Boiling Down Books, Algorithmically 177
destinyland writes "A year ago, Aaron Stanton harangued Google over his new project, a web site analyzing patterns in books to generate infallible recommendations. In March he finally finished a prototype which he showed to Google, Yahoo, and Amazon, and he's just announced that he's finally received a big contract which 'gives us a great deal of potential data to work with.' The 25-year-old's original prototype examined over 200 books, plotting 729,000 data points across 30,293 scenes — but its universe of analyzed novels is about to become much, much bigger."
Re:Newspeak (Score:5, Informative)
"Does 1984 really match the U.S. Patriot Act?
No, that is an easter-egg. A bit of a joke on our part."
It already happened (Score:3, Informative)
...considering the quantity of "classic" tripe that I had to read in high school and college. Who needs an algorithm when you have English teachers who follow flawed formulae?
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:5, Informative)
We scientists would absolutely love to have all of the journals opened up for free access to everyone. But, you see, the publishers own the copyright to our articles. The system requires us to give them the copyright, in order to get our stuff published. Then you, me, and everybody else has to pay to read recent research.
Thankfully, some established journals are going open-access.
That's very promising. But the fact remains that publishers such as Elsevier own the copyright to many decades-worth of scientific literature. And they're not about to give any of it away.
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:2, Informative)
I don't mean to throw stones, but books cost money, many people afford to be on the Internet, yet buying books has become old hat. When you can go on the Internet and get the latest information, books are ... well, a waste of money for the most part. The delay between discovery and publishing and reading is no longer tolerable, not in this throw away society. Look at some science fiction ideals... such delays are always intolerable. I will cite an event that is not even related to show that delay is not right: junteenth. It took several years for emancipation news to reach Texas. Is that right? The point is that information and knowledge should be universal, and instant. The great promise of the Internet was just that. If you wish to spend your nights reading information from 2+ years ago, that is your problem. The rest of us want today's information, and now. Good luck with the personal library.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:3, Informative)
Access Brutal honesty, we don't really care about the access restrictions. Every university has license to pretty much all the major journals. We can get them from wherever with a quick login and so can everyone we know. Sorry, but that's the truth.
This is simply not true. I work at a very large university, and it still amazes me to find that some electronic journals have not been purchased by the university. When I need these articles pronto, I must email friends at other universities. But what about smaller colleges? Enthusiasts? (I doubt there are that many biochemistry enthusiasts, but I'm sure there are a few who would love reading the new Methods in Enzymology or Nature, Science, Cell, what have you. The field needs these enthusiasts.)
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:4, Informative)
We did.
http://www.plos.org/ [plos.org]
(not me personally, I had no role in this but as a member of the community I applaud)
Re:Just one more errosion.... (Score:3, Informative)
The problem is not with the researchers so much as the beuraucracies of univiersities and funding, and the problems of peer review.
Many universities, especially those outside the U.S. use metrics for rating their researchers that are weighted towords publications from Elsevier and others. England is especially bad about this. For that reason many scientists don't have much of a choice in that they are forced to publish there is go without pay.
So totally open spaces raise issues of what it means to be published and the cost of maintaining the system must be borne somewhere. For that reason alone some money must go to journal publishing. However it is very possible for that funding to come from something other than overpriced subscriptions.
Finally, and optimistically most scientists are recityfying this themselves. Most authors post copies of their academic papers online and make them available through Citeseer and other locations so even though the journal is costly the paper may still be obtained even if a few months later.