The Open Access (OA) tenets of granting unrestricted access to the results of publicly-funded research are in contrast with current models of scientific publishing, where access is restricted to journal customers. At the same time, subscription costs increase and add considerable strain on libraries, forced to cancel an increasing number of journals subscriptions. This situation is particularly acute in fields like High-Energy Physics (HEP), where pre-prints describing scientific results are timely available online. There is a growing concern within the academic community that the future of high-quality journals, and the peer-review system they administer, is at risk.
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badScience
» Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column from the Guardian and more…
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openAccess
BioMed Central Blog : Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences votes to adopt mandatory open access policy: "As discussed in the New York Times and the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences has just considered, and approved, the adoption of a new policy designed to ensure that the results of work published by members of the Faculty remain openly accessible. The policy is the first of its kind in the US, though similar institutional open access mandates are becoming increasingly common around the world."
googleArchitecture
googleArchitecture @ highScalability
"Google is the King of scalability. Everyone knows Google for their large, sophisticated, and fast searching, but they don't just shine in search. Their platform approach to building scalable applications allows them to roll out internet scale applications at an alarmingly high competition crushing rate. Their goal is always to build a higher performing higher scaling infrastructure to support their products. How do they do that?"
"Google is the King of scalability. Everyone knows Google for their large, sophisticated, and fast searching, but they don't just shine in search. Their platform approach to building scalable applications allows them to roll out internet scale applications at an alarmingly high competition crushing rate. Their goal is always to build a higher performing higher scaling infrastructure to support their products. How do they do that?"
distributedSystems
The Basics
What is a distributed system? It's one of those things that's hard to define without first defining many other things. Here is a "cascading" definition of a distributed system:
- A program
- is the code you write.
- A process
- is what you get when you run it.
- A message
- is used to communicate between processes.
- A packet
- is a fragment of a message that might travel on a wire.
- A protocol
- is a formal description of message formats and the rules that two processes must follow in order to exchange those messages.
- A network
- is the infrastructure that links computers, workstations, terminals, servers, etc. It consists of routers which are connected by communication links.
- A component
- can be a process or any piece of hardware required to run a process, support communications between processes, store data, etc.
- A distributed system
- is an application that executes a collection of protocols to coordinate the actions of multiple processes on a network, such that all components cooperate together to perform a single or small set of related tasks.
Why build a distributed system? There are lots of advantages including the ability to connect remote users with remote resources in an open and scalable way. When we say open, we mean each component is continually open to interaction with other components. When we say scalable, we mean the system can easily be altered to accommodate changes in the number of users, resources and computing entities.
Thus, a distributed system can be much larger and more powerful given the combined capabilities of the distributed components, than combinations of stand-alone systems. But it's not easy - for a distributed system to be useful, it must be reliable. This is a difficult goal to achieve because of the complexity of the interactions between simultaneously running components.
