Re: [tlug] Open Access Journals

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 12:16 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<stephen@example.com> wrote:
> Attila Kinali writes:
>
>  > I don't know how it was in other countries, but the (AFAIK) 80s and
>  > 90s were all about interdisciplinary work in switzerland. By the
>  > time i entered university, if you weren't doing something
>  > interdisciplinary, you weren't doing important research in the eye
>  > of the general population (and also politics).
>
> The response of the lay people sounds very faddish to me.  There's
> plenty of good research to be done within disciplines, and the
> long-term goal of interdisciplinary research should be establish a
> discipline, ie, a common set of concepts and methods used to treat the
> same kind of information allowing people working on those problems to
> communicate without tripping over terminology.  If *everybody* is
> doing "interdisciplinary research," I doubt that will be the outcome.


As someone involved in the "interdisciplinary research" of
bioinformatics, I can surely vouch for Stephen's comment.  Building on
CS, biology, statistics, and possibly others, if research in these
other fields were to stop, then bioinformatics would stop, too.  While
some good work in CS algorithms are being done by bioinformaticians,
they still rely on CS research for some of their ideas.


> At the other end of the quality scale, how my colleagues do the
> shit-stick test doesn't involve laboratory measurement.  Instead they
> take economic data (which is quite accurate in most cases, and things
> like prices are basically infinite-precision since they're integers),
> and run a bunch of statistical regressions switching variables in and
> out or tweaking nonlinearities until they get a "statistically
> significant" deviation from theory (these are the better ones) or zero
> for some coefficient.  And that's a publication ... Yay! :-(


...your research area, too?  I thought it was just what I'm seeing in
bioinformatics...  Nice to have company...  ;-)

Ray