Though very painful, this experience has reinforced my strong commitment to the Open Science
movement. As it clearly shows, posting data publicly, pre-registering studies, and conducting
replications of prior research is key to scientific progress. During my time as Editor at OBHDP, I
organized a special issue on Open Science and co-authored an editorial titled “The Future is
Now: Full Reporting at OBHDP” that serves as the introductory article to this special issue. I
wanted to bring positive change to OBHDP, and organizing this special issue was one of my
proudest moments during my editorship. In the last few years, I also consistently pre-registered
studies, posted data on OSF, included transparency disclosures in my papers, and made sure my
students follow the same steps.
- Every participant in the workshop writes a brief presentation, with enough lead time for the organizers to read them all.
In the context of an inter-disciplinary workshop, what often works best is to describe an outstanding problem in the field.- The workshop organizers semi-randomly assign each participant’s presentation to someone else, with enough lead time that the assignee can study the presentation.
Again, in the interdisciplinary context, the organizers try to make sure that there’s some hope of comprehension.
(While I called this the “presentation exchange”, it needn’t be a strict swap, where A gets assignd B’s presentation and vice versa.)- Everyone gives the presentation they were assigned, followed by their own comments on what they found interesting / cool / provocative and what they found incomprehensible. No one gives the presentation they wrote.
In some contexts, I have found it helpful to institute the rule that the author don’t get to speak until after the presentation is finished…Doing this at the beginning of the workshop helps make sure that everyone has some comprehension of what everyone else is talking about, or at least that mis-apprehensions or failures to communicate are laid bare. It can help break up the inevitable disciplinary/personal cliques. It can, and has, spark actual collaborations across disciplines. And, finally, many people report that knowing their presentation is going to be given by someone else forces them to write with unusual clarity and awareness of their own expert blind-spots.
http://bactra.org/weblog/presentation-exchange.html
Would be a cool idea for a journal club
There has been some degradation and loss to communication systems that rely on high-frequency radio waves, NOAA told NPR, as well as some preliminary indications of irregularities in power systems.
“Simply put, the power grid operators have been busy since yesterday working to keep proper, regulated current flowing without disruption,” said Shawn Dahl, service coordinator for the Boulder, Co.-based Space Weather Prediction Center at NOAA.
“Satellite operators are also busy monitoring spacecraft health due to the S1-S2 storm taking place along with the severe-extreme geomagnetic storm that continues even now,” Dahl added, saying some GPS systems have struggled to lock locations and offered incorrect positions.
As NOAA had warned late Friday, the Earth has been experiencing a G5, or “Extreme,” geomagnetic storm. It’s the first G5 storm to hit the planet since 2003, when a similar event temporarily knocked out power in part of Sweden and damaged electrical transformers in South Africa.
I find it staggering and deeply encouraging that despite the severity of this storm, things seemed to be… okay?
It’s like Hank Green’s “Golden Gate Bridge Didn’t Collapse” video.
" THE ANALYTIC CAUCHY PROBLEM WITH SINGULAR DATA"
LAMPORT, LESLIE B
.
“In writing formal mathematics, one is usually very careful to obliterate the path which actually led him to the results.”
I recently learned about rubber band airplanes.
Wings are as lightweight as possible, with the skins made by Langmuir-Blodgett thin film technique hundreds of nanometers thick, with propellors turning so slowly
A good episode.
https://www-nature-com.cyber.usask.ca/articles/s41467-023-44157-3
spectacular paper. What I think is really remarkable is - at least from my understanding of Jolene’s summary - the microbiological techniques that were used here would not at all be out of place in d’Herell or Luria’s labs, 100 years ago. They key points rely on careful design using simple, macro-scale methodologies; plaque assays, mice with metal implants.
I think this ties in with my thoughts about “amateur science”. This is a fundamental, revolutionary finding which literally anyone that could safely do BSL work could have performed (+ animal husbandry)
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01293-0
Zhang told Nature on Monday that his situation was “terrible”.
“You don’t know what I have experienced,” he said, but declined to comment further.
Holmes thinks that the lab closure is part of an effort to sideline Zhang for unauthorized sharing of data. “It is heartbreaking to watch,” he says. “It is unfathomable to me to have a scientist of that calibre sleeping outside his lab.”
There is a chilling interview by with Zhang’s western contact, Eddie Holmes, discussing the events that led to the first sequence being published, which was crucial for the development of e.g. tests.
27:21
"VR: And this is because of your relationship with Zhang?
“Eddie: We have to keep the lines of communication open - or else the world is going to be a less safe place. The thing I’ve learned from the pandemic - unless you share the data, and have access globally - that counts for nothing.”
So many incredible snippets in the transcript.
This has been happening on and off for a long time in the nuclear weapons industry— look into FOGBANK, a classified material of classified manufacture and classified purpose (though we’re decently sure it’s an interstage plastic foam material for two-stage thermonuclear devices) whose production process was lost, forgotten, and ultimately had to be reverse-engineered in order to sustain maintenance of the warheads that required it. Outsourcing has not only exported our manufacturing capacity but also our tacit knowledge (see Collins, “The TEA Set”), which is an order of magnitude more difficult to recover than even our moribund factories.
two very thoughtful discussions of two topics:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07970-4
We also identify 372 ‘intragenic invertons’, a novel class of DNA inversions found entirely within genes, in genomes of bacterial and archaeal isolates. Intragenic invertons allow a gene to encode two or more versions of a protein by flipping a DNA sequence within the coding region, thereby increasing coding capacity without increasing genome size.
As a result of sparse inspection documentation, there
is uncertainty around how much damage was evident immediately post-Maria. Inspections made in late 2018 and
early 2019 observed cable slippage greater than 1.5 inches on auxiliary sockets at the ground end of backstay B12W
and 1.125 inches at the tower end of M4N. “The cable slips were evidence of structural distress in the sockets and
should have raised a concern that cables may fail.”10 The question is why cable slip did not spark greater concern.
It might be that the gravity of the situation was not recognized for the following two reasons: (1) The traditional
safety factor based on cable strength divided by cable loads was still comfortably above 2 depending on the particular cable, and (2) in structures using spelter connections, the weak link has never been the connector itself.
The Arecibo Telescope gave fair warning post-Maria that it was in structural distress through increasing cable
socket pullout. Upon reflection, the unusually large and progressive cable pullouts of key structural cables that
could be seen during visual inspection several months and years before the M4N failure should have raised the
highest alarm level, requiring urgent action. The lack of documented concern from the contracted engineers about
the inconsequentiality of cable pullouts or the safety factors between Hurricane Maria in 2017 and the failure is
alarming. Given the observed excessive cable pullout, continued use of the factor of safety calculations based on
the original design ignored the impact of any degradation mechanism. Safety factors based on cable strength are
not pertinent to failure modes involving creep, stress corrosion cracking, hydrogen embrittlement, fatigue, or the
integrity of the socket connections.
The cables whose sockets failed were suspended in a unique and
powerful radio telescope environment, capable of inducing current in the cables at some level. Electric current
flowing through zinc has been found to increase its creep rate
While there is not enough data or empirical evidence
to prove LEP as a causal mechanism for the acceleration of the socket zinc creep, no other mechanism has been
found likely. The circumstantial evidence and the cable pullout patterns offer support for the role of LEP. LEP
provides a physically plausible but unproven mechanism to answer the outstanding questions described above
about why this spelter socket failure mode was seen in the Arecibo Telescope and nowhere else in history, the
non-uniformity in the rate and pattern of the cable pullouts, the failure of a young auxiliary cable socket first, and
the timing of the Arecibo Telescope’s cable wire breaks.
Another structure could have simply rusted, but of course the Arecibo would not such a pedestrian. Poetic that it had one last mystery to divulge.
The decision to decommission a major structural facility should be an orderly and
safe process. Reduced funding for maintenance and monitoring runs the risk that nature will “decommission” some facilities, such as the Arecibo Telescope, by processes that are inevitably disastrous, and may include loss of life.
Proximate causes.
You can construct a pretty solid argument that climate change is another proximate cause.
an extraordinary article.
Heartening because it is clear that we can produce tools commensurate to the largest problems
Today we are used to seeing the total output of the economy grow. Since 1960, the total output of the UK economy has grown 300% and the world economy has grown more than 600% (see here). Not only has the total size of the economy grown over the last century, but per capita incomes have increased too. This tells us that the growth in economic output has been faster than the growth of the population.
Because of this zero-sum logic, efforts to support the poor used to be regularly met with scorn in the pre-growth economy. The Malthusian argument against redistribution was that any well-meaning effort would inevitably make everyone worse off: improving the living conditions of the poor would lead to fewer deaths and the ensuing increase of the population would decrease everyone’s living standards.9
COVID-19 shows us that in today’s economies the logic of Malthus no longer applies: the people in countries that suffered the highest death tolls can obviously not expect to see any economic benefits from the death of their compatriots. We do not live in a zero-sum economy anymore.
The fact that the pandemics in history lead to economic booms for the survivors allowed us to understand the pre-growth economy of the past. The fact that the COVID-19 pandemic is creating an economic downturn allows us to see the collaborative, positive-sum economy of our own time.