Tag: Tenure
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Before WP rudely interrupted me…
Back to regularly scheduled snark. Taibbi discusses his parents who were both journalists: My father had a saying: “The story’s the boss.” In the American context, if the facts tell you the Republicans were the primary villains in this or that disaster, you write that story. If the facts point more at Democrats, you go…
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More wasted energy
Rehashing from a few weeks ago: = = = = = START REHASH: What the world needs now is NOT love, sweet or otherwise. The real tragedy of the bitcoin/NFT/DAO crap is identical to the real tragedy of the hippie crap. Both were motivated by youthful idealism, and both ruthlessly exploited the idealism to gain…
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Parkinson, not cheating
Via UncommonDescent, suspicion falls on the work of a Nobel-winner in genetics. Several research articles co-authored by Nobel-prizewinning geneticist Gregg Semenza are being investigated by publishers after internet sleuths raised concerns about the integrity of images in the papers. Journals have already retracted, corrected or expressed concerns about 17 papers over the past decade, and…
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Kirn misses it
Here he balances out yesterday’s precise hit! We’re in what I’d term the “taste destruction” phase of cultural change. It’s similar to what food co’s did once to wean us off good food and prepare us for products like Wonder Bread, only it involves language, images, and music. You’ll accept less once you forget there…
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Avi does Carver
Avi makes a nice strong Carverian point in this piece. He’s discussing astronomical stuff like gravitational waves and spectral lines. In each case the theoreticians predicted that the signal would never be there, or at best would be ferociously hard to detect among the noise. In each case the signal was perfectly obvious after the…
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Stacks, not Savannahs
Sharp observation from Gary Smith, discussing the perils of letting stats lead you around by the nose: Our distant ancestors benefitted from noticing that elephants could lead them to water and that wildebeest stampedes might warn them of predators. The best pattern spotters were more likely to survive and reproduce, passing on their pattern-recognition skills…
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Thinking like an astronomer
Avi is an astronomer, so it’s not shocking that he thinks like an astronomer. The ultimate goal of his project: = = = = = I am often asked why the Galileo Project aims to collect its own data on UAP rather than rely on numerous images taken by cell phone cameras. The reason is…
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Big news for the renaissance
Avi Loeb has achieved solid crowdfunding for his project to investigate a meteorite. He considers this particular rock found in New Guinea to be a possible UFO. This is a BIG development toward the PROPER functioning of science. Since 1946 (of course) the military has sucked up all potential UFOs and all information about the…
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Special yup
An article at Brownstone hits all the right points about the “virus”, in the usual overly cautious Brownstone way. I want to single it out for special kudos because FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE a commentator grasped the basic truth about colleges: In some past golden age, we like to think that university…
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More BIG
Wesley Smith hits hard on two BIG corrections in BIG medical topics. Two longstanding orthodoxies have been PROVED wrong. 1. Depression is caused by biochemistry. Wrong but probably not fraudulent. 2. Alzheimers is caused by plaque. Wrong and deliberate fraud. THIS IS BIG. I already know 1 is wrong, because I’ve figured out non-chemical ways…
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Possible answer
Convective thought, triggered by the ascendance of Sunak as Boris’s replacement. Fact 1: In the last 10 years, immigrants from India have been filling the elite slots that were formerly held by Anglos and Jews. This is happening in NYC banking, in Silicon Valley tech, and in some parts of academia. Now the new elites…
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How old?
Earlier I mentioned a 1953 interview with science writer Ruth Moore, who was pushing her book Man, Time and Fossils. I decided to buy the book, mainly as spiritual ‘pay for value’. I opened it, not expecting much of substance, and got a tremendous surprise. This is the best non-fiction book I’ve ever read. Moore…
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Beyond convergence
Looking for a link, I noticed my earlier discussions of the fake “free university” in Austin. Decided it was time for another peek at their website. The main banner still shows their lack of real purpose. They’re waiting for accreditation instead of going ahead and running some classes. Dammit, rent a suite of offices and…
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Model of the solution
MindMatters is worrying about hard-to-detect deepfakes in “scientific” research. As with replication, this is not a serious problem, and doesn’t affect real research. The real problem is tenure and federal funding. Quantity, not quality. The vast QUANTITY of low QUALITY papers is a direct result of tenure and grants. These papers don’t matter because real…
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More rambling on UATX
Most of our institutions are stuck in a Parkinsonian positive feedback loop, often without any real reason. Corporations and universities and media channels keep punching and torturing and strangling their customers, and then they wonder why their customers are running away. Life is negative feedback. If the current path is leading to failure, try something…
Polistra's Mill 