Get Started Reading Books and Articles on the Cheap

…s and translations). Just make sure you select “Full View” in the dropdown menu, and Google returns only books that are old enough to have been released to the public domain. This trick is very effective, as long as the author you want is already dead. Download Free Articles from Preprint Servers. Read the almost-ready-for-print version, without paying for it! Physics and mathematics: arxiv.org. Philosophy of Science: philsci-archive.pitt.edu. Dow…

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Special: What’s With the Economy.

…Duck MUCH MORE than the original amount (say, 200,000 dollars). But the payments are made in small amounts, every month, over the course of 30 years. (Actually, the extra amount paid is interest, but let’s not complicate this story.) That payment is called a mortgage. PART 3: PRE-PAYMENTS & FORECLOSURES. In order for the deal with McDuck to be fair, there’s one exception about those mortgage payments. Imagine that, one week after McDuck gave Burge…

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Get Started Learning General Relativity Online

…w of any online resources that are not on this list, suggest them in the comments and I will add them to the list! Contents Non-mathematical introductions to general relativity Mathematical introductions to general relativity Philosophy of general relativity Other general relativity references. Non-mathematical introductions to general relativity Einstein for Everyone, by John D. Norton. This is a complete introductory text. Many pictures and anim…

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Improving the Peer Review Process

…her many suggestions are: Online interface for anonymous author-reviewer communication. Why keep the slow (and frankly archaic) editor-mediated communication between author and reviewer, when everyone has access to the interwebs? An anonymized online interface would be quicker, easier, and more useful. In particular, it would allow for quick clarificatory questions, and even back-and-forth discussions of important results between author and review…

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Stop commercializing academic publishing

…your business model runs completely counter to the aims of the academic community, for this reason: academic publishing is not like commercial publishing. Stop conflating the two. I know of nary an academic that is publishing for the bling. So, stop thinking of us as obscure niche counterparts to J. K. Rowling. Scholarly authors would be crazy to write books for the tiny (or often non-existent) monetary compensation. They do it to disseminate inf…

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