1y ago

Beyond Wikipedia, what are some of your favorite online learning resources?

From time to time I find a dive into the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy useful for refreshing my memory on some ideas and concepts.

Also the MDN Learning Area is really useful for getting a handle on some web development details.

What others are you fond of, whether esoteric or exoteric?

🤞 this federates properly this time (sorry if the old post eventually emerges, I initially posted this shortly after the Lemmy update kinda threw a wrench in things across instances)

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45 comments

Whatever you do, make sure that you learn legally and avoid those horrible sites that steal the hard work of researchers and prevent publishers from properly incentivizing academic research by allowing just anyone to download research for free. You know, horrible sites like LibGen, SciHub, or Anna's archive.
Totally disgusting sites that you should definitely avoid.
- Do not go to sci-hub.se! Can you believe someone had the audacity to allow access to government funded research papers for free? Everyone knows that only elite institutions deserve the benefits of publicly funded projects.
  Support your local capitalist by paying them for the content they rightfully stole.
  
  based comment right here
  
  I forgot about that one, thank you!
- Oh that sounds horrible, thank you for letting me know where to avoid as I had no idea.
- YSK: That publishers do not fund or incentivize academic research.
  Authors of scientific papers do not receive money for publishing them (sometimes they have to pay). The peer reviewers work for free. The high prices of scientific journals simply turn into obscenely huge profit margins for the publishers. Publishers harm research by siphoning off money from research budgets and also by preventing better ways of sharing research. Their obscene profits depend on doing things a certain way.
  Funny story: Traditionally, researchers have transferred the copyrights to their papers to the journal. When the internet had become a thing, authors made their own papers available directly for download. Publishers then went after the authors for sharing their own research.
  
  But surely the journals provide some sort of service for the researchers, right? Like paying for experts to review their scientific claims, or fact checking their citations, or even basic grammatical proofreading, right? If the journals are earning so much from research, then conducting academic research must be a lucrative field with so many publishers competing to be the first ones to publish a paper.
  
  I see what you are asking: Why doesn't market competition drive down prices?
  People have to publish in prestigious journals to make a career in science. So, that's the "service". Their position in the system lets them extract payment for something that other people deliver.
  Even if someone opens up a competing journal, they are not likely to get quality submissions, because publishing in some unknown journal does not help the CV.
  At the same time, the cost is mostly born by other people. Librarians pay for the subscriptions. I'm not sure why there is not more pushback from that angle. Eventually, institutions need access to these journals.
  The cost to scientific research is spread over all society. No one person feels it. No one can even be sure how much better things would be under a reformed system.
  Progress happens only when someone goes too far and causes outrage in the academic community. There has been some progress to move to a better model. But all that money can pay for a lot of PR.
  ETA: On second thought, I'm probably simply not aware of the efforts of librarians, etc.
  
  Let’s trace it back. Why do academics need to get published in order for their career to succeed? Why wouldn’t a paper published in a no-name journal carry any weight?
  Does it boil down to whoever would be hiring them not having the time to read their research, so they rely on someone else’s judgment?
  
  I was being sarcastic. Many journals don't provide any of those services. Some journals even charge researchers for the "prestige" of publishing a paper. Peer review is mostly unpaid work, and some reviewers act as gatekeepers.
  
  Add a " /s " at the end to help people know that.
  
  No, please don’t. Do it using word choice and tone of your writing. Sarcasm exists for a reason and denoting it with a single symbol is a bad idea. Sarcasm functions through its subtlety, in writer and reader.
  Sarcasm is using categorical imprecision to point out how obvious the truth is. It’s words face-planting on purpose to get themselves out of the way of your eyes. To clearly label the sarcasm as such screws up this whole effect. It’s bird shit on the lens — now they’re looking at the surface of the lens not the thing you want to show them.
  It’s a structure that points elsewhere, and requires an intuitive leap. Adding the /s bridges what should be a leap and the utility of the technique as a means of communication is lost.
  If you find yourself tempted to use the /s, what you’re discussing is probably too important for sarcasm anyway and you should just say what needs to be said.
  
  I thought you might be, but I'm sure it's not common knowledge that it doesn't work that way.
  For some reason, Lemmy has a tendency to go all in on trickle-down on copyright. Some threads feel like they are overrun by right-wing libertarians, with their faith in absolute property rights. Except that even the more doctrinaire among those libertarians tend to be conflicted on intellectual property.
  
  Often it's a requirement of the workplace (typically acadaemia, e.g. R1 institutions), and it's paid for in large part by various grants from the government. Or done for free in "spare time" as is the case where I work. ¯(ツ)_/¯
- As an information, you can always rely on the wikipedia page for those sites to find the up-to-date domain, so you can avoid it at all cost!!
- As a quick reminder to everyone: Researchers have to pay to get their papers published in scientific journals. They receive no money back from those journals. The journals are all double-dipping by charging both the author and the reader to use them. It isn’t stealing from researchers when researchers don’t get paid for your usage regardless.
  In fact, one of the most ethical ways to get access to research papers is to go to journals, find the author(s) of the paper you want to read, and email them directly to politely ask for a copy. They’ll gladly send it to you for free, because they also hate the journal system that they’ve been forced into using.
- I struggle to find recent publications on SciHub, y'know, to report them to the hardworking journals that tirelessly implemented paywalls.
  Any ideas how I can find papers that are within the past 6 months?
  
  Honestly - if it's a specific article, then just email the author. Unless they're a blowhard they'll usually be happy to shoot off a copy of the final PDF or at least a preprint. Doubly so if you're a grad student and say how excited you are about their research.
- Whoever set up these sites should be ashamed of themselves. How dare they make critical knowledge that can improve humanity freely available?
- Our teacher show us exactly how to access scihub, libgen and sites like this just for us to "avoid them".

45 comments