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Comment Re:So, if you don't like a certain article (Score 1) 31

Add a statement "Here is your Wikipedia article on..." and poof, it will disappear!

If the people pushing the "delete" button are doing their jobs right, they will be checking the edit history to make sure it really is "AI slop" and not a human-created page edited later to make it look like "AI slop."

Comment Re:We MUST name and shame publicly! (Score 5, Informative) 15

a retracted paper is an admission that they lied

This is frequently the case, but not always.

Sometimes an author will retract his own work if he later realizes it was based on faulty data or a faulty process.

Sometimes a publisher will tighten its standards and retract something that was considered acceptable under an earlier, more lenient standard.

Comment Re:Does he have a problem? (Score 1) 81

I wouldn't want a medical doctor that learned their trade on the job

If he'd been doing his work at a better-than-medical-school-graduate-level for long enough to have an established track record, I wouldn't automatically turn him down. That said, I don't think my government allows you to call yourself "doctor" (in the medical sense) without an M.D. or government-recognized equivalent (D.O., etc.).

By the way, most medical doctors in my country go through a long residency, which amounts to on-the-job-training mixed with classroom and practical education. If they learn new skills that didn't exist at the time they were in medical school, they probably learned them "on the job," at a training seminar of some sort or other, or possibly (gasp!) from reading it in a journal or other publication ("self-taught!").

Comment Re:Completely false (Score 2) 81

We care A LOT about prestigious degrees where I work. If you have one, it lets us know not to hire you because you're a stuck up, entitled rich kid who will cause problems.

If you said "... because you're more likely to be a stuck up ..." then I would believe you.

If every one of your interviewees has been a stuck up, entitled rich kid, that leads me to believe you haven't interviewed enough people to get a truly representative sample.

On the other hand, the number of people who can graduate with a prestigious degree* without some amount of skills, knowledge, and effort is much lower than the number for Podunk Community College.

* after excluding elite athletes and other "special students" who are "exempt" from the normal you-don't-put-in-the-work-you-flunk-out process that applies to everyone else

Submission + - White House Orders NASA to Destroy Important Satellite (futurism.com)

ArchieBunker writes: The White House has instructed NASA employees to terminate two major, climate change-focused satellite missions.

As NPR reports, Trump officials reached out to the space agency to draw up plans for terminating the two missions, called the Orbiting Carbon Observatories. They've been collecting widely-used data, providing both oil and gas companies and farmers with detailed information about the distribution of carbon dioxide and how it can affect crop health.

One is attached to the International Space Station, and the other is collecting data as a stand-alone satellite. The latter would meet its permanent demise after burning up in the atmosphere if the mission were to be terminated.

We can only speculate as to why the Trump administration wants to end the missions. But considering president Donald Trump's staunch climate change denial and his administration's efforts to deal the agency's science directorate a potentially existential blow, it's not difficult to speculate.

Worse yet, the two observatories had been expected to function for many more years, scientists working on them told NPR. A 2023 review by NASA concluded that the data they'd been providing had been "of exceptionally high quality."

The observatories provide detailed carbon dioxide measurements across various locations, allowing scientists to get a detailed glimpse of how human activity is affecting greenhouse gas emissions.

Former NASA employee David Crisp, who worked on the Orbiting Carbon Observatories' instruments, told NPR that current staffers reached out to him.

"They were asking me very sharp questions," he said. "The only thing that would have motivated those questions was [that] somebody told them to come up with a termination plan."

Crisp said it "makes no economic sense to terminate NASA missions that are returning incredibly valuable data," pointing out it costs only $15 million per year to maintain both observatories, a tiny fraction of the agency's $25.4 billion budget.

Other scientists who've used data from the missions have also been asked questions related to terminating the missions.

The two observatories are only two of dozens of space missions facing existential threats in the form of the Trump administration's proposed 2026 fiscal year budget. Countless scientists have been outraged by the proposal, arguing it could precipitate an end to the United States' leadership in space.

Lawmakers have since drawn up a counteroffer that would keep NASA's budget roughly in line with this year's.

"We rejected cuts that would have devastated NASA science by 47 percent and would have terminated 55 operating and planned missions," said senator and top appropriator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) in a July statement, as quoted by Bloomberg.

Simply terminating Earth-monitoring missions to pursue an anti-science agenda could be a massive self-own, lawmakers say — and potentially breaking laws as well by overriding existing, allocated budgets.

"Eliminating funds or scaling down the operations of Earth-observing satellites would be catastrophic and would severely impair our ability to forecast, manage, and respond to severe weather and climate disasters," House representative and Committee on Science, Space and Technology ranking member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) told NPR.

"The Trump administration is forcing the proposed cuts in its FY26 budget request on already appropriated FY25 funds," she added. "This is illegal."

Comment Re:Yet they have 6 million slop articles (Score 1) 31

Wikipedia ruined my life

If you are a Wikipedia-addict-in-recovery I can understand you saying that, but other than that, I don't see how it could ruin your life all by itself. If you are a Wikipedia-addict, black-holing from your network might be a good 1st, er, post-first-step (the "first step" is admitting you are powerless over Wikipedia...).

If you mean Wikipedia's content about you ruined your life:

If you are a living person, Wikipedia's policies, editors, and overlords generally do a good job of keeping out unverifiable gossip that might ruin your life.

Someone infamous might say "Wikipedia ruined my life" but their life was already ruined without Wikipedia.

Comment Re:kinda problematic (Score 1) 33

people assume you're recording, so they are suspicious or tell you they cannot consent so turn it off.

Tell them you are hard of hearing. Most people will understand.

If you can, use a transcription app that explicitly does not save audio or text beyond the current session's look-back buffer.

In the workplace, you may have legal protections if your hearing is so bad that you need this as a medical accommodation. Outside of work though, you may just have to rely on charm and sympathy to get people to accept it.

Comment Yes and no (Score 1) 1

Read the Wikipedia pages for Microsoft Windows and its various versions for details.

Basically, Windows 11 is the "next version" of Windows 10 which is the "next version" of Windows 8.1, of 8, of 7, of XP, and of 2000, of NT 4, and of lower-numbered versions of NT. I've heard rumors, probably true, that at least some source code from the earliest versions of Windows NT is (with modifications) in Windows 11. That said, don't try to take any compiled applications from early-days Windows NT and run them on Windows 11. You CAN run some Windows 2000-era applications on Windows 11 though.

If you want to think of the newer versions as all just "upgrade versions" of the older versions, you can.

But if you asked Microsoft, they would say they are different operating systems.

Comment The cruel irony Re:The ancient rule (Score 1) 29

"If it sounds too good to be true, it isn't."

The cruel irony is the unspoken part at the end: "Except the rare times that it is, which lets people get their hopes up."

"I have a $10,000 winning lottery ticket and I want to give it to your charity" sounds too good to be true, but it probably happens a few times a decade. Better make that a few times a century.

But if someone comes to me with that speech, I'll be like "thank you, that's very generous of you" until he asks for anything of significant value or asks me to pick up the winnings in Nigeria. Then it's "this smells dodgy, buh-bye."

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