~metafilter | Bookmarks (933)

A UCLA professor is suing six major academic publishers for violating antitrust law. The proposed class action claims that Elsevier, Wiley, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wolters Kluwer "conspired to unlawfully appropriate billions of dollars that would have otherwise funded scientific research" by not paying for peer review, banning simultaneous submissions to multiple journals, and preventing scholars from freely sharing their work.An...

AP/PBS investigative series (part one, part two, interactive; full length documentary)on how (esp in the 1970s & 80s) the international adoption agencies, the governments of South Korea AND the receiving countries (esp. in Scandinavia and North America) met the demand for adoptable children by turning children with families into "abandoned" kids available for export. Though the stated intention of adoption was to spare children...

It's natural to focus on successful teams: Winning is, after all, the point of every game, the reason we have scoreboards in the first place. But we remember the truly great teams far more than we remember the regular everyday champions: to be the best at something will make you immortal. It thus stands to reason that being the best at losing is also...

The brazen heist, which made international headlines, occurred during a COVID-19-related lockdown in Ottawa some time between Christmas Day 2021 and Jan. 6, 2022, the hotel determined. No one was in the building during that period. The photo had been gifted to the hotel by Karsh himself and had been on public display at the Château for decades until it was removed from the...

A person has died for the first time in euthanasia campaigner Dr.Philip Nitschke's suicide machine, the Sarco, in Switzerland. The Sarco machine is in effect a mini gas chamber which fills with nitrogen, an inert non-poisonous gas, after the person who wants to die has entered, closes the lid and presses a button, leading to a painless drug-free death without medical assistance. Nevertheless, several...

Nari Nari Tribal Council looks to wind farm to restore culture and country in New South Wales. A traditional owners' group strikes an agreement that could see it become an equity partner in a renewable energy project proposed for their land in the state's south west. Only one per cent of renewable developments in Australia involve Indigenous ownership, compared with 20 per cent in...

Highlighting all the small but powerful steps you've taken to conserve energy over the past few months (and how that energy has instead been used to fuel the insatiable beast that is AI).

Nowadays, we have a different appetite or tolerance for scientists who had mystical beliefs. We have become increasingly tolerant of his heretical views, which have seemed less problematic. Sometimes, people can still get very upset about the alchemy. But there's actually very little that he left of his own work in alchemy. Most of it is copies of other people's stuff that he indexed...