From a Press Release:

Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association and Cambridge University Press launch new Open Access journal

The Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) and Cambridge University Press announced today the launch of the APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing – a groundbreaking new Open Access journal that will serve as an international forum for signal and information processing researchers across a broad spectrum of research, ranging from traditional modalities of signal processing to emerging areas.

APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing will be an advanced platform for researchers to publish and disseminate their work rapidly, through the continuous publication of peer-reviewed articles. Every article will be freely available online worldwide without restrictions.

All articles are published under the Creative Commons license, with authors retaining copyright. Upon acceptance of a paper, authors pay a one-off processing fee to cover the costs of reviewing, producing, hosting and archiving the article. This quality peer-reviewed journal is overseen by an international team of distinguished and leading experts on the Advisory and Editorial Boards. The APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing will be led by Editor-in-Chief, Professor Antonio Ortega from the University of Southern California.

…

Find out more here.

I doubt that this new journal is of any great interest to most of the readers on this site, but I point it out because it is an example of a major press producing a journal with this new model (Open Access).

Why think “Orangutan” when we expect “Chimp”¹
Continue reading New Open Access Journal →

I know that she does not want me to help her. Our friendship is based on paying attention to each other, so I know that being helped is not something she likes. If I do what I want to do, she’ll get mad and break both my arms, or at least, look at me very very sternly. So I stay away. I could tell her “I’m not helping you. I’m merely loving you, like the friend I am, and you are kindly letting me do that” but she’d break both my arms anyway. The thing is, it was hard to watch. She had taken the puck from a big scary player on the other team, skillfully moved it around the rink, shot it to a teammate who lost it to the other team’s player, then my friend took it back again, and was busy pushing back towards the goal and doing some very fancy puckwork when things went terrible wrong and she hit the ice hard, sliding about half way across the arena and slamming into the boards behind her own goal. Then there was what looked like convulsions but turned out to be her efforts to put her arm back into its rightful position. Continue reading New Rules in Ice Hockey →

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

Last month, I went to Andrews Air Force Base and welcomed home some of our last troops to serve in Iraq. Together, we offered a final, proud salute to the colors under which more than a million of our fellow citizens fought – and several thousand gave their lives.

We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world. For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq. For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country. Most of al Qaeda’s top lieutenants have been defeated. The Taliban’s momentum has been broken, and some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home. Continue reading The State of the Union Address (2012) →

Google will now follow you around the internet, as you use e-mail, search, YoutTube, and so on and so forth, as you use web browsers or your Android phone, and you can’t opt out. This starts March 1st.

I’m not sure if this is a bad thing or not. It depends on exactly what they are doing. It will certainly make the Google experience a bit creepier: As you search for YouTube videos on some topic, Google may make suggestions based on information on your Google Calendar, or if you have a business trip to a certain city on your Calendar, Google may suggest which of your circled contacts on Google+ might like to know you’ll be in town.

From the Washington Post:

Privacy advocates say Google’s changes betray users who are not accustomed to having their information shared across different Web sites.

A user of Gmail, for instance, may send messages about a private meeting with a colleague and may not want the location of that meeting to be thrown into Google’s massive cauldron of data or used for Google’s maps application

Click through to the Washington Post piece if you want to participate in a poll regarding your reaction to this. So far 53% of respond ants plant to cancel their Google accounts because of this policy, 22% will not cancel, and 26% are not sure.

… over This Billboard.

Free-Dos Fearless Leader and IT Manger Jim Hall has a post at Almost Diamonds that some of you will be interested in.

Some time ago, I posted an online poll to survey the relative importance of four qualities at various levels in an IT organization. With the help of other bloggers, and through retweets, we got the word out to as many IT folks as possible. We received responses from all across the globe (though most were from the U.S.) representing private industry, higher education, and government. The poll was up for about two months, but most of the responses came within the first few weeks. I’d like to share the results with you.

Click here to read it.

Sea Monkeys Made of Straw

So, you’ve got what you think is a problem in your community. You know you’ve got a bunch of arguing happening, and you observe what you believe to be fallacies mixed in, probably due to the strong feelings the topic brings u. You have some strong feelings yourself, whether about the community or the subject or about the behavior you witness. Your SIWOTI meter is pegged. What do you do?

Defending Our Mother’s Gardens: In Observance of Roe v. Wade

In her landmark work In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, Alice Walker wrote: “What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmother’s time? Our great-grandmothers’ day? Did you have a genius of a great-great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved white overseer’s lash? Or was her body broken and forced to bear children (who were more often than not sold away from her)—eight, ten, fifteen, twenty children—when her one joy was the thought of modeling heroic figures of rebellion?”

Is feminism skeptical? (or: are ninjas awesome?)

Every damn conversation we’ve had over the past several years in our respective atheist/skeptic communities that even approaches the topic of feminism, or discusses women in any way, seems to attract the sort of person in our communities who demands that we prove that feminism — the idea that women are human beings and should be treated with basic human dignity — is skeptical. Who evidently believes that the natural overlap between skepticism and feminism is insufficient for the topic to be broached. That the feminists in the skepticism community are not turning a skeptical eye to their dogmatically held beliefs that women shouldn’t be systematically mistreated or disadvantaged by any social structure that we humans have built.

The remarkable adaptability of ‘family values’ voters

The Republican party likes to portray itself as defenders of ‘traditional family values’, which seem to many of us to be synonymous with narrow-minded, bigoted, and religiously-motivated ones. But that’s fine. People have their own moral standards and need some measures by which to evaluate candidates and they have every right to expect the candidates they support to have the same values that they do.

But what is odd is that rather than letting the values determine who their candidate should be, many of those voters seem to reverse the process and let the candidate determine their values at any given moment.

Islamophobia is used to scaremonger people into silence

The Guardian has published a letter calling for an inquiry into the ‘anti-Islam’ press.

Whilst racism must be unequivocally condemned, the signatories – like the Guardian, confuse racism with a criticism of Islam. They are not one and the same no matter how many letters and articles the Guardian publishes.

Islamophobia is nothing but a political term …

Hello, Hello Again!

Hi everyone!

My name is Natalie Reed, and I’m newly arrived here to Freethought Blogs. Before this move, I was a writer for the Skepchick network, and managing editor for sister site Queereka. I’m young and grossly unqualified, but people seem to enjoy what I do. “What I do” generally being posts on trans and queer issues, gender, sexuality and so on from a skeptical, secular perspective.