Ben Taylor @VoxDei@social.cleverlibre.org

Around 40,000 junior doctors in the UK began a three-day walkout on Monday. It's expected to be even more disruptive to the healthcare system than recent strikes by nurses and ambulance staff.

Why are the British suddenly so strike-happy?

Double-digit inflation has spurred a wave of strikes across the UK not seen for 40 years. While French and German workers want to maintain standards, British workers are trying to get back what they've lost.

https://www.dw.com/en/why-the-british-are-suddenly-so-strike-happy/a-64965078

#UK #Strikes #Strike #NHS

Nice to see the sun this morning for a change. taken shortly after sunrise on my way back down Glastonbury Tor. Portrait format so might need a click.
#glastonbury #glastonburytor #somerset #landscapephotography #sunrise #sunrisephotography

Documentary film crew in a computer room in the 1970s caused system crashed because their camera flashes were setting off the reflective End Of Tape sensors on all of the reel-to-reel drives

Never get tired a this un...

"Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones.
But no.
Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed.
Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die.
You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food.
You are meat for prowling beasts.
No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.
A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery.
Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts, Mead said."

We are at our best when we serve others.
Be civilized.

“Ah," said Mr. Pin. "Right. I remember. You are concerned citizens." He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where 'traditional values' meant 'hang someone'.
― Terry Pratchett

Two years since the new version of google icons and the struggle is still real

1/2 When I read an article published in PNAS in 2013 by Starr et al. claiming that the ability to discriminate the number of items in visual sets in infants was a significant and specific predictor of their future ability to understand the rudiments of mathematics, it seemed to me too good to be true and too important to believe it without at least an independent replica of the results…

Good grief! In place of MOTD Women's super league, BBC has substituted a programme by that well-known impartial GBNews presenter, Neil Oliver,
They must be kidding!

A short argument for why the big publishers cannot be part of a publishing reform effort

Science is stuck in a vicious cycle it is hard to escape from. The decision to publish a scientific paper is made based on an evaluation of its likely importance and technical correctness. Scientists are evaluated based on these publication decisions, and resources (jobs, grants and promotions) are distributed accordingly.

The current system distorts scientific priorities. Science is incredibly competitive, resources are allocated on a short term basis, and the primary metric used to evaluate scientists is their publication record. As a consequence, there is an unavoidable pressure to select problems and design studies that can lead to results that are likely to be favourably evaluated and published in the short term. This is in opposition to the long term scientific value, a fact that appears to be widely acknowledged by working scientists (https://www.vox.com/2016/7/14/12016710/science-challeges-research-funding-peer-review-process).

The current system is a vicious cycle and stable equilibrium. In principle, we could choose to evaluate scientists and their work in a better way. However, no individual or small group can do this alone. If an institution chooses to hire scientists who do work that they believe will be of enduring scientific value despite being unlikely to win short term grant funding, they will take a huge financial hit. Public research is under such severe resource constraints that this is simply not feasible for most institutions even if they wished to do so. Similarly, a public funding body that makes decisions based on long term scientific value and not short term publishability is likely to be able to count fewer high profile papers in their output, and compared to other funding bodies will appear to be underperforming when they are reviewed at the government level. Individual scientists have even less flexibility than these institutions.

Journal prestige cements this problem. It is the widespread availability of an easily calculated metric based on journal prestige that makes this cycle so hard to break. If there were no such metric, different groups could try different approaches and the effect would not be so obvious in the short term. The availability of the metric forces all institutions to follow the same strategy, and makes it hard to deviate from this strategy.

The majority of big publishers commercial value rests on their journal prestige. If there were no funding implications to publishing in one journal rather than another, scientists would be free to choose based on price or features. There are widely available solutions with better features at virtually no cost. Consequently, the entire business model of these publishers would collapse without the journal prestige signal.

Big publishers therefore cannot be part of the needed reforms. The success of these reforms would untie the evaluation of the quality of scientific work from the journal it is published in, and this would destroy the business model of these publishers. They will therefore do everything in their power to resist such reform.

Divorcing from the big publishers will not be enough. Journal prestige is the cement of the current negative stable equilibrium, but eliminating that will not guarantee a globally better system. We need systems for publishing and evaluating science that is diverse and under the control of researchers. This is what we intend to do with Neuromatch Open Publishing (https://nmop.io/).

Just read an article about chatgpt "lying" about someone being dead and it's like "I asked it for the link to the obituary but it doubled down on the lie and provided a fake link instead" and I'm begging people to understand that it's a statistical model, it doesn't know it's lying so it can't "double down". The statistically probably answer to "where is the link" is not "I'm sorry I made it all up", it's a link. It doesn't even know what a link is, it just knows vaguely what one looks like so you're basically asking it "generate a plausible looking link to an obituary in the guardian" and it did

The AI isn't malevolent, it's just NOT AI

By 2024, social media will be a flood of human and synthetic videos, each vying to be more engaging than the last

But humans have limits. The machines don't. They will outproduce and overwhelm any level of human contribution

Read @mpesce's latest column https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/08/generative_ai_viral_video/

#bot
Original tweet : https://nitter.fdn.fr/TheRegister/status/1633569367991652353

Microsoft’s official @dotnet sent its first Mastodon post today.

Pay attention to the domain: dotnet.social.

Which means Microsoft is operating their own Mastodon community server.

@dotnet account was registered in November, but it became active today.

Clearly, Microsoft sees the Fediverse as core to marketing to developers. I wonder what other brands they’ll bring to the Fediverse as well.

https://dotnet.social/@dotnet/109990127969245035

@fediversenews

Hello world! Elon Musk picking a twitter fight with Icelandic philanthropist and man of the year 2022 Haraldur Thorleifsson ended up being the final push that we needed, so now we are here on Mastodon. We don't know how any of this works, but follow us for posts on vision science, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, and stupid memes.

Margaret Hamilton, NASA's lead developer for the Apollo program, standing next to all the code she wrote by hand that took humanity to the moon in 1969.

#InternationalWomensDay

"The modern British right are doing all they can to reframe basic humanity as a vice. It really isn’t Gary Lineker whose job should be on the line today." https://www.newstatesman.com/quickfire/2023/03/defence-gary-lineker

@DeliaChristina

In 1999 to 2000 I was going through a very rough patch in my life. What with the state of things, I didn't get to see #GalaxyQuest when it was first released. Finally, on a day I was feeling particularly low, and shortly before the movie left the theaters, I canceled work and took myself out to a midday matinée.

I was the *only* person in a vast theater, of a size that no one builds anymore, sitting and waiting for the lights to go down. At one point, I turned and peered up at the projectionist's booth. I saw a shadowy figure moving back and forth behind the window, bending and straightening. This was in the days before automated, digital films. The Phantom Menace had been released digitally in 1999, but the equipment to show such films was extremely expensive and most theaters hadn't converted yet; "projectionist" was still real job.

While I was looking, the figure paused, strode to the window and peered back at me, then disappeared quickly.

I turned back around and continued to fidget and ponder the misfit pieces of my life.

At the top of the aisle behind me, the theater door swung open and banged loudly on the wall. The projectionist strode down the aisle toward me, a tall barrel-shaped man with a thick beard and glasses. My first thought was that the matinee was canceled due to low turnout, and I'd be getting a refund. Just as I'd resigned myself to that, the marching projectionist shouted out in a booming voice,

"WELCOME to your PRIVATE viewing oooooooof GALAXY QUEST!!!"

He stopped in front of my row, and I saw that he had an *armload* of STUFF. One by one, he began presenting each thing to me, and as the pile in his arms dwindled, the one in my lap grew.

"As our SPECIAL VIP Galaxy Quest GUEST today, YOU are entitled to..."

"- A commemorative t-shirt!"
"- A poster suitable for framing!"
"- A limited edition refrigerator magnet!"
"- A button to pin to your lapel!"

The list and the shwag went on. With every ridiculous item, I laughed harder and harder, until there were tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes.

Then he bowed and shouted, "WE HOPE YOU ENJOY THE SHOW!" and turned on his heel to march back up the aisle and out the exit door.

Alas, of all the shwag only the magnet has stood the test of time. But the humor and kindness of the unknown projectionist lives on.

"The disconnect is designed to prevent any software — even with root or kernel privileges in macOS, and even the software on the T2 chip or other firmware — from engaging the microphone when the lid is closed"

Hardware microphone disconnect https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/security/secbbd20b00b/web

The Council of Elrond is the "follow up meeting" where the client acts baffled that all the stuff you said would bite them in the arse, did.

MORTALS: This ring of power didn't work the way we wanted
ELROND: Worked the way I told you it would. Mordor is that way. Have fun.

Remember, the only elf that volunteers to join the Fellowship on the Second Mordor Project is the one who wasn't around for the first one.