3,045 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2020
  2. Apr 2020
    1. Wynants, L., Van Calster, B., Bonten, M. M. J., Collins, G. S., Debray, T. P. A., De Vos, M., Haller, M. C., Heinze, G., Moons, K. G. M., Riley, R. D., Schuit, E., Smits, L. J. M., Snell, K. I. E., Steyerberg, E. W., Wallisch, C., & van Smeden, M. (2020). Prediction models for diagnosis and prognosis of covid-19 infection: Systematic review and critical appraisal. BMJ, m1328. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m1328

    1. Salganik, M. J., Lundberg, I., Kindel, A. T., Ahearn, C. E., Al-Ghoneim, K., Almaatouq, A., Altschul, D. M., Brand, J. E., Carnegie, N. B., Compton, R. J., Datta, D., Davidson, T., Filippova, A., Gilroy, C., Goode, B. J., Jahani, E., Kashyap, R., Kirchner, A., McKay, S., … McLanahan, S. (2020). Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1915006117

    1. This is a generic problem in scholarly publishing and affects the geochemistry community as much as other disciplines. Some research has shown that preprints tend to be of similar quality to their final published versions in journals [7].
      • Ilmu kebumian terdiri dari komponen atmosfer, lithosfer, dan hydrosfer, yang masing-masing telah membangun tubuh keilmuan (body of knowledge) sendiri.
      • Geokimia sendiri merupakan interaksi antara litosfer dan hidrosfer, tentunya ini akan memberikan kondisi yang berbeda lagi.
      • Kondisi itu membuat kebutuhan dan perilaku ilmuwan di masing-masing sub bidang ilmu akan berbeda-beda.
      • Namun demikian kebutuhan untuk memiliki media publikasi yang cepat, minim hambatan waktu (delay) sepertinya akan tetap sama.
    1. ``Debugging is parallelizable''. Although debugging requires debuggers to communicate with some coordinating developer, it doesn't require significant coordination between debuggers. Thus it doesn't fall prey to the same quadratic complexity and management costs that make adding developers problematic.

      contrast this to physical manufacturing: Gereffi's typology of manufacturing Manufacturing today is rarely evolved to the modular stage for complex projects (such as code), and yet it proceeds across oceans, machinery, and---more frequently---across languages. Programming standardizes the languages of production while allowing the languages of collaboration to be multiple. These multiples are the parallel clusters around the world hacking away at their own thing. They are friends, they are scientists, they are entrepreneurs, they are all of the above.

    1. La rationalité objective relève de la démarche scientifique et se base sur la construction du savoir par la preuve. La rationalité subjective est du ressort de la croyance. Les croyances ont leur logique propre qu’il convient de décrypter et d’analyser mais ne relèvent aucunement d’une démarche irrationnelle. “Chaque individu a ses raisons de croire. De ces dernières, s’échafaude un système de croyance qui pose l’individu dans une situation souvent valorisante et réconfortante pour lui-même”, développe Gérald Bronner. Cela explique la méfiance qui s’installe à l’égard de la science notamment. Malgré les progrès indéniables dans toutes les disciplines et l’amélioration considérable qu’elle apporte concernant nos conditions de vie, la méfiance et la défiance s’installent. Il est toujours plus facile de croire que d’acquérir un savoir basé sur des preuves. En cela, les fausses informations (notamment en matière de santé) marquent bien souvent l’opinion de façon très profonde.

      Cet argument prends la suite du précédent pour renforcer l’idée que les croyances l’emportent sur le raisonnement scientifique pour des raisons psychologiques, parce que l’esprit humain est biaisé en faveur des premières.

      On peut noter la structure du raisonnement logique :

      Prémisse 1: la rationalité objective (= science) se base sur des preuves neutres et demande une démarche active de construction de savoir

      Prémisse 2: la rationalité subjective (=croyance) trie les informations en fonction de ce qui est le plus satisfaisant a croire

      Conclusion : il est plus facile et spontané de croire que de savoir

      Ce raisonnement lui permet d’expliquer le paradoxe entre les bénéfices factuels des progrès scientifiques et la méfiance croissante que ces progrès suscitent.

    1. The benefit of passing data “by value” is readability. The value you see in the function call is what is copied and received on the other side

      no hidden cost, eg., memory growth on the heap or pauses during garbage collection. but there is a cost in stack memory usage and "scoping" among multiple stack frames, CPU caching, etc.

    2. Functions execute within the scope of frame boundaries that provide an individual memory space for each respective function. Each frame allows a function to operate within their own context and also provides flow control. A function has direct access to the memory inside its frame, through the frame pointer, but access to memory outside its frame requires indirect access. For a function to access memory outside of its frame, that memory must be shared with the function.

      eg., shared via the "pointer" to an address in heap memory

  3. Mar 2020
    1. The charges focus on Lieber’s alleged involvement in China’s Thousand Talents Plan, a prestigious programme designed to recruit leading academics to the country. Documents outlining the charges allege that Lieber received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and agreed to lead a lab there — and that when US government agencies asked about his involvement with the programme he stated that he was not a participant and denied any formal affiliation with WUT.
    1. Ideally, the process is democratic: Anybody can science the shit out of anything. In reality, most people “do” science vicariously—by reading about new discoveries and having faith that the discoverers aren’t charlatans. Though it’s not quite faith: We trust them because scientists argue in public.
    1. Sempre ricordando che quando si parla di sfericità, l’elettrone non deve essere pensato come una pallina: si tratta di una particella elementare, dunque non strutturata e indivisibile, e per forma si intende in realtà la simmetria delle sue interazioni con i campi esterni, con altre cariche.
    1. If you’re planning on flying a robotic or even human mission in the near future to the Moon, an asteroid or even Mars, one indispensable requirement you’ll face is the need for at least one deep-space tracking dish to communicate with your craft.
    1. propelled by a “water plasma” engine. Solar panels generate electrical power, which the vehicle then uses to generate microwaves, which superheat the water up to Sun-surface temperatures. That produces a plasma that shoots out a nozzle, propelling Vigoride forward.
  4. Feb 2020
    1. "We are at a time where some people doubt the validity of science," he says. "And if people feel that they are part of this great adventure that is science, I think they're more inclined to trust it. And that's really great."

      These citizen scientists in Finland helped identify a new type of "northern light". Basically, 2 people were able to take a shot of the same display at the same second, 60 miles apart, allowing for depth resolution.

  5. Jan 2020
    1. the phenomenal form

      In Fowkes, the 'form of appearance' or the Erscheinungsform.

      Exchange value is the 'form of appearance' of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it--this 'third thing' will turn out to be 'socially necessary labor time'.

      Book Two of Hegel's Science of Logic, the Doctrine of Essence, begins with a chapter on 'Der Schein,' which appears in A.V. Miller's translation as "Illusory Being" (Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. by A.V. Miller, pp. 393-408).

      Here, Hegel describes "schein" as "reflected immediacy, that is immediacy which is only by means of its negation and which when contrasted with its mediation is nothing but the empty determination of the immediacy of negated determinate being," (p. 396).

      Hegel goes on to remark that "Schein" is "the phenomenon [Phänomen] of skepticism, and the Appearance [Erscheinung] of idealism," (p. 396).

      In describing exchange value as the 'Erscheinungsform' of 'something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it'--which will be labor--Marx is clearly flirting with the terminology surrounding "Illusory Being" in the Science of Logic, which suggests labor as the 'thing-in-itself' of the exchange value. Exchange-value is the reflected immediacy that conceals the congealed labor that it is its essence.

      The passage as a whole is suggestive of how exchange value will wend its way through Marx's demonstration, unfolding from itself determinations of itself.

      Before presenting a long, difficult quotation from Hegel, I think the most straightforward way to present this reference to Hegel is to say present the argument as follows:

      In Kantian idealism, we find that the 'thing-in-itself' cannot become an object of knowledge; consciousness only ever has immediate access to the form of appearance, the 'sensible form' of a 'thing-in-itself' which never presents itself to consciousness. In referring to the value form as the 'form of appearance' of something else which does not appear, Marx is saying that just as idealism subordinates the objectivity of the world to its appearance for consciousness, exchange-value represents immediately an essence that it suppresses, and implicitly, denies the possibility of knowledge of this essence.

      Hegel writes, "Skepticism did not permit itself to say 'It is'; modern idealism did not permit itself to regard knowledge as a knowing of the thing-in-itself; the illusory being of skepticism was supposed to lack any foundation of being, and in idealism the thing-in-itself was not supposed to enter into knowledge. But at the same time, skepticism admitted a multitude of determinations of its illusory being, or rather its illusory being had for content the entire manifold wealth of the world. In idealism, too, Appearance [Erscheinung] embraces within itself the range of these manifold determinateness. This illusory being and this Appearance are immediately thus manifoldly determined. This content, therefore, may well have no being, no thing or thing-in-itself at its base; it remains on its own account as it is; the content has only been transferred from being into an illusory being, so that the latter has within itself those manifold determinateness, which are immediate, simply affirmative, and mutually related as others. Illusory being is, therefore, itself immediately determinate. It can have this or that content; whatever content it has, illusory being does not posit this itself but has it immediately. The various forms of idealism, Leibnizian, Kantian, Fichtean, and others, have not advanced beyond being as determinateness, have not advanced beyond this immediacy, any more than skepticism did. Skepticism permits the content of its illusory being to be given to it; whatever content it is supposed to have, for skepticism it is immediate. The monad of Leibniz evolves its ideas and representations out of itself; but it is not the power that generates and binds them together, rather do they arise in the monad like bubbles; they are indifferent and immediate over against one another and the same in relation to the monad itself. Similarly, the Kantian Appearance [Erscheinung] is a given content of perception; it presupposes affections, determinations of the subject, which are immediately relatively to themselves and to the subject. It may well be that the infinite obstacle of Fichte's idealism has no underlying thing-in-itself, so that it becomes purely a determinateness in the ego; but for the ego, this determinateness which it appropriates and whose externality it sublates is at the same time immediate, a limitation of the ego, which it can transcend but which has in it an element of indifference, so that although the limitation is in the ego, it contains an immediate non-being of the ego." (p. 396-397).

      In Lenin's notebooks on Hegel's Science of Logic, these sections provoke a considerable degree of excitement. Lenin's 'Conspectus of Hegel's Science of Logic' can be accessed via Marxists.org here:

      https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/ch02.htm

    2. presents

      In Ben Fowkes translation in the Penguin edition, we find "The wealth of societies…appears as."

      In the German edition, Marx uses the verb erscheint ('scheint' shares an etymological link to the English word, shine.)

      On p. 127, Marx uses the Hegelian expression, Erscheinungsform (form of appearance). In this edition, it is rendered "the phenomenal form."

      Marx uses this term to describe the way that, in order for exchange-values to present an equivalence between two distinct use-values (i.e. x corn, y silk) they must possess some common element of identical magnitude. As exchange-values, commodities "cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the 'form of appearance' [Erscheinungsform], of a content distinguishable from it," (Karl Marx. Capital, Vol. I, p. 127)

    1. Overall, we received 60 submissions for the Call for Poster Presentations. Among the high amount of excellent abstracts, the programme committee decided to accept 20 abstracts for poster presentations.

      Even a normal conference in the geo-sciences is more open than this "open science" conference. There is a limited amount of time for speakers, but why would anyone deny someone the possibility to present a poster and try to find an audience for their research? There is no scientific need for this gate keeping.

    1. Summarizing a paper in your own words restructures the content to focus on learning rather than novelty.

      In the scientific papers we convey novelty, hence, some of the early readers might confuse themselves that this is the right way to speak in a daily scientific community

    2. Blogging has taught me how to read a paper because explaining something is a more active form of understanding. Now I summarize the main contribution in my own words, write out the notation and problem setup, define terms, and rederive the main equations or results. This process mimics the act of presenting and is great practice for it.

      Why teaching others/blogging has a great value in terms of learning new topics

    3. When I first started teaching myself to program, I felt that I had no imagination. I couldn’t be creative because I was too focused on finding the syntax bug or reasoning about program structure. However, with proficiency came creativity. Programming became less important than what I was building and why.

      While learning, don't worry about the creativity, which shall come after gaining proficiency (knowledge base)

    4. In my opinion the reason most people fail to do great research is that they are not willing to pay the price in self-development. Say some new field opens up that combines field XXX and field YYY. Researchers from each of these fields flock to the new field. My experience is that virtually none of the researchers in either field will systematically learn the other field in any sort of depth. The few who do put in this effort often achieve spectacular results.

      I think we all know that...

    5. Many of us have done this on exams, hoping for partial credit by stitching together the outline of a proof or using the right words in an essay with the hopes that the professor connects the dots for us.

      Often we tend to communicate with a jargon we don't understand just to pretend we know something

  6. Dec 2019
    1. we shield ourselves from existential threats, or consciously thinking about the idea that we are going to die, by shutting down predictions about the self,” researcher Avi Goldstein told The Guardian, “or categorizing the information as being about other people rather than ourselves.

      Magically, our brain doesn't easily accept the fact that we will die some day. It was proved by the short experiment:

      volunteers were watching images of faces with words like "funeral" or "burial", and whenever they've seen their own one, the brain didn't showcase any surprise signals

    1. Brown's Vulgar Errours.

      Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquiries into very many received tenets and commonly presumed truths (1646), commonly known as Vulgar Errours, was an important text in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Browne, like Francis Bacon, argued that empirical evidence was necessary to support (or disprove) claims, so his "trial" here likely involved many bird dissections.

      Browne is credited with introducing a number of words to the scientific discourse, including "electricity" and--interesting for our purposes--"computer" and "hallucination."

    1. It was, perhaps, the amiable character of this man that inclined me more to that branch of natural philosophy which he professed,

      The relationships between Victor and his teachers appear to drive the interdisciplinary curiosity that leads to his later discoveries. For example, M. Waldman, who loves chemistry, notes that "I have not neglected the other branches of science," and neither does Victor.

    2. Natural philosophy is the genius that has regulated my fate

      Not called "science" until the mid-nineteenth century, "natural philosophy" was science in the tradition of England's Royal Society (begun 1660), with its emphasis on Baconian induction, careful experiment, and refusal of any older science that could not be proven and demonstrated in a laboratory.

    3. blood circulate

      The early modern English physician William Harvey (1578-1627) made several valuable contributions to the medical sciences, including the circulation of blood in the human body. In De Motu Cordis (1628), Harvey sets down his landmark experiments; in these, Harvey used ligatures to stem blood flow to better understand how the heart works to pump blood throughout the human body. This knowledge will be critical for Victor's creation of the Creature.

    4. I was surprised that among so many men of genius, who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.

      Victor seems to regard himself as godlike in his research. Subsequently, he advances a personal ethics of creation about the specific "raw material" he uses for his experiments, and to the source of the raw material.

    5. having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials

      Cadavers for anatomical training in this period were scarce, and thus a medical education meant to study and extend life also fostered serial killers who committed murders for the sake of selling fresh corpses. Such killing sprees were ended by the Anatomical Act of 1832 in England, which made corpses legally available for medical research.

    6. physiology

      By 1818 physiology had become a controversial branch of medicine at the center of the dispute between vitalism, the idea that a divine spark energized animal life, and materialism, the argument that chemical processes alone give rise to life. Mary Shelley was well aware of the dispute since the Shelleys' family doctor, William Lawrence, was vigorously taking up the materialist argument in works like An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology (1816). For a full view of this controversy as it relates to the novel, see Marilyn Butler, "Frankenstein and Radical Science" [1993] reprinted in J. Paul Hunter, Frankenstein, Norton Critical Edition, second ed. (New York: Norton, 2012): 404-416.

    7. It was with these feelings that I began the creation of a human being

      "Creation" points toward popular literary themes, and to the Bible. It also calls into question property rights. John Locke (1632-1704) argued in Two Treatises of Government that applying one's labor to nature made that creation one's property. Shelley seems to call into question the relation of scientific research to the idea of ownership.

    8. with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour

      Victor's understanding of biological systems as machines was typical of nineteenth-century biology and physiology, and the debates between mechanists and vitalists, which still partially embraced the mechanistic perspective of human life advanced by Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and others.

    9. Dr. Darwin

      Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the evolutionist and poet who lived in Birmingham, England, is clearly on Percy Shelley's mind when he introduces Mary's text in the 1818 edition. Critics of the novel have not often followed this lead in thinking about it as an early work in the British evolutionary imagination. Erasmus Darwin had made "not of impossible occurrence" that one presently visible species could mutate into another. Victor contemplates this possibility—as an alarming one—when he speculates in Volume 3, Chapter 3, that the Creature's demand that he create a "mate" could result in a new evolutionary development, "a race of devils."

    10. Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus

      Paracelsus (1200-1280) was a medieval Swiss theologian and physician interested in alchemy and astrology, and a pioneer in the medical revolution of the German Renaissance. Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) was a German Catholic Dominican friar and bishop. Known as Albert the Great or later Saint Albert, Magnus also wrote on alchemy and was the first to comment on the writings of Aristotle and the teachings of Muslim academics, notably Avicenna and Averroes.

    1. In a thousand ways he smoothed for me the path of knowledge, and made the most abstruse enquiries clear and facile to my apprehension. My application was at first fluctuating and uncertain; it gained strength as I proceeded, and soon

      In this 1831 revision, M. Waldman's influence depends less on his personality or charisma and more on his capabilities as a teacher.

    2. Such were the professor’s words—rather let me say such the words of fate, enounced to destroy me. As he went on, I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being: chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein,—more, far more, will I achieve: treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation. I closed not my eyes that night. My internal being was in a state of insurrection and turmoil; I felt that order would thence arise, but I had no power to produce it. By degrees, after the morning’s dawn, sleep came. I awoke, and my yesternight’s thoughts were as a dream. There only 35remained a resolution to return to my ancient studies, and to devote myself to a science for which I believed myself to possess a natural talent. On the same day, I paid M. Waldman a visit.

      In this lengthy addition to 1831, Victor experiences an early flash of ruinous ambition during the chemistry lecture by M. Waldman. The new picture of Waldman as an evil force belongs to a pattern of provoking suspicion about scientific education in the 1831 edition that did not appear in the 1818.

    3. pursuits. In rather a too philosophical and connected a strain, perhaps, I have given an account of the conclusions I had come to concerning them in my early years. As a child, I had not been content with the results promised by the modern professors of natural science. With a confusion of ideas only to be accounted for by my extreme youth, and my want of a guide on such matters, I had retrod the steps of knowledge along the paths of time, and exchanged the discoveries of recent enquirers for the dreams of forgotten alchymists.

      Shelley adds this 1831 passage in which she traces Victor's fascination with alchemy and outmoded scientific ideas to an impetuous childhood, while the 1818 edition shows Victor reading the ancient sciences as an adult.