Yahoo Releases the Largest-Ever Machine Learning Dataset for Researchers

Your PhD is obviously not in history. Academia itself would not exist if what you said was fundamentally true. The assertion to placate the layman with the response "still enough to educate yourself and attempt to contribute" is simply laughable. If you fear getting shitty research from people -- that's fine -- but I believe that the current journal system addresses that fear, or at least attempts to.

There was not really an assertion that "randos-at-home" are the equivalent of academics - only an assertion that they could and do provide great value again and again and again. Every goddamn century people come out of the fucking woodwork and shock the world; Ramanujan anyone?

With all that being said - I believe in the right of the data owners/distributors in choosing whatever 'licensing' they want.

I will not try to debate the relative merits of academia, because good or not, the question is whether we should allow data to be available to people outside of those institutions or place restrictions on the data we are releasing that limit it specifically to academic institutions even when we've already deemed it suitable for release.

We are also not talking about whether the average joe is equal to the average PhD, but whether it is right to actively exclude those who are willing and able to contribute to research because they are not part of the academic institutions.

Let us be clear in this case that we are talking of several TB's of data, well within the remit of a setup an intelligent employed professional on a decent salary is able to set up in his own home with a bit of money, time and work. Odds are if someone is able to obtain this data and store it properly, they have already passed a basic competency barrier that suggests they are able to contribute.

Now, it is a common academic myth that universities have access to the best resources and abilities, and that those outside do not. But I, for example, have now been employed with several bodies...arguably/theoretically with more/as much money, data and resources as many universities.

I'm not going to comment on fMRI or NMR, thats not my field, but i'm not going to discount intellectually curious people's ability to gain access to tools/machines outside the academy, and i'm not even touching upon grey/black methods of doing so, which in computing can mean often that those outside academia can often bring more power/insight to problems than those inside.

You aren't providing any reasons why anyone not blessed with the appropriate three letters should be barred from accessing this data.

The dislike of academia - specifically of higher education post B.S - partly stems from the archaic admission process that strictly limit the opportunity for the majority of people to participate in it. You have to be doing the correct things no later than, let's say your junior year in college to be able to have a chance for a PhD at a top tier research university (less than top tier PhD and you hit the massive road block for tenure after your PhD, so it's almost the same thing).

There are people did the correct things early in their life. The majority of us make mistakes. How would even a mid-late 20s (young, by any account) good software engineer get through the gatekeepers and get his PhD? There was even a thread on HN a few days ago asking about the exact question.

To put it another way, it's not that we don't want the training. We don't have the option to do so (at least in the traditional way).

As someone who doesn't have a degree that gets contracted to work with/help build (hardware/software) such tools like EEG devices and fMRI's to make them usable for people with PhD's where most don't really understand the physics behinds such systems and having seen first hand how bastardized the academic process™ has become, its laughable to think that just because things may have been one way in the past, means that it will continue to be the way in the future. So much waste, which means so much opportunity…

>You also don't have access to a NMR, or an fMRI, or any number of hundreds of others of tools that cost $100k - 1m+

I call bullshit, because if you think outside of the box and have a friend who has access (which many people on HN probably do know someone who does), you can always jump in on their pilots in exchange for whatever works for you both. But outside the box thinking is definitely not apart curriculum for most researchers… unless such was prescribed in the literature lol

>There is so much disrespect for institutions

Damn right, but doesn't stop them from trying to co-opt a generation after having loaded them up on debt to feed the gravy train, and I don't see why individuals can't do the same to institutions.

>…and what we as a people are capable of when we systemize.…

People are not limited to existing institutions, we can seek beyond.

>I understand the appreciation for decentralization and the FOSS model behind technology but there is so often a complete unwillingness to show any respect to any centralization at all, it's very strange.

Here's a hardware/software FOSS project[0] of a bunch of different people from many orgs and some without for electrophysiology research, and this stuff is just the beginning once all the contributors (and others like them) realize they can pursue their other interests in life with out constraining themselves to the academic process™.

If anyone in the boston/prov area is interested potentially doing some software/hardware work or want to connect more to stuff like this and has a software + mathematics + physics background or side interests and not involved now, you can contact me at my username at NSA's favorite email provider (gmail) :P

[0]https://github.com/open-ephys

SmugMug is great! It's a little bit different from Flickr though -- SmugMug is more of a personal photo hosting/portfolio website, while Flickr is more about photographers community. I believe the social aspects of Flickr are much more important than it's actual photo storage capabilities!