

Living on the edge of academia - hhm
http://www.drmaciver.com/2008/12/living-on-the-edge-of-academia/

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timr
This article fairly accurately sums up the process of doing research: you read
about some idea, work like crazy for a few days/weeks/months to try a variant
of it on your problem, discover it fails, and repeat the process. For the rare
thing that actually does work, you rush to publish it, then quickly move back
to the grind. There's no time to polish software for distribution, when the
reward is entirely based on the number of documents you produce in a year.

This is why it amuses me when people stereotype academic scientists as
impractical dreamers -- anyone who has stuck with the process of completing a
PhD has demonstrated him or herself to possess a truly super-human tolerance
for drudgery.

(Public service announcement: Hire a PhD! They need the work!)

~~~
Herring
Something I've always wondered about- is there no value in failed results? I'd
think people would benefit from knowing what approaches have failed. How is
that information communicated?

~~~
lliiffee
It basically isn't, which I suspect is a _huge_ collective waste of effort. I
have several times had what I thought was a reasonably obvious idea that was
"sure to work" which I was baffled that I couldn't find in the literature.
Then, after spending a lot of time pursing it, I find it didn't work (for non-
obvious reasons). I suspect I am one in a line of many people that have gone
through that process.

~~~
joeyo
I occasionally wish there was a Journal of Negative Results. However, there is
a real problem in that it is nearly impossible to properly interpret a
negative result. Something might not work because you have a sloppy
experimental technique or because you have a typo in the implementation of
your algorithm.

~~~
waldrews
There are real current efforts to create such publications. This is quite
relevant in pharmacology and other areas where biostatistics is applied, since
there are often fewer incentives to publish the results of, say, a drug trial
that fails to find a significant effect.

Hence, The Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine (yes, it is actually
called that): <http://www.jnrbm.com/>

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cowmoo
If you graduated college, consult with your college librarian. The chance is,
most journals have online subscription deals and they are accessible via
VPN/proxy through your school's subscriptions. If this doesn't apply, go to a
local University's library or research hospital in your area, most of these
subscriptions are validated through universities' ip addresses - so any
computer on campus will do. Trust me, I do this all this time even though I
graduated already.

~~~
lliiffee
There are also certain public libraries (I believe the NY public library is
one) that have access to these databases, and allow residents from anywhere in
the country of world to get a library card. (You may have to get the library
card in person, however.)

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scott_s
The ACM's copyright form states that author's are legally allowed to put a
copy of the paper on their personal website. Really, you don't need to pay any
subscription. If you know the author's names for a paper, chances are one of
them will have it on their personal page.

Most of this is findable in Google within 30 seconds. Often when I search for
a paper's title, I get a pdf from the author's site before an official ACM or
IEEE listing.

~~~
newt0311
CiteseerX is also a good source of papers though not as good as an ACM
subscription.

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11ren
Some university libraries have a public terminal or two (mine does), which has
access to all the electronic journals they are subscribed to (ACM, IEEE,
JSTOR, Springerlink etc).

They don't advertise this; you have to ask.

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wheels
I end up needing a lot of research papers for the work that I'm doing. My
solution is kind of lo-fi crowd sourcing. I'm usually in a few channels on
Freenode and when I hit a paper that I'd like to have and can't hit with a few
well-crafted Google searches I just ask if anyone around has access to them.
Usually gets me the copy I need within 10 minutes or so.

Now, what's really annoying is market research. Friggin' Forester and their
hundreds of dollars per paper. Hrmf.

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marcus
The process the author describes is almost identical to the one I've
experienced, despite the fact my area of research is different than his
(machine learning), but his analysis of the results drastically differs from
mine

Its true, 90% of the stuff doesn't work/isn't applicable and I have spent more
money on buying papers than on rent in the past year, and I spend many days
working on stuff that often has little or no positive effect. But its still
the most cost effective research you can do, after you factor in the value of
your time.

Every new idea I develop on my own takes far longer to develop and test, and
trying to get better results than everyone else is a lot easier when you're
basing your progress on the cutting edge instead of something that is a decade
old.

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bbgm
There is a lot of value in failed results, especially in science. What doesn't
work is critical, if for nothing else, than for protocol and experiment
design. Freeing up negative data is a huge motivation behind Open Notebook
Science(1) and a subject of much discussion on the science blogosphere(2)

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_notebook_science> 2\.
[http://network.nature.com/groups/harvardpublishingforum/foru...](http://network.nature.com/groups/harvardpublishingforum/forum/topics/712)

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ojbyrne
The solution to the "Academic Firewall of Doom" is to get a degree, and then
you can generally go back to your alma mater and get some kind of library
account that will let you access the stuff behind the firewall (generally from
within the library only, of course). Of course its been over a decade since
that loophole worked for me, might have been closed up by now. Or it might
have expanded.

~~~
DaniFong
I recall some kind of problem when I attempted to do this at Dalhousie, but I
can't remember what it was. Maybe I'll try again soon.

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puzzle-out
For journal access, consider some part-time lecturing / mentoring at your
nearest university. I mentor a group of business students once a week, and
aside from the extra money and overall enjoyment, get a university email and
athens account - as I'm undertaking market research for a new startup, this is
saving me A LOT of money.

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parenthesis
I pay a fee to have access to my local university library. (As a graduate of
said university I get half price, but full price (160GBP) is still
reasonable.) This gives me book-borrowing rights, and reference access to
printed copies of journals, (but not electronic access).

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albertcardona
It's a current tragedy in computer science research: authors release a matlab
blob (no source code) or no implementation at all. When asked, I've
encountered these answers:

1) An implementation _is not important_. We developed an _algorithm_!

2) Uh... the student who made the program already left and we can't find it.

3) [the student] I can no longer find my notes on which parameters I used to
make the figures of the paper.

Very rarely, nearly never, does one encounter a proper software release.

Why? Many reasons--the key point is that only a handful of research
institutions have technical staff on board to collect and curate software
produced in house.

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oldgregg
oh, that's so cute! it's almost like he's pretending that academia isn't a
soul-less abyss controlled by self-aggrandizing profiteers.

~~~
gnomic_conic
Ugh, seriously. Academia isn't the place for people with 'Big Ideas' anymore
(or was it ever?)

You find most of the innovation and creativity out in the startups and small
businesses.

