rastinza @rastinza@qoto.org

A couple very rough estimates retrieved quickly in 5 minutes from official Elsevier data.
RELX, the company which owns Elsevier has a capitalization of 56£ billion. Elsevier publishes around 600.000 articles per year and the average price per submission is 2350£ (simple average over submission price in every journal, not counting amount of articles published.)
The average subscription price for each journal is 3524£, I'll assume 600.000 subscription just to have a number.
This means that research institutes and universities overall would pay around 3.5£ billion to Elsevier every year. By saving that money, we could collectively buy Elsevier in less than 10 years.
Maybe we should set up an association, every time you pay money to Elsevier you'd have to make a donation to such association with the objective of buying the majority of RELX.
This would be an economically sound decision.

#research #elsevier #publishing #publishers

I found this service: https://fetchrss.com
They are able to convert a facebook page in a rss feed and 5 of these feeds are for free.

My internet connection has been extremely slow for months: when connecting to certain websites I'd have to wait several minutes to load the page. However, the connection is very quick when I transfer data.
Recently, I decided to investigate. Apparently my company is dropping connection to a vast amount of domains; this wouldn't be a problem, if they didn't include a lot of CDN among those domains.
I asked the IT technician, who said that the security system mistakes CDNs for spam addresses.
Now people, host your own style sheets please, as I otherwise have to wait several minutes to get bootstrap, which you use for setting a header and nothing more.

I'm amazed by the fact that hundreds of people work here and nobody ever complained about it...

Fuck CDN, Fuck people dropping packets rather than rejecting them.
#internet #disservizioIT #CDN #firewall

How to get a Facebook page as an RSS feed? Here they have very cool sociocultural centers that publish the activities on Facebook, and I don't want to regularly log on Facebook just to check events.

#rss #facebook

Ho smesso di fumare, non per la salute o robe del genere.
Dopo anni di onesto scrocco professionale ho dovuto cominciare a comprare tabacco perché il mio coinquilino fumatore si lamentava che gliene scroccavo troppe.
Però allora non ci stò, non voglio mica comprarlo il tabacco, poi così non c'è gusto.
Almeno prima quando avevo voglia di fumare andavo a farmi un giro e mi facevo una chiacchierata con qualcuno, ora ero arrivato al punto di fumare tutti i giorni in casa da solo.

Sto avendo una fervente discussione epistolare con Massimo Fini ed ho provato ad utilizzare #ChatGTP per rimettermi le frasi un po' a posto.
Mi ha sparato fuori questa perla "Meglio non riportare i dati in modo errato, piuttosto che riportarli del tutto."

I mean, 5 minutes ago I didn't know what an MTT assay was. It was what I had in mind and what I was more or less searching for, but had no specific idea of how it worked and what it was.
Now I know what it is and I know where to find specific information about the methodology if I need to.
And I even had the time to write this post...

Normally, I'd have to find a review about these methodologies and skim through it to find the one I was interested in.

I'd say it is quite useful to quickly get a birds eye view of a topic.
Do you trust anything written in there? Obviously not, but you can find a lot of useful keywords related to a topic you know nothing about and save yourself quite some time.

#chatgpt

I didn't know about all this thing, never seen anything about it on local newspapers.
Johnson and Johnson had been sued by several people because apparently some of the baby powder it sold contained asbestos, which led to several young people developing cancer.
Recently, the company opened a spin off and gave it ownership of that product, and with it the legal liability. That company filed bankruptcy, thus victims will not be compensated.

Quite disgusting story. Shame on the USA governments allowing companies to behave in such a way.
I found out the company is in one market index I own; I'm considering selling that and getting something else.
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/19/1123567606/johnson-baby-powder-bankruptcy-lawsuits

#Johnson #company #fraud