Comment Re:Why is 1984 in this poll? (Score 1) 410
I love 1984, but I'm tired of hearing how it's banned. I've never seen it banned.
Well, then you apparently don't have a Kindle.
I love 1984, but I'm tired of hearing how it's banned. I've never seen it banned.
Well, then you apparently don't have a Kindle.
As I am not a user of the PubPeer platform, I cannot judge if comments meant to attack the reputation of an other due to private disputes commonly occur. Furthermore, such attacks with other motive as pure improvement of scientific publication quality are difficult to spot, because this is what anonymous commenting enables to do.
If somebody presents evidence for image manipulations, then why would you care whether this was posted because someone has an axe to grind?
Anonymous review is usual in the peer-review processes of most journals, but these comments are in general non-public or at least reviewed by an editor before publication. Some reviewers choose to do their peer-review work without the cover of anonymity and I encourage this. If you have constructive criticism on the work of an other and can this criticism is well founded, you can very well do it openly.
No, you can't. Most active scientists do not have tenure and therefore openly criticizing the work of a bigwig in the field would be extremely dangerous, even when perfectly justified.
Something like PubPeer is extremely tricky. It's an open door to abuse and for commenter to wash their dirty linen in public.
Can you provide an example of someone using a service like PubPeer to wash dirty linen? I have a hard time to imagine how this could be done, especially if you want others to take your allegations seriously.
I wouldn't be surprised to see countries such as BRIC members, EU members, or other countries start trying to woo the best and brightest for economic gains.
I think this focus on the "best and brightest" is actually a part of the problem. Sure, you'll need certain skills to run a research group, but these skills are found in many people and not just in the top of the batch. Beyond a certain point, the individual abilities of a researcher tend to be only weakly correlated with the actual research outcomes. There are many examples of people doing amazing science even though they are generally not considered to be top-notch scientists, even including Nobel laureates.
Science is an inherently risky business, with most scientists not finding out anything really exciting during their entire career and only very few ones will hit something that turns out to be really big. But you cannot possibly know in advance what this next big thing is going to be and who will find it, otherwise this wouldn't be science at all. In such an environment, the best investment strategy is to allocate your funds evenly across as many scientists as possible (I think it was Taleb who showed that). Of course, you have to make sure that each scientist gets enough money to run his or her group, but this optimal strategy is exactly the opposite of the current trend towards mega-chairs involving multiple labs and dozens of grad students and postdocs.
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't pulse running at the user level only allow ONE user and system-wide utilization is vehemently discouraged by the developers for SECURITY reasons?
No, it's the other way round: Running PulseAudio as a system daemon (as opposed to the default way of per-user sessions) has security implications.
So, please, tell us, how are Android, Windows or BlackBerry phones any better?
Many Android vendors have well-documented procedures how to unlock the bootloader of the device and install a custom ROM, which can be mostly built from source (the remaining proprietary blobs come from non-US companies and/or are unlikely to contain backdoors because of the greatly reduced codebase). None of the other major players allow this.
Where have you ever been re-screened after boarding the first flight.
Just a few examples off the top of my head:
so a lot of people think that there should be no gender seperation in shooting sport competitions, and I tend to agree. but for some reason, the top females can never quite break into the top levels with the top males.
This is simply not true. Margeret Murdock won a silver medal at the 1976 Olympics (she lost the battle for gold under very controversial circumstances) and set four individual world records. In the eighties, most shooting sports became gender-segregated, the only exceptions being skeet and trap, which became gender-segregated right after a woman (Zhang Shan) had won the gold medal in the skeet competition in 1992. There are other examples as well.
So, if today's women are no longer competitive with men, then that's certainly a consequence of gender segregation and not an argument for it.
If newer plants were that much safer, you could buy insurance for them. The fact that you can't makes it very obvious that even these newer plants are inherently unsafe.
Nuclear is the safest we have available.
Oh, then I'm sure you'll find an insurance company that will cover the risk of Fukushima-style accidents. Oh wait, no you don't, because such an insurance would make nuclear energy totally uneconomic.
From what I understand, their goal as a SuperPAC is to pour money into congressional races to help reform candidates win, with the ultimate goal of having them pass campaign finance laws that limit the influence of SuperPACs.
So, the winning move for any candidate is to support reform until elected and then make a reversal and enjoy the windfall from the status quo. How are they going to prevent that?
Isn't it ironic that a consumer graphics card can simulate more qubits than most actual quantum computers have right now?
No. If it were the other way around then quantum computing wouldn't be an open research problem but a multi-billion dollar industry.
Waste not, get your budget cut next year.