In my experience open access is considerably more expensive. Maybe it depends on the field and the journal but places like PLOS often quote something upwards of $3,000 for publishing, and closed-access(?) journals are, ya know, usually free to submit and publish. I could be wrong about that though, and I do know that many open access journals and universities offer price reductions and financial support for cash-strapped scientists.

Not only to account for the fact that there's still a strong negative bias towards open-access journals in many scientific communities. A lot of (older) researchers still view open-access as a "pay to publish" sort of deal. I think that'll change over time, and a lot of younger researchers seem much more receptive to open access publishing, but it's hard to convince up and coming researchers to use open access journals if they know that it's going to negatively bias the senior researchers in their field.

True, but the reason that most rich people in America are white guys is because our government has, as an institution, historically worked to deny other groups access to power. And, in many cases, still work hard to deny minority groups access to political power.

If you're not capable of contributing to your society then what value do you truly have?

I think the usual counterargument to this is that those who don't contribute to society have emotional and social value to those who do. Ie the reason we don't euthanize allentally handicapped people is because of the emotional trauma (and related loss of capital) that would cause is more costly than the expense of keeping a mentally handicapped and non-earning person alive.

Not that this counters what you're saying in your comment--i don't think you value economic modelling highly--but it just goes to show how many hoops you have to jump through to make it look like human lives are valuable outside of their capital in economic modelling. I wish something like that were more immediately obvious.

I hope I didn't sound supportive of flying the Confederate flag or anything like that--wasn't my point. I guess I just feel that the identity of those who embrace and support the Confederate flag has drifted from a strict Southern Pride definition to a more flexible identity that falls in line with a lot of different social, political, and geographic divisions in the US. I mean I've lived in the North all my life and you see a fair number of people with Confederate flags on their cars or their hats or whatever if you get out of the cities.

Do you have a link to the AskHistorians post? I'd be interested to read it.

It certainly has little to do with Southern Pride anymore. You see people proudly flying it all over the US.

I think it's more about the distinctions that exist in the US--metropolitan vs. rural, progressive vs. regressive--and how these line up with other political divisions. The flag has come to represent "country pride", but the people that claim that sort of pride are also heavily Republican.

It's just the same political, social, and geographic differences that have already existed in the US for the last 30 and 40 years attached to a new issue, and people are incapable of seeing eye-to-eye on this issue (just like every other political debate in the US).

Thanks, the second link worked for me. I think it might be because I'm not on my University wifi at the moment.

The details in the provided article are pretty slim (and I can't get the paper link to load for some reason), but it sounds like the rats are sharing learned information through electrodes. While I'm pretty skeptical of the results (without being able to see the paper itself), the first sentence of the last paragraph of the article linked is pretty exciting:

One of Nicolelis' most fascinating observations was that the rodents figured out a way to divide their workload among the group so one wasn't bogged down with more work than the other.

I know that Nicolelis has been doing a lot of exciting things related to neuroscience for a while, and that there are certainly a good number of people in academia interested in his research. But I'd like to see the original paper before I come to any conclusions -- this stuff seems like science fiction.