Scientific Science
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More SIGBOVIK:
Gotta Collect ’em All
Key excerpt:
In the end, there are some simple math(s) one can go through to calculate the expected value[1], but the solution is for n coupons, one would expect to get nHn coupons on average before getting one of every coupon, where Hn is the nth Harmonic number1 . Because we don’t like doing math(s) in this math(s)-inspired paper, we will instead be replacing the math(s) with other math(s) and approximating the Harmonic numbers by the natural log function2 , because it takes way too much effort to get Excel to do the Harmonic calculations, but the natural log is a default function, and laziness is very important.
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@boomzilla said in Scientific Science:
we don’t like doing math(s) in this m
aeth(s)-inspired paper
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Until someone tells me what happened to the cat, I’m calling the whole thing hogwash.
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@DogsB And that's supposed to be news to whom, exactly? I thought everybody (who cared at least somewhat anyway) already knows that.
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@Bulb Not having read either the book nor TFA, I'd guess maybe it gives more detail that isn't commonly known, or publishes some original correspondence between the physicists, or tells the story in a particularly entertaining way. Otherwise, no, it's not news to anyone who cares.
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@Bulb said in Scientific Science:
@DogsB And that's supposed to be news to whom, exactly? I thought everybody (who cared at least somewhat anyway) already knows that.
The cat or it's hogwash?
@HardwareGeek said in Scientific Science:
@Bulb Not having read either the book nor TFA
in a thread where you’re not suppose to ignore the article.
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@DogsB said in Scientific Science:
in a thread where you’re not suppose to ignore the article.
Minor acts of nonconformity.
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@DogsB fucking stupid website. You can read it if you click on reader mode immediately. Otherwise, if you try to read it normally, it'll show some dumb popup and then reader mode doesn't work anymore.
Websites really go out of their way to be shit now, but I guess you need that Google traffic somehow.
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@topspin said in Scientific Science:
@DogsB fucking stupid website. You can read it if you click on reader mode immediately. Otherwise, if you try to read it normally, it'll show some dumb popup and then reader mode doesn't work anymore.
Websites really go out of their way to be shit now, but I guess you need that Google traffic somehow.Google search rank gives double super mega bonus points based on how enshittified the website is
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@topspin badly written paywall is bad.
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@DogsB's article said in Scientific Science:
The Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli, one of the strongest of Einstein’s critics, had himself long been a fascinated adept of Jungian psychoanalysis. He acquired more grievances to analyse when “his wife, a former cabaret dancer, went off with a chemist, and not a very good one”.
Primarily complaining that the new guy isn't a good scientist. Things that remind you of WTDWTF members ...
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@topspin said in Scientific Science:
@DogsB fucking stupid website. You can read it if you click on reader mode immediately. Otherwise, if you try to read it normally, it'll show some dumb popup and then reader mode doesn't work anymore.
Websites really go out of their way to be shit now, but I guess you need that Google traffic somehow.INB4
@remi
: Turn off javascript on that site.
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Some background information on the superconductivity claims.
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Paul Canfield, a physicist at Iowa State University in Ames, says: “There should be a good German word that’s 50 letters long and is simultaneously ‘impressive’ and ‘depressing’” to describe the report.
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@Zerosquare I read that, too, but I am still thinking which word he meant. All words I found with that range of meanings have at least 150 characters.
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produced enough thrust to overcome earths gravity
give us millions of dollars to demo this in space.
You don’t need to demo this in space. If your shit was real and produced even a tiny fraction of the thrust required to “overcome earth’s gravity”, you could easily measure it on earth.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief.
Of course.
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@topspin said in Scientific Science:
This discovery of a New Force is fundamental in that electric fields alone can generate a sustainable force onto an object and allow center-of-mass translation of said object without expelling mass.
They’ll be miffed to learn that Hendrik Lorentz managed to snag that one 129 years earlier. Or maybe Maxwell by 159 years
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@dcon said in Scientific Science:
@izzion Academia's "Publish or Perish". Oops. Wrong choice.
Academia importance to science is overrated. Things that matter would still be researched without this theater
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@sockpuppet7 said in Scientific Science:
@dcon said in Scientific Science:
@izzion Academia's "Publish or Perish". Oops. Wrong choice.
Academia importance to science is overrated. Things that matter would still be researched without this theater
Apparently dark matter doesn't.
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@LaoC said in Scientific Science:
@sockpuppet7 said in Scientific Science:
@dcon said in Scientific Science:
@izzion Academia's "Publish or Perish". Oops. Wrong choice.
Academia importance to science is overrated. Things that matter would still be researched without this theater
Apparently dark matter doesn't.
such a perfect pun that double as a good valid response, you deserve some serious internet points for this one
the scientists behind those big particle accelerators are important. people with loads of crap publications and fabricated bullshit are not
would you pay me big money just knowing the number of GitHub repositories without looking at it's contents? something is weird on publish or perish
maybe the funders doesn't accept that a scientist isn't gonna produce a measurable amount of results if they're truly focused on discovering currently unknown things, and take measurable bullshit instead
a scientist that makes one breakthrough a week exist only on fantasy tv series
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@sockpuppet7 The phrase "publish or perish" is a cynical description of the current state of affairs, due to exactly what you say.
Basically, the beancounters of the world want beans to count and they want those beans to be something they can understand. The system isn't great, but given alternatives like "you know a guy" (and become a participant in a massive circlejerk), it's perhaps the less bad option.
On the other side of the coin: publishing isn't necessary about a breakthrough. Work-in-progress, progress reports, or negative results are all technically valid publications. Academic publishing has its roots in just being communication between peers. It's just that the current system is very out of whack and hasn't scaled well with ... well .. scale.
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@cvi As usual, when someone gets rated for some numbers, he'll make sure to improve the numbers (but not what they were originally meant to indicate). And thus the numbers get useless over time...
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@cvi I remember big arguments about methods of assessing Research Impact back about 10-15 years ago. While the camp that measured impact by the volume of thud made by the journals on the desk was discredited (i.e., there wasn't a vast drive to publish any old shit anywhere, thank God!) there was a huge war between the people who wanted everything ranked by societal outcomes and those who preferred gating by "rigour" (which was something like the fraction of each paper that was mathematical equations).
It was a weird shadow war fought viciously on committees by people who otherwise pretended to be best of colleagues. The prize was who would get the highest rating multiplier for getting funding, so ultra-sought-after.
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@dkf There are some reasonable movements here and there. E.g., some places include publishing/contributing to (open source) software, or curating data sets. I don't think "societal outcomes" is an entirely dumb thing to look at (and similar ideas are counted as valid "outputs" in some places), though looking at that alone would be pretty fucked up. The example with rigour (fractions of equations) is just plain dumb and the opposite of rigour by itself.
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@cvi I'm of the societal impact camp too (and I think they were the eventual winners of the fight; that was around the time I stopped paying much attention to most academic matters). But the rigour camp used to be really quite strong in CS, stemming from foundations in Pure Math, asking questions such as how can you know whether an assertion is true if you don't prove it from basic principles.
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@cvi the whole problem is generally just Goodhart’s law in action.
You want some kind of public funding for science, for good enough reasons, so you need to decide what and whom to fund. That leaves either cronyism, arbitrary decisions, or non-arbitrary decision processes. So metrics will be cooked up to assess merit, but the metrics inevitably turn out to be bullshit. And now an entire industry of Chinese crap to game the bullshit.That’s not to say there’s not massive room for improvement.
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@topspin said in Scientific Science:
So metrics will be cooked up to asses merit,
I think you accidentally something.
So metrics will be cooked up to asses' merit,
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@topspin said in Scientific Science:
Was there an inexplicable and unexplained uptick in penguin maulings in the data?
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‘bug bounty’ programmes
In our industry, too, the costs of undetected errors are staggering.That sounds like a good idea on the face of it. I'll call it Paid Post-Publication Peer-Review, P4R for short.
Will it work to improve peer review? Probably not. Is it worth trying? Anything, at this point.Estimating the Reliability and Robustness of Research (ERROR), pays specialists to check highly cited published papers, starting with the social and behavioural sciences
I'm going to order a new Ferrari right now ...
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@topspin said in Scientific Science:
‘bug bounty’ programmes
In our industry, too, the costs of undetected errors are staggering.That sounds like a good idea on the face of it. I'll call it Paid Post-Publication Peer-Review, P4R for short.
Will it work to improve peer review? Probably not. Is it worth trying? Anything, at this point.Estimating the Reliability and Robustness of Research (ERROR), pays specialists to check highly cited published papers, starting with the social and behavioural sciences
I'm going to order a new Ferrari right now ...Scientists that are discovered to publish shitty or outright doctored and false papers should be sent on a world tour and put in stocks at the largest universities where people can throw rotten eggs at them, ending with a month in stocks at the university where they published the most falsehoods. And all the universities should have a small town square with a collection of shame stocks for this purpose.
And also fine the publications that publish the most shit.
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An interesting excerpt from today's Science:
Lawmakers in Peru last week approved legislation that makes scientific fraud punishable by fines and suspension or expulsion from the country’s national registry of scientists. Under the law, which received overwhelming support in Peru’s Congress, the National Council for Science, Technology, and Technological Innovation will be obligated to enforce punishments against those found guilty of various infractions, such as plagiarism, data manipulation, and fictitious authorship. Suspension from the national registry makes it much more difficult for scientists to receive government grants and promotions. In the coming months, the Peruvian Congress will also debate a bill proposing criminal penalties—including prison time—for scientific misconduct.
Actually, such a law should exist in every country. The scientists get paid to conduct research, not to pretend or even fake it.
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@BernieTheBernie said in Scientific Science:
Actually, such a law should exist in every country. The scientists get paid to conduct research, not to pretend or even fake it.
Journal editors might find themselves somewhat lacking submissions with the Impact™ they crave…
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@ixvedeusi
Won’t somebody please think of the publishers??
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@kazitor said in Scientific Science:
@ixvedeusi
Won’t somebody please think of the publishers??I think of the publishers, but what I think of them isn't fit to be published. Not in a family-friendly journal, at least.
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@kazitor said in Scientific Science:
@BernieTheBernie said in Scientific Science:
Actually, such a law should exist in every country. The scientists get paid to conduct research, not to pretend or even fake it.
Journal editors might find themselves somewhat lacking submissions with the Impact™ they crave…
If they want Impact, we can find a font for them...
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@dkf said in Scientific Science:
@kazitor said in Scientific Science:
@BernieTheBernie said in Scientific Science:
Actually, such a law should exist in every country. The scientists get paid to conduct research, not to pretend or even fake it.
Journal editors might find themselves somewhat lacking submissions with the Impact™ they crave…
If they want Impact, we can find a
fonthammer for them...
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@topspin said in Scientific Science:
I hope the authors have successfully left China before it got published. Because talking about problems tends to be taken as the worst possible offence, so I won't expect them to get away with this and staying.
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@Bulb Sometimes leaving China isn't sufficient self-protection.