Developing a de-centralized atmospheric science journal

[turtlehurricane]

This hash contains the ENTIRE best track for 2014, how crazy is that? I didn't realize cryptography was so powerful

 

78b4819c

[tornadotony]

It is most definitely peer review, and everyone is allowed to give their view. I have enough faith in the meteorology community to believe rigorous peer review can be done without anyone in charge.

Sent from my iPhone

Nope.

[turtlehurricane]

Nope.

Centralization stems out of lack of faith in our fellow man, it is a belief that people need to be controlled to make the world a better place.

 

Ultimately centralization inhibits the large majority of people while giving power to a few. Imagine if everyone could increase their power and knowledge uninhibited by anyone else? There'd be a lot more discoveries.

[Mallow]

It's certainly well accepted to pay thousands of dollars for an article, but it creates an insurmountable entry barrier for most. If you're middle class and not employed by the government or a university you won't be able to publish ideas, even if you have the best idea ever. Allowing all people in the world to post to the de-centralized journal would probably increase the flow of new ideas by orders of magnitude.

 

And it definitely won't be easy, but I expect the community will over time develop a rigorous and legitimate peer review system on this platform.

 

Thank you for mentioning arXiv.org, I've never seen it before and it is somewhat similar to what I'm imagining here.

 

???

 

As WxUSAF noted, that money comes from the grants, usually. If you're "middle class and not employed by the government or a university", but you have the "best idea ever", you can surely get a grant to fund your article. Not just the publication costs, but also the research costs.

 

This whole thread strikes me as very odd. Tip seems to think meteorology has it worse, but based on the conversations I've had with researchers whose opinions on the matter I trust, the opposite is true--people with ulterior motives who make publication difficult for others are there, as they are in any scientific field, but if anything, it's less common in meteorology, not more common.

 

The idea that the AMS has some sort of monopoly on meteorological research, and are out to make publication difficult for those who deserve to be published... I don't even know where to begin with that. As others have pointed out, there will be costs for any worthwhile publication platform--it's unavoidable. Saying "people will be willing to create the thing for free", or "the [petabytes of] data can just be spread across all users for no charge", or "people will voluntarily do quality peer reviews because they will"... all are pipe dreams.

[turtlehurricane]

Surely my butt, researchers in universities have a hard time getting grants, someone part of no institution would not get a grant. Prove me wrong by listing 1 grant that has been given to someone who isn't employed by government/university/well known weather business.

It's sad how incredibly closed minded a lot of meteorologists are. I know this would definitely be a great tool, but several people have said they are certain no one would contribute.

The ams definitely has a government funded monopoly on weather research, and they've abused that power to squeeze every dollar they can out of researchers. The ams clearly has little concern for spreading new research to the public, otherwise it would be 100% free to read. Charging $35 to read an article decreases viewership by orders of magnitude.

It's a sad state of affairs, and clearly some people are brainwashed into supporting the current broken centralized system. I get a sense that people against this can't even comprehend how de-centralized publishing would work

Sent from my iPhone

[uncle W]

I heard this was the Amway thread. Am I in the right place?

there are no rocks here to hide under...try another thread...

[WxUSAF]

The AGU journals (like JGR and GRL) have started a trend to make more research free to the public and you can actually pay extra to have your journal be immediately open-source.  I do agree that science should be open to the public, maybe after some sort of journal proprietary period.  I think things are slowly moving in that direction.

[Ginx snewx]

 

so this thread isn't about the AMS or your poorly-understood concept of the peer review system--it's a bitcoin-related grift you're floating.

 

Some interesting discussion from the Meteorology community and you have to bump this nonsense. He has an opinion, answered you already,others have countered that opinion, either add something or don't.

[bobbutts]

It's really hard to get closed minded people to understand the difference between Bitcoin the currency and other uses for the blockchain.  People love to mock what they don't understand.   How many posts did you have to answer about this being a bitcoin collection scam or Amway comparisons?

[bobbutts]

 

so this thread isn't about the AMS or your poorly-understood concept of the peer review system--it's a bitcoin-related grift you're floating.

 

If you had any idea about Bitcoin or how his proposal used it you're realize how wrong you are about the grift.  It seems like there's plenty to attack that you're knowledgeable about, stick to that.

[turtlehurricane]

Someone created something similar to what I'm thinking of: http://twister.net.co/

 

It's a de-centralized messaging system. It doesnt use Bitcoin's blockchain however, instead it made a new alternative cryptocurrency and uses that chain. This makes the network very weak and subject to 51% attacks, since there's probably less than 100 computers using this. I think it's crucial to use Bitcoin's network since there is hundreds of millions of dollars of computing resources securing it, which makes it nearly impossible to alter the fundamental code.

 

 

The white paper for twister is hosted on arXiv: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.7152v1.pdf

 

And all the code is open source, so this will be a major help to developing a de-centralized posting system. First I gotta get the basic system running, adding all the features needed for the journal would be after that step.

[Mallow]

The AGU journals (like JGR and GRL) have started a trend to make more research free to the public and you can actually pay extra to have your journal be immediately open-source.  I do agree that science should be open to the public, maybe after some sort of journal proprietary period.  I think things are slowly moving in that direction.

 

This is the one part I agree with. Making the research available to the public for free is great (if tough for some organizations to implement) and absolutely worthwhile. But I don't see th's idea as being anywhere near the ideal solution to make that happen.

[Typhoon Tip]

???

 

As WxUSAF noted, that money comes from the grants, usually. If you're "middle class and not employed by the government or a university", but you have the "best idea ever", you can surely get a grant to fund your article. Not just the publication costs, but also the research costs.

 

This whole thread strikes me as very odd. Tip seems to think meteorology has it worse, but based on the conversations I've had with researchers whose opinions on the matter I trust, the opposite is true--people with ulterior motives who make publication difficult for others are there, as they are in any scientific field, but if anything, it's less common in meteorology, not more common.

 

The idea that the AMS has some sort of monopoly on meteorological research, and are out to make publication difficult for those who deserve to be published... I don't even know where to begin with that. As others have pointed out, there will be costs for any worthwhile publication platform--it's unavoidable. Saying "people will be willing to create the thing for free", or "the [petabytes of] data can just be spread across all users for no charge", or "people will voluntarily do quality peer reviews because they will"... all are pipe dreams.

 

Yes, it could very well be an opinion less ubiquitously shared.   However, I am certain it's one based upon a given individual's personal, subjective impression of their own experiences.  

 

Sure, if one is fortunate to have side-stepped many professional/intellectual pitfalls and landmines during their rearing into an egg in the field, they probably would be less empathetic, or even incredulous in matters. Despite the real truth of an entirely disparate set of circumstances that may, and probably was, encountered along roads fraught with proverbial hurdles and opposition of one of their doe-eyed peers.  (the latter privately resents the former ... even though they are close friends - nice! )  

 

Something similar happened to me on the forums - or to be fair, I am not entirely certain, but the circumstance and results were very suspect.  I used to work for WSI back in the day, but only for a limited number of months. They have access to pretty much every technology known to Meteorological man ... with entire product spectra.  Because I was in their employ, I had access.  Once I was no longer in their employ, I still found that I could log-on and peruse the various products.

 

I did not make that fact readily known to anyone.  But around the time, I was also putting out some pretty impressive long-lead winter pattern discussion/philosophies that were tending to come true.  I started receiving accolades, both out in the forum, and via private PMs. (this was all way back in the earlier days of Eastern...).   However, at one point in time, I started receiving irately intoned PMs from a ...cadre (for lack of better word) of Met users, whom I later determined were working in the long lead energy markets.

 

It didn't take much to put two and two together.  So naturally, there is was native competition, where in fact my contribution was entirely free because I'm just a gent on the web. I'm sure that rubbed some the wrong way..  

 

My gaffe was that I leaked it at one point that I had access to certain modeling tools. Within two weeks, I could no longer log on to WSI.  I found that whole era to be remarkably cause-and-effective.  

 

Now...it may be that it was all coincidental.  Sure, as a scientist by mind, I have to accept that plausibility until it is outright determined not to be the case. However, my instincts tell me that it was not.  It may also be the discord, along with what I felt were really trumped up and contrived resentment contents that began, seemingly out of no where (unnecessary opposition), to stream in from certain individuals ... right smack during the weeks leading up to my ability to log onto WSI suddenly terminating.  

 

Simply put, someone feeling threatened on some level, by a wayward unknown showing promise in what has since become a lucrative industry, probably placed a call to WSI and warned them to change there PW/Security settings.  

 

Fine, it was not readily disclosed to me by WSI, upon my leaving that organization, that I was not allowed to continue using their server (though, obviously morality implies that, sure).  It jsut wasn't even brought up upon my leaving.  In fact, I think it was during the ensuing tropical season and I was curious what the long range was doing with some CV disturbance, and had an inkling to try. 'Oh cool!'  And that was about it.  

 

The irony, I never really relied upon those products suites anyway. I have different methods that are uniquely rooted in the way I perceive matters.  So in the long run, it didn't really bother me that I was lampooned (or might have been...) in that regard.

 

What bothered me is there was a definite aroma of a smear campaign that came along with it, where undue opposition to my forum contributions started eroding on my reputation.  It may seem silly, but for those of us that do not have access to refereed/peer review recognition circles, maybe the Internet is a 'better than none' recourse?  

 

In any event, folks started ignoring me on the Internet, and I did nothing personally to conjure that sort of recourse. I could only assume it was the discrediting efforts in general of a few others to remain nameless, gaining traction in time.  And since, I don't post my thoughts on storms that are three weeks away in the imagination that tend to always come true...anymore. F-it.

 

In fairness, all of that may still in fact be coincidental.  I'd like to underscore that statement, and that I am fair as a person. I have to consider that possibility.  However, the experience lending to perception on matters cannot be ignored, either.  And, perhaps when I made that contribution to the present discussion the other day, ...sure, I may have been a little too reliant on that singular story in the composition of my thoughts.  

 

Perhaps, 'Tip seems to think he was targeted once' might have been better?  

 

As an afterthought ... I think also Meteorology is overrun.  There are in affect, too many heads in this discipline.  Too many cooks and it's become a bad episode of "Hell's Kitchen" in this field. I don't believe there are nearly as many deep field Astrophysicists as there are aspiring and/or degree Meteorologists, whereby douche-baggery cannot nearly as successfully hide in the din of a competitive chorus.  If you're "like that" in a less crowded room, you almost cannot keep your self concealed nearly as readily.  But a couple million Mets vying for few jobs, and/or recognition in the field...?  Heh, I've been around on this planet dealing with humanity long enough to know that's less functional.  

 

It's all good... I make a large salary in software and know full well, with confidence, that I have native talents and insights in operational Meteorology, and I'm good with that these days.  I hope my blurb the other day did not add any negative energy to the conversation, though I fear it may.  My bad - 

[turtlehurricane]

This is the one part I agree with. Making the research available to the public for free is great (if tough for some organizations to implement) and absolutely worthwhile. But I don't see th's idea as being anywhere near the ideal solution to make that happen.

How could it be tough to implement? Simply allow free online access. Server hosting is incredibly cheap nowadays, so there'd be minute costs.

 

Ultimately the authors of articles are the ones impacted by this the most, they put months/years of hard work into an article and thousands of dollars, and then the general public can't view it. By the time their article is allowed to be viewed publicly it's ancient history. This prevents almost all AMS articles from gaining popularity. In the end this prohibition on allowing the public to read articles severely inhibits funding potential for researchers and prevents the growth of the AMS journals themselves. It makes zero sense.

 

Also they don't need to pay any taxes and receive millions in donations. I would like to see how much they earn by charging for articles, but their income/budget is impossible to find on the internet. I'm guessing it's a paltry number that isn't worth all the damage it causes.

 

Maybe charging fees for articles was a good system 50-100 years ago, but at this point it's a vestige of the past.

 

Anyways this isn't the main point of why I'm doing this, just 1 of the reasons. Even if AMS articles are free, they can still be censored via the review process. Some might argue it's not a big problem, but at any time it could become a huge problem if the wrong people are put in charge.

[Mallow]

*snip* 

 

I was talking about meteorology researchers, not operational meteorologists. Although there is occasionally an overlap, conflating the two is a mistake, IMO.

[Mallow]

How could it be tough to implement? Simply allow free online access. Server hosting is incredibly cheap nowadays, so there'd be minute costs.

 

Ultimately the authors of articles are the ones impacted by this the most, they put months/years of hard work into an article and thousands of dollars, and then the general public can't view it. By the time their article is allowed to be viewed publicly it's ancient history. This prevents almost all AMS articles from gaining popularity. In the end this prohibition on allowing the public to read articles severely inhibits funding potential for researchers and prevents the growth of the AMS journals themselves. It makes zero sense.

 

Also they don't need to pay any taxes and receive millions in donations. I would like to see how much they earn by charging for articles, but their income/budget is impossible to find on the internet. I'm guessing it's a paltry number that isn't worth all the damage it causes.

 

Maybe charging fees for articles was a good system 50-100 years ago, but at this point it's a vestige of the past.

 

Anyways this isn't the main point of why I'm doing this, just 1 of the reasons. Even if AMS articles are free, they can still be censored via the review process. Some might argue it's not a big problem, but at any time it could become a huge problem if the wrong people are put in charge.

 

Not that I intend to get in an argument over what the AMS does with their money... but I do want to address the bolded quote above.

 

Is the figure you used below a summary meant to support your point? Because it does the opposite. First of all, according to the figure, they received barely over a million in "extramural support", which in most people's book, wouldn't qualify as "millions". Secondly, grants are not "donations" by any means. If their extramural support listed above includes all donations, they've received far less than a million in donations. But pedantics aside, neither you nor I know the AMS's operating costs, and neither you nor I know how much of that they receive from subscriptions for timely viewing of articles.

[turtlehurricane]

it's a terrible platform for this use. I know enough about publishing and online publishing to say that definitively. it's also terrible for the future of scientific research. this has been pointed out in detail to him, and he's consistently ignored every significant criticism.

either he's completely irrational re: constructive criticism or he stands to make money off this.

An increased amount of ideas and debate would increase the pace at which atmospheric science advances. Restricting which ideas reach the scientific community and public is a major hinderance. 99.9% of the world cannot get their ideas expressed in AMS journals, and those people are a tremendous untapped resource.

A web of trust of some sort will develop on its own in a de-centralized system, where people figure out who is legitimate and who is not based on their postings. There will still definitely be a barrier of entry for people who don't know what they're talking about.

Every single thought will be publicly available and stored forever, which massively increases the amount of data available and gives detailed insight into the scientific process. It will be excellent for students to read through debates on a de-centralized platform.

In the current system we are losing a lot of useful information by not publishing reviewer's comments and the responses to those comments; rejected articles should be viewable too.

[winterymix]

It's for everyone, but the disenfranchised and poor of the world will certainly find it useful and beneficial. It will level the playing field.

Sent from my iPhone

Scientific communication doesnt benefit from a "level playing field".  It benefits from integrity.

[winterymix]

The only thing this would do, is allow for psuedoscience beliefs to be given an avenue of publishing. ..

 

Observational astronomy chooses an inarguable standard.  Discover a new comet?  Great!  Discover a new asteroid?  Fantastic!

If so, put your methods and results through the central clearing house for your intellectual discipline so colleagues can attempt to replicate your finding.

 

If anyone in this link wants to know what scientific integrity looks like, here it is:

 

http://www.cbat.eps.harvard.edu/

[turtlehurricane]

People can do the same things you define as 'scientific integrity' in a de-centralized system. People can choose to follow whichever guidelines they want, and create their own journals that peer review via this decentralized system.

There will be infinite freedom, so I expect all the things in our current system and new publishing/peer review techniques which will enhance the literature

[winterymix]

People can do the same things you define as 'scientific integrity' in a de-centralized system. People can choose to follow whichever guidelines they want, and create their own journals that peer review via this decentralized system.

...

 

Science benefits from centralization and very high standards. Folks with the most experience, best insights and solid academic records that stand the test of time along with a national and perhaps international scientific reputation serve as editors of the journals of record.  This system establishes the highest possible standards.  For people earlier in their careers, it should be daunting to get recognized at that level unless those folks have insights that are worthy of recognition at the highest levels.

If a scientist has a good enough mind, they will find a way to get recognized by other scientists with high standards.

 

If a scientist requires a system of decentralization in order to become recognized, they are seeking a hollow victory.

 

Decentralization relaxes scientific standards because the high barriers are gone.  In addition, with decentralization, "high standards" take on definitions colored by all sorts of irreverent influences.  It is so much easier to get into the game.

Science should not be easy.

[turtlehurricane]

Actually the high standards remain, if not intensify. There will be more people criticizing each article then ever before.

 

Keep in mind this is a message system/forum/journal, it can be used for literally anything. People can setup their own centralized journals via the system, essentially anyone could submit articles to them via the de-centralized system and the centralized journals can do their own peer review at that point, and choose to reject or accept articles.

 

To be 100% clear, most of the stuff on this de-centralized platform won't be journal quality articles, so people will need to write external software to parse through it or create their own journal with similar standards to AMS.

 

I would expect current journals to continue to exist, and a bunch of new journals to be created. The good thing is all of the information for all of the journals will be on this system, making research far more efficient and productive for those using the system to obtain information.

 

As it is now we have a whole bunch of centralized journals with no clear conduit of information between them, which is inefficient. And like I keep saying some of these journals monopolized the industry, giving them the ability to censor. Censorship comes in many forms, forcing customers to pay is censorship, forcing authors to pay is censorship, then there's good ole classic biased censorship. If in the future a journal is using unfair censorship then someone else can create their own journal.

 

Ultimately a de-centralized journal system like I describe would enhance the scientific process, and wouldn't be a threat to pre-existing journals, if it's beneficial they will use it.

[jojo762]

While this may seem like an okay idea. It seems as though this would be literally impossible without any funding. Who is going to pay to produce the infrastructure necessary to keep a "de-centralized" journal going? If this was on the internet, like I assume it would be, someone has to pay for domain costs as well as donate TONS of time to writing code and maintaining a website all by themselves, or with their "co-supporters." Without any funding or costs-for-consumers,  it sounds like a giant time suck for some poor unfortunate souls. To be able to maintain this type of idea, either several people would need to be un-employed and work solely on this with no pay, or an unachievable amount of people would need to work on this for free, neither of which will/would happen.

 

Seems to me like it is one of those things that is probably a decently good idea, but is just too far-fetched, and has too many complicating parts to it to actually make it achievable. Also, you'd need to advertise this new journal in some way to get anyone to actually care about it, which also costs money, unless you're going to rely on the old fashioned--and slow--way of people just spreading the word.

[turtlehurricane]

I don't think you understand how de-centralized systems like Bitcoin work. Once it's produced there are no further costs. External programs will be made to make it even better, and the developers will do it for the sake of making a better system, not money.

 

It's not far-fetched at all, Bitcoin already does this, and so does Twister. I'm going to build upon their results and make something optimal for atmospheric science discussion and publishing.

 

At this point I am the only one working on it, and from what I gather so far it's not going to be that difficult to get the basic structure working. Hopefully some people get inspired and hop on board.

 

Bitcoin was developed entirely for free, and has tons of developers who actually fight for control of the external programs. If something is worth developing for the good of the world people will do it without funding. Makes it even better in my view because they are doing it out of passion and not to get a paycheck.

[turtlehurricane]

The easy part will be hashing/encrypting information into small strings (probably with SHA1 since it's easier to write code for), converting to hex, and then sending out on the blockchain. Then to view the articles gotta reverse the hex and the SHA1.

 

Cool thing about hashing is it compacts information by orders of magnitude, which will reduce blockchain fees to near zero. In fact this can be done for free as long as blocks aren't full, which will be true for the next 2-3 years. This entire paper ( http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/2009MWR3000.1?queryID=59%2F977635) can be expressed as 4911a5e92eef75cf9550156a60a59a4b79cd5878 with SHA1, 271492180c3dbcf69efe7873e3432642, with MD5. Will probably use a checksum like adler32 since it produces the most compact string: 5582416b , although there are several checksums that can do the same thing, so it'll depend on which is easiest to implement.

 

This is extremely secure, for example SHA1 was 4911a5e92eef75cf9550156a60a59a4b79cd5878 but if I delete literally 1 space it becomes 5b84bc357392d7196db2db39066a331acefbdbde.

 

I may pass it first through SHA1 or SHA256 and then through a checksum, so it is ultra encrypted when sent onto the blockchain.

 

The tricky part is in order to decrypt the hashes the key needs to be saved, and the key has the same amount of info as the original document. It would be innapropriate to put that much data on the blockchain, so I will need to create a parallel program which saves all the keys for all the hashes generated, unless I find a better way to do this. The parallel program would have a torrent-like feature where computers relay data to each other to mantain the proper database.

 

There might be a simpler way to do this so I'll keep looking. I could just do a reversible compression function and implement a character limit for any given post. I don't want to do that however, it's not robust enough. If I successfully made the parallel database/torrent thing and it was efficient, then the sky would be the limit with this.

 

Considering that most people have internet in excess of 10 mb/s, and terrabytes of data are cheap, I shouldn't be scared of having a large database. I can use compression before putting keys/ciphers in the database to be more efficient. Also I can run a website which saves the database so people can use this system without downloading the database. Of course if the server went down only the people with the database downloaded into their client would be able to keep using the system, so downloading the full thing would be recommended.

 

After I do all that, it will be time to parse the blockchain for posts/articles submitted to this database. I will need to implement some sort of identifier, to separate journal messages from random blockchain messages like you see on http://cryptograffiti.info/That site is a bare bones example of the external program that will be needed to display articles.

[Rainman]

try nwa

 

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) currently has a monopoly on Atmospheric Science publications in the USA and even around the world. In order for your meteorological work to be scientifically accepted it is vital to publish in one of the AMS journals, or somehow get into a bigger one like Nature or Science (but that is quite a rare accomplishment for a meteorologist).

 

I argue that the AMS journal publication system is inhibiting the growth of meteorological knowledge, greatly impeding the flow of scientific ideas, as well as wasting tens of millions of dollars.

 

To begin, it costs many thousands of dollars to publish anything in an AMS journal. If you cannot afford this then you are not allowed to publish, no matter how good your article is. Most publications are funded by the government agency or university the meteorologist works for. This gives governments/universities almost complete control of the official atmospheric science knowledge pool, excluding the ideas of 99% of the world.

 

It is 100% backwards and absurd that authors have to pay to produce content for the AMS. The AMS should be paying authors for their content, like it is in most of the world's newspapers, journals, publications, etc. Rewarding authors for publications would definitely increase the quality of articles too, as people would compete to get the most money and viewership. The way it is now it doesn't really matter if the author's article is mediocre or stellar, as long as it's published it's considered a win. Additionally, the government spent many thousands of dollars on the research for any given publication, clearly the data produced is valuable. A good journal would be motivated to publish valuable data without charging fees to publish it.

 

The AMS does not allow people to view thier articles unless they pay a fee. This isn't a problem for people in the government or universities, but for the general public it is a huge problem. Charging people to read articles in AMS journals massively decreases the amount of people that are reached by the article, I bet there would be orders of magnitude more viewership if the AMS didn't force people to pay. The flow of scientific ideas in the meteorology field is catastrophically inhibited with the current setup, data in new publications rarely reaches the public. It is an insult to the authors that the articles aren't freely shown to members of the public on the internet. The government funded the research to expand public knowledge, yet the knowledge barely reaches the public just because the journal operators want more money.

 

A good journal would charge fees to neither the author or the customer, in order to obtain the highest quality content with maximum viewership. If the AMS journals cannot exist without authors paying and customers paying, then they shouldn't exist. A journal which allows anyone to view articles for free and pays authors would rise to dominance in a free market. Unfortunately as things are the atmospheric science field is not a free market, it is dominated by government institutions, and the AMS has latched itself onto this structure. Scientific ideas that aren't in AMS journals are usually ignored, since those in government institutions and the AMS will tend to lambast non-AMS publications, even if they have a similar peer-review system. Most scientists aggresssively reject for-profit journals as well, since the journal would have an incentive to manipulate content to make money, obscuring the real science.

 

Since the AMS has free reign to do what they want with the publishing system, they have become very inneficient. It takes more than a year to get almost anything published, at best several months even if you did groundbreaking work. This greatly slows the advancement of meteorology, since it takes too long for new results to reach other scientists. During that time other institutions are often working on the same idea, all funded by government money, so ultimately the government wastes a ton of money funding several different scientists to do the same research. And in the end the publication barely reaches the public due to ridiculous demands by the AMS to pay a fee. A one sentence post on twitter often gets more viewership than any given AMS journal publication, which is inexcusable.

 

And that's if your idea even gets published, even with government funding and backing many good ideas get prematurely aborted by the AMS peer review system. Theoretically the system is great, articles are reviewed by people with expert knowledge on the article subject. Unfortunately this doesn't workout so well in real-life. If the expert reads something in your article that disproves their own findings they have an incentive to reject your idea and torpedo the article. The article is either rejected, or the author has to modify the article to agree with the findings of the reviewer, even if the modifications obfuscate the truth. In situations like this things can become overly competitive quickly, the expert in the field can take different results as a personal attack and respond with vigorous agression. This can be worked out by having multiple rounds of review, but it causes a huge delay.

 

In meteorology there is a tendency to attack those with different results, rather than work together to advance science. I believe this problem stems from a lack of funding in atmospheric science, there are too many meteorologists and not enough government or corporate money to go around, not even close to enough. Meteorologists rarely admit they were wrong even when fully disproven with hard empirical data, likely due to sub-conscious fear they might lose funding. Fights between meteorologists can get quite agressive, quickly escalating to personal attacks, which shouldn't happen during scientific debate. Case in point, the National Hurricane Center director was forced to quit since he had a scientific disagreement with staff. http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/07/09/hurricane.official/index.html?eref=rss_topstoriesThere is a strong urge to discredit others in the atmospheric science field to preserve status and funding, especially if their research is in direct competition with your research, regardless of the validity of the research. The total amount of funding stays the same or decreases each year (mostly due to very slow research progress), so if another institution does great research and obtains funding, that means other institutions lost funding. This makes it very difficult for a new institution or scientist to gain a foothold in the field, attacks will come from those already estabilished.

 

The estabilished meteorological institutions and scientists essentially control the AMS journals, and this is used as a weapon to shoot down research from less estabilished scientists. The ability to control the flow of scientific information gives them a major advantage to maintain funding, while putting others at a disadvantage. Clearly we as a community need to somehow separate the flow of scientific information from monetary concerns.

 

The solution would be a decentralized meteorological journal. The centralization of the current AMS journal system has slowed the advancement of meteorological science to a crawl, it has wasted tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars of government funding. And the centralized nature of the AMS allows certain people to control what gets published. In an ideal world this would be fine, but even in a field like meteorology people can and do abuse their power to increase their wealth and reputation. This abuse directly inhibits scientific growth.

 

How would a decentralized journal work? In order to work it would need to be 100% uncontrolled and trustless. Even if a journal is started with the best intentions, if it is centralized it can be taken over by the wrong people. Essentially anyone could post anything to this journal at any time, and it wouldn't be possible to delete what other people say without their permission. Each person will be able to sign messages using a private encryption key they control, so they can definitively prove they were the ones who posted a particular article or comment. If someone wanted to remain 100% anonymous they can do that too, to avoid backlash from coworkers, other institutions, or the government. This will facilitate the free flow of ideas like never before.

 

New data and discoveries will be instantly posted to the journal, rather than waiting months/years like the current AMS journal system. There would be an incentive to quickly post your idea so you get credit for it. Each user of the journal will be able to comment on each article posted in the journal, in this way a peer review will be conducted. Each and every thought on the subject will be documented, so that the reader understands all sides of the debate. If the original author and a reviewer disagree then both ideas will be visible, rather than the author being forced to modify their article.

 

The history of each user will be easily searchable, so that their reputation can be ascertained when considering their comments. Software can be written to find the most popular articles at any given time. Instead of looking through all the AMS journals for new findings it would be easy to see the most popular and important research at any given time on a single page. Research would become much more efficient, simply search the journal for your topic and you will find every relevant article in history in the same spot.

 

This journal can also be used as a hub for forecasting discussion, the ensemble of scientists would likely produce more accurate forecasts than we ever thought possible. Experts on every single topic in meteorology will be reading and contributing to the same thread.

 

There will be no single location or computer where the journal is stored, instead it will be on each computer which participates in the journal. This will make it impossible for the journal to be destroyed or centralized, as long as 1 computer survives the journal lives on. I imagine a similar system to torrents will be used, where each computer sends data to other computers. All data will be cryptographically encrypted and impossible to change without the correct private key. It will obviously be crucial for every scientist to keep their key safe, I'm sure government institutions will ask for the key from all scientists working for them, but it would be a mistake to oblige. Regardless even the most oppressed scientists could make new accounts and post their real thoughts.

 

One of the major advantages to a decentralized journal is it will be independent of money. The journal will be free to use for everyone in the world with a computer, which would drastically increase viewership of articles versus the current AMS system. There would be no publishing costs, so any author can publish regardless of their wealth or position. It will be impossible for scientists to censor each other in attempts to maintain or acquire funding, giving scientists a more fair chance to be funded if their ideas are worthy.

 

The best part is this journal could be easily created, it won't need millions of dollars to setup or approval from the estabilishment, just a single well-built open source program.

 

Basically it will be a discussion board like AmericanWX, de-centralized like Bitcoin, and would have quality peer reviewed content. If the meteorological community adopted something like this scientific progress will become magnitudes faster, and cooperation would occur like never before. The open forum nature of it essentially forces discussion and cooperation, rather than censorship and coercion like we see today. The key is for it to become a respected hub for publishing data, and eventually the most desired place to publish results due to massive viewership, and also since you can get your results published and peer reviewed within days or weeks rather than months and years. I think ideas would advance so quickly that the funding issues of the modern system would disappear.

[turtlehurricane]

I've begun writing the code, using Python. I'm not an expert programmer, but my sister works for Facebook as a programmer so she will be a major help. This huge project might be a simple task for someone like her, especially since other open source programs exist that have the components needed to build this. I'll be posting here as I progress, the code will be open source and so will the discussion.

[andyhb]

try nwa

 

Well he has been expressing himself.

[turtlehurricane]

This is my first time using Python and I'm finding it incredibly versatile.

 

So far I can convert a message, in this case my name 'turtlehurricane', to hex. Then I convert hex to the public Bitcoin key, and then the public key is converted to a Bitcoin address.

 

 

Now I need to see if sending to that Bitcoin address produces the desired result, or if I can simply send to the public key. That's what I'm working on now.

 

Once I figure that out I will write a script to send the transaction. The public key in the output script is the message in hex, and I can recover it from there.

 

It will cost 0.00000546 Bitcoins to send a string of data to a single address, which is 1/10th of a penny. This will be lost forever unless someone generates that address in the future, which is unlikely. Also there is a miner fee, but as of now it's not required to get transactions confirmed in the blockchain. So it will be free to post, I'll give like $20 of Bitcoin to this system and it'll probably last months.

 

I will use an adler32 checksum or something like that to ensure only 1 transaction is needed to get all the data cryptographically secured and proven via the blockchain, even if someone is sending an entire book. I will likely need a paralllel database to store the adler32 checksums and corresponding input data, since that will be too much data for the blockchain. This parallel database may utilize a torrent like feature so everyone shares it with each other, and I can store it on a server for users who don't want to download it. Of course if that server explodes only users who downloaded it would have it, but that should be sufficient since someone can put it up on their own server, or people can just connect to the system for it.

 

Once I got all that written then I can start worrying about getting into the details of making a journal.

 

Basically this is a hack of the Bitcoin system, it's not meant for messages, but message data can be stored in the public keys for addresses since there's essentially infinite bitcoin addresses.

[turtlehurricane]

Saving images into the journal will be simple as well, PNG can be converted to ANSI and then I'd simply hash it. JPG can be made into text and then of course hash, the program will change the file back to a jpg so the end user can see the image. I'll look into the most optimal way to do this to prevent data bloat.

 

I bet even videos would work, but that's probably complex stuff, no need to worry about it yet.

 

I already have a possible way to make this 100% free and have plentiful data storage and processing speed, but won't go into that until I'm sure it's the best way.