Link roundup

Some links not long enough for their own separate posts:

Verizon to kill unlimited data plans for existing subscribers. As a happy user of a 3G android phone with Verizon's unlimited plan, this is causing me some apprehension: I don't want to be switched to a new plan on a new and expensive 4G phone.

Yet another instance of Goodhart's law in bibliometrics. Some journal editors are driving up the impact factors of their journals by publishing review articles that cite everything they've recently published. I hesitate to call it fraudulent because why shouldn't they write review papers? But it does seem from the details to be less about trying to help other people find the literature and more about just making numbers bigger. I still don't understand why authors and tenure committees care about impact factors at all, anyway. If you want to tell whether a paper has been having an impact, look at its own citations, not at the citations of the other papers it happens to have been published with. Via MF.

In case you are an ACM member and still haven't voted in the ACM elections (as I hadn't until today), Brighton Godfrey has helpfully collected the candidates' positions on open access and copyright. Via Sariel.

The ideal shape for a metropolitan subway system turns out to be well-connected in the city center and tree-like in the suburbs, with a fixed ratio of suburb distance to center radius.

I've been looking at cars lately. Here's a pretty and popular European car and the ruined and hit-with-an-ugly-stick American version. Why does Detroit do this to us?

And finally, a video that becomes even more impressive when you learn that its images and music were generated algorithmically from only 4k of code (via Josiah, also on BoingBoing).

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