strangeloops85

What exactly does 'truly successful' mean here? If Nobel prize is the standard that's ridiculous. As someone who is a fairly successful (by conventional metrics) tenured academic at a top-10 school in the physical sciences, this was really dumb advice but not atypical from previous generations (along with: "make sure you have a wife at home to take care of everything" which, btw, was the more common advice to get, since almost every male academic had a wife and kids)

It is quite possible to get grants, do valuable work, advance your field (and get awards, if that's your jam) and still live a pretty normal life. In my case my spouse is also a successful (by conventional metrics) academic, and we have kids. It's not without challenges, but it's quite plenty of positives. And neither of us are charismatic geniuses. We have talents, sure, but the more important thing is that we are organized.

The unequal impact highlighted here is very real. As the man in a dual-career academic couple, I have actively worked (along with my wife of course) to counter it. Simple examples include strongly encouraging and supporting a spouse, including crucially owning/ being the primary point person on childcare - especially needed when they are in the midst of grant applications or important conference presentations, even in early childhood years.

I think Xerox has been trying to unload PARC for a while, and this just seems like a way for them to do it and get a tax write-off since it's a 'donation'. PARC has already been doing a lot of government contract work, and I've seen teams from PARC and SRI compete for certain programs, so there's definitely synergy there. But I think PARC was historically more commercially oriented than SRI, so there will be some cultural differences internally.

Over time Xerox has gone quite far from where it was when PARC was founded and I think internal support for it had weakened a lot.

The bigger problem both orgs have historically had is on compensation and retaining talent. A lot of people tend to leave or get poached by major companies and their R&D units - lots of former PARC folks at X, and lots of former SRI folks across various robotics companies.

As an academic editor for a society journal this is ridiculous. Most of this process is automated and takes a grand total of 15 mins of time. Also, Nature charging $10k for open access while PLOS charges more like $2k should tell you what’s going on here

The costs are minimal to handle rejected submissions. Most of the work is done by reviewers.

And no it doesn’t cost that much.. that’s the rate with a fat 50% margin, corresponding to the massive profits Elsevier rakes in. It’s just a tax on the system

This basic idea was demonstrated by some groups at MIT in 2016: https://www.nature.com/articles/nnano.2015.309

MIT news article about it: https://news.mit.edu/2016/nanophotonic-incandescent-light-bu...

I think this paper follows the same basic principle and idea.

He admitted to publishing a paper with authors he didn’t know.. and which external evidence suggests had authorship for sale. These people are a disaster for science..

“We are not going to distribute this material, considering the proprietary nature of our processes and the intellectual property rights that exist.”

The fact that they are going to making independent verification impossible makes me highly highly suspicious. Most scientists I know in their position would be sharing the material widely (even ahead of publication) to have replication from other parties, to bolster this claim. Until there is replication, I trust NOTHING from this group which has outright fabricated data previously.

Extraordinary claims, from those who have previously faked data, require independent third-party verification.

There is absolutely no connection. Carbon dating and genetics alone disprove any such connection.

You could just look this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island - it's all pretty well understood at this point.

Rapa Nui arrived between 300 and 1200CE, from eastern Polynesian islands (Cook and/or Marquesas). Both genetics and cultural similarities confirm this. Tectonic plate movements take (hundreds of) millennia more to have a meaningful impact here.

As entertaining as they are, unfortunately these conspiracy theories are usually a bit racist since they deny agency to the actual cultures that have made this monumental architecture. Which is to say, the implicit comment in many of these ridiculous theories (including ancient aliens or whatever) is: "there's no way Polynesian culture could accomplish this".

Of course, there is plenty of archeological evidence of precisely how the moai were built, and why they were later toppled.

Telling the emperor he has no clothes only works if he has any self awareness..

Well if there was a vaccine that reduced the risk of dying from drowning I think you’d definitely want to add it to the childhood vaccination schedule. Again, death rate is not the only metric by which we decide what to vaccinate children for.

Nope, this isn’t true. If a kid comes to a hospital due to an accident and tests Covid positive and dies, that would not be counted. It is ultimately the judgment of the physician (as is the case for illnesses in general since a judgment is often needed to tie the proximate cause of death - say respiratory failure - to and underlying illness.

https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-are-covid-19-deaths-c...

The arguments they make regarding children's vaccines don't make much sense to me. The end target for the pediatric vaccine trials was immunobridging, which has widely been used for other common childhood vaccines. Are they arguing against those as well? If so, that goes against a widely accepted and validated strategy to bridge adult vaccines down to pediatric age groups. Efficacy is a very complicated thing to measure as variants change. The symptomatic disease efficacy seen for the pediatric trials compare well vs. Omicron to what we've seen for adults, so it's all consistent and makes sense. Also, would they argue against the annual flu shots? We don't even run efficacy trials for those every year for different strain compositions.

Also, a bit of perspective: we vaccinate children for many illnesses that would result in comparatively "small" numbers of pediatric deaths (lower than Covid even!). The reason is that even rare pediatric deaths, if preventable, are terrible given the life-years lost. And there HAVE been FAR too many pediatric Covid deaths by our modern standards for pediatric infectious diseases. If Covid only affected kids, the absolute numbers of deaths would be a very worrisome thing. Second, the possibility of long-term complications from even non-fatal illnesses. For pediatric COVID, MIS-C and potential super antigen links to the recent spread of pediatric hepatitis are more than sufficient to meet that bar.

Finally - there was no safety signal seen in the 5-12 year old pediatric vaccines that have been given out to millions for ~year already, and no signal in the under 5 trials as well. The myocarditis risk primarily seems in teenage and older groups and linked to puberty/adolescent hormones.

There may be contrarian voices in the FDA and CDC as there will be in any large organization. But to believe their voices over the consensus requires a heavy dose of motivated reasoning and not engaging with some basic facts about the goals of pediatric vaccines and the ways vaccine trials work. There's a reason every pediatrician parent I know was first in line to get their kids vaccinated.

This is going to Delaware Chancery court, and if his ridiculous claims hold it does turn upside down long-held general principles of mergers and acquisitions that would affect.. everyone. I don't think the court will side with him on this. In the past, they have forced mergers to go through..

Two main differences: Scale and transparency.

The scale of reach is tremendous, faster and optimized in a way newspapers/media could only dream of.

It's also not publicly clear what is being widely disseminated and to whom, other than when outside parties analyze what's happening within Facebook on a given day (and this has limits).

One take-away I had from reading this excellent and detailed article is the fundamental tension in Facebook's approach to moderating content:

They rely on a hammer to catch what is objectionable or misinformation, but optimize for engagement maximally with everything else. However the hammer misses plenty of newly emerging inflammatory content (for example, anti-Rohingya content would look very different from anything prior), and this content gets maximally amplified because the overall newsfeed algorithms optimize for engagement.

An alternate approach would be to sacrifice engagement overall (perhaps only a little!) to reduce the very real and negative consequences of undesirable content that slips past the detection algorithms (which it always will). I suspect some of the fixes that were proposed, but never implemented, effectively did this. But they were shot down because, well, the top-line engagement numbers would dip.

I think you may be misunderstanding the implication. It's not that he's a postdoc that's surprising, but that he's a statistician who happens to have solved a major problem in convex geometry. The following quote sums it up:

"Chen is not a convex geometer by training — instead, he is a statistician who became interested in the KLS conjecture because he wanted to get a handle on random sampling. “No one knows Yuansi Chen in our community,” Eldan said. “It’s pretty cool that you have this guy coming out of nowhere, solving one of [our] most important problems.”"

The great thing is, the reaction of the community working on these type of problems was to understand and verify the result. And once it was, all credit to him.

It helps (and perhaps is no surprise, given her easy facility with the material she covers) that she's a Math PhD as well :)

Completely agree! I’ve really enjoyed Erica Klarreich’s writing in particular. I think she may very well be one of the most gifted and capable writers today on math in particular.

Somehow Microsoft Research manages to be a much more open place than Google and has researchers publish critical pieces all the time. It's ultimately a bit sad that Google, the company started by two PhD students, is incapable of creating a similar culture to MSR.

"“I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count,” she wrote."

The scale of how the platform's being used for political manipulation in every country is enormous, and it's clear that if a junior data scientist is having to independently make these decisions, that there's little interest in proactively dealing with this.

Worth noting: This does not affect many of the major municipal utilities, including SMUD in Sacramento, LADWP in LA, and Silicon Valley Power in Santa Clara because many have their own generating capacity and are also in alternate distribution arrangements. The investor-owned utilities don't have much direct generating capacity anymore and rely on CAISO, and well, that has its limits. Also pretty sure that customers of the municipal utilities pay less than PGE/ SCE customers. For example, this is why Santa Clara has so many data centers (municipal utility, Silicon Valley Power).

Really unclear what value investor-owned utilities provide us - the municipal utilities in general seem way better.

Yeah - the statues are not necessarily accurate depictions to begin with.

My take always was that their long-term vision remains very hard to implement in practice, particularly in a consumer-friendly form factor. They should've kept working on it in a R&D capacity in the background, and pushed a more limited AR (or even VR..) product to build a brand, ecosystem and start generating some revenue. And, of course, figure out what the hell their product-market fit was going to be! The quarantine era, in theory, could be a golden age for AR/VR products that deliver a compelling experience.

Which is also to say, the charismatic/ crazy founder with a reality distortion field is great and all, and can move mountains and often succeed - but sometimes reality hits with a thud. To some extent, their challenge was one grounded in physical limitations of our technological capabilities in the 2010s. In the 2030s though..

Not sure if Facebook is stepping away from AR/VR. Oculus/ Facebook reality labs is still hiring plenty of folks in the optics/ photonics world.. even making announcements over the last week on open positions.

It's one thing to advance a theory in academic papers during normal times. It's another to pen widely-read op-eds advancing said theories in the middle of a pandemic. Their theory and op-eds have already, and are, influencing policy - and it's clear they want to influence policy. Hence, it merits more scrutiny than the average study. These results are being used by policymakers to make decisions - skepticism and criticism is most definitely warranted.

I'm in no position to conduct studies, though I am certainly doing things in my wheelhouse to help. Other studies will clear up matters, but results may be weeks away. And these results may be used to end quarantines in the intervening time.

Excellent point!

Another odd thing: One of the co-authors of the study, Andrew Bogan seems to manage a hedge fund, and then published a WSJ op-ed on the study. He didn't note in the op-ed that he was involved in the study (and a co-author no less!). A lot of conflict of interest potential here. These authors seem to have an agenda and end-result in mind, no matter the data.

Edit: here's the WSJ op-ed (paywalled): https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-data-suggest-the-coronaviru...

The more I think about this, the more outrageous I find this. It's a form of astroturfing to advance the beliefs of the authors of the study. (Note that the senior author Bhattacharya and of course Ionnadis were advancing this theory before data collection began. This means their analysis deserves even more scrutiny)

Just a press release, no pre-print. That being said it was being co-run by LADPH it seems. Many people involved were also involved with the Stanford study which has been very thoroughly criticized for its assumptions.