 7915 times)

Trekkin

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #60 on: October 31, 2017, 08:59:38 pm »

Nice ad hominem there Trekkin. :P

For a better explanation of my view, i will just give it, so you dont have to confabulate one.

In terms of curation, the costs of that process have dropped from several dollars per article, to less than a few cents per article. This is especially true when the people reviewing the literature are more often than not, NOT PAID for it.  The services the journals provide are typesetting, spell checking, and general document formatting. (In addition, of course, to being prestigious.) Nearly all of those are fully capable of automated processing today. We are not talking about paying people to set up a lithograph template to print the article anymore. Those days are long gone. The actual source of costs for curation are from storage and bandwidth costs. Granted, with the ever present threat of the removal of network neutrality rules, these costs have the potential to skyrocket due to double dipping from the ISPs involved, the current normative costs are pennies per megabyte. Well within the boundaries of being financed within the reach of the lay public.

0. Hey, apparently vipers are good at ad hominem attacks.

1. citation needed on those costs.

2. I'm not talking about whether the dollar amounts are sensible -- they aren't, but much like hospital chargemasters, they're not "real" costs unless something's gone awry somewhere. I'm saying that, as long as journals exist, someone's got to pay for them. Paywalls are a way to do that. They are a way that needs you to pay rather than me, yes, and I get that you'd rather it be the other way around. I don't blame you; who wouldn't rather things be free? But as long as there has to be money coming in, charging people to read gets us more science than only charging people to publish. I want more science.

Regarding "is it better to hide information from the public or to educate them", my point is that it's a false dichotomy. The public needs to be educated before giving them access to research is equivalent to giving them information; I could fling data at you all day one randomly selected number at a time, but you'd hardly call yourself more informed at the end of it, would you? You, in the sense of the public, would need context for it to mean anything, statistical literacy to evaluate it and some familiarity with the methods to test it properly and so on, if you wanted to properly understand it.

The average charlatan wouldn't need that at all to quote-mine it and willfully misinterpret it to sell nonsense to people, and that's why I think that just throwing the floodgates open is not only not the same as educating the public, it actually has the potential to do real harm by giving people tools that are easier to misuse than to use properly. I'd rather not see research papers deceitfully cut up like movie reviews to sell vitamins, and it's way faster for some marketeer to do that than for the public at large to reliably see through it.

So no, I don't see any value in letting the public skip to the end of the education process and read research they're not trained to evaluate; there's very little good that can come of it and a lot of damage it could do. It's just too easy for people to find something that lets them decide they know better than all those fuddy-duddy science snobs, and then they don't take their medicine or drive drunk or rub crystals on their plague sores or shoot meth directly into their brains or who knows what else. They already believe it. Giving them access to anything they want will just let them find "proof" and be that much harder to disabuse of whatever ridiculousness they've decided to believe.

Find me a way to educate the public properly and I'll push for public access at the end of it. Doing it by itself would just make many existing problems worse. It's not the library I'm worried about burning down. It's the world when they think they understand fire.
« Last Edit: October 31, 2017, 09:03:22 pm by Trekkin »
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wierd

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #61 on: October 31, 2017, 10:37:34 pm »

Citations you say?

Ok-- here's an article from a financial publication about this very topic (actual costs of bandwidth)
http://business.financialpost.com/technology/how-much-does-bandwidth-actually-cost

They estimate that the actual bulk cost of transmission of data is in the ballpark of 5 cents per GIGABYTE. Additions over that price would include such things as markup and one-offs. Since a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, that means the costs to transfer a 1mb file is less than 1 cent.

So, what about the data storage side of that equation?

Google gives us some nice pricing information for their cloud storage solutions...
https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing

They give prices of slightly less than 3 cents per gigabyte per month for simple storage in a multi-regional context (the most expensive one).

That pretty neatly supports my argument I think.
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Trekkin

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #62 on: October 31, 2017, 11:31:35 pm »

Citations you say?

Ok-- here's an article from a financial publication about this very topic (actual costs of bandwidth)
http://business.financialpost.com/technology/how-much-does-bandwidth-actually-cost

They estimate that the actual bulk cost of transmission of data is in the ballpark of 5 cents per GIGABYTE. Additions over that price would include such things as markup and one-offs. Since a gigabyte is 1024 megabytes, that means the costs to transfer a 1mb file is less than 1 cent.

So, what about the data storage side of that equation?

Google gives us some nice pricing information for their cloud storage solutions...
https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing

They give prices of slightly less than 3 cents per gigabyte per month for simple storage in a multi-regional context (the most expensive one).

That pretty neatly supports my argument I think.

And you would be flatly wrong. Again.

1. You found the cost for the ISP to provide bandwidth to the consumer, not the price for the consumer to buy it. That's why it's talking about switching costs and so forth. Journals are users, not ISPs; they buy bandwidth at price, not cost.

2. The cost of curation is not only the cost of storing and transmitting data, but also salaries. You've got IT, administration, and senior editors -- who, in contrast to reviewers, are often paid staff, and are responsible for the complex task of screening the junk out from potentially publishable science. That's hard to automate. Top-tier journals even have paid associate editorial staff. That's on top of facilities and so forth.

And now reality. Per Cambridge Economic Policy Associates' Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system in the UK (Research Information Network, 2008), journals run between 20% and 35% profit margins, barring any entanglement with societies. So your $200 per article is, in that case, earning them $70 in profit, with $130 being consumed in costs. $130 is not "cents per article." Comparing listed revenue to articles published at these margins suggests that the marginal cost of publishing a single article runs into the thousands of dollars.

Yes, yes, I know, it's clearly bloated and inefficient and wrong and evil and whatever else you feel like calling it. Your numbers are still inapplicable, and your willingness to put them up anyway is still illustrative of my point that the general public wouldn't know what to do with all our data even if they got hold of it.
« Last Edit: October 31, 2017, 11:34:31 pm by Trekkin »
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wierd

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #63 on: October 31, 2017, 11:37:24 pm »

A better question is how much of your 130$ is advertising and lobbying/legal, since the paid journals are essentially monopolists (given their requirements for exclusive copyright holding as a prereq for publishing, and their dominant position as the "prestigious" publications that are most valuable for impact scores) and have a strong incentive to protect said monopoly status. (So, this includes the costs of maintaining an army of attack lawyers, lobbyists, and the like.)

Good luck getting that (They really arent going to tell you how much their retainer fees are, or how much they actually grease up world governments for cozy copyright rules)-- Besides, I seriously doubt that a single document is going to have several thousand dollars worth of invested employee time (since the payment is being done PER DOWNLOAD, and not as a one off cost-- but clearly that little foible is unimportant. /s) especially on a highly cited, high impact paper (meaning more opportunities to amortize that cost vector statistically.)
« Last Edit: October 31, 2017, 11:42:24 pm by wierd »
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Paxiecrunchle

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #64 on: November 01, 2017, 04:30:14 am »

Do we need a new thread for talking about economics and open access journals vs Paywalls and academic/scientific societies and the like.

I only ask because reading about that did not make me feel particularly doomed.

wierd

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #65 on: November 01, 2017, 05:15:03 am »

Sadly, Trekkin seems to feel that without pedantic amounts of background and rigor, we are not qualified to even see the data, let alone discuss it. Until we can get him to acknowledge otherwise, he will just rant and rave about how we dont know what we are talking about and need to be quiet.
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ChairmanPoo

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #66 on: November 01, 2017, 05:21:17 am »

I got bored early on and placed him on the ignore list. I'm simply not willing to scroll through his textblocks.
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Jimmy

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #67 on: November 01, 2017, 05:40:35 am »

If you don't feel doomed, spend a moment to reflect on the immense wealth of information available to the common man today against the average level of intelligence of the population, and you'll get there pretty soon.

1. If you can freely answer in this venue, do you consider steep paywalls to be ethical (your own ethical standards count in this case)? Why or why not?

Paywalls are absolutely ethical. If a person does a job, they should be able to choose what value to attach to that job. However, competition or regulation should exist in some form to avoid monopoly of content.

Supply and demand of scientific information is a niche market, one typically created for and consumed by only the academic elite. Niche markets usually attract premiums which larger markets that survive on volume don't require. The biggest issue is that technology, especially that relating to the location and transmission of information across large distances, has grown exponentially within recent history.

Increasingly, those who profit from buying and monopolizing information are finding their business model is eroding within an era where free flow of information is near universal. The evolution of the market requires a rapid shift to adapt to current trends, lest their business model becomes obsolete. This has been most visible among the music and film industries, where market demands and developing technology have created new ways for consumers to access content on demand for relatively reasonable prices.

2. If you have considered alternatives to a steep paywall for academic content, which do you like best?

Where exclusive rights are the norm for information, limitations on duration of exclusivity should be key to combating loss of access. Public domain access after a limited duration of exclusive distribution offers publishers time to gather remuneration whilst still offering the general public access to content. Five to ten years from date of publication is typically well within the range of most generally accepted "current" research, and universal access to academic content older than this date would promote healthy uptake among those not practicing at the cutting edge of research.

3. If you have a favorite alternative, is it also the one you consider the most viable for the long-term proliferation and propagation of widely and practically applied scientific information and understanding? Why or why not?

Public access to academic material after an appropriate exclusivity period is a viable option for propagation of information, as it maintains incentive for content creators and publishers alike to push the boundaries of knowledge whilst still allowing universal access to all interested parties no matter their financial status.

4. If you have any more time, what do you think about piracy of paywalled content? Is it a force that will eventually make the world a better place? A worse place?

At its core, piracy of content is one form of competition, a rebellion against what is perceived as an imbalanced relationship between service and price.

A great analogy is that of patented drugs. These medications are owned by a company that bought the rights to distribute this creation, perhaps from an independent academic who created this as part of their own field of research but sold the rights to distribute the creation to a different company.

The cost of manufacturing and distributing this creation is actually quite small. Yet, the company serves its own interests and that of its shareholders when picking a price based, not on the cost of the creation, but upon the maximum price they believe prevailing market for this creation will reasonably pay.

Now let's introduce a theoretical magic box that almost all people who use this drug might have in their home or workplace. This box manufactures stuff, and if you wanted, you could even use your magic box to create this drug. But the law says it's wrong to do so, because that's owned by the company that bought the exclusive rights to charge money for creating this drug.

If the price of the drug was reasonable, most people wouldn't break the law. If it's unreasonably high, many would consider doing so, especially if the consequences were quite low even if they're caught.

The same principle applies to companies who profit from transmitting information. They've paid for the right to offer this creation to other people, and there's laws that say, even though you could do the same thing yourself for free, you're not allowed to. Whether people respect the law depends on whether the price is worthy or respect or contempt.
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wierd

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #68 on: November 01, 2017, 06:11:29 am »

What makes me feel particularly doomed, is that now, more than any other time in human history, we have access to not only large sums of data, but also to powerful tools to analyze that data quickly and reliably. YET-- despite these tools being available, not only to academics, but to policy makers, economists, and even the general public (who is ironically more educated, or at least has access to more educational tools than ever before), the SAME PATTERNS seen in less advanced societies in the face of ecological catastrophe and resource depletion are extant, and nobody seems to give a flying fuck-- even arguing that the hard choice to actually change economic and human behavior, as evidenced by the data analytics, is just too terrible to even contemplate, even though the outcome of refusing to act is guaranteed collapse of the civilization.

This is compounded by the reality that also for the first time in human history, there is nowhere for humanity to spread to, to avoid the consequences of that ecological disaster while the biosphere recovers, and for the first time in history of mankind, the entire biosphere as a whole is imperiled in such a fashion that human life will not be possible after the inevitable consequences hit.

So, yeah, I am pretty upset about the inaction of my parent nation, the US-- and about the denialism about climate change.
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dustywayfarer

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #69 on: November 01, 2017, 09:47:44 am »

If the thread has been sufficiently derailed that individuals are getting blocked over it, I believe a new thread is in order. If it helps, great! If it doesn't, hopefully no kittens *Microcline Doors* were harmed in the process.

I thanked/replied to people over there, because my posts have little to do with the impending doom hanging over the land.
« Last Edit: November 01, 2017, 09:52:25 am by dustywayfarer »
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MoonyTheHuman

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Re: Impending Doom Thread
« Reply #70 on: November 01, 2017, 03:22:45 pm »

PTW.

In the meantime, will Dwarf Fortress create singularity? Up next on the Conspiracy Theory Channel! </snark>

Sheb

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