realradicalwash

> As far as I am concerned main stream journalism has sold its sold and it cannot die fast enough.

To be replaced by what though? How will one get the right input that is needed to create and inform one's opinion?

this constant urge to check your phone, I don't think it's much different from an OCD. OCDs constantly interrupt the normal flow of one's thought processes with obsessive, intrusive interjections ("you are dirty", "did I do x/y?", "maybe you are gay", etc).

that's what apps have instilled into our minds: a constant urge that interrupts our thought processes, so that we check fb, WA, gmail, etc.

I switched all notifications off and I still have this, less than previously, but still. I am thinking of going back to a brick phone because of that.

if transactions were done in btc, each transaction would amass the typical fees - which are pretty high at the moment.

converting btc to fiat to pay your visa card bill at the end of the month would be one transaction per month.

that's a huge difference.

Bitcoin was created with the use case currency in mind and it was used like that by the earlier adopters. I think this is what OP was pointing at with "Many have forgotten why we used cryptocurrencies in the first place" and certainly with the qualifier "many", I think OP is correct: That's how we initially used Bitcoin and other cryptos.

_Now_ many (most?) people use bitcoin as a store of value. But I think this is more out of necessity: Bitcoin as a currency is semi-dysfunctional.

> the westerners that seem to be almost rooting for their own society to collapse just to have another reason to use Bitcoin

I have not met a single person in my life with that motivation. However, I have met people who want to see the current system collapse, but mainly because it's not working for them.

Nice to see some active learning around here. To add a data point from a less successful story:

In one of our research projects, we used AL to improve part-of-speech prediction, inspired by work by Rehbein and Ruppenhofer, e.g. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P17-1107/

Our data base was a corpus of Scientific English from 17th-now and for our data and situation, we found that choosing the right tool/model and having the right training data were the most important things. Once that was in place, active learning did not, unfortunately, add that much. For different tools/settings, we got about +/-0.2% in accuracy for checking 200k tokens and only correcting 400 of them.

Maybe one problem was that AL was only triggered when a majority vote was inconclusive. Also, we used it on top of individualised, gs training data. I guess things can look different if you don't have a gs to start with. And if you have better computational resources: Our oracles spent quite some time waiting, which is why we even reorganised the original design to then process batches of corrections.

As so often, those null results were hard to publish :|

Either way, I thought I'd share our experiences. Your work sounds really cool, best of luck!

We are dealing with 5+ papers that are fraudulent and another 5+ newer papers that are most likely fraudulent, too. That is, there have been 20, 25+ reviewers looking at those papers. Their job was to carefully read them and double check the numbers. All of them gave those papers a pass. I am at a loss here.

The authors' behaviour is outrageous, but this story is also about a broken reviewing process, partly due to wrong incentives.

> driving a huge battery around will burn more fuel

and driving around two engines. also, equally important, having to produce two engines gives hybrids an extra co2 footprint even before their first km. this way, the total co2 footprint over the entire life cycle of a hybrid car can be just the same as that of the same car with a combustion engine.

The academic 'controversy' aside -which I think is BS, at least as it is presented in the article-, two things truly amaze me:

1) How beautiful of a city Wuppertal was in 1902. I have been to Wuppertal about 5 years ago, and it's ... well, not beautiful. Great people, though! 2) The appetite for engineering, for creating things, and the audacity of the late 19th century, early 20th century. A freaking flying train for a city of less than half a million of people. Contrast this to the changes over the past two decades in my hometown, which is about the same size as Wuppertal. The changes were marginal; a cancelled train route is what pops to mind.

being in academia myself, this hits home so hard :/ the field picks some rockstars, which imv is to a good extent based on charisma, and then goes with that.

one of 'our' rockstars has pushed a certain hypothesis for more than 10 years. it is plausible on a conceptual level, but I have yet to see systematic, large-scale evidence for it. it would not be entirely trivial, but also not that hard to test.

here is what happened: that person has fallen from grace due to some troublesome accusations. those accusations did not stick up in court btw. the case was made public 2017, the court case was closed this year. still that person's reputation is tarnished, so is their rockstar aura.

here comes the kicker: just this year, the first study comes out, presenting results that that hypothesis does not hold up, certainly in some contexts. i know for a fact that at least one more team has had similar results a few years ago - but when they first presented the results informally, they felt pressured to shelf the project.

Great article. A snippet from the conclusion that I found particularly interesting: "History of science all too often highlights "superstar" scientists who have illustrious careers, overcoming great obstacles and resistance to new ideas, leading to a public vindication, sometimes followed by a Nobel Prize. Miescher’s story is different. There was no immediate recognition nor ultimate vindication in his case, yet his discovery proved fundamental for the whole of modern biology. Excavating stories such as his from the past, and incorporating them into the history of genetics, helps us portray the process of science more realistically."

Aren't other countries that have already ratified UP in violation of those agreements, too? I.e., how is this about Germany in particular and not about the European patent system itself?

I am hesitant to take the lack of the ability to embed as a fact. My impression is that Everett had a theory in mind when he surveyed Piraha and that he sought to confirm his theory. That is, I am worried that this account is subverted by "theory selects data". So I think what we need is a lot more data, ideally collected by someone who the field views as (relatively) neutral.

> how can you call it social "science" if you can't reproduce it?

NB: this is not specific to the social sciences. psychology, cognitive sciences, medicine(!), and other fields have a 'replication crisis' also. there are some really good papers on this. i am not aware of systematic queries into CS/ML/DL papers, but from my own experience: when you pick up a paper that claims 9x% accuracy, the chance that you are able to replicate that number is in line with replication % in other fields.

think about steam whatever you want, but they've done some real fantastic work there with their linux support. the other day i installed forged alliance -from 2007, only supports win natively- on my linux machine and it was easy as pie: after a few mins of downloading and installing, the game was up and running.

Meanwhile, the academic job market, certainly in my area, ie linguistics/computational linguistics, has collapsed, too. A colleague did a similar and equally nice analysis here: https://twitter.com/ruipchaves/status/1279075251025043457

It's tough atm.

indeed, an increase would be good. however, it is worth noting that China and the US are in different situations. the US spends about 2.7%-2.8% of its GDP on R&D and China is catching up to that, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_research_...

this is nice, and a clear step forward. but more is needed to fix a semi-broken system. because publication bias is one thing, but there is also something like a _reception bias_.

there are already null result journals and workshops. it is increasingly possible to publish negative results / unsurprising results.

still, imv those results are less likely get cited. because negative results are often messy that can be hard to understand. and people don't want to pick up a paper and then not understand. so it's no surprise that positive results, certainly the way they are framed, often neatly come together. the 'stories' they tell you are often easy to grasp mono-causal stories. it's almost like you read them and you feel good about yourself, because you feel like you suddenly understand a difficult problem.

and then, which paper will you cite in your own work? the paper you understood, that has that catchy title? or the one that you struggled through, the one that painted a picture of a far more complex, messy reality?

this kind of reception bias will be very hard to fix. it takes more critical editors, reviewers, and readers to fix this.

Just to be sure that the passage is not misinterpreted (not saying you do, OP): This was not said to excuse the Germans from the responsibility of facing their history.

I can personally be not guilty and yet, by being part of a society that builds on a troubled past, bear the responsibilities that come with that past (responsibility to do better, reparations, making amends, and alike).

And in this spirit, Weizaecker continued: "No discerning person can expect them to wear a penitential robe simply because they are Germans. But their forefathers have left them a grave legacy. All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it. The young and old generations must and can help each other to understand why it is vital to keep alive the memories."

This point can imv be applied to many historical failings and their long lasting legacies.

you can tweak the settings to higher maintenance and higher interest rates. but yes, even then, it becomes too easy after a while. would be nice if the settings allowed it to make it even harder (extra high maintenance costs, 6% interest rates, etc)

civ 5 can be different with the right settings: when I played on deity, half of the time it has been a struggle until a few rounds before victory (conquest).

Isn't this the perfect application for ASR technology? Instead of fiddling around with buttons, or worse, a touchscreen, you could just say "Honda: heat up", "Honda: heat two down", "Honda: aircon off". I would love that in my car.

i've been using DDG for a few years now. i generally like it a lot. however, i have decided to stop using them for image search. their filters are just not good enough.

two examples: I've searched for some kind of speedo (jammers?) and got to see a really problematic image I thought of reporting to the police. and just recently, i image searched 'martin from the simpsons', because I came across his name and forgot which character that was. near the top of the results were some really wtf images (now removed). I don't want to see that stuff - so if anyone at DDG sees this: please up your image filters.

not sure this is all due to self-agency. China has also threatened them over Huawei. the UK is really between a rock and a hard place

the "best" in 'best places to work' is pretty vague. it's based on employee reviews and a lot goes in there. what is best for those who have left reviews? social atmosphere, pay, career path, etc.? it most likely differs from company to company, sector to sector. with this in mind, comparing In'n'Out to fb is comparing apples to oranges. however, the fact that fb and google have experienced such a noticeable drop in favourability over time is news.

here is a breakdown of the country of origin under the waterways theory: https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/WO-AV462_OCEANS_9...

I am not sure the new research is letting consumers completely off the hook. their garbage could well show up in the big whirlpools in a few years. but the new data is suggesting that there is another source of how the plastics entered the ocean and it's probably ships, yes.

the conservatives seem to be way ahead of the others when it comes to modern technology/media. we've seen physicists being hired to plan where to knock on doors [0], very targeted social media ads based on proper data analysis, and now apparently SEO hacking.

not sure that these are good developments; but they seem irreversible and labour/the libdems want to catch up asap if they want to stay relevant.

[0] as mentioned by Cummings here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDbRxH9Kiy4

so a categorical variable got mixed up as a numerical one and produced misleading results.

to the credit of the authors, they released their data sets. -- however, i suspect that proper data exploration and visualisation would have prevented all this. visual inspection would have most likely revealed that there is no visible effect, or even an effect in the opposite direction, and once you see this, all alarm bells should go off if your model predicts otherwise. so i suspect that the authors skipped some basic steps and got carried away by results that promised a nice headline.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei

I see lots of accusations, but very little evidence

my criticism is not aimed at her at all - but at the media.

and yes, she emphasised this elsewhere, too, which imv shows what a great and humble person she is.

this is hard to say, tbh.

first: by alluding to Ive, you insert a gender component. i don't want to make this about gender - which is what happened itt. as mentioned, i think the difference in focus is because of geo-cultural reasons. another piece of evidence for this hypothesis comes from the following: over here, the EU also gets a lot of praise for providing the main chunk of the funding for the project. a quick check tells me that this detail is often omitted in US articles about the project. also, a note on myself: i work in a field where the majority of people are female. so is my boss. her work is great and i love working here. at the same time, i am aware that the bar to get here was higher for my female colleagues than it is for men. also, i see the glass ceiling having an effect on the careers of my sisters and my female friends. and i am painfully aware of the struggles that my mum and other women of her generation had/have to go through. so i consider myself a feminist, in the sense that i believe that we should have full equality and that we do not have it yet.

second: think iphone, i think jobs. so what "Jony Ive: The Man Behind The iPhone" would imply to me is that Ive is _the one person_ that had the biggest impact on the development of the iphone. i don't know enough about Ive to evaluate this. but here's the thing: if it turned out that another person contributed as much if not more than Ive, then i'd say: hey, it's nice that the article introduces Ive and gives him some credit, but let's not exaggerate and let's not forget about the other people who have also greatly contributed to the project.

edit: to clarify: i find it hard to say, because it's somewhat hypothetical. i truly hope for myself that i would react the same way / that gender has no impact on my thought process.