It's an over reaction if you have a decade to argue with morons.
I've had papers sit in peer review for two years, get rejected, then when they are finally published the other editors of the journal that rejected them came crawling in asking for the next paper in the series and promising the front page. Worse they ran a news story about our paper _in the journal that rejected it_ saying how groundbreaking it was.
The only people who think peer review still works are people who have never used it or people who have never had a novel idea in their lives.
> I've had papers sit in peer review for two years, get rejected
And for people who aren't in academia, lets just say the unspoken part: While one or more of the reviewers are actively trying to replicate the work so they can beat you to submission after rejecting you.
As an outside observer, it does seem that the whole process is tedious, capricious, and corrupt. No wonder academia is crumbling - it deserves to, and it needs to be replaced with a new, better system.
We must live in different worlds, I’ve been literally blown away by the advances I’ve seen and the new research coming out in the past 40 years. In some ways it feels like we are just getting started, especially in bio. We finally have the tools to discover the wonderful nano machines that make up life and people are using them in wonderful ways.
The commenter was talking about biology and you are talking about physics. Just because your view of one field stagnates doesn't mean the rest of science doesn't, and your quip about stamp collecting (referring to that sneering quote) means you are thinking in memes and are not a serious interlocutor
Understanding how a bunch of baroque proteins interact is the definition of stamp collecting. As a meat bag made up of such machines
I appreciate it for what it is. As a intelligence capable of abstraction I don't measure our progress in science by the number of stamps in our collection.
There are no big ideas, biology included, because peer review is only there for small ideas.
"Co-author" lol we both know what that means. Still, if that's true that makes it even sadder. Hope you mature and broaden your horizons at some point instead of engaging in undergrad-style petty field rivalries
What does this mean “it’s the left that’s the problem”? The right’s solution to academic reform is literal pseudoscience. And I don’t mean this as whataboutism—I’m responding to the implication that some political faction other than the left has the right answer, and I don’t know who that would be.
> Anyone pointing out the obvious - that peer review is broken and science hasn't worked in 40 years - is at best a flat Earther.
Yes, if someone claims that science hasn't worked (what does it even mean?) for 40 years then he's not that far from being flat Eather. It's hard to expect other side to be reasonable while making such absurd claims.
It would only be effective if the significance of this work is clear. They certainly felt this message needed to reach people, and that it did work makes it self evident they were probably right.
Journalists believing what you tell them says nothing about if the underlying work is actually significant.
The legacy of bad science being picked up is why this is a bad idea, even you personally don’t think it’s an issue the risk reward isn’t about just you.
There are other quotes that do think it’s significant. Why do you think the more critical scientists are more correct?
> John Glass, a synthetic biologist at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, Calif., who was not involved in the study. “It is dazzling that she has put these things all together,” he said.
> “We’re going to remember this moment,” said Roseanna Zia, a computational biologist at the University of Missouri who was not involved in the project.
Maybe you prefer scientists who put their money where their mouth is (even if that’s a conflict of interest)
> When Dr. Adamala showed SpudCell to Dr. Endy… (a synthetic biologist at Stanford University) … last year, he was so awestruck that he decided to help her found Biotic, the nonprofit organization intended to create a community of SpudCell researchers. “I’m pouring my life’s work into this,” Dr. Endy said.
I’m going to give some advice that you probably won’t understand for years, but when you don’t find value in a process you’re missing something about what it’s doing.
A common shortcut is to look past who is making money to who is paying for that process and why they would want to pay for it.
In this case, the process is paid for by the government, and the reason they do it is that they wish to outsource the decision of which scientists on their payroll should be promoted.
If you're willing to stipulate their goals, it's easy to understand why they appreciate this system. But there is no benefit to other parties. As far as society is concerned, this is a big loss and an unforced error.
You’re mistaken in thinking it’s paid for by the government, though yes many governments are collectively a significant funding source they are far from the only funding source here.
The most critical function by far is it saves people doing research vast amounts of time. That includes people working at pharmaceutical companies, students, and non profits etc not just government employees. Thus why private colleges who don’t do cutting edge research as well as private labs etc still subscribe to such journals and thus fund the system.
This is a vast win for society. Could it be improved, sure, but you need to understand the value in order to build something that’s an actual improvement.
>The legacy of bad science being picked up is why this is a bad idea, even you personally don’t think it’s an issue the risk reward isn’t about just you
Who do you believe should be the gatekeeper here? Why can’t the scientist and the news outlets be trusted to make the decision about whether to publish or not themselves? Why can’t the general public be trusted to evaluate the quality of the news outlets they read?
> Why can’t the scientist and the news outlets be trusted to make the decision about whether to publish or not themselves? Why can’t the general public be trusted to evaluate the quality of the news outlets they read?
Because the scientists involved and reporters manifestly do a bad job about picking what is or isn’t groundbreaking and more importantly have various incentives to hype things up.
CERN scientists with the whole FTL neutrino particle were actively skeptical of the results and still held a press conference on the topic. As to reporters, you’re welcome to go through the published stories about the topic and notice how rarely getting the distance wrong was brought up even when the scientists involved where skeptical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_OPERA_faster-than-light_n...
The general public is utterly incompetent at judging science. Homeopathy is the tip of the iceberg of ignorance.
You didn’t answer the actually interesting question I posed, who should be the gatekeeper instead?
Yes, yes, journalists and scientists have bad incentives and the general public is dumb. You’re not exactly setting the world on fire with that observation. The problem is that there is no better alternative. Any conceivable gatekeeper to scientific knowledge will be no smarter than the research scientists producing the results and will certainly have problematic incentives of their own. And a gatekeeper will also lack the local knowledge that might determine whether the information might helpful or harmful to the potential reader.
Programming reinvented a similar system of peer review before commits. It’s not that the reviewer is more knowledgeable about the bits of the system being changed that makes this work it’s that they have enough expertise to understand what’s involved and a new set of eyes on the problem.
In science having multiple journals acts as a safety valve here, but the underlying principle is very similar. As much as some people bad mouth it, peer review is a very low hurdle before publication that still catches a great number of mistakes.
> Sending it to journalists beforehand is what I consider an overreaction.
No knowledge on this particular situation. My guess is that they wanted to protect their work by getting it out there. This prevents someone from stealing it during the peer review process.
If you have something so truly revolutionary that everyone can see with their own two eyes how awesome it is you don't have to rely on a middleman to bless it. "Ok your loss"
Whenever i sit down to read research, I remind myself of Lockheed Martin reading the USSR published research[0] on how electromagnetic waves scatter off of surfaces, and using that to fuel the initial stealth technology. The leading theory being that the USSR didn't recognize how brilliant and revolutionary ability these calculations were.
Just because I can't see the immediate brilliance, doesn't mean it is not brilliant in it's own right.
There is a similar story with the discovery of buckey-balls. A researcher at University of Houston had data that demonstrated buckey-balls were created, but he didn't fully understand what he was looking at. Then a researcher at Rice saw the data and recognized c-60 was being created, so he bought the data and the process and then "invented" carbon balls
I'm not suggesting you tell no-one about your ideas, but if you can't convince people who know the field, turning to laypeople instead is the hallmark of a crank.
Extraornary claims should require extraornary proof, not a credulous audience.
Distribution is trivially easy these days. All publishing does is say "yup, this is some legit science alright". It's a stamp of approval. Blessed by the publisher. To get this blessing you have to fulfil a set of requirements ranging from promoting good science to "thats just how its done, thats how we always done it" to the whims of a particular reviewer. You play the game you get the prize. But if you don't need the prize then you don't need to play.
> Yes 1-based indexing is a mistake. It leads to significantly less elegant code - especially for generic code - and is no harder to understand than 1-based indexing for people capable of programming.
Some would argue that 0-based indexing is significantly less elegant for numerical/scientific code, but that depends on whether they come from a MATLAB/Fortran or Python/C(++) background.
A decision was made to target the MATLAB/Fortran (and unhappy? Python/C++) crowd first, thus the choice of 1-based indexing and column-major order, but at the end of the day it's a matter of personal preference.
0-based indexing would have made it easier to reach a larger audience, however.
> and is no harder to understand than 1-based indexing for people capable of programming.
The 0 or 1 based indexing is actually a very superficial debate for people not very familiar with Julia. Note that 1-based indexing is a standard library feature not inherent to the Julia language itself.
The real indexing issue is whether arbitrary-base abstraction is too easily available.
# Correct, Vector is 1-based
function mysum(v::Vector{T}) where {T <: Integer}
s = zero(T)
for i in 1:length(v)
s += v[i]
end
return s
end
#Incorrect, AbstractVector is not necessarily one based
function mysum(v::AbstractVector{T}) where {T <: Integer)
s = zero(T)
for i in 1:length(v)
s += v[i]
end
return s
end
#Correct
function mysum(v::AbstractVector{T}) where {T <: Integer)
s = zero(T)
for e in v
s += e
end
return s
end
Basically, the concrete `Vector` type is 1-based. However, `AbstractVector` is could have an arbitrary first index. OffsetArrays.jl is a non-standard package that provides the ability to create arrays with indexes that can start at an arbitrary point including 0.
Aside from the fact that 1-based indexing is better for scientific code (see Fortran), I don’t think that it matters very often. I don’t think that any Julia program I’ve ever written would need to change if Julia adopted 0-based tomorrow. You don’t typically write C-style loops in Julia; you use array functions and operators, and if you need to iterate you write `for i in array ...`. If you really need the first or last element you write `a[begin]` or `a[end]`.
> the fact that 1-based indexing is better for scientific code (see Fortran)
It really isn't. "Scientific code" isn't some separate thing.
The only way it can help is if you're trying to write code that matches equations in a paper that uses 1-based indexing. But that very minor advantage doesn't outweigh the disadvantages by a wide margin. Lean doesn't make this silly mistake.
> If you really need the first or last element
What if you need the Nth block of M elements? The number of times I've written arr[(n-1)m+1:nm] in MATLAB... I do not know how anyone can prefer that nonsense to e.g. nm..<(n+1)m
What if I want the nth element up to the math element? arr[n:m]. And if I want to split the array into two parts, one until the nth element and the other from the m+1st element arr[1:m] and arr[(m+1):end]. Julia matches how people speak about arrays, including C programmers in their comments. Arrays are (conceptually) not pointer arithmetic. Also for your usecase typically you would just use a 2d array and write a[n,:].
so you just need to overload the syntax of intervals even more to make it work
> arr[0..m], arr[m..]
now `m` refers to different things depending on which side of the interval it's on. less characters doesn't mean nicer
I get it though, I was skeptical about 1-based indexing when I started Julia. By the nature of indices vs length there will always be an off-by-one problem: either you have elements [n, m - 1] with length (m - n) or [n, m] with length (m - n + 1). Unless you're doing a bunch of pointer arithmetic type stuff, I find the symmetry of a inclusive-inclusive interval to be a better default.
Your second point is the main argument for me personally. Numbers in brackets always mean the same thing: the ordinal number of the references object in an ordered collection. In 0 based indexing you can think of the number as refering to the space between the referenced objects. But that is simply an additional mental image on top of the original one.
As a neat bonus, in Julia 1:5 is just the iterator for the numbers 1 to 5. So slicing is typically not some special syntax either. It all works rather nicely.
So if I have a row of 5 apples, I can say "take the second and third apple" or I can say "take the apples between one apple length and three apple lengths from the start".
Which is more natural? The ruler is exactly the right mental image if an array to you is a partitioned region of memory starting at a specific pointer location. If an array to you is an ordered collection of objects, you would never invent 0-based indexing or inclusive-exclusive slicing.
Either way, it's not a big deal. I have lived in both worlds, I have come to think Julia is a bit more natural and easier to teach. But it ls really the silliest bike shedding complaint, given that the language has considerable real trade offs.
This is such a classic example of online discourse in general. There are two options, and folks tribally cling to one or the other without realizing that both are legitimate and well-suited for different situations.
Yes, of course distances are measured starting from 0. But we count discrete things starting at 1. You can do mental gymnastics to enumerate from zero and many programmers are (unfortunately IMO) taught to do so. It's a hard thing to learn that way, so for the folks that have done so, it often becomes a point of pride and a shibboleth.
As a classic example, a four story building has four floors. But you only need to go up three flights to get to the top. You can legitimately call the top floor either 3 or 4, and folks are similarly tribal about their own cultural norms around this one, too.
> There are two options, and folks tribally cling to one or the other without realizing that both are legitimate and well-suited for different situations.
No I disagree entirely. One is simply better.
> It's a hard thing to learn that way, so for the folks that have done so, it often becomes a point of pride and a shibboleth.
It is not hard. It's not better because it's hard-won knowledge. It's better because it leads to simpler, more elegant code. Simple as.
Fully agreed. I first struggled when switching from python to Julia, then ended up finding it slightly better for my use cases (which includes teaching scientists who are not programmers). But it's simply not a big deal either way. I am also reminded of the significant whitespace objections to python in the old days, before python took over everything...
> Aside from the fact that 1-based indexing is better for scientific code
I find it to be substantially worse. It's fine as long as you don't manipulate the indicies. But as soon as you start doing math on them 1 based becomes a headache (at least IME).
Meanwhile all you get in exchange (at least as far as I can tell) is ease of speaking about them in natural language. But I'm not usually conversing about indicies.
Concise range notations are a mixed bag. There's pros and cons to either scheme there as far as the syntax goes.
Heh. I grew up writing C code and had real trouble adapting to Matlab's 1-based indexing. Much later I tried Python and was constantly confused by 0-based indexing.
I don't think one is better than the other but my mind is currently wired to see indexing with base 1.
Then there's Option Base 1 in VBA if you don't like the default behavior. Perfect for creating subtle off-by-one bugs.
The approach could be helpful for searching though large 3D model libraries like GrabCAD for some visual placeholder part by just describing it.
The generality of the part descriptions made me chuckle.
> A bevel gear with a circular base and a series of angular, tapered teeth extending radially outward. The teeth are uniformly distributed around the circumference, allowing for meshing at an angle with another gear. The gear's face includes a set of holes, varying in size and symmetrically arranged around the central bore, likely for weight reduction or mounting purposes. The central opening likely acts as an axle or shaft attachment point. The design facilitates the transmission of rotational motion between intersecting shafts, typically at a 90-degree angle.
Meh, depends what's the goal.
Exceeding predicted performance is not a screw up, it's just providing a minimum guaranteed performance aka playing it safe (under promise, over deliver).
Also, we don't know by how much the most optimistic predicions were exceeded.
