More on Lithium Batteries
shkrobius.livejournal.com
shkrobius.livejournal.com
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp406274e http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jp406273p"
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Every. Single. Time. I have ever tried to read a scientific paper, this is what happens. It's complete crap. The research was done in a national laboratory, under public funding. I should be able to read this.
Fortunately, I am now a university student so I will see if the library can help me with this.
Why do people bother with these crappy hosting services that require people to pay to see your content?
I am honestly asking what these people actually offer other than hosting. I'm totally up for setting up a little web app for hosting scientific papers, but what would be preventing me from competing with these people?
The purpose served by publishers isn't really the hosting of articles, it's the names of journals the publishers own which carries an implication that top-tier journals get better reviewers and therefore higher quality articles. As long as academia values impact factor and journal rankings, the parasite can subsist.
Most academics tend to self-host preprints, or stick them on arXiv so the publisher as a hosting service isn't really the "value-add" offered.
That is not true for chemistry or biology. Tell them what arXiv is and they will say, huh?
Whether these publishers contribute enough to warrant the high price of their publications is debatable.
http://ia600808.us.archive.org/17/items/GuerillaOpenAccessMa...
sigh
I have access through my home institution, but I'm already dreading being suddenly cut-off from all of this information when I leave :/ - the idea that upon leaving the institution my ability or willingness to read existing content and contribute back should disappear is bothersome, to say the least.
Many universities have a proxy site you can use to access journal articles without having to physically be on campus. You should find out if yours does this. I wish I had looked into it when I was a student. I had no idea the privilege I was letting slip away.
> These folk "knew" what they needed to obtain
If I hadn't seen the resemblance between the username and the first name on the linked publications, I would have closed the page and written it off as a pseudo-science blogger fighting big corporate interests. I just wish the user info page had his real name on it, for confirmation.
"So I decided to find out - and I did! "
Followed up by a link to a published scientific article. Seriously, I don't know what your complaint is. There's a nice dry scientific paper, and a blog post with a more accessible tone. This seems like a pretty good mix of the different types of media (putting aside for now the issue of the paper being behind a bloody paywall).
This is stupid. My research is molecular dynamics and ab initio studies of novel carbon anodes in lithium batteries. We don't "tweak" the model until it fits; if you did that you would be 1) an idiot 2) not a scientist.
All models describe reality only to an approximation. How well this approximation works depends on how good your model is. In computational science, we have algorithms that can almost perfectly match experimental carbon anodes. The only problem? These techniques (short of someone inventing a quantum computer) take essentially infinite time to run on a classical computer. So you cut down the computational complexity of your model by making approximations (e.g. removing electron-electron correlations) until you get something that can run on today's best supercomputers.
But you don't stop there! You have to actually assess these models and figure out how well they work! For instance, there's probably 20 or so MD models that describe water (TIP3P, TIP4P, etc...) Each model can accurately predict certain properties of real water, but is also very poor at predicting other properties. In other words, your model needs to fit what it was designed for and you will get good results.
It seems to me that most people who bash simulations nowadays are experimentalists that aren't up to date on the state-of-the-art algorithms that provide very good agreement with reality (for some situations at least).
I'm not saying that in a dismissive/judgmental way - it is probably the most realistic way of doing a lot of things - but it pretty much is exactly what the original post says (although he is dismissive/negative about this). I don't know enough about chemistry in general to comment on this, but we do have batteries and they do improve over time - so some people must be doing "something" right.
What surprises me more are his claims that we don't even understand (or understood) even the basics of lithium on a chemical level? Is this even true? What could be the impact of this paper on future battery development? Could computational models be improved using this data?
The difference is that he is implying scientists tweak their models to get what they want to see; i.e., they have a hypothesis and then manipulate the model until it gives them results that confirm their hypothesis. This is bad science. What I'm saying is that scientists (should) create their model to fit reality for only the specific situations where it is provably applicable. If the model then confirms the hypothesis, great. If it doesn't, no big deal; it just means your hypothesis was wrong and you probably won't get a paper out of it (in an ideal world, we would publish papers about negative results because that is science as well, but I'm afraid those papers don't garner near the attention or interest that positive results do).
> What surprises me more are his claims that we don't even understand (or understood) even the basics of lithium on a chemical level? Is this even true?
Yeah, it's true. That's why me (and a whole lot of other people) are doing research in this area.
As for the paper, I'm not sure what its impact is. Research becomes very narrow in fields like this, and I don't study electrolytes (I study carbon anodes). So I can't comment on that.
Experiments are usually so expensive that you want to get the most out of them, so most people work discovering what experiments they should do, and what they do with the results, instead of just jumping in the lab and doing the experiments.
Then, sometimes, people with that culture face a problem just like this one, where blind experiments are the fastest, simplest, cheapest route to understanding something. Except that nobody knows it beforehand.