Not to mention that it assumes assumes lying, cheating, and corruption is just the price you pay for quality products.
Seriously, if people are framing this in terms of "what's good for industry" vs "what is the right thing to do", the crooks have already won and your national industry has already lost.
Yeah it's pretty essential that construction equipment be pretty easy to construct and deconstruct. There are some videos [1] which are worth checking out.
See I'm thirsty, but I can drink the water later. And my grant proposal is due at midnight tonight (12:01 on Sunday, technically), and my PhD student is texting me to say that he can't log into the cluster, and we also just got the proofs back from that paper but I guess that can wait. At some point I should fill out that reimbursement form for the conference last week but first I should get back to those undergrads who said they wanted a summer ... wait water? Oh yes sure water would be great.
Don't confuse a polished TED talk from a practiced speaker with a seminar from any random person in academia. I'm sad to admit I've given talks (many recorded) that are much worse than this.
These seminar-style talks in particular have a strong Goodheart bias: academic scientists judge each other on the papers they write, but the highest honors usually come in the form of invited talks. The result is that everyone is scrambling to have their students give talks.
In larger scientific collaborations it can get a bit perverse: you want to get everyone together for discussions, but the institutes will only pay for travel if you give their students a 20 minute talk. You'll often have conferences where everyone crams into a room and listens to back-to-back 20 minute lectures for a week straight (sometimes split into multiple "parallel sessions"), and the only real questions are from a few senior people.
It's a net positive, of course: there's still some time around the lectures and even in 2025 there's no good replacement for face-to-face interaction. But I often wish more people could just go to conferences to discuss their work rather than "giving a talk" on it.
> But I often wish more people could just go to conferences to discuss their work rather than "giving a talk" on it.
Very true point. I've been wondering why academics "suffer" so much from a system that they themselves created and are actively running (unpaid, all volunteers-based). Conferences are organized by academics for academics. Grants are subitted by and evalated by academics. Journals' editorial boards are staffed by academics to review the work of their peers.
Even metrics of merit are defined by scholars of scientrometrics, also academics, to rate the works of their peers. Yet we have a system where peer review has a high element of arbitrariness, lacks minimal professional standards, conferences organizers take too much of their valuable time to do a job (rotational, even!) that is often mediocre, and authors donate their papers for free to commercial publishers from which their institutions then buy these same papers back for a lot of money.
After a quick analysis of these entrenched systems in my first months of doctoral studies, I questioned the intelligence of people who first created such a system and then keep complaining about it, yet they make no move to change anything.
Let's invent a new meeting format where people basically travel to a nice place with few distractions in order to discuss their research informally, no talks.
In my field (computer science), it's what workshops once were before they became mini-conferences with three minutes question time (for all the questions from the whole audience after one talk, not per person asking) after talks.
PS [edit]: I once saw two older professors discussing something on the corridor floor of a conference while talks were going on inside the various rooms. They were sitting on the floor, both held pens and there were some loose papers scattered on the floor. This was right were people coming out of talks would have had to walk over them. I had skipped that session, so I asked them what they were doing. They said "Oh, we're writing a paper. We only meet twice a yeara some conference, that's when we need to get most of our important work done." At the time I found it funny, but with the benefit of hindsight isn't it a sad state of affairs?
The "giving a talk" is to introduce newer students to these fields. If you don't introduce undergrads to real research, they never learn about the possibilities they have to study in the future. It is probably really annoying to have to do it, but I think some have forgotten that the research and results aren't the only important thing to come from research, but also the passing of knowledge and experience that is important.
> Don't confuse a polished TED talk from a practiced speaker with a seminar from any random person in academia.
I don’t expect a TED talk but we’re still talking about MIT here. I’ve seen 8 year olds more articulated. I guess where I am from being called in front of the class and having to present or talk about the homework reading is common, so perhaps why it’s seen as exotic in US to be able tie words together without saying “like” after every other word, or slump and touch the hair every 10 seconds.
Yeah, MIT-affiliation certainly doesn't imply good presentation skills, I agree with you there.
I wonder about this too, but I think any academic institute asks a lot of PhD students. 90% of it isn't about giving a good public talk. Especially at PhD level it's much more about actually gathering a blob of data, distilling it into a (still nonlinear) structure, and then, finally, serializing it into a paper draft. In many cases the talk is something you do at the end as a formality.
This doesn't get any simpler just because you're at an institute with a fancy name. Your hypothetical 8 year old has one chance to get a cookie and had better be pretty articulate about it. This MIT-branded academic has a million other things going for them and can afford to slack off a bit on the presentation skills.
> Your hypothetical 8 year old has one chance to get a cookie and had better be pretty articulate about it. This MIT-branded academic has a million other things going for them and can afford to slack off a bit on the presentation skills.
Nah, they also can explain how potential and kinetic energy works, talk about how many types of stars are out there and so on. Not hypothetical at all. They do like cookies, too!
> This MIT-branded academic has a million other things going for them and can afford to slack off a bit on the presentation skills.
Well, I posit in this case their 1st out of 1 million other worries was to sound credible, because they may be asked about their methodology. Staying consistent while making things up does take considerable amount of effort and the speech will suffer. Listen to the segment I point out and see how they act. They sort of pretended they didn't hear the question at first.
The point here was that he cheated. He made things up and as soon as he was asked about methodology he pretended not to hear the question, slowed down, started to sprinkle “likes” everywhere, etc.
The question is more about how good of a cheater he is. Not very good as keeping a story straight takes up a considerable amount of effort and speech suffers.
What is this even supposed to represent? The entire justification I could give for stacked bars is that you could permute the sub-bars and obtain comparable results. Do the bars still represent additive terms? Multiplicative constants? As a non-physicist I would have no idea on how to interpret this.
It's a histogram. Each color is a different simulated physical process: they can all happen in particle collisions, so the sum of all of them should add up to the data the experiment takes. The data isn't shown here because it hasn't been taken yet: this is an extrapolation to a future dataset. And the dotted lines are some hypothetical signal.
The area occupied by each color is basically meaningless, though, because of the logarithmic y-scale. It always looks like there's way more of whatever you put on the bottom. And obviously you can grow it without bound: if you move the lower y-limit to 1e-20 you'll have the whole plot dominated by whatever is on the bottom.
For the record I think it's a terrible convention, it just somehow became standard in some fields.
I discovered the feature accidentally a few days ago while I was trying to simultaneously write a presentation, book accommodations, submit travel paperwork, and brief my colleagues on what they should do while I'm away. And for the last day or so it was very useful.
Basically, though, it's a sign of toxic multitasking, as some others have said. I'm not happy that this feature was useful but it was useful.
As a European have you noticed a recent increase in tipping in Europe as well?
In Switzerland a lot of the restaurants that have moved to tablets for payment, and the payment screen pops up a "suggested tip" window with a few options. They might be a bit lower than the standard American tips but it's still there and it never was before.
As an American, may I suggest you Europeans start a social media movement to boycott all businesses in Europe which have that tip screen on their card terminals, before the cancer solidifies its foothold in your home? We won't get rid of tipping here until we get a superdepression for a number of years and no restaraunt operates anymore because literally nobody can afford it.
Sometimes it's ridiculous enough that the waiter is the one pressing "0%" to switch directly to payment, e.g. when you get your order at the bar yourself and the amount of service is minimal.
There's no custom of tipping that much at any of these places, but I feel cheap just clicking the lowest (no tip) of 4 options. Maybe all the time I've lived in the US plays a role here but it seems like it might just be the decoy effect [1] applied to tipping. It will be interesting to see if consumers see this as a dark pattern and push back.
I haven’t noticed such thing, but maybe you are right. I think that Switzerland is completely different than other parts of Europe and it is hard to compare with.
At the same time, it gives me some hope that humanity can still get smarter.
Progress in science and technology oscillates between breakthroughs and consolidation: new ideas are exciting but the repercussions and formalism need some time to sink in. If you don't give it enough time you are left with overly elaborate and confusing frameworks. Usually the academics sort this kind of thing out before it goes into mass market education but it's never too late to simplify.
I was asking about this 9 months ago and it started quite a thread [1]. I remember learning about this in grade school, finding it pretty confusing, and wondering why a simple "newton's third law" wouldn't suffice. That's incomplete but at least not wrong.
Newton's third law (as in, thinking of air molecules hitting the wing underside, disregarding any interactions between air molecules) would work for something like a spacecraft in the initial process of reentry, where one may assume that the atmosphere is so thin that air molecules don't interact much with each other. Lower down that assumption is no longer valid, and then applying Newton's laws to a continuum of interacting particles gives you fluid mechanics (Navier-Stokes etc).
Seriously, if people are framing this in terms of "what's good for industry" vs "what is the right thing to do", the crooks have already won and your national industry has already lost.
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