All Your Cards Are Belong To Us: Understanding Online Carding Forums

http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.00117

This paper investigates the use of online card fraud forums.  Over a period of three months they collecting details of deals for stolen credit card details, the kind of details sold and the patterns of use by criminals.  Surprisingly, these details are carried out quite publicly, were found using simple searches with deals arranged in the open, often not even requiring a log-in.

The Evolution of Al Qaeda’s Global Network and Al Qaeda Core’s Position Within it: A Network Analysis

http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/view/469

This paper uses graph analytics to look into the network of associations surrounding Al Qaeda over time.  They're able to show that Al Qaeda emerged as a hub bringing together groups with different ideologies in different areas, but that since Bin Laden's death, their network has fragmented back into ideologically isolated groups.

Hanohano: A Deep Ocean Antineutrino Observatory

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0810/0810.0564.pdf

The Hanohano Observatory is a deep-ocean anti-neutrino detector, currently being designed.  This paper is a brief sketch of some of the experiments it would be able to perform.  Placing the detector near a nuclear reactor would allow us to measure the mysterious phenomenon of neutrino oscillation, and could advance fundamental science.  Deep-ocean locations would measure neutrino activity from inside the Earth, allowing us a view of nuclear reactions in the mantle and in the core.  It's also possible that the detector would allow us to detect astronomical events, and could open up a whole new realm of astronomy.

This paper is from 2008, and it's hard to find what progress there has been since - not sure if this is usual for this kind of proposals, of if it means it's been shelved in favour of another design.  Still, I love how much this sounds like something Charles Stross would write!

Is a Refrigerator Good or Evil?

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11211-008-0082-z#/page-1

(Sadly this paper isn't published in an open journal, but Springer do provide the first few pages as a sample)

This paper shows that despite what you might thing, people constantly assign moral values to inanimate objects.  The authors note that in some circumstances this is understandable, such as heirlooms and instruments of torture, but they were also able to show that people assign moral values to everyday things too.  The values they assign are consistent between people, so there really does seem to be a real judgement here, although it's not clear how it works.
It turns out people rate most things as slightly morally positive, so the answer to the question in the title seems to be that refrigerators are good, not evil.

Quantifying thermally induced flowability of rennet cheese curds

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.06846.pdf
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.3897.pdf

There are exactly two papers on arxiv.org on the subject of cheese.  I'm not sure why I was searching arxiv.org for cheese, but still, here they are.

Cheese is formed by adding rennet to milk, which causes casein proteins to aggregate into a mesh, which traps globules of whey and fat.  These papers look at the physical properties of cheese at different temperatures and pHs.
These experiments demonstrate that cheese undergoes two phase transitions as it heats up - below 15 C the fat globules are solid, and reinforce the protein structure, making the cheese rigid.  Above 15 C the fat starts to melt, and the cheese becomes more flexible, but still solid.  At 43 C the protein structure breaks down and the cheese melts.
The behaviour of the fats is complex, but understanding it is important for making low-fat cheeses with similar textures to standard cheese.

The Prickly Skin of White Supremacy: Race in the “Real America”

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/traa.12038/full

This paper looks at how race and racism operate in the "sundown town" of Huntington.  From its founding, Huntington has been overwhelmingly white.  It demonstrates through anecdotes and conversations with locals that while race and racism are not generally talked about explicitly, it's an ever-present part of what makes the town what it is.
Through these investigations, it argues that race isn't a static structure that can be addressed as a whole, but that it's a series of events, happening to people and places.

Introduction

Hi folks, here's a quick background post on what I'm looking to do with this blog:

I'm interested in reading academic papers on a range of different subjects.  I think it would be great if academic work was circulated more widely, and for more general interest.  Academia does great work in performing this research, and sharing it with everyone.
But these papers can be quite daunting, which puts a big barrier in the way of reading them.  What I'd like to do here is provide quick snippets of what I found interesting in different papers.  I'm not an expert in any of these fields, and what I find interesting is probably quite different from where the research interest lies.

I guess the key thing I'd like to take away from it is that a general interest reader can get plenty out of academic writing, and that all this knowledge is out there for anyone who's curious!