Evolving notes, images and sounds by Luis Apiolaza

Month: January 2012 (Page 1 of 2)

Academic publication boycott

The last few weeks there has been a number of researchers calling for, or supporting, a boycott against Elsevier; for example, Scientific Community to Elsevier: Drop Dead, Elsevier—my part in its downfall or, more general, Should you boycott academic publishers?

What metrics are used to compare Elsevier to other publishers? It is common to refer to cost-per-article; for example, in my area Forest Ecology and Management (one of the most popular general Forestry Journals) charges USD 31.50 per article but Tree Genetics and Genomes (published by Springer Verlag) costs EUR 34.95 (roughly USD 46). Continue reading

Mid-January flotsam: teaching edition

I was thinking about new material that I will use for teaching this coming semester (starting the third week of February) and suddenly compiled the following list of links:

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IPython

I installed the latest version (0.12) of IPython from source in my mac, but forgot that I had a previous version (0.10) installed using easy_install. When trying to run ipython I kept getting the error: No module named terminal.ipapp.

Fixing it. I ran easy_install -m ipython in Terminal, so Python doesn’t continue looking for the old package, as explained here. Then I was able to navigate to /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages and then use rm -r ipython-0.10.1-py2.6.egg. Now everything works fine.

R is a language

A commenter on this blog reminded me of one of the frustrating aspects faced by newbies, not only to R but to any other programming environment (I am thinking of typical students doing stats for the first time). The statement “R is a language” sounds perfectly harmless if you have previous exposure to programming. However, if you come from a zero-programming background the question is What do you really mean?
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The world owes you nothing

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Mark Twain

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