This is a great write up. It's also weirdly similar to a video I happened upon yesterday playing around with raw Hubble imagery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gBXSQCWdSI
He take a few minutes to get to the punch line. Feel free to skip ahead to around 5:30.
I know what you mean by your comment, but you might want to give catch 22 another try sometime. I'd say that the start with the Texan is far from the best the book gets. Reading it, I think you'll find Yossarian more and more understandable and the situations more and more bleakly comic as you go.
Or don't. There's no end of great novels out there.
Several of the candidate variable objects are characterized in the results section of the paper. The model is also tested for effectiveness against synthetic data. It appears to be a useful method and the paper describes a plausible path for it to aid future discovery.
Everywhere? This is a crazy thing to claim. I was also recently in Japan and I never took a car anywhere. I'm sure there are particular routes that are badly served but come on.
I've been few times to Japan. Limiting yourself to rail gets boring very quick.
Also if you travel (aka kinda pressed for time), esp. with larger group (aka family) a lot of time cars are cheaper and faster and more practical option.
Everywhere. I was staying right next to Tokyo Station, too. I went from a meeting in Roppongi Hills to a bookstore in Jimbocho. Apple Maps says 31 minutes by train and 24 minutes by Uber.
And I was traveling alone this time. Last year when I went with my wife and three kids the differential was even more extreme. I’m convinced public transit is a major reason for the birth rate collapse in east asia.
> I’m convinced public transit is a major reason for the birth rate collapse in east asia.
Sure thing. Just so we're on the same page, mind backing that up with the obvious basic research? You know, just a simple breakdown of birth rates vs public transit usage across the world. Rudimentary stuff.
A lot of obviously positive things correlated with lower birth rates, like not having half your kids die before they reach adulthood, being able to treat infections with antibiotics, not needing a crazy amount of labor to keep subsistence farming going.
Birth rate collapse itself is a positive thing, this planet can’t ecologically sustain pre-industrialization birthrates combined with modern medicine and life expectancy. Back in the mid-century there was a lot of academic concern about overpopulation.
> In fact up until a recent funding method change from the Trump Administration, most grant money was subject to "overhead"--a nebulous nonsensical accounting trick that allowed the university administration to get upwards of 60% of the dollars that are earmarked for grants.
We're better than this here. Don't spread misinformation. First of all overhead is listed as a percentage, such as 55% or 60% or whatever but the university doesn't get that fraction of the total grant. You work up the so called direct costs, ie the line item salaries of the researchers, the reagents, etc. and then the overhead is 60% of that figure. So it would work out to be 38% of the total dollars granted.
It's also not a trick. It's a negotiated amount that is supposed to avoid each grant requesting some amortized fraction of the cost of office space and other necessary but shared expenses.
I and most people agree that's it's possibly too high, but it's ignorant to treat it like a scam.
I and most people agree that's it's possibly too high, but it's ignorant to treat it like a scam.
The fact that it is so high is a scam.
It really depends on the grant. For the larger grants, it may work somewhat like you describe. For the smaller grants, they literally do just take 60% of the money (and complain that it is not enough to administer the grant while providing absolutely no support whatsoever). In theory, it's paying for salary and office space and whatnot, but those are already covered by other budgets.
It's not misinformation. You are repeating a misleading talking point. Here's what happens.
- Professor & students get a grant application for 100K.
- University charges indirects at a ratio (0.55)
- 155K gets transferred from treasury to the university account.
That extra 55K comes from the money that congress allocated for grants, so if congress allocates 1 billion dollars -> 450 million will actually go to professors for research. (less than half).
I don't know about you but the universities I went to were rarely ever building new labs or buildings. Furthermore, those large projects always have state grant money coming out of another funding pool.
Glossing over some details, but the fact of the matter is that it's opaque.
In short, the authors and NASA strongly disagree with the decision to retract and argue that this is clearly outside of the typical norms for what retraction is supposed to represent. A paper being wrong isn't and shouldn't be the standard for retraction, particularly in this case when the original paper was published with multiple technical responses and rejoinders.
That was helpful context, thank you for highlighting it. From the NYT article, it sounds like the NYT’s pursuit of a feature piece last year [0] (also worth reading) spurred Science to revisit making a retraction.
> The internet and scientific critics largely moved on, and so did the journal. While some researchers called for the paper’s retraction, Science instead published technical critiques of the finding. Then last year, Science’s stance shifted. A reporter contacted Science for a New York Times article about the legacy of the #arseniclife affair.
> That inquiry “convinced us that this saga wasn’t over, that unless we wanted to keep talking about it forever, we probably ought to do some things to try to wind it down,” said Holden Thorp, editor in chief of Science since 2019. “And so that’s when I started talking to the authors about retracting.”
Science explains in the article that this retraction is consistent with evolving scientific norms:
“Over the years since the paper was published, and especially in the past 5 years, as research integrity has become an even more important topic, Science has moved to retract papers more frequently for reasons other than fraud and misconduct. In this case, a number of factors led to the publication of a paper with seriously flawed content, including the peer review process and editorial decisions that we made. With this retraction—and with all retractions and corrections—we acknowledge and take responsibility for the role that we played in the paper’s publication.”
From the article this seems much less bad than the headline might imply. This idea predates trump and it does not eliminate scientific review of proposals. That said, whether the cost savings itself is worth what might be a diminishment in review quality is hard to say. I can only comment from the NSF side of things to say that peer review of proposals is a mixed bag and will unavoidably run into human error and individual predispositions regarding scientific importance so maybe this isn't a bad approach to try.
There have been several of these deep dives into manipulated speed runs and they seldom disappoint. Since we are on HN, I'll mention another mathy one that was summarized by Matt Parker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ko3TdPy0TU
He take a few minutes to get to the punch line. Feel free to skip ahead to around 5:30.