Links for 2022-07-23
A popular thread on nuclear waste that actually gets things right! 66k likes! Amazing: “Scientists and engineers abuse public trust when they pretend we must bury nuclear waste deep underground or put it in the middle of a desert. Any "expert" who believes this is, at best, confused about the role of science and engineering in advising public policy."” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1550148385931513856.html
A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease [“If this research fraud set back a cure for Alzheimers by on average 10 years, it would have cost us 250 million quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). I'm sorry to use provocative language, but that would put it among history's worst crimes against humanity.” — @Chris_Said]
“A ‘transformational’ therapy has effectively cured people with the bleeding disorder haemophilia B, say British doctors… The medical team says the majority of adults with haemophilia could be cured in the next three years.” https://www.bbc.com/news/health-62240061
Over the past two years, Wikipedia editors have been undermining research on intelligence by removing sources and content from articles. https://quillette.com/2022/07/18/cognitive-distortions/
“…we found that a variety of design configurations, spanning different architectures, layers, training data, and learning objectives, are sufficient to yield high-performing encoding models of visual cortex. However, when analyzing the geometry of these networks, we found that a common thread running through the best-performing models was their strong tendency to encode high-dimensional manifolds.” https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.07.13.499969v1.full
Advanced EV Batteries Move From Labs to Mass Production: “For years, scientists in laboratories from Silicon Valley to Boston have been searching for an elusive potion of chemicals, minerals and metals that would allow electric vehicles to recharge in minutes and travel hundreds of miles between charges, all for a much lower cost than batteries available now. [Now a few of those scientists and their companies] are building factories to produce next-generation battery cells, allowing carmakers to begin road testing the technologies and determine whether they are safe and reliable.” [The New York Times] https://archive.ph/UrzYx
“Examining 1.8 billion citations among 90 million papers across 241 subjects, we find a deluge of papers does not lead to turnover of central ideas in a field, but rather to ossification of canon.” https://pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2021636118
150,000 Qubits Printed on a Chip https://spectrum.ieee.org/silicon-spin-qubits
Record-breaking supernova manages to “X-ray” the entire Universe https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/supernova-x-ray/
"In some cases the climate scenarios being used to inform trillions of dollars of investment may be obsolete or completely untethered from reality." https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/two-things-all-esg-investors-should
UFOs: “What we can say for certain is that each explanation explored in this piece should be disconcerting.” https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/features/mystery-of-the-damn-things/
A study showed that "only" 35% of job applications that included a photograph such as the one on the right received a positive callback. If the photograph did not feature a hijab, such as on the left, the positive callback rate was 70%.
Is this really surprising? The symbol stands for an ideology that rejects almost all liberal views on social matters and segregates people into men and women, moral and immoral, into groups with unequal rights.
How many employers would accept someone parading far-right tattoos? This is no different. What should be surprising, and worrying, is if such discrimination does not occur, such as in Spain, where the difference was not statistically significant.
The study: https://academic.oup.com/esr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/esr/jcac032/6633824?login=false