Who Does Eric Doll Think He Is?

A question-and-answer column with senior Eric Doll

Summer 2011 Travel Guide

Summer vacation is all about having fun, oh, and working to try to save enough money for next semester’s tuition. Taking a fun summer trip doesn’t have to be time consuming or expensive; just look around, there are many sights right here in Iowa that you shouldn’t miss! Get out the maps and your camera and set out on an Iowa road trip

Changing Campustown

Mickey’s Irish Pub was not filled with the usual smell of stale beer and the slurred pick-up lines. Instead, its dwellers asked questions and raised concerns about the project LANE4 Property Management and the City of Ames plans to wreak on Campustown in as little as a year. Business owners crowded onto the sticky floors of the popular bar on Welch Avenue in hopes to get their questions answered and an understanding on where the LANE4 wrecking ball would be making its impression. Tim Schrum, general manager of Mickey’s, organized the meeting March 3 so Campustown business and property owners could ask questions about the future of their businesses, and they heard advice from a lawyer who was present

Open Access is Broken: What Can Be Done?

The idea of “Open Access” (hereafter OA) emerged in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s with a noble goal: to provide comprehensive access to the scholarly literature for everyone around the world by making the results of scholarly research freely and immediately available online to all. After more than 20 years of OA advocacy and development, where do things stand? Has the noble goal of universal access been realized, and is the scholarly literature now accessible and open to the global community of scholars? How strong is the current OA movement and where is it headed? While significant advances have been made, to be sure, the fact is that elements of OA have taken a wrong turn somewhere, resulting in a system that is broken and has not lived up to its promise. Early OA efforts focused on the need for better access to read and reuse scholarly literature. While significant advancement has been made in this area, it has created another barrier to the free and open sharing of scholarly research–access for authors to publish their research. This is especially problematic for those without the means or support to participate in the “pay to publish” model of OA that has become dominant. There is still hope to correct this imbalance, but the scholarly community must refocus and recalibrate its efforts to get back on track

How open access is crucial to the future of science

A commentary published recently in The Journal of Wildlife Management argued that open access publication has strong negative implications for the future of science. Unfortunately, that commentary was founded in serious and deep misconceptions about the distinctions between open access, commercial, and society publications, and the rigor of peer review in open access journals. To the contrary, open access responds more appropriately than traditional closed publishing venues to the needs and participation of an increasingly global scholarly research community, and peer review by a broader community may in many cases be more rigorous, responding to the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of modern research. We respectfully suggest that The Wildlife Society consider a transition from closed access to open access for The Journal of Wildlife Management, as a means of optimizing and maximizing its role in communications in the field

The astronomer, the software engineer, and the cloud

We are in the midst of a transition in the way that computing resources are obtained in the sciences. Cloud-based architectures play an increasing role in scientific processing as well as scientific communication, leveraging the considerable technical investment in these platforms. Typically astronomers have believed that the economics drive them away from this model, however these calculations often fall short of the total cost of delivering computing infrastructure. Moreover there is often a false dichotomy between commercial cloud services (like Amazon Web Services) and traditional bare-metal “special snowflake” hardware; privately deployed clouds (such as university OpenStack clusters) represent a path forward with many of the technological advantages of working in an open standardized infrastructure while avoiding some of the direct costs of the commercial clouds. Here we describe how we have navigated some of these issues in the context of engineering the LSST Data Management’s developer infrastructure, which includes a cross-platform cloud-based continuous integration architecture

Analyzing the Prophylactic and Therapeutic Role of Inoculation to Facilitate Resistance to Conspiracy Theory Beliefs

Conspiracy theories pose a variety of social and psychological consequences for individuals and society, and research suggests that around half of the U.S. population believes at least one. A two-phase inoculation experiment was conducted. Inoculated participants reported more negative general attitudes toward conspiracy theories and lower Phase II generic conspiracist beliefs, which are both indicators of harm-reduction and the beneficial healing impacts of therapeutic inoculation. The addition of therapeutic inoculation as a harm-reduction or healing technique in practitioners’ stakeholder response toolkit is a valuable contribution to both theory and practice