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Comment Re:Quite a bit of culture in Japan is ossified (Score 1, Insightful) 85

For those that have attended a Christian wedding ceremony there's often a biblical passage read about the need for the man and woman to break ties with their parents and create a new family.

- But why should I give a crap what it says in your cult's shitty book full of rape, murder, incest, and other bullshit?

Comment Re: Peer review doesn't mean much (Score 1) 19

That is a really bad analogy. Reviewers are not complaining about the author, they are pointing out things that need to be corrected in a piece of writing. It is not supposed to be taken personally, as an attack, but impersonally, as a part of a collaborative effort to put forth the best possible description of the project and its implications.

Pointing out someone did not format a table perfectly, or left out a footnote should not embarrass anyone, reviewer or author. Nor should highlighting a missing citation, that a sentence of paragraph is confusing, a word is misspelled, or the word count for an abstract exceeds the journals official limit. Which is to say the vast majority of edits are innocuous.

Some may be more substantive. I frequently have to point out problems with the statistics in papers I review. Things that require they redo them, and then possibly having to rewrite a portion of the results and discussion sections to reflect the corrections. Still, that kind of comment shows someone other than the author thought long and hard about how to ensure the interpretation is as accurate as possible. It itâ(TM)s a good thing.

In my experience, if the comments are extensive enough that the authors should feel embarrassed for their work, (e.g. design cannot actually address the question that it was intended to answer) the paper is probably going to be rejected by the journal anyway. In which case the comments will not be made public, as this policy (as far as I can tell) will only apply to papers that are ultimately accepted for publication. And if a paper does take a ton of effort to reach a publishable state, then that is the consequence of not doing a better job before submission.

my first publication took 3 or 4 rounds of edits, and that was not fun. If the reviewer comments had been public I would not be embarrassed, I was an MS student. I had little idea what I was doing, and it showed in my work. That is the price of doing something difficult for the first time.

Comment Re:Peer review doesn't mean much (Score 4, Interesting) 19

I review for a couple of different journals in my field (Not Nature, which outside of my field).

I have been offered a check box for over 2 years about my willingness to have my comments follow the paper should the authors decide to switch to a different journal at the publisher with different policies around publishing reviewer comments (our journals don't publish comments currently), and I have always said "Yes".

First off, even if my comments go with a paper, my name does not. So it's not like I need to worry about blow back from authors or their corporate sponsors.

Second off, if I've done my job right, there should not be anything in there I would be embarrassed to have linked back to me, even if my name were some how put to my comments. Anyone treating anonymous manuscript comments like 4chan should not be reviewing manuscripts in the first place.

I honestly don't see any reason for the conflict of interest you propose should Nature supply the reviewers. It is not like Nature has on-staff reviewers. They, like every other journal of which I am aware (and is not a pay to play journal), uses volunteer reviewers from amongst their subscriber base, which means they are ALREADY supplying the reviewers.

The objective for things like this, IMO, is to improve the transparency of the peer review process. If I find issues with a published paper, and see that the 2 reviewers did only a half assed "all looks good to me" type of review, then I know why the final product isn't great. However, if I find an issue, and can see that the reviewers worked with the authors to address the topic, I have more confidence in the quality of the paper.

Comment Re:Penny-wise (Score 1) 72

It isn't really about the money, it is about the principle. "We pay nothing, ever"

Also, I recall working for a similarly sized company that almost ended up in court over tonnage fees (basically taxes on feed ingredients) in half a dozen different US states. There had been a couple of reorganizations and responsibilities for receiving the invoices and paying the fees bounced around to a couple of different people. The person they ended with saw dealing with those products as "not my job" becuase her job title had the name of a different business unit (Pharma) from the business unit incurring the fees (Animal nutrition).

fast forward 2+ years, and I'm looking into bringing some new products into those states, and I get told by the state level folks about these threatening letters they had sent to our offices. I asked who they went to, and when I went and talked to the recipient, she handed me a folder with threatening letters from half a dozen states, with increasingly emphatic language and threats. I asked why she hand't done anything with them, or about them, and she said something to the effect of "not my job". I pointed out that the threats would affect her business because her business unit would be caught up in the seizures of inventory, and she just blinked at me. "but that's your business unit" she said. To which I responded "the name on the building is the one that matters to the lawyers. They will sue the entire company, not just one business unit, and since you are the recipient for these, your job will the the first to go for incompetence". She just shook her head, and told me to deal with it if I felt it was important (which a member of my team did from that point forward).

Never underestimate the incompetence or short-sightedness of a moron manning a desk.

Comment Re:They don't really cater for the most obvious de (Score -1, Flamebait) 141

Simple fact: Meta is an antisemitic Nazi trash company. They banned many people for posting links to the HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY TRUST and have refused to reverse that blindingly antisemitic decision.

Nobody in their right mind would EVER want Zuck's Nazi Shitbag Company to have the kind of access to their life that "AI Glasses" feeding their entire life into a server would provide.

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