However, in settings rich in novelty, uncertainty or immediate feedback, the tendency to shift focus can become an asset. Moving quickly between cues allows hypercurious people to spot patterns, follow hunches, and adjust their thinking as new information emerges.
Put me in front of a computer, day after day, week after week, and the will to live will slowly leave my body. Put me in charge of a live production or event and I really shine, juggling all the variables in play.
What if the question isn’t what constrains attention, but what captures it?
This is an important question. What I struggle with, however, is the inability of anything to capture my attention when I am not in a particularly good state mentally. That is, the lethargy that poor mental health confers on me extends to few things being attention-worthy, resulting in me mostly trying to drown out my thoughts with (aural) noise.
I myself kept burning out in a structured corporate setting but now thrive in a flexible research one
Fun being in a corporate-like research environment. Or rather a research environment where you are not involved with any research yourself. :/
Each infrastructure began with promises of liberation and human triumph. But stability calcifies into compliance through legal policy, economic incentives, consolidation and embedded technical defaults.
Nothing to add. This is well put.
the cold thrill of tanking other people’s papers
This, I imagine, is what keeps many reviewers going.
This was a shocking reversal of a policy that had stood for years, allowing trans women to compete in amateur women’s cricket.
It left me pretty broken about the prospect of never playing for my club’s women’s team.
Mean and Clean
A really fun short story!
I’m honestly baffled.
I am not that baffled by GNOME removing features. There is a reason I use KDE.
I will admit that I am slightly less bothered by Firefox disabling it, since I use middle-click for automatic scrolling anyway, and prefer that function over pasting in browsing environments.
convivial tools are sustainable, energy-efficient (though often labor intensive), local-first, and designed primarily to enhance the autonomy and creativity of their users
<3
You start to regret that the world has changed, even though what changed the most is you.
This is a valuable reminder to reflect.
This is a depressing thought to consider in (linear) middle age, but it is hard to escape the feeling that it is essentially true. Childhood memories have an intensity and a vibrancy that it is difficult for the rest of life to match.
What a thought to wake up to on new year’s day!
This leisurely pace made Middle-Earth blossom before my eyes. When I paused after each comma, and let each sentence ring for a small moment after the period, the events of the story reached me with more weight and strength.
I don’t think I had ever considered this. There was always a desire to finish books quickly, and I have been admonishing myself for not reading fast enough. Perhaps it is time to slow down with purpose; or rather treat my natural slow reading as intentional and give it purpose.
it writes like the millions of us who were pushed through a very particular educational and societal pipeline, a pipeline deliberately designed to sandpaper away ambiguity, and forge our thoughts into a very specific, very formal, and very impressive shape
All these 20th-century colonial experiences have more in common than we know!
For example, many “podcasts” have chosen to partner directly with streaming services rather than provide an open RSS feed. Whether these should even be called podcasts is in doubt; what’s not is that they’ve allowed those streaming services to intermediate their audiences.
The fucking BBC has done this, and even though they still let you subscribe via RSS, they have episodes available way earlier on their app.
The goal is acquiring many experiences. The side effects include entertainment and increased skill.
I love this. <3
they also pressure their scholars to publish at a brisk pace
And their scholars are foolish enough to keep running on their hamster wheels.
It's redundant to say "I think" at any point in an opinion piece.
I think this is a good rule of thumb. :P
purdahnishin
Today, probably spelt purdahnashin.
Copyright is a very weak tool for protecting creators' interests, because copyright only gives us something to bargain with, without giving us any bargaining power, which means that copyright becomes something we bargain away.
This is well-said.
Life is so rich when ease and efficiency are not the measure.
This is beautiful.
The simple software I wrote really made it a feasible one-person project though, and motivates me to go through the whole process again next year.
This is the key bit for me. The reproducibility of the process itself will make the next time a lot more streamlined. I really like this article!
Everyone should be lucky enough to find work they enjoy. But for those with ADHD it's a requirement if you want to be successful.
Indeed. Also, far easier said than done, especially if you are an immigrant.
The bug means a large number of citations are automatically attributed to the first paper in a given journal volume, instead of to whichever paper in that volume they were intended for. The issue appears to affect many of the publisher’s online-only titles, such as Nature Communications, Scientific Reports and several BMC journals.
This is utterly hilarious.
Every time someone maintains a legacy project, documents its history, or tracks down long-lost contributors, they’re weaving the threads that connect computing’s past to its future.
Beautifully said.
the World Wide Web is just text
Putting on my former-Web-Editor-at-CERN hat to note that the Web didn’t exist in 1987! I believe the author meant the Internet.
https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web
Cerquiglini shows that it’s the Norman accent that explains the differences between French and English in pairs like guerre > war, jardin > garden, coussin > cushion, marché > market, bouteilleur > butler. English, he says, is not so much badly-pronounced French, but French pronounced with a Norman accent.
I had no idea!
And the whole time, I’ve written stories and parts of my novels during breaks—fifteen minutes for coffee and then half an hour for lunch.
This is some discipline!
millenarian
throws out
Translation: “pulls out of his arse”
“I’m sort of a complex chaotic systems guy, so I have a low estimate that I actually know what the nonlinear dynamic in the memosphere really was,” he said.
This is beyond jargon… this is farce.
Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, is said to have led chants of “Feel the AGI!” at team meetings.
This cannot be real.
America is an absurd country, and I’ve no compunction whatsoever about making fun of it.
Hah.
Excellent post, and worth a full read.
Such an omission is strange not only because socialists pride themselves on practicing the “ruthless criticism of everything existing,” but because they are descended from a radical tradition overstuffed with vegetarians two centuries ago.
I wonder how this contrasts, historically, with vegetarians in India…
We depend on a calculator to produce identical results no matter who uses it, but identical results in a writing context are boring at best.
I like this!
In my admittedly small sample, Altman’s analogy didn’t hold up.
Indeed. See my comment above.
imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable
This makes the (incorrect) assumption that maths is about calculations: mathematics is about much more than stringing along numbers in arithmetic operations.
community
“research community”
Live data from CERN accelerator screens
Need to plan alternatives for periods of shutdown.
Playing with particles to combine them to make atoms, molecules, …
Go one step back: tune the Higgs field to give quarks the right mass so that neutrons are heavier than protons. If not, the protons will decay quickly and we can't have atoms.
What happens if the Higgs couplings to quarks is too strong?
Science Gateway exhibitions – overview of scenario
Types of feedback sought:
Animals are not permitted on the CERN sites.
on the CERN sites, except those required for medical reasons.
before the summer
"before planning your visit"?
just before the summer
See above comments.
just before the summer
Replace with "soon"?
available before the summer
Should probably delete this.
collaborator
collaborator → volunteer
collaborator
collaborator → volunteer
(everywhere)
Delete "(everywhere)". Sorry my instructions weren't clear. :P I meant to say you need to replace the word "collaborator" with the word "volunteer" everywhere in the document.
Plan Your Visit
Link to this?
There will be access for bicycles and
Add comma after "bicycles".
19h
7.00 p.m.
9h00 to 18h00
9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
losing personal
loss of personal
`
Replace with correct punctuation.
animal welfare
animal-welfare
+ 41227674444
Spread out for accessibility:
+41 22 767 4444
our interactive map of activities
Link?
period that we call the “long shutdown” during
periods that we call “long shutdowns”, during which
OR
“long shutdowns”, during which
More information to come soon
Should have a full stop at the end.
Bookings will open before the summer.
It's summer! This should change.
Pre-book your visit to see specific points or sites, our interactive map can help you decide where you would like to go.
The comma needs to be a semi-colon, or the second part should be a new sentence.
Can we annotate this PDF using Hypothesis, when it has been shared viaCERNbox?
No we can't. :(
Hypothesis test
Successful annotation.
This doesn't work when sharing a PDF via CERNbox though.
CERN unveils its Science Gateway project
Official website: sciencegateway.cern
Area under L is meaningless.
There is no "dP" in Poisson case, so you can't integrate here.
“P(0 events | model true) = 5%, and 0 events observedmeans there is 5% chance the S.M. is true.” (UGH!)
incarnations
right
"appropriate", not "right"
"There are wrong methods and appropriate methods." –– Bob Cousins
openSNP
Annotatable using Hypothesis
This is an example annotation!
http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/papers/volume15/delgado14a/delgado14a.pdf
http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/papers/volume15/delgado14a/delgado14a.pdf
No Free Lunch
K-means++
XGBoost
Gradient boost
AdaBoost
neural-network-zoo
Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU)
To address Vanishing gradient problem
Dropout
See https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/JMLRdropout.pdf
Backpropagation
Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation
Getting page views is not, per se, an indication of scientific quality.
Then again, are citations?
When I make an error in a blog post, I can go in and update it. I am pretty confident that I make approximately as many errors in my published articles as I make in my blog posts, but the latter are much easier to fix, and thus, I would consider my blogs more error-free, and of higher quality.
It would still be good to have all the versions of the blog post available for examinations, so that readers can know when content has changed. [Edit: Ah, I see you addressed this later in this paragraph. I still think that even for the consumer you should be able to review versions.]
Some blogs have Open pre-publication Peer Review.
While @neuroamanda and I review each others' posts before "publishing them" via GitHub, in principle, anyone can leave their comments on apostilb before the article goes "live". For example: https://github.com/apostilb/apostilb.github.io/pull/70
we need a stable scientific record
Or do we? See We Need a GitHub for Academic Research.
I don’t see how anyone will become aware of this error when they download our article.
… unless we openly annotate the original articles to point to retractions, corrections, replications etc.
But if a blog has comments, at least you can see what peers thought about a blog post, giving you some data, and often very important insights and alternative viewpoints.
Next step: enable hypothes.is!
On average, it seems to me almost all blogs practice open science to a much higher extent than scientific journals.
It would be good if this statement were itself backed by some data. :)
In 2013, François Englert and Peter Higgs were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the development of the Higgs mechanism.
'The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider"'
– https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2013/
It is encoded in a compact description, the so-called 'Lagrangian', which even fits on t-shirts and coffee mugs.
And, although the Standard Model may not be written in stone, the compact description certainly is: https://home.cern/cern-people/updates/2013/03/standard-model-set-stone
Actually, the addition of \text{h}.\text{c}. is not required for term 2, since term 2 is self-adjoint.
Indeed! See another Quantum Diaries post on it: http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2011/06/26/cern-mug-summarizes-standard-model-but-is-off-by-a-factor-of-2/
But you'll have to talk with John Ellis) about that: http://cds.cern.ch/record/1071200?ln=en
we recommend using the term 'transformation' instead of 'decay', as this more accurately describes the physical process
OH MY GOD YES! <3
The term "decay" when applied to non-macro phenomena is terribly misleading for anyone who isn't a physicist.
"Decay" has several meanings (see the Wikipedia page), but it would not be foolish to assume that the term is commonly associated with things like decomposition or biological decays. Even in physics, an orbital decay is a gradual process.
"Transformation" is much more applicable, and is a term I've used myself over the last few years instead of "decay" in this context.
where μ and ν are Lorentz indices representing the spacetime components
Look at "Four-vectors": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-vector
Feynman diagrams
"Let’s draw Feynman diagrams!" and more, on the Quantum Diaries blog: http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2010/02/14/lets-draw-feynman-diagams/
EDIT: This is already referenced in the article, but I'll leave this link up as a pointer anyway.
quantum field theory
Here's a beautiful (if long) explanation of QFT, on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-field-theory/
The latest success was the verification of the Brout–Englert–Higgs field by ATLAS and CMS at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in 2012. Both experiments successfully detected the quantised excitation of the BEH field—the so-called Higgs boson.
the Brout–Englert–Higgs field interacts with particles that have mass (all particles except the gluon and the photon)
Or is it that all particles that interact with the BEH field have mass? ;)
Matter particles can be divided into three groups: quarks (q) and antiquarks (\bar{q}); electrically charged leptons (\ell) and antileptons (\bar{\ell}); neutrinos (ν) and antineutrinos (\bar{\nu}). Gluons (g) couple to colour charge, which only quarks, antiquarks, and gluons themselves, have.
Typically, though, the matter particles (fermions) are grouped into two, depending on whether they interact with the colour charge (quarks) or not (leptons, which include both the electrically charged leptons and neutrinos).
However, the division into three groups, as shown here, is helpful!
No Evidence of Persisting Unrepaired Nuclear DNA Single Strand Breaks in Distinct Types of Cells in the Brain, Kidney, and Liver of Adult Mice after Continuous Eight-Week 50 Hz Magnetic Field Exposure with Flux Density of 0.1 mT or 1.0 mT
This paper has been summarised at https://apostilb.github.io/2016/08/27/mouse-dna-magnetic-fields/
Carbon dioxide emission to Earth’s surface by deep-sea volcanism
This paper has been summarised at https://apostilb.github.io/2016/03/05/co2-undersea-volcanoes/
Carbon dioxide emission to Earth’s surface by deep-sea volcanism
This paper has been summarised at https://apostilb.github.io/2016/03/05/co2-undersea-volcanoes/
BioInitiative Working Group 2012 (2012) BioInitiative report: a rationale for biologically-based public exposure standard for electromagnetic fields (ELF and RF). Available: www.bioinitiative.org/report/index.htm. Accessed 2014 June 09.
URL for the report has changed: http://www.bioinitiative.org/table-of-contents/
My PhD project
See also my presentation given at PCST 2016:
Miller, 2001
DOI: 10.1088/0963-6625/10/1/308 -- NOT Open Access, but accessibly through the CERN Library
Crettaz von Roten, 2011
DOI: 10.1177/1075547010378658 -- NOT Open Access, but accessibly through the CERN Library
Stocklmayer & Bryant, 2012
DOI: 10.1080/09500693.2010.543186 -- Open Access
The Royal Society, 1985
The full report (open access): https://royalsociety.org/policy/publications/1985/public-understanding-science/
Crettaz von Roten, 2011, p.54
Photo credit: Wikipedia
No, the credit belongs to Calvin Teo, and the image is shared under CC BY-SA 2.5.
Attitudes towards outreach in particle physics
Carbon dioxide emission to Earth’s surface by deep-sea volcanism
This paper has been summarised at https://apostilb.github.io/2016/03/05/co2-undersea-volcanoes/
Optical role of die attach adhesive for white LED emitters: light output enhancement without chip-level reflectors
This paper has been summarised at https://apostilb.github.io/2016/01/30/led-reflectors/
Optical role of die attach adhesive forwhite LED emitters: light outputenhancement without chip-level reflectors
This paper has been summarised at https://apostilb.github.io/2016/01/30/led-reflectors/
Red shift, blue whale
Annotations to paper available at https://via.hypothes.is/journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0107740
global evaluation
“Global evaluations might color presumptions about specific traits or influence interpretation of the meaning or affective value of ambiguous trait information. Thus, if we like a person, we often assume that those attributes of the person about which we know little are also favourable.” (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977, p.250)
circumpolar
"A circumpolar distribution is any range of a taxon that occurs over a wide range of longitudes but only at high latitudes; such a range therefore extends all the way around either the North Pole or the South Pole." –– Circumpolar distribution on Wikipedia
austral summer
i.e. summer in the souther hemisphere
parsimonious
conservative, in this case
increasing population density
Increasing densities may be due to populations becoming more concentrated due to whaling (limited area), although "the Californian Blue Whale population (historically a relatively small proportion of the global total) has rebounded to an estimated 97% of its pre-hunting population."
repeated, stereotyped, low-frequency calls
Hindi
Typo. Should say "Hindu".
like Darwin
Relevant: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-darwin-didnt-know-45637001/?all
Nature had initiated an 18-point checklist for authors
the per-dollar return on investment can far exceed the costs
A source for this claim would be appreciated, because it's a bold and potentially powerful one.
Amgen Inc. and Bayer AG reports
fraudulent research by D. Stapel