rauhallinen

Some rants from the foxhole.

American Chemical Society is the one of the main publishers in molecular sciences. Researchers at Finnish universities haven't been able to access articles published after 2023 after failed negotiations [0], greatly hindering one's - and collectively the nation's - ability to progress in these fields. It's quite frustrating, shocking, and eye-opening to have this rug pulled beneath you.

Finland is not a poor country, and the situation is surely worse elsewhere. Nonetheless, our economy and the academic funding situation is quite crappy and getting crappier. In 2022, Finnish university library consortium spent ~25M€ for subscriptions [3]. Last year, the negotiated sum for seven main publishers was ~16M€, inc the failed ACS deal. One can easily imagine better ways to use the dozens of millions.

Science is expensive and inequalities between countries/uni's/wherever are a n unfortunate fact of the world. Not every player can pay millions to get the 10M€ Cryo-EM machine, and thus can't compete in advancing knowledge frontier in this.

To some extent, constraints cultivate creativity. One can still participate through collaboration, theoretical and computational work, creative crafting of experiments with already existing equipment (& with fascinating DIY low-cost open-science hardwarex stuff!)

However, one must know the giants on whose shoulders one stands on, and the game played by the behemoth publishers attacks this fundament. The consequence - inequality in accessing knowledge is deeply disgusting in its artificiality.

Meanwhile, people at eg. MIT are able to get the whole ACS corpus in sweet delicious machine readable XML [3]. In the same time it takes for the "poor" researcher to get one email requested watermarked pdf with detached figures that they excitedly share to their group, a Boston grad student can curl terabytes and science-of-science/NLP/RAG the shit out of it.

Gap exists and grows with the arbitrarily increasing costs. Something needs to change, but for now, I'm cynical. Strong will get stronger and so on.

Thank god for open science movement living on github and *rxivs, and for the risky work taken on by shadow librarians.

[0] https://finelib.fi/sopimus-acsn-kanssa-paattynyt/

[1] https://www.kiwi.fi/display/finelib/Vuosikertomukset

[2] https://finelib.fi/kustannukset-saatava-kuriin-tiedelehtien-...

[3] https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/text-and-data...

Agree with other responses. Maté's book, as his other works, resonates intuively - a humanistic shout in this cold and sick world.

Things are however more complex. He gets a lot of publicity, eg with recent Joe Rogan interview clips on the topic being spammed to me by YouTube's rec engines. Mental health issues are something that many people take intellectually lazy stances, to one direction or another, and this is somewhat worrying.

This book is 20 years old. I'd imagine the scientific & clinical understanding of ADHD has progressed since. Opposing views are of course important for progression, but I'd like to understand his thinking in wider context of psychiatry. Would be interesting to see a dissection of his ADHD points, carried out in a rigorous way.

There's some work on using ML methods to map from the structure of a molecule to an odor. Interesting to see where it goes, current results aren't that mind blowing:

1. B. Sanchez-Lengeling, J. N. Wei, B. K. Lee, R. C. Gerkin, A. Aspuru-Guzik, A. B. Wiltschko, Machine Learning for Scent: Learning Generalizable Perceptual Representations of Small Molecules. arXiv [stat.ML] (2019), (available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1910.10685).

2. J. Kowalewski, B. Huynh, A. Ray, A System-Wide Understanding of the Human Olfactory Percept Chemical Space. Chem. Senses. 46 (2021), doi:10.1093/chemse/bjab007.

3. L. Shang, C. Liu, F. Tang, B. Chen, L. Liu, K. Hayashi, Odorant molecular feature mining by diverse deep neural networks for prediction of odor perception categories. bioRxiv (2022), , doi:10.1101/2022.04.20.488977.

Fascinating indeed - good luck!

Saw some talks years ago by Daniel Nocera, in which they did water splitting and fed hydrogen to engineered bacteria to make more complex products. Cool stuff - I'd imagine the end products, fuels in their case, would still be way too expensive.

There's interesting stuff going on in modifying microbes to make cannabinoids and other natural products. Would be kinda cool to combine these two :)

I had a project where I had to convert absorption spectrum of a liquid sample into a colour. It was one of those "Just do this quick, it doesn't have to be perfect" type of things where I didn't get a chance to really understand it. I was baffled how many standards and technicalities there is behind a seemingly simple thing.

My work is important but not urgently so. I gave them the ultimatum - I have a lot of knowledge hard to gain from other sources.

I'm one of these people. Changed to a 40% contract, work Mon-Tue. I am in a privileged position where I'm able to live with my wage comfortably, albeit frugally. Living in Nordics helps too.

I was expecting that I'd be dwelling deep with all of those side projects that I was craving to do on work days instead of solving semi to not-at-all exciting problems for a company. Found out that those were mostly escapistic fantasies to regain my creative mind under the time and stress pressures.

Now I enjoy living simply. I feel better mentally and physically. Interesting to see where this will go. Maybe I'll eat the hustle fruit some day and start grinding - this idea that dictated my adult life seems very alien for me now.

So no new articles have been uploaded this year.

While I have relatively good access options through my university, roughly half of the publications appearing in my Google Scholar alerts are unaccessible. As they are also in fields were use of preprint services isn't common, it really interferes with me being up to date with ongoing research.

As the use of sci-hub is so common, I wonder about the wider implications of the newest articles being inaccessible. Could bibliometric methods be used to quantify this? Missed citations? Less citations for articles published in more obscure journals?

Interesting that no new solutions have come out yet. I'm seeing people getting back to use #ICanHazPDF - not the best way to conduct research when an article is often just a gateway to more finding more relevant articles to read.

This came out recently, "A low-cost, wearable, do-it-yourself functional near-infrared spectroscopy (DIY-fNIRS) headband"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S246806722...

Looking forward for that mysterious free time to build this & play around with neuro-feedback

During my time as a research assistant / grad student there was a remarkable shift in the atmosphere. It started with massive layoffs of research staff, linked to the more general savings of our government.

More esoteric professors were replaced with more efficient manuscript machines submitting manuscripts to more prestigious journals. Soon after the layoffs, the university's innovation and commercialization services became extremely active. Recurring events at lecture rooms where we were blasted on how our work is IP of the university, how the university takes only 50% cut if something works, how cool is it to be a researcher who commercializes ideas in comparison to being one those dusty farts in the science cave studying one protein or butterfly for their entire life.

Being a believer and practitioner of open source, I once asked how does this all this apply to computational science. Basically all algorithms and tools should be passed through them to see if they have commercial potential - if no, we can go ahead. Found it appalling and interfering with my intellectual freedom, one of the many events that made me pursue life outside the academia.

There's an ongoing trend in miniaturizing optical spectrometers [1]. MEMS-FTIRs should have interesting application in air analysis [2,3].

Real-time gas measurements are quite routine and mandatory in industry [4]. Wider spread of analytical chemistry technology to consumers will lead to a better world - pregnancy tests, insulin meters, breathalyzers are just the beginning :)

1. Z. Yang, T. Albrow-Owen, W. Cai, T. Hasan, Miniaturization of optical spectrometers. Science. 371 (2021), doi:10.1126/science.abe0722.

2. M. Erfan, Y. M. Sabry, M. Sakr, B. Mortada, M. Medhat, D. Khalil, On-Chip Micro–Electro–Mechanical System Fourier Transform Infrared (MEMS FT-IR) Spectrometer-Based Gas Sensing. Appl. Spectrosc. 70, 897–904 (2016).

3. A. Fathy, Y. M. Sabry, S. Nazeer, T. Bourouina, D. A. Khalil, On-chip parallel Fourier transform spectrometer for broadband selective infrared spectral sensing. Microsystems & Nanoengineering. 6, 10 (2020).

4. Eg. https://www.gasmet.com/

Love the idea, hope it gains popularity! Absolutely can't stand quora spam.