Author: Schimmer, Ralf et al.; Genre: Paper; Published online: 2015-04-28; Open Access; Title: Disrupting the subscription journals’ business model for the necessary large-scale transformation to open access
An interesting viewpoint on the future of scientific publication, and assessment of its cost.
Today there was an interesting article in Helsingin Sannomat.
http://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/a1415168967244
The book by Mary Somerville, that is mentioned in the article is in the public domain and available, as many other old and interesting books, through the Internet Archive.
https://archive.org/details/onconnexionphys00somegoog
I was particularly impressed by the preface written in the 1830’s:
In one of the comments in HS a reader writes that programming is boring… I disagree, just coding may be boring, but designing software and algorithms is anything but boring!
Another reader correctly says that Ada is not a super-computer langauge. In a way it was ment to be when it was designed, but in the sense of being a tool for creating reliable and bug-free software. However, as some other languages designed by a commitee it ended being too complex and inconsistent, and because of this difficult to use as a general purpose language.
This layman’s introduction to plant-plant communication in Quanta on-line magazine is interesting both in relation to the phenomena studied and how science works. Nowadays that plants communicate with each other is widely accepted, but several types of communication are still controversial and not all available evidence is as strong as one would wish. Consequently, it is a very exciting field and time to do research about plant-plant interactions, including communication!
Check out this paper colleagues, as far as I know it is the first report of leaf mimicry:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982214002693