The author has accurately summed up what I despise about modern P.C. (I guess youth?) culture and my main source of aggravation when trying to have a conversation about basically anything these days.
"A matter of how they were raised — everybody’s special and everybody’s point of view is valid and everybody’s feelings should be taken care of"
"Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake"
"bland, inoffensive, smile-and-a-shoeshine personality — the stay-positive, other-directed, I’ll-be-whoever-you-want-me-to-be personality — that everybody has today"
"this is why, unlike those of previous youth cultures, the hipster ethos contains no element of rebellion, rejection or dissent"
Why would you still use FB today? There are better photo sharing apps, there are better messenging apps, there are better broadcasting apps. The fact that FB monolithically encloses these is only relevant on a desktop browser.
FBs biggest strength is it's market share, the fact that you can be reasonably assured that you _can_ look up that girl from that party on it.
But that strength is waning, especially in the sub 20s who are strangely rediscovering what sharing on the internet used to be. We have yikyak instead of IRC for community based anon-chat. We have whatsapp and wechat instead of AIM for non-anon chat. We have tumblr instead of geocities for free expression front walls.
Kind of funny how far people think we've come and how innovative these new apps are. It's all just a rehash wrapped up in pretty colors with trendy logos.
It was cool for about 5 years, then people started realizing that maybe it wasn't a good idea to have your smoking cyph posting pictured of bongs on your biometric profile that you got pressured into sharing with the boss and mom. No clue what happened to that early 90s generation. The late 90s are way more savvy.
What an annoying article. I don't really see the point of it besides it being half humblebrag half swan song. All the actual information has been covered to death.
I do like the paroxysms of noble largesse regarding his wife though. Strangely cuckoldish.
That is true, but ref reports can definitely be nightmares, especially in niche areas where only 3-4 groups qualify to ref something. And some journals can be particularly bad about the feedback, especially some of the lower tier journals, but I guess that's why some people go to the low impact journals...
I would also guess that most social media like comments would be "have you seen my paper vaguely related the topic", which is not ultra-useful.
But if you could somehow emulate the conference feel, where people are constantly walking up to you and saying "oh this is neat, I think Prof. X is working on something similar, you should find him," that would be optimal.
I think it's fairly easy to give honest feedback about a paper you dislike without it being politically disastrous, just something along the lines of: "Is there a reason why you used method a instead of method b?"
It hasn't been long enough to see how these specific groups would act with anonymity, and certainly some groups are more resistant to trolling than others, but I think in general anonymity will tend toward the nasty part of the spectrum.
Even in public, recorded lectures, I've seen full professors just go to town on the speaker trashing their work, especially if the work is controversial in any way. It's nice to be able to see who's acting that way.
A friend of mine had a paper response written to his first ever paper that point-by-point tried to discredit his whole point. Then his professor had to step in and write a point by point rebuttal, because someone with just one paper has no clout to deal with that really. It's nice to see that happen in public because now the guy just looks like an ass for jumping on first year PhD students.
Interesting that one of the opening premises of this piece is: "Most people, including many scientists, believe that emotions are distinct, locatable entities inside us — but they’re not. Searching for emotions in this form is as misguided as looking for cerebral clarinets and oboes."
from the second article: "Each emotion activates a distinct set of body parts, he thinks, and the mind's recognition of those patterns helps us consciously identify that emotion."
OP does mention this, but the thesis is that emotions and responses are not universal, which is contra to the thesis of the second.
I'm not sure how it is in other fields, but in Astronomy we have a monolithic database of publications (called ADS) where you can search by author or title or date or keywords etc. And there are sort options for views, downloads, citations, etc (all with time data, so you can see trending behaviors). IMO that serves the same function as "Like" but better.
This is something that I had been thinking would greatly benefit the arXiv for a long time.
Presently, when you do a scientific work, the article goes to a referee who then sends you back their comments which you account for before resubmitting. Sometimes you get an excellent referee who really knows his stuff and gives reasonable comments for improvements. Sometimes you get a guy who really just can't be bothered who gives minimal comments leading you to wonder if they've even read it. Sometimes you get an opposing group, which frequently leads to untenable comments and prompts submission to a different journal.
This is the only feedback you will ever get outside of your coauthors except the citation count. In my opinion it would be amazing to have some big named authors who have read your paper drop off advice, what they liked what they didn't like, etc. At most universities in most groups you do "journal club" once a week where you discuss others' papers and produce this exact feedback, but there's no forum to post it in, so it just stays in the journal club.
However, just as abuse on arXiv led to the transformation to an invitation only site (I forget if you need an invite or just a university sponsored email; see also vixra.com), the community on a site like this _should require your real identity_.
It could be devastating to a young researcher to have their work publicly shamed by an anonymous commenter who has it out for their research group. But if the comments are linked to real identities, I think the community will police itself... Although there are frequently unofficial "response to... " articles on the arXiv, they are publicly attached to other research groups, and you will sometimes see "response to response to ..." letters.
It's interesting to see these sort of 2010 things popping up amongst our 1990s bastion websites like arxiv and ADS and such (see researchgate, the facebook of scientists). But frequently they kind of seem to fall victim to the same downfalls of their non-scientific counterparts ("cite" is the equivalent of "like" on researchgate to improve your "profile impact" metric so you frequently get people acting needy about "citation requests" even though we have our own metrics like Hirsch Indeces to measure scientific productiveness in an objective way).
TLDR;
I worry that a comment based website could host troll-like behavior which could be especially harmful when the whole premise is people's professional work. This is one of the few places on the internet where I think real names must be required and institutional affiliation should be provided (as is the case with arXiv). As it is I signed up with a BS name and email in 5 seconds and can immediately start trashing this paper on quantum physics that I know nothing about.
... and the author has failed to adequately communicate that person's story.
I didn't say a thing about the subject of the piece. Is it poor taste to criticize everything associated remotely with something tragic? What about poorly done WWII documentaries? Can I criticize them?
Just saying Nicholas Sparks probably shouldn't be writing news articles.
Author lays it on a little fucking thick don't they?
Couldn't wade through the tidal wave of forced narrative. Who starts a story with a 3 minute hero shot? Just poor.
"she never lost the awareness that she had honed over a lifetime—her daunting gift for seeing people and situations plain—nor the voice that always said the right thing, the true thing, the honest thing, the thing that cut to the bone."
"she spoke as if from the deepest well of exhaustion "
"She was always so dignified in her bearing, so erect in her carriage, so put together in every way"
It's like introducing someone to the Lord of the Rings with Boromir's death scene and expecting them to get all teared up.
edit: go ahead and take a look at the author's other pieces. He seems to specialize in Mad Men recaps, lists like "8 ways the world has changed" and "7 things Snowden learned," Obama bashing and celebrity gossip.
First, some telescopes do do portions or all of their observations in queue or staff mode, where you just give them the required objects and weather conditions. Just not all of them. I think most 8m class ones will have a mixture-- if your proposal wins just 1 night, then maybe it goes to staff, but if you got 10 nights you get to do it yourself.
There are a few reasons. First, lots of astronomers do not trust anyone but themselves to deal with the data (and this is a reasonable distrust as every single telescope has a unique 'feel' and quirks)-- so they want to be there to do reshoots if necessary.
Another is that it's not entirely schedulable, like, if you queued up the whole year's worth of observations (this is what you do, twice per year you can apply for time, some telescopes once per year), and then everyone's sent you their absolute best case requirements and you end up not being able to fulfill them on time (because maybe there's a big volcano in Iceland that changes the atmospheric transparency for 4 months), then its inconvenient and the astronomers feel gypped that they won the time but didn't get the observations.
Astronomers prefer being told: okay, you get 8 dark nights, but if there's a storm, your SOL. But this is ok because you frequently have all your buddies on Skype at the dome, so when you say "shit well the seeing is too bad to get these spectra" your buddy says "well I have a bright night project we can probably do through the clouds." This is how a lot of observations and projects that can't win time on their own get their data.
A staffer will know how to take your observation requirements, wait until the conditions are right and get exposures of x object at y wavelength for z time.
An astronomer will be able to, on the fly say: well our original plan isn't going to work, but I know that at this time in winter we can see Draco from this latitude and my friend was doing a project in Draco that isn't too hard so I'll just snap that while I'm here.
That and most people like going to observatories, best business trip ever.
Hmmm, great article that summarizes some of the more advanced explanations for the Fermi paradox.
Some say that the Sun is young and so if there's other intelligent life, some would naturally have a 7 or 8 gyr lead on us. But the contra is that the young sun evolved just when the metallicity of the gas was high enough to actually form rocky planets and the solar system.
The article notes that the universal star formation rate has been decreasing for a while, since about redshift 2. So everything that's going to get a start has already gotten it. The vast majority of possible planet host environments are hostile because of SNe, AGN feedback, stellar winds etc. etc. etc. in the article.
Short of the long, sure we could say that we are approximately at the time when one would expect to see the emergence of advanced life give or take a couple billion years.
HOWEVER, this article neglects the fact that there are still billions of stars similar in aspect to the sun, that have cosmically long lifetimes, high metallicities and relatively quiescent environments.
From Kepler we know that planet formation is not the exception, it is the norm; at this juncture, it is impossible for us to say if rocky planet formation is an exception or a norm. You have to understand that the Kepler mission was not designed to figure that out, it was designed just to figure out if planets were common. The next major ESA planet mission, PLATO (and I think NASA may have a similar project in the works), will answer that question, and until that time, it's entirely plausible that the galaxy is filled with goldilocks planets.
(For reference, the Kepler spacecraft's sensitivity to earthlike planets in the habitable zone is minimal-- it's a function of size of the planet vs distance from the star, every time the planet goes in front of the star (function of distance) a small signal (function of size) is added to a time series that can be coadded over and over to remove noise (so maybe it takes 7 or 8 orbits to verify a planet). This is why Kepler mostly finds molten rock planets and gas giants. The distribution of planets we know about today _is a function of the instrument, not the actual planet distribution_.
The more interesting projects are the ones attempting to take planetary spectra. A spectra of a planet's atmosphere will tell you the chemical components of that atmosphere and is performed by taking a spectra of the star and then subtracting the spectra of the planet in front of the star (the difference between the two being the planet. There are certain chemicals in atmospheres, called biomarkers, that are indicative of life (ozone, for example, only exists in meaningful quantities because of photosynthetic life). This is an incredibly difficult and ambitious project: you need high res spectra at large signal to noise to even see these biomarkers which means probably multiple nights of 8-10 hour observations on modern 8m class telescopes, in the 30m telescope era, maybe it's more plausible; you need the right type of rocky planet, of which we know few; you need that planet to be in the exact right spot in its orbit in front of the star; and of course god needs to make it not rain after your 20 hour flight to Hawaii.
For all we know, not only are planets the norm, not only are rocky planets the norm, but life is also the norm.
Thus, not seeing advanced life is a function of _our instruments_ not indicative of the fact that advanced life is somehow new, or rare. Even with all the notes in the article, there could be advanced life with several billion years head start on us.
A thought I haven't devoted much time to is that perhaps interstellar travel is just downright impossible on a meaningful scale at a reasonable speed.
... Unless of course life arose from a panspermia situation, and we are the actual results of the most sophisticated form of interstellar travel in the universe. Perhaps we are a colony of some monolithic species, packing their genetic blocks into chunks of ice and tossing them willy-nilly about the galaxy...
Yes, I despise when someone begs me to force their work into my friends faces. If I like it enough I am perfectly capable of copy-pasting the link myself.
I'm fine with the illustrations, the layout is just annoying and counterintuitive. Why would you not just have a long-ass column with some images in it like basically every other article? That's what's awesome about webpages, infinite scroll, maybe some hyperlinked table of contents in a frame to the left, you know 1990s HTML stuff.
According to my internet experience:
1) scroll down - failure, maybe my scroll isn't strong enough to get past some weird header frame thing
2) space bar - failure, maybe it's a side to side thing
3) scroll right - failure
4) scroll left - go back a page, reload
5) look at bottom of page for navigation down - failure, only outside links
6) look to right - failure, no generic slideshow next button
7) scan top of page - immediately censor out what I assume is the menagerie of facespace, tweeter, clinked-in, youporn share links
The initial "READ ARTICLE" button is a tiny link, next to links you generally assume to be worthless, in the wrong part of the page. Yeah, I consider that a logic puzzle, not daunting, but yes.
And yes, any link to "please share me on the facespace and validate me with some twits" comes off as obnoxious begging.
Well fuck you too.