a critique of economy of intellectual property, an introduction

it is time, as we the scientist need to acknowledge the fact that there is an economy behind our rather solipsist defined "search for reality" practice of science. Not only a whole industry of "tool building," is out there what is worse, our intellectual property gets owned by scientific journals so that they can sell subscriptions.

this discourse is motivated by a recent phdcomic.



they argue that they are providing the important service of deciding what is "cutting edge research." imagine the journals that affect you getting a job, continuing research are basically setting the "contemporary trends" in contrary to what most of the scientists think of as the science they need to pursue. i don't know what my molecular biology and biophysics friends think but my astronomer and physicist colleagues are fed up and disillusioned by the choices these highly regarded magazines make.

and get this, they are getting paid for this. be they are non-profit organizations or not.

here comes another challenger, called Public Library of Sciences. they support ideologically all articles should be publicly accessible and they publish online journals. they emerged from a very effective public relations stunt, which was triggered by a boycott of journals to make their archives public.

now they are considered to be a new business model in which they rely on scientist charges and do almost the same kind of editorial "filtering" that the high brow journals do.

i became interested in the progress of scientific publishing which not only affects but defines most of our lives. and this is a first post in this series. and i want to finish with a post from phdcomics phorum.

If I had any editorial input at The Onion, I would do an article about Nature announcing a new spin-off journal: Nature Horseshit. There'd be quotes from Nobel laureates about all the horseshit research they had that would be perfect for the journal, etc, etc.

cryptic update

today is the day i solved one of the major problems of my phd thesis.

after all this time of not writing, i decided to tune on to write this. and the worst part is i cannot talk about it. not only i am keeping myself anonymous, as if i am an important person, i am keeping my work secret, as if it matters. as if anybody cares about my blog or my work, or anybody will find this out in a search engine. for fucks sake only approx. 5 other person work on my topic in the world overall, and still i (we? i an my supervisor) need to be careful for our work not to be stolen.

so this blog is called marxists in space and yet i admit my copyrights, or worse intellectual property. in my mind, in a communist society information should be open (as in open source) and free (as in freedom). but nevertheless, the world of science is based on merit and i cannot ignore the existence of these concept just like communists consuming goods from capitalist production, investing their money and financing their future.

there is a well known cliche about the communist kid who has converse shoes and levi's jeans which comes from the "common" people as a criticism to show the idiosyncrasy of the marxists, inescapability from the market and the impossibility of communism. the basis of the criticisms are not only ill founded also what kind of communist the people expect us to be is uncertain.

probably an alien, who has nothing to do with the social comtemporary life. another reason why marxists should go to space.

hence why as a scientist who is critical of the ethics behind the meritocratic system of intellectual rights, which puts competition before collaboration, i practice the same values in order to not parish.

but other than that i want to show you!



this is a circular polarization spectrum, it is quantified by the ratio of stokes parameters. stokes parameters are basically the amplitude of a photon as an electroamgnetic wave. hopefully i will explain these things more in detail later. but nevertheless i am working on modeling of astrophysical objects and their spectra is the main diagnosis tool for us. this object very peculiar just by itself, have been modeled before, but reason for its high circular polarization has been unable to be untangled before. i have a quite good idea what is causing it, and i made some test. this all happened today around 19:00 pm, but i will present my hypothesis to my supervisor.

even if it is correct, the following precise modeling will be painstaking and tedious and life shattering. (ok i am a bit dramatic)