LetThereBeLight's comments

LetThereBeLight | 2 years ago | on: A mental health crisis in science

A large issue is that PIs have no training on how to manage people nor is there much protection for grad students (and practically none for postdocs). It is surprisingly common to hear stories of sexual harassment, or international researchers essentially being held captive by their advisors. The universities are motivated to maintain their public appearance, and so cases of harassment and mistreatment are either entirely ignored or dealt with quietly. This, in addition to pay issues, is also playing a significant role in the unionization efforts that are taking place across US universities.

LetThereBeLight | 3 years ago | on: The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Funny to see this pop up, it's from 2008. I worked with Martin for quite a few years and we spoke about this article at one point. If I recall, the intended audience of this article is primarily incoming graduate students.The point being that the experience of doing research is very different from taking classes. It is not uncommon to see those who excelled in their undergraduate studies go on to graduate school and be dismayed to find that a PhD program uses a different skill set from getting good grades.

LetThereBeLight | 4 years ago | on: Why We Use Julia, 10 Years Later

I agree, there are a variety of plotting library options in Julia but they aren't nearly as developed/robust as matlab (e.g. quiver plots). There are a number of plotting functions that have completely changed how they work across versions and generally lack descriptive documentation. There have been several occasions where I had to give up and export my data into matlab to generate a plot. I also think the image analysis libraries are underdeveloped.

LetThereBeLight | 4 years ago | on: AI could end foreign-language subtitles

It is striking to me that this article doesn't discuss the negative impact such a technology will have on actors and translators. In fact, the author makes the surprising claim that there is a shortage of translators and voice actors, which is very hard to believe.

LetThereBeLight | 4 years ago | on: A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited more

More specifically, this paper is focused on the social sciences. That's not to say that this isn't present in the basic sciences either.

But one other thing to note here is that these headlines about a "replication crisis" seems to imply that this is a new phenomenon. Let's not forget the history of the electron charge. As Feynman said:

"We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan.2...

LetThereBeLight | 4 years ago | on: Advancing Sports Analytics Through AI Research

I think the main complaints about VAR in football have been the amount of time these decisions take and the inconsistency of the rulings. Instead of the constant play we used to have, now we see players stand around as the screen shows lines drawn in seemingly arbitrary locations to decide whether or not an attacking player was onside before a goal.

In contrast, fans have been fine with the goal-line technology, which gives decisive (usually) and quick results.

The use of AI in this paper seems more relevant for setting team strategies and picking players rather than enforcing rulings.

LetThereBeLight | 4 years ago | on: Lego Microscope

This is correct [1].

> Why the difference in price between Deluxe Individual Kits and Classroom Kits?

>Our mission is to bring bring affordable scientific tools to everyone (not just communities who have the resources - but everyone). For any of this to be possible, our business model balances our cost of operations with offering extremely low-cost (low-profit) products.

>We find this balance through a pricing structure that operates on a 2-tier system: high price point kits for individual Foldscopes (Deluxe Individual Kits), and low price point kits for bulk Foldscopes (Classroom Kits).

>We arrived at this pricing structure for many reasons, but primarily because the reality of fulfillment and shipping means we cannot ship a single Foldscope that costs roughly $1 in parts to produce at a $1 dollar price while being sustainable. Overall, we make a profit only from our high price point kits, this profit allows for us to exist and produce any microscopes at all, and this profit also subsidizes our low price point kits (which we do not profit off of), in which offer Foldscopes for as inexpensive as $1.75 each!

[1] https://www.foldscope.com/faq

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