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LessWrong Help Desk - free paper downloads and more (2014)
Over the last year, VincentYu, gwern and others have provided many papers for the LessWrong community (87% success rate in 2012) through previous help desk threads. We originally intended to provide editing, research and general troubleshooting help, but article downloads are by far the most requested service.
If you're doing a LessWrong relevant project we want to help you. If you need help accessing a journal article or academic book chapter, we can get it for you. If you need some research or writing help, we can help there too.
Turnaround times for articles published in the last 20 years or so is usually less than a day. Older articles often take a couple days.
Please make new article requests in the comment section of this thread.
If you would like to help out with finding papers, please monitor this thread for requests. If you want to monitor via RSS like I do, many RSS readers will give you the comment feed if you give it the URL for this thread (or use this link directly).
If you have some special skills you want to volunteer, mention them in the comment section.
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Comments (279)
"A psychological study of physical scientists", Roe, Anne; Genetic Psychology Monographs, Vol 43, 1951, 121-235 http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1952-01756-001 ; possibly also listed as "A psychological study of eminent physical scientists".
EDIT: requested on /r/Scholar EDITEDIT: requested on Twitter, got a copy.
Does anyone know if and where can I find "IB Mathematics Standard Level Course Book: Oxford IB Diploma Programme" (I need this one specifically)?
https://global.oup.com/education/product/9780198390114/?region=uk
Here. Figures 4 and 5 are missing from the scan that I received. Dope ads.
Thanks. Looks like figure 4/5 were not important going by the article text.
Seems harder to find than I anticipated. WorldCat suggests my university has this journal, but I can't find it in their catalog. My university's proxy doesn't work on the site. Doesn't seem the Library of Congress has it either. Sorry, can't be of much more help.
Requested.
I'll be making a visit to the Library of Congress sometime in the next month. I visit the Library of Congress a few times each year to scan things which basically can't be found elsewhere. If there's anything in particular you want from the Library of Congress next time I go, let me know here. I'd strongly prefer that you've tried other resources first, and checked that what you want is in the Library of Congress catalog (or likely so; sometimes you can't tell).
I might also visit the NIST library and National Agricultural Library.
Also, if there's anything who is going to make a visit to the British Library or any major library in Russia (e.g., the Russian State Library, the National Library of Russia, Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, any major academic library), let me know if you'd be willing to take some scan requests.
I went to the Library of Congress today. It's highly likely I'll go again next summer, so you can still let me know if there's anything you want scanned.
Does your offer include entire books?
Yes, with some caveats:
With the above caveats, this should be at worst fair use, but I am an engineer, not a lawyer. (I am, however, finishing up a class on US intellectual property law, which clarified much of my understanding of the law in this regard.)
I'll limit myself to 2 requests for entire books (first come, first served), as the scanner they have is not ideal for scanning entire books. They have a good overhead scanner, but it's somewhat slow.
It's a Mexican book that used to be available in libraries here in Colombia around 6 years ago. Today it's nowhere to be found, and all my known pirated sources for books in Spanish lack it. It's not available for Kindle, and the LoC happens to have it.
However, I just checked in Amazon that the printed version has 401 pages, which makes me feel embarrassed to ask for such a cumbersome favor. Upon further search, I discovered one public library in my city that has it available for loan. I'll do that.
To be honest, I'd be okay with scanning 401 pages if I could get something out of it. I mentioned here that I wish there was a website where you could get credits for the number of pages you scan and then use these credits to pay others (perhaps with a rating system for getting the correct item, speed, quality of scan, etc.). Might not be that hard to set up, actually, but I don't have the time to do it.
You're probably aware, but for those who aren't, WorldCat is a good way to see which libraries near you have which books. Unfortunately, participation of libraries outside of the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia seems to be incomplete, but at least some Colombian libraries participate. Another problem is that not all of the holdings of some particular libraries seem to be in WorldCat. The Library of Congress in particular seems to have problems with this for some more obscure items. I've gotten into the habit of checking the Library of Congress' catalog separately.
Applied Statistical Decision Theory, Raiffa & Schlaifer 1961 (not to be confused with their 1995 or 1959 decision theory textbooks).
Not on Libgen, Google Books, Google Scholar, the Chinese library site, or in any of the Google hits I found despite all the book review PDFs. I found a table of contents for it, and googled some chapter titles in quotes, but only turned up the same table of contents, so it really doesn't seem to be online in the clear. Betawolf discovered that an online copy does seem to exist at HathiTrust, which seems to think that the book is somehow in the public domain as unlikely as that may sound, and can be downloaded by people at a variety of institutions such as UMich, UWash, etc, but in this case, my UWash proxy doesn't work (it gets me IP-based access to stuff, but not account-login-based access, which HathiTrust seems to be.) Can anyone download it? (EDIT: the 1-page-at-a-time PDF download does work so I am scripting that right now as
for i in {1..394}; do sleep 60s; wget "<http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/imgsrv/download/pdf?id=mdp.39015022416351;orient=0;size=100;seq=$i;attachment=0>" -O $i.pdf; done, but if someone can get the whole PDF, that'd be better since then I know nothing was left out and all the metadata will be intact.)If not, I will buy a used copy ($16-25 on Amazon & AbeBooks) and try out 1DollarScan.
On a historical note, besides compiling many results and being one of the key texts of the 1960s Bayesian revolution, apparently this is the book which introduced the general concept of conjugate distributions into Bayesian statistics, which I had always assumed had been introduced by Laplace or someone early on like that since they are so critical to pre-MCMC analyses.
Got the whole PDF from HathiTrust. I think Chart I is missing from the scan.
In Feymann's Cargo Cult Speech he writes:
What's the paper towards which Feymann points?
We don't know: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3jx/the_decline_effect_and_the_scientific_method_link/396z
Software Engineering, A Historical Perspective J. Marciniak DOI 10.1002/0471028959.sof321
Here. Sorry about the horrible format; I didn't see a better way to download the content or print the page. In addition, I couldn't access the figures.
Probability and Statistics for Business Decisions, Robert Schlaifer 1959. Surprisingly expensive used, and unfortunately for such a foundational text in Bayesian decision theory, doesn't seem to be available online. If you can't get a digital copy, does anyone know of a good service or group which would produce a high-quality digital copy given a print edition?
Page-by-page .djvu scans are available here (found via this search; edit: it seems to appear sporadically in the search results). Full sequence of download links is
<http://202.116.13.3/ebook%5C24/24000522/ptiff/00000{001..744}.djvu>I wrote the following just before finding the scan of the book. I'll post it anyway.
I've used 1DollarScan for about 50 books, including math/stat textbooks, and the quality is consistently good (unless you need accurate color reproduction) even with the cheapest option (i.e., $1 per 100 pages), but you'll need to do your own post-processing to:
I use Adobe Acrobat with ABBYY FineReader for these. FineReader's OCR is more accurate than Acrobat's, but Acrobat performs okay by itself. Acrobat's trial can be indefinitely reactivated every month in a Windows VM by reverting to a pre-activation snapshot, whereas FineReader has to be bought or torrented, as its trial is overly restrictive. I don't know of any good options on Linux.
BTW, there's a used copy on Half.com for $39. Not sure if you saw that.
If anyone could find the following, I'd appreciate it.
Funk JR, Watson RA, Cormier JM, Guzman H, Bonugli E. Kinematics and kinetics of vigorous head shaking. J Appl Biomech. 2015 Jun;31(3):170-5.
'twas on Libgen: http://libgen.org/scimag/get.php?doi=10.1123%2Fjab.2014-0161
Dynamic choice in a complex world
Murali Agastya, Arkadii Slinko
Journal of Economic Theory July 2015, Vol.158:232–258
doi:10.1016/j.jet.2015.04.001
(I'm sorry: Libgen seems to be currently out of reach.)
Libgen seemed to work fine for this: http://sci-hub.org/downloads/7c30/10.1016@j.jet.2015.04.001.pdf
Allozyme polymorphisms detected in mature needle tissue in ponderosa pine. J. B. Mitton, Y. B. Linhart, K. B. Sturgeon, J. L. Hamrick. - Journal of heredity v. 70 issue 2. - 1979.
Thank you.
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/jhered/freepdf/70-86.pdf ? First hit in Google Scholar.
Thank you! (For some reason, I could not download it on my own - lack of proxy servers or something like that.)
this was an unhelpful comment, removed and replaced by the comment you are now reading
The relevant paragraph is in Section 2.2.5:
Following the Bobes et al. citation yields:
Reference 22 is to "WHO Fact Sheet no. 217", which no longer exists. Luckily, the Wayback Machine has a copy. The relevant point:
Unfortunately, there is no citation and it does not precisely match Bobes et al's claims. Neither Bobes et al. nor the WHO fact sheet refers to lost income, so the reference to that in the original claim is wholly unsubstantiated by these citations.
My currently unfilled requests on /r/scholar:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/29hi38/request_2_dissertations_on_online_learning/ :
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/2xlrv5/article_modafinil_the_unique_properties_of_a_new/ :
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/2xpgig/article_is_lithium_a_neuroprotective_agent/ :
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/32z239/can_transcranial_direct_current_stimulation/ :
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/34nlq5/studying_with_music_is_the_irrelevant_speech/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/34nsug/article_the_effect_of_music_as_a_distraction_on/ :
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/352qyo/article_gwas_and_metaanalysis_in_aginglongevity/ :
ILL couldn't get Schretlen et al. Can try again once the paper is included in the print journal, but I'd recommend just asking the authors for a copy.
The PDF/journal copy seems to be up now: http://clinicalschizophrenia.org/doi/abs/10.3371/CSRP.SCST.103114?journalCode=csrp (PDF). Can't get to it through Sci-hub, but maybe your university access can get it now?
Still can't get it. I should be able to access it through an institutional subscription to the EBSCO database once the paper is assigned to an issue, replacing its current "online first" designation.
I'm still waiting for Schretlen et al.
The last one.
I don't think I can get the two dissertations. I'll put in ILL requests for the other papers over the next week.
Toward a neurobiology of delusions P.R. Corletta, , , J.R. Taylora, X.-J. Wangb, P.C. Fletcherc, J.H. Krystala
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3676875/ ? First (and only) hit in Google Scholar.
Can anybody send me this paywalled article? Rhizome Growth and Clone Development in Anemone nemorosa L. D. A. SHIRREFFS, A. D. BELL. Annals of Botany Vol. 54, No. 3 (September 1984), pp. 315-324 Thank you!
Here.
That's going to be difficult. It looks like the non-JSTOR databases only go back to 1993 and the usual JSTOR access doesn't cover that journal.
If it is too difficult don't trouble yourself, I'll find something similar instead, but if someone happens to have access, I'd be most grateful.
In case anyone is interested, I have a similar paper supplying project here: http://www.ccapprox.info/pod/eng/
Just putting that out there. In case the admins of this site want to try to collaborate somehow, I am all for, so feel free to write me :-)
All the best,
Gene
I'm looking for the following paper:
Carlos Santiago Nino, Some confusions around Kelsen’s concept of validity, Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie, vol. 64, no. 3, pp. 357-377.
It's available on Jstor, but although my university subscription usually allows me to download papers from that database, I don't seem to have access to this particular one. If anyone can get it for me, I'd be very grateful.
Libgen doesn't seem able to get it, and my university proxy can't either; sorry.
Thanks anyway. Someone else managed to get me a copy (he contacted me privately).
Some folks here seem to be pretty skilled at tracking down hard to find papers, so let's give this one a shot:
Nikonov, G. P., and Shavlovskii, S. S. 1961 Gornye Mashiny i Avtomatika, Nauchno-Tekh. Sb, 1 (18), 5.
That's the citation from another journal article. I originally found reference to this paper in the book Waterjetting technology (see reference 2.19). I don't speak Russian, so this one has proved pretty hard to find. I'm not looking for someone to get me a PDF of this (though that would be nice!), just someone to help me identify a library that has the journal this is in so I can get my university library to request a scan via their interlibrary service.
What I have figured out:
The journal seems to be called "Gornye mašiny i avtomatika" or "Горные машины и автоматика" in Cyrillic. This journal seems to be successor to that journal. (I am going to email the people who run the journal now to see if they can help, but my experience suggests that I'll get no reply, that they won't have copies of the older journals, or that they will not be able to provide scans for various reasons.)
I can find what appears to be this journal a few times on WorldCat: 1, 2, 3
All libraries I found above do not seem to have the right volume (volume 1). I suspect this journal would be much easier to find for someone who lives in Russia or speaks Russian. Any directions would be appreciated.
FWIW, I don't find their treatment of reverse causality convincing. Adoption of Confucianism as a predictor of peasant revolts is as plausible as their preferred causal arrow, and in some cases makes better sense (eg they seem to think of temples as brainwashing nearby subjects, but AFAIK most temples were not 100% state-funded and rely on contributions... so temples are more plausibly a measure of Confucianism, than a cause of Confucianism; and given how explicit Confucianism is about being a tool of central state propaganda & control, would it be at all surprising if more independent places aren't too keen on it?).
They try to use a measure of 'Confucian sages' a millennium before to deal with this a bit, except that measure is from the same data source as everything else, which was compiled in the 1890s.
Does http://ihome.ust.hk/~sojk/Kung_files/Confucian%20rebellion_Aug%202013.pdf not work? (First hit in Google Scholar.)
Its the version I've read, trying to see if the latest is different. They also have a version floating around from 2012.
If you need a specific version, you should say so. If you must have the latest, then you need to specify that so searchers can start with the paywall rather than go for the easiest available version.
In this case, it looks like Libgen has the final version from Elsevier: https://pdf.yt/d/96edLzq8SzpYBSuR / https://www.dropbox.com/s/8w53cqdb354umh5/2014-kung.pdf / http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/get.php?doi=10.1016%2Fj.jdeveco.2014.08.006
I will remember to do so in the future, sorry for the inconvenience!
Technology Assessment and the Fourth Discontinuity: The Limits of Instrument Rationality by Laurence H Tribe
A little tricky but turns out Sci-hub had a proxy which could go through the Hein Online paywall (at least, once you figure out you have to specify the page-range of the article! what the heck):
https://pdf.yt/d/DM3BGcxxfb3x_HKK / https://www.dropbox.com/s/5u266r5ubijz2bi/1972-tribe.pdf / http://sci-hub.org/downloads/baaf/10.0000@heinonline.org@generic-EF457CE69B6D.pdf
In The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett, there's an interesting endnote:
We're all familiar with his essay on superintelligent machines, and it seems this links up.
This claims to be a version from 1980. It appears to have scans of the illustrations from 1980, but retyped text.
See Good's bibliography:
391. "The human preserve" (an invited contribution to a symp. on extraterrestrial life held by the Institute of Biology and the British Interplanetary Society, May 1964), JRNSS (1964), 370-373; and Spaceflight 7 (1965), 167-170 and 180 (See #476)
[JRNSS = J. Royal Naval Science Service]
476. "Life outside the earth", The Listener 73 (June 3, 1965), 815-817. Japanese translation in The Japan Tiles Weekly, Aug. 28, 1965, pp. 14-15. (See #s 391, 597, and 644.)
597. "The Cosmic Club", Context 2 (1968), 2-9 and 36. (See #s 391, 476 and 644.)
644. "The chief entities", Theoria to Theory 3 (April 1969), 71-82. (See #s 391, 476, 597 and 1298)
1298. "The chief entities", a shortening of #644 for Cosmic Search 2, No. 2 (Spring 1980), 13-17.
Supposedly, the Listener has been digitized, but it's probably not available at many American universities.
Thanks. That's sufficient for my curiosity: Good lays out the argument for lots of aliens (which is cogent enough and time has vindicated various beliefs such as planets being common), notes that galactic colonization is easy and highly certain on astronomical timescales, that there must be a stable governing structure (the Chief Entities, who may or may not be FAIs), and argues that the reason for the Great Silence is the 'zoo hypothesis' (just with FAIs).
Not too unreasonable for the time period - as he notes, the first SETI searches had just been done and parapsychology still seemed fairly credible then - but I'd say by this point it's pretty clear that there are no intelligent aliens whatsoever and the zoo hypothesis is untenable, and parapsychology likewise. So a historical piece of minimal general interest.
Speaking of parapsychology...
780. "The use of clones in experimental parapsychology", paraSCIENCE, 1, No. 1 (1971), p. 5.
882. "And Good Saw the it was God(d)", Parascience Research J. 1, No. 2 (Feb. 1975), 3-13. (See #1322.)
882A. A reprinting of #882, with minor changes, Parasc. Proc. 1973/77 (issued '79), pp. 55-66
1322. "Is there any scientific basis for parapsychology?" For the tenth annual meeting of the American Culture Association and the second annual meeting of the Popular Culture Association, Detroit, Michigan, April 16-19, 1980. Session on the Philosophy of Parapsychology, 8:30a.m. to 10:30a.m. April 19 to the Crystal Ballroom, Book Cadillac Hotel. (See #882.)
1322A. "Scientific speculations on the paranormal and the parasciences", a slight revision of #1322 for The Zetetic Scholar, No. 7 (1980, Dec.), 9-29. [Issued Feb. 1981] (See #s 882, 1460.)
1460. "Scientific speculations on the paranormal: introductory comments", for the workshop on "The demarcation between science and pseudo-science," at the Center for the Study of Science in Society, VPI&SU, 1982, April 30 to May 2. #1322A was invited. These introductory comments show the relevance to the workshop. In VA Tech Center for the Study of Science in Society, Working Papers, 2,No. 1 (April 1983), 107-112.
1322A is available here
I think it might be available elsewhere: http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/4662265 identifies it as being in "Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology [1972, 30:137-149]", which doesn't seem to be this book.
EDIT: no response here, so trying https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/2o4e7n/article_intellectual_assessment_in_primitive/
Here.
"The construction of the paranormal: Nothing unscientific is happening", Harry M. Collins & Trevor J. Pinch; In Roy Wallis (ed.), On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge. University of Keele. 27--237 (1979) (linked in http://rationalconspiracy.com/2014/10/10/robin-hanson-on-cold-fusion/ )
Here.
Buehler, Denis. "Incomplete understanding of complex numbers Girolamo Cardano: a case study in the acquisition of mathematical concepts." Synthese 191.17 (2014): 4231-4252.
Vélez, Ricardo, and Tomás Prieto-Rumeau. "Random assignment processes: strong law of large numbers and De Finetti theorem." TEST (2014): 1-30.
Nico Roos. A logic for reasoning with inconsistent knowledge. Artificial Intelligence Volume 57, Issue 1, September 1992, Pages 69–103.
http://pdf.aminer.org/000/745/743/a_logic_for_reasoning_with_inconsistent_knowledge.pdf / http://libgen.org/scimag/get.php?doi=10.1016%2F0004-3702%2892%2990105-7
A scan/photograph/transcription of page 415 of Hays 1973, Statistics for the social sciences. (2nd ed.) New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston; or heck the whole book if anyone can find it.
(Meehl in his 1990 "Why summaries of research on psychological theories are often uninterpretable" claims Hays agrees with him about the null hypothesis always being false, but I'm interested in exactly what Hays said and how he said it - albeit not enough to buy the book just to look at one page, and Google Books won't show me the relevant part regardless of how I try to chain my search queries.)
Here.
Requested.
Here are some Pubmed papers I'd love to have:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9892779
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11683551
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22363174
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10545668
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11021636
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24490079
Haga, William J. "Perils of professionalism." Management Quarterly (1974): 3-10.
Unfortunately, my university library reports that they have exhausted all possible sources and no library was able to supply this paper.
Interesting! Thanks for trying.
Requested.
(2011) Costa, AC. and Anderson, NR., Measuring trust in teams: development and validation of a multi-faceted measure of formative and reflexive indicators of team trust, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology 20 (1) : 119- 154
or in a pinch
(2003) Costa, AC., Work team trust and effectiveness, Personnel Review 32 (5) : 605- 622
Awesome, thanks!
2 dissertations on online learning:
(I requested these a month ago on /r/scholar but they apparently couldn't help.)
Zuehlke, T. (2003). "Estimation of a Tobit model with unknown censoring threshold". Applied Economics 35,1163–9 (this is for a little analysis: https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/TG98DXkHrrs )
Here.
Vision: A Computational Investigation.
Recommended here
http://lib.freescienceengineering.org/view.php?id=785555
Amazing! Can't thank you enough!
Could you also metaphorically "teach me how to fish" and tell me how you found it, please?
Usually, I just use this custom search engine for textbooks, but en.bookfi (the website that usually has the most hits when using the search engine) was down (hopefully not permanently).
Also, could I please put in another request for the following?
-http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/harmonic-mind
-http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallel-distributed-processing
-http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/parallel-distributed-processing-0
I dunno, I just use what the hardcore pirates mention using for e-books, which currently is Libgen and before that was library.nu.
Criminal offending as part of an alternative reproductive strategy: Investigating evolutionary hypotheses using Swedish total population data
You can download that through http://libgen.org/scimag/index.php ; I've reuploaded to https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/182368464/2014-yao.pdf
Fox, J. (2014). Intelligence and rationality. PSYCHOLOGIST, 27(3), 143-143. (BRITISH PSYCHOLOGICAL SOC.)
This popped up on my Google Scholar. Unless I wrote it in my sleep, that's not me, but I am curious.
Here.
The article to which this letter is responding to is Stanovich and West (2014).
Thank you! The author, J. Fox, is actually Joshua Fox. I'm starting to wonder if I wrote this in my sleep and should add this to my CV :-)
And he may even have a point.
Requested.
"Reversible and Irreversible Decisions: Preference for Consonant Information as a Function of Attractiveness of Decision Alternatives", Pers Soc Psychol Bull December 1981 7: 621-626 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=7564911921849567347&hl=en&as_sdt=0,21 http://psp.sagepub.com/content/7/4/621.short
Here.
Hello! I would like to know if someon can get 3 papers for me... (Sci-hub couldn't help me...) They are:
WILSON, A. G., 1971, "A family of spatial interaction models, and associated developments" Environment and Planning, 3(1), p. 1–32. http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=a030001
BROWN, S., 1992, "The wheel of retail gravitation?" Environment and Planning A, 24(10), p. 1409–1429. http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=a241409
HARRIS, B., WILSON, A. G., 1978, "Equilibrium values and dynamics of attractiveness terms in production-constrained spatial-interaction models" Environment and Planning A, 10(4), p. 371–388. http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=a100371
Thanks very much!
The journal lets google see them, so the text is in the cache, though not the pdf: 1 2 3
I'd like to access the "Users' Guides to the Medical Literature JAMA Series" here: http://guides.library.stonybrook.edu/content.php?pid=194158&sid=1696250
For a Feynman mystery:
"Can cognitive restructuring reduce the disruption associated with perfectionistic concerns?" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005789401800514
Here.
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/article1379779.ece
(/r/scholar seems to have failed me.)
EDIT: never mind, they came through: http://www.sendspace.com/file/0kww8v
Thank you so much for this.
I'm currently working as a researcher for Will MacAskill, who's writing a book about effective altruism to be published by Penguin in August 2015. I have access to the Oxford library network, but there are occasionally journals that the university is not subscribed to. So I expect to be using this resource regularly in the coming weeks. I shall be posting my requests as replies to this comment.
Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective, pp. 67-75.
Here.
Thank you!
Requested.
Ubel, P. A., DeKay, M. L., Baron, J., & Asch, D. A. (1996). Public preferences for efficiency and racial equity in kidney transplant allocation decisions. Transplantation Proceedings, 28, 2997–3002.
Here.
Thank you. :)
I've requested a scan from my university's medical library.
"Peering Into Peer Review", 2014 (linked from http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/02/20/the_nih_takes_a_look_at_how_the_moneys_spent.php and apparently the fulltext is at http://sciencemag.lovefuck.me/content/343/6171/596.short - no, I don't understand either why Science is now being hosted on
lovefuck.meeither. There are many things in this world I don't understand.)Here.
I took a look. That domain is acting as a 2-hop open web proxy. The first hop routes through a VPS in New York. The second hop routes through a (dedicated?) server in Montreal. The New York VPS is running nginx as a reverse proxy with no caching. The Montreal server is running Mr9.SM, which looks like an online fraud toolkit built on top of a web proxy back end. On the same server, there is an exposed MongoDB interface that is leaking data that should not be leaked.
There are other domains that are also using these two servers as a 2-hop open web proxy (the domains and two servers are most likely managed by the same entity, since the setup requires coordination). A small sample (rot13ed to stop bots from picking them up):
Strangely, I wasn't able to figure out what fraud is being attempted. I expected to see cookie stuffing, but there was no sign of that—the only thing added to each page is a javascript StatCounter tracker. Phishing seems unlikely given the rather conspicuous domain names... but I suppose many users still fall for that. I don't understand why a 2-hop design is used, especially since nginx is not being used to cache anything. If anyone figures out what's going on, I would be very interested to hear about it.
"Modafinil Augmentation Therapy in Unipolar and Bipolar Depression: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24330897 http://article.psychiatrist.com/dao_1-login.asp?ID=10008467&RSID=90129742967317
Here.
Bjelakovic G, Gluud LL, Nikolova D, Whitfield K, Wetterslev J, Simonetti RG, Bjelakovic M, Gluud C. Vitamin D supplementation for prevention of mortality in adults. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2014, Issue 1. Art. No.: CD007470. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD007470.pub3.
Does anyone know if Cochrane publishes the data they use in their meta analysis? I have a suspicion that meta analysis generally does not make good use of the available data. In their vitamin D analysis, they have shockingly large confidence intervals compared to the amount of data they have. I'd like to check that theory.
It turns out Cochrane does provide their data. Very nice of them.
Also, at least in this case my own metanalysis based on their data perfectly replicated their results. The inefficiency I thought was there was not there.
Here.
I had a look. It turns out Cochrane does publish all their usable data, and they seem to be ungated! Here's a link to the data for this meta-analysis. (The link to this data is provided in the gated HTML article, but there doesn't seem to be a link from an ungated page, so I wonder if these data are supposed to be freely accessible... In any case, all their data are currently ungated and accessible by appending '/downloadstats' to the appropriate URL.)
Here are some details about the file formats: http://tech.cochrane.org/revman/documentation/file-formats
I find myself irritated that they only include effect sizes and sample sizes rather than the actual observed counts for each group, as that would make a Bayesian analysis much easier.
I haven't looked in detail at it, but is that because their formats or approaches do not support raw data or because they do support raw counts but simply did not supply them? ie they had the data & discarded it, or they may never have had the observed counts & were going off effect sizes reported in papers; the latter is plausible as I've found authors very unwilling to share detailed information beyond what is reported in papers.
Turns out they actually, do report it! It was just under an unexpected label "EVENTS_1". I'm going to do a meta analysis of my own.
Followup:
Hm. I wonder how I would get a full list of URLs. It'd be nice to feed it into my archiver bot.
It would be easy to extract a partial list of URLs from this. Google probably has better coverage with its in url search, but I don't know how to get lots of data out of it.
Looks like one would be better off using the
site:parameter thaninurl:, since it's a prefix; sosite:onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858huh. I didn't try that because I knew that
site:doesn't work for all prefixes (eg, it fails if you chop off the last digit). I thought it required termination with a slash, but maybe any punctuation works? I do recommendinurl:abstract.Can anyone help with this one: Nonsocial Transient Behavior: Social Disengagement on the Greyhound Bus
Here.
I am generally good at finding papers via various techniques, but some have evaded my grasp. Try your luck at the documents listed below. I wrote some notes about my own unsuccessful attempts to find these documents. Apologies in advance for likely reducing you all's success rate!
FOUND: H. G. Haines. 2004. “A pilot study evaluating the bioavailability and absorption rates of two vitamin B12 preparations in normal human subjects”. Health Plus International, Inc. (study protocol # HPI-NF-B12-1).
J. Hovingh, “Stability of a flowing circular annular liquid curtain,” Lawrence Livermore Lab., Internal Memo SS&A-77-108, Aug. 8, 1977.
Б. Я. Кузнецов. “Аэродинамические исследования цилиндров”. Труды ЦАГИ, в. 98, 1931. (B. J. Kuznetsov. “Wind channel tests of cylinders”. CAHI/TsAGI report number 98, 1931.)
M. J. McCarthy, “Entrainment by plunging jets,” University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, 1972.
Here is the first one. The key was finding it cited in the company's patent, though the URL was wrong. But the archive has a search.
I am impressed; I had looked for the paper and failed to uncover the related patent. Could you share the exact string that you searched for (and the search engine you used) to discover the patent?
It's on the first page of results for the serial number (the patent does not mention the author's name). What I was looking for was not the actual study, but additional citations, on the hypothesis that the citation was incorrect. I didn't expect a patent to have a link, but to be more accurate than a alternative medicine website.
For people looking for papers, there's also r/scholar.
I've been commenting in this thread whenever I see a new way to pirate books or papers. If anyone knows of something that's missing, please consider adding it! Or PM me and I will get around to adding it eventually (if you don't want to use your main account or go to the trouble of making an alt).
"Later School Start Time Is Associated with Improved Sleep and Daytime Functioning in Adolescents", Boergers et al 2014 (Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics)
Here.
I can provide feedback for writings in philosophy of mind, evolution, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and popular science. (to make this easy, please use google docs)
It wouldn't be bad to know what lesswrongers are reading (and having trouble finding) maybe publishing all the previously searched books every now and then would be nice.
I'd like to ask for writing help every now and then, I'll keep that in mind.
If you are looking for books, you may want to try here and here first.
The canonical version of your second link is here. It also covers papers.
This is a nice service you're offering, but aren't there platforms to do this that would be more effective, more useful to a wider audience and for a longer time than a LW thread?
What constitutes relevant? I'm always looking to work smarter, not harder.
I've considered other places, but haven't seen anything. Also, I specifically wanted to help people working on lesswrong type topics.
Relevant means working on some lesswrong type topic that you might share with the broader community.
If you want to donate work to the LW community, go for it. I'm not going to send you anywhere else. But I think some kinds of requests should be sent elsewhere. Why should you put effort into supplying journal articles when people could go to r/scholar? (though trivial inconvenience - I don't have a reddit account) Also, it is more likely that libgen is harvesting r/scholar than this thread, increasing the value of contributions there. Moreover, I suspect that a high volume of such requests will discourage other kinds of requests; I'm glad that so far this year does not look like last year.
I guess "relevant" depends on what kind of help you want. If you just want a journal article that someone can download in under a minute "relevant" is going to be fairly broad. If you want someone's help proofreading a paper you wrote, the definition is going to me more narrow as that requires more work.
Just model the people on Lesswrong in your mind and ask: "Do I think they would want to help here?" If the issue is relevant in a way that would embarrass you, you are probably good enough at modelling this community to avoid asking.
As asking is generally quite low cost, it's not the end of the world if you do write a request that on the edge of being relevant and nobody wants to help.
Thank you so much for this! I expect to be making use of it.
I can offer advice on statistical analysis of data (frequentist, alas, still learning Bayesian methods myself so not ready to advise on that). Unfortunately, right now I have too little spare time to actually analyze it for you, but I can explain to you how you can tackle it using open source tools and try to point you toward further reading focused on the specific problem you're trying to solve. In the medium-future I hope to have my online data analysis app stable enough to post here, but this is not looking like the month when it will happen.
I can probably answer almost any question you have about the R language, many questions about the Shiny framework, and some questions about Javascript, PHP, and various flavors of SQL (though there are probably plenty LW-ers more knowledgeable than I on the latter three topics).
Also can advise on designing controlled animal experiments so that you won't regret painting yourself into a corner later, but I'm guessing there aren't many biologists here.
I apologize in advance for slow turnaround times. My schedule is pretty full of kids and work. :-/
PS: if your question is too lengthy to post here, just post it on the appropriate Stackexchange site and post the link here.
Might want to look at http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/kez/r_support_group_and_the_benefits_of_applied/ then.
That's really amazing!
First of all thanks for the service. I'll launch the first request and see how it goes :)
I'm interested in Odifreddi chapters, title "Ultrafilters, dictators and gods", from the book "Calude, Paun (eds) - Finite vs infinite, contributions to an eternal dilemma - Springer Verlag - 2000". You can find more details here
Books are easier than chapters.
Weeeeee!
Last time I searched there was no trace of it...
In any case, thanks so much!
When did you search? If you search "vs" rather than "versus," it fails. A general suggestion is to search authors if titles fail.
Harney JW, Leary JD, Barofsky IB. "Behavioral activity of catnip and its constituents: nepetalic acid and nepetalactone", Fed Proc 1974; 33: 481 (/r/scholar)
Behrman et al 1977, "Controlling for and measuring the effects of genetic and family environment in equations for schooling and labour market success", In Kinometrics, ed. P. Taubman. North Holland: Amsterdam (/r/scholar)
Killian, Lewis M. "Social movements." Handbook of Modern Sociology. Chicago: Rand McNally (1964): 426-455.
[r/Scholar request]
Retracting since article was found on r/Scholar.
Morris, Aldon & Cedric Herring (1987),Theory and research in social movements: A critical review, Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 2, pp. 137-98
[r/Scholar request]
Hart, B.L., 1977. "Olfaction and feline behaviour". Feline Practice 7(5): 8-10
https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/501shm/article_olfaction_and_feline_behaviour_feline/
McGuire, W. J. (1969), The nature of attitudes and attitude change, in Elliot Aronson & Gardner Lindzey (eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology, 2nd ed., Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, vol. 3, pp. 136-314
(/r/scholar didn't help)
~~~DeFries, J., Olson, R., Pennington, R., & Smith, S. 1991. "Colorado Reading Project: An update". In D. Duane & D. Gray Eds, The reading brain: The biological basis of dyslexia pp. 53±87). Parkton, MD: York Press. (/r/scholar)~~~ EDIT: ordered used copy
c̶h̶2̶6̶-̶2̶7̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶̶G̶e̶n̶e̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶A̶n̶a̶l̶y̶s̶i̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶Q̶u̶a̶n̶t̶i̶t̶a̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ ̶T̶r̶a̶i̶t̶s̶̶,̶ ̶L̶y̶n̶c̶h̶ ̶&̶ ̶W̶a̶l̶s̶h̶ ̶1̶9̶9̶8̶ ̶(̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶o̶l̶e̶ ̶b̶o̶o̶k̶,̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶c̶h̶2̶7̶,̶ ̶"̶R̶E̶M̶L̶ ̶e̶s̶t̶i̶m̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶g̶e̶n̶e̶t̶i̶c̶ ̶v̶a̶r̶i̶a̶n̶c̶e̶s̶"̶;̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶[̶G̶C̶T̶A̶]̶(̶h̶t̶t̶p̶:̶/̶/̶e̶n̶.̶w̶i̶k̶i̶p̶e̶d̶i̶a̶.̶o̶r̶g̶/̶w̶i̶k̶i̶/̶G̶C̶T̶A̶)̶.̶)̶ ̶(̶[̶/̶r̶/̶s̶c̶h̶o̶l̶a̶r̶]̶(̶h̶t̶t̶p̶s̶:̶/̶/̶w̶w̶w̶.̶r̶e̶d̶d̶i̶t̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/̶r̶/̶S̶c̶h̶o̶l̶a̶r̶/̶c̶o̶m̶m̶e̶n̶t̶s̶/̶4̶l̶d̶4̶e̶m̶/̶b̶o̶o̶k̶̶c̶h̶a̶p̶t̶e̶r̶̶c̶h̶2̶6̶2̶7̶̶o̶f̶̶g̶e̶n̶e̶t̶i̶c̶s̶̶a̶n̶d̶̶a̶n̶a̶l̶y̶s̶i̶s̶_̶o̶f̶/̶)̶)̶ EDIT: bought a used copy
"Antidepressant and anxiolytic activities of tianeptine: an overview of clinical trials", Defrance et al 1988, Clinical Neuropharmacology.
(/r/scholar didn't help.)
Here.
Thanks.
Requested.
Landes, Joan B., The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration, in Joan B. Landes (ed.), Feminism, the Public and the Private, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, ch. 5.
You can get the book on Libgen: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/search.php?req=Feminism%2C+the+Public+and+the+Private&lg_topic=libgen&open=0&view=simple&phrase=1&column=def https://www.dropbox.com/s/7yemn37wa6egz45/1998-landes.rar
Ah, I thought I had searched Libgen but it seems I didn't. Thanks!
You might have searched the scientific papers (where it indeed is not) but not the books. Each of the search engines seems to be separate.
May also be available through ProQuest, although not through my university proxy's PQ subscription:
EDIT: requested on /r/scholar
Thanks.
I'm intersted in polyphasic sleep.
Wikipedia notes:
The Time archive isn't accessible via SciHub. Can someone gave me the article through another way?
The article is available on various websites by exact phrase searching, but there are some minor transcription errors in these copies. I've transcribed it below using Google's copy of the scanned article to correct these errors. There seems to be a relevant captioned figure (maybe a photo of Fuller?) on p. 63 of the magazine that is missing from the scan.
Dymaxion Sleep
Sleep is just a bad habit. So said Socrates and Samuel Johnson, and so for years has thought grey-haired Richard Buckminster Fuller, futurific [sic] inventor of the Dymaxion* house (Time, Aug. 22, 1932), the Dymaxion car and the Dymaxion globe. Fuller made a deliberate attempt to break the sleep habit, with excellent results. Last week he announced his Dymaxion system of sleeping. Two hours of sleep a day, he said firmly, is plenty.
Fuller reasoned that man has a primary store of energy, quickly replenished, and a secondary reserve (second wind) that takes longer to restore. Therefore, he thought, a man should be able to cut his rest periods shorter by relaxing as soon as he has used up his primary energy. Fuller trained himself to take a nap at the first sign of fatigue (i.e., when his attention to his work began to wander). These intervals came about every six hours; after a half-hour's nap he was completely refreshed.
For two years Fuller thus averaged two hours of sleep in 24. Result: “The most vigorous and alert condition I have ever enjoyed.” Life-insurance doctors who examined him found him sound as a nut. Eventually he had to quit because his schedule conflicted with that of his business associates, who insisted on sleeping like other men. Now working for the Foreign Economic Administration, Buckminster Fuller finds Dymaxion working and sleeping out of the question. But he wishes the nation's “key thinkers” could adopt his schedule; he is convinced it would shorten the war.
Intermittent sleeping was not originated by Fuller, has respectable scientific backing. [sic] Last week the Industrial Bulletin of Arthur D. Little, Inc., famed Cambridge, Mass. research firm, which published Fuller's sleeping plan, noted a strong point in its favor: most sleep investigators agree that the first hours of sleep are the soundest. Some pro-Fuller evidence:
Photographs and electric devices to record movements show that the average sleeper, who changes position at least 40 times during an eight-hour stretch, is quietest in the first two hours, then grows progressively more restless.
At Colgate University sleep investigator Donald A. Laird found that people awakened after four hours' sleep were just as alert, well-coordinated physically and resistant to fatigue as those who slept eight hours (but they did lose in accuracy and concentration).
* A Fuller word representing “dynamic” and “maximum service.”
My opinion of polyphasic sleep as a way to reduce sleep requirements is negative, so I recommend not tracking this down.
Given that the Wikipedia article about polyphasic sleep recounts the story, it's important for people debunking polyphasic sleep to respond to the story of Buckminster Fuller. That's easier when the article is available.
The article is more of historical interest to me. I don't think Buckminster Fuller's claims are more trustworthy than those of other people, and from what I've read they aren't any different from what others claim. So the basic criticisms seem to hold against his claims. And the evidence for polyphasic sleep is quite bad, so bad in fact that I am surprised and disappointed that so many rationalists take it seriously. I suppose it comes from wishful thinking, but I'm not sure. (My intention is not to be mean to people who take these ideas seriously, but rather to check if there's anything I'm missing. It seems to me that I know considerably more about sleep science than polyphasic sleep proponents, though I'm still not an expert.)
Google Books shows a small part of the article.
Could anybody download an article Biology and functional ecology of Equisetum with emphasis on the giant horsetails by C. Husby in The Botanical Review, June 2013?
Thank you.
On Libgen: https://www.dropbox.com/s/htqal94zwxhe1zs/2013-husby.pdf / http://moscow.sci-hub.bz/b8b299e9173d27c6d3bcb677f7e9b0ed/10.1007%40s12229-012-9113-4.pdf
Thank you very much.
Catnip papers:
Todd, Neil Bowman 1963. "The catnip response". Doctoral dissertation, Harvard (ocm05134795) (likewise, no joy on /r/scholar) EDIT: got it!
Maybe someone can get a scan via ILL? The library entry has an option 'Scan and deliver', which sounds promising, but requires a Harvard account. In general, Harvard seems to provide reasonable access: http://asklib.hcl.harvard.edu/faq/81789
Misc:
3. "The Placebo in medicine: Editorial", Medical Press, June 1890, pg 642 (volume unknown: vol 101?)
'Medical Press' here is the English journal Medical Press, sometimes also named London medical press and circular, which began as "Dublin Medical Press on January 9, 1839, later as the Dublin Medical Press and Circular and finally as the Medical Press and Circular".
There's no official site and almost the entire run of the journal would be public domain now, but the volumes for 1890 do not seem to have been digitized, going by HathiTrust & IA/Google Books. There are a few quotations from the editorial floating around (eg "We feel sorry for it, but apparently the law does not think well of placebos"), with a long quotation in ch1 of Follies and Fallacies in Medicine (pg3/15), but those don't turn up any copies anywhere. (/r/scholar)
Why the interest in catnip?
Thanks. I wasted a bunch of money on catnip when it turned out my cat was immune, which I didn't even know was a thing.
After reading up on it, it seemed like there were gaps in the research literature - most of it was hopelessly old and inaccessible, there was no single estimate for how frequently cats respond to catnip and substitutes (so I could meta-analyze/multilevel-model this easily), and no data on the relationships of responses within a cat (so if your cat is immune to catnip, what do you optimally try next?) but this is easy to experiment with since cats are common (I've already gotten set up with several cat toys impregnated with catnip/valerian/honeysuckle so I can test each cat I run into with a battery of stimulants).
So after jailbreaking all the relevant literature, maybe run an online survey of catowners, then combine everything to get the population frequency of catnip response, and then begin experimenting with available cats to get an idea of whether responses are correlated and how frequently cats respond to each stimulant. Then catowners will know the risk of catnip immunity and each stimulant they should try next. See http://www.gwern.net/catnip
A minor contribution, perhaps, but there are a lot of catowners out there and it would be nice to bring some clarity to this area.
An anecdote that probably tells you nothing you don't already know. My father has a chess set whose pieces are made of olive-wood and rosewood, and at least one cat my parents have owned has responded to the box (which I think is olive-wood, but I'm not certain) in the same sort of way as many cats respond to catnip. Googling suggests that other people have found that olive wood provokes a reaction from their cats. So you might consider adding olive wood to your battery of cat-tests.
It's worth testing if I can get a decently odorous chunk of olive wood. Not sure where, though, as it seems like the sort of thing usually sold in a manufactured form and I'd rather not pay for expensive end-consumer cutting boards or chess sets. There's also a lot of anecdotes that it works with plain old olives like, presumably, the ones you get in a can. Maybe that would work?
Maybe. I don't have a cat myself (my wife is allergic) so I've no way of testing myself, and I have no more information than what I've already said. Sorry not to be more help.
EVOO should be a much better bet than olives in a can. Good EVOO smells different than "regular" olive oil, and olives in a can are basically dead and don't smell of anything yummy.
There is also olio nuovo (or olio novello, depends on from which part of Italy) which is fresh unfiltered olive oil available only seasonally (around right now, for Italian olives) which is in entirely different class by taste and smell.
I thought of that, but if I was only going to get one thing, the google hits suggest that it would be much more reliable to go with olive wood, then olives themselves; most the of the hits concern constipation and things like that (only a few single out olive oil), which is inconsistent with what I would expect from a catnip substitute (firsthand, the effects of catnip, valerian, honeysuckle, and the silvervine I just got today, are all fairly noticeable) and suggests that whatever the active ingredient is (may not be the same as catnip, as some of the olive anecdotes claim catnip immunity in olive responders), it is lost or reduced in oil compared to the still relatively physically intact woods or olives.
That said, why not - if the EVOO does nothing, I can always eat it myself, and how expensive could it possibly be? Is there any specific brand or product you would recommend as particularly reliable?
I wonder if the olive wood reports are coming from the places (like Spain or Italy) where it's easy to get fresh olive wood... In the States kitchen supply stores (including Bed Bath & Beyond) sell olive-wood spoons ($5 or so), bowls and such, but I don't know how much processing (e.g. thermal) did that wood go through.
I buy olio nuovo here and can attest that it's very different from the supermarket olive oil.
The anecdotes don't seem to specify that it must be fresh, no. Consider gjm's anecdote right here: I doubt a chess board made of olive wood is all that fresh when it's bought by the end-consumer, and if the freshness made a big difference and the chessboard was just months old, then the effect should've noticeably gone away. (That wood lasts a long time makes sense - the oils and other chemicals must be able to take a long time to leach out in at least some cases, because otherwise, there would be little point to things like cedar-lined closets.)
Mm. I was kind of hoping for an Amazon link, since I need to do an order on there soon anyway for Christmas gifts.
That place (olio2go) has an Amazon storefront, I think they have some but not all of their olive oils there. You want the 2015 harvest, of course.
Just to avoid misunderstandings: what the cat freaked out over was actually the box that held the pieces. I do not know for certain that the box is actually made of olive wood. I do not know for certain whether it's the wood of the box or the residual smell of one or other set of pieces.
I do agree, though, that it seems fairly clear that great freshness isn't needed. The set wasn't terribly new when the cat that freaked out over it joined the household.
3. Here.
Huh. I never knew there were so many other plants that had similar effects on cats.
Anyway, best of luck getting Todd's work… and getting cats high.
Thanks. Funny story - morphine addict with other issues for which the treatment was... morphine. Clever solution.
Thanks. As far as the Todd dissertation goes, I know someone who can request it for me and I've asked them, so hopefully! (I really want it since it seems to be the most comprehensive set of experiments ever done on catnip and any analysis of mine would be crippled without it.)
I got the following e-mail from the Harvard Library today:
I am not sure what is going on here: Since it is a Harvard thesis, they presumably hold the copyright themselves. I know they will make my own thesis available for free after a one-year embargo. This seems more like an excuse to not have to scan it manually
Ouch. That is weird. Perhaps there's something historical going on where they used to let Harvard students keep their own copyright but a few decades ago changed it to demand copyright, which is why they can't scan the entirety of an old thesis like Todd's. Hm. You could try replying and asking why they can't scan a Harvard thesis given your personal experience.
If that doesn't work and the other guy can't help, I wonder what I could do. Leaving that thesis out is a really big gap in the literature... Going to Harvard physically with a scanner is not an option since I don't know if they would even lend it out of the stacks to me, much less when I'll ever be in Boston again. In an instance of rather bad timing on my part, it turns out Todd died just last year so I can't simply email him and ask him to release it under CC-BY-SA or something and then the Harvard people could be told they have copyright clearance; his wife Joyce is still around, though, so I could try asking her to license the thesis.
Perhaps you could ask the scanners what they would accept as adequate proof of copyright safety, such as some sort of document signed by Joyce? (No point in bothering her if it wouldn't get them to unlock the thesis, after all.)