From my understanding when you click on the lemmit.online link it brings you to a redirected archive, not the actual link.
Even still, I agree because it’s annoying having posts with guaranteed no comments. Those posts only work if there is engagement surrounding it. No engagement and it’s just spam.
I’d just give you a regular ass large fry if you ordered that.
If you ask for extra lettuce and get a second leaf for free most places won’t bat an eye. But there’s usually a way things are portioned the way they are. Nobody wants a burger that’s one 1/8th pound patty and 3 inches worth of solid lettuce.
There used to be a subway or Quiznos commercial that went something like, “'Cause nobody wants a salad on a bun.” I would see it and think, “Me. I do. I want a salad on a bun.” WTH’s wrong with a burger that’s one 1/8th pound patty and 3 inches worth of solid lettuce?
Often factories want to get the maximum use out of their equipment since it’s very expensive and only lasts some finite number of years. Many factories run 24 hours a day in rotating shifts to minimize the downtime of their machinery.
I used to work EMS 12 hour shifts 6-6. At one point management decided to stagger base start times. Some 6-6, others 7-7 & 8-8. So when someone flips their car and flies out at 5:45 they don’t have to wait for all the available service to finish their shift change, when the 8-8 team has 2 hours left they can get to the patient and back to base without extending their duty day too far.
Many of the workers who went 8-8 hated it. They complained nonstop about how it ruined their whole day since day shift they are headed out the door before the fam eats breakfast and get home after dinner. Same for night shift, rush through dinner or miss dinner and breakfast with the family.
Personally I enjoyed the 7-7/8-8 shifts more but enough people bitched enough they changed all but 1 base back to 6-6.
Huh. So it seems to me that when the job requires 12 hour shifts, the employees require at least one meal with their family, and the most common solution is to start early enough to let the employees make it home for dinner.
Yeah, not sure if I answered your question in regards to what you were thinking about but this specific scenario the 6am start time worked better for many of those with families.
It’s like that for the most medical communities. Some nurses and docs spend a full week at the hospital. We were an air ambulance so the FAA limited us to 12 hour shifts but many ambulance, fire fighters etc. are 24-72 hour shifts.
My wife had a super cool phone that would slide up to reveal a full keyboard. Really slick. Her favorite phone to this day, her Nexus 5 was a close second.
Say it with me, the ethnonationalist settler colony Israel is conducting a genocide on the Palestinian people. This is happening in front of our eyes. We can see it unfolding in real time. It’s not too late for you to stop supporting a genocidal state and be on the right side of history instead. And let me say it very explicitly. The right side of history is the side of the Palestinian people.
I mean Jesus was born in Palestine and there are still many Christian Palestinians, some of them living in Betlehem, the birthplace of Jesus.
There’s even many news reports about how Christmas in Betlehem is canceled. I know it’s hard to comprehend but shit is really that serious. This year’s Christmas is canceled in the birthplace of Christmas.
The religious fruitcake portion of my family. I’m so tired of listening how they’re afraid of everything. This year it was the horror of how my state legalized weed, abortion, and some Disney movie had “gay stuff” in it and how thats bad because the movie is meant for kids.
Same here!, although we call her by the Spanish version “Robotina”. Just in the hopes that more of the stuff from the Jetsons actually comes to fruition.
My dog was a big tall greyhound, and one time he was humped by another dog - a tiny Yorkshire terrier. It was clinging to his hock (ankle) and banging away for dear life, while my dog ignored it. Its owner and I were both laughing too hard to do anything about it, it was a ludicrous sight.
Science articles that reference paywalled journals you can’t actually read. Most of them are probably making stuff up because they know no one will be able to call them out on it.
First, let me start off by saying that I agree with what I believe your actual premise is (or should be) - that articles in science journals should not be behind paywalls. I’m strictly against the practice, I think it’s a massive scam, and so does everyone I know who does research. I have paid to open source every paper I’ve published. Well, not me personally. But thank you taxpayers for funding me to not only do my work but to make sure you have access to it too. I’ll talk about this more at the end.
With that out of the way, I’d like to mention a couple of things. First, the scam is on the part of the academic journals, not the researchers or the journalists writing the articles. It’s not part of some scam to hide the fact that the journalist is making crap up. If the authors were unwilling or unable to pay the fees for open sourcing their papers ($3-5k when I was doing it several years ago), then you’re either going to be in an institution that has a subscription to the journal or you’re going to have to find some way of acquiring it.
Search for the exact title in quotes. Sometimes the Google Scholar engine will return with the default link to the pay walled page, sometimes it’ll have a link to a prepublication server. Arxiv is one of the more popular ones for physics, math, and computer science of all stripes. Step 2 is to go to the institution web page of the first author. Very often, researchers will keep an updated list of their publications with links to the PDFs. If that still doesn’t work, you can write the author and request the paper. We love those emails. We love it when people read our work, especially when they’re so excited that they wrote to request a copy. None of these involve copyright infringement. That prepub that you get is the same paper (usually but you can confirm with the author if that’s a question), but possibly without the masthead and layout from the journal. It’s still cited the same.
So, why are so many journals behind a paywall? Because the publishers want to monetize what today should be a cost free (or minimal) set of transactions. Here’s what happens:
I have an idea for some research. If it’s good and I’m lucky, I get money from the government (or whomever) to do the work, and I use it to pay my expenses (salaries, materials, equipment, whatever). I also get taxed on it by my institution so they can pay the admins and other costs. When submitting a proposal, those are all line items in your budget. If you’re doing expensive research at an expensive institution, it’s pretty trivial to set aside $10-20k for pub fees. If your entire grant was $35k, that’s a lot harder to justify.
You write the paper after doing the work. You don’t get paid to write the paper specifically - it’s part of the research that you are doing. The point here is that, unlike book authors, researchers see zero of any money you’d pay for the article. If you do locate a copyrighted copy, you’re not taking a dime out of my pocket. Again, just thrilled someone’s reading the damn thing.
You pick a journal and send it in. The journal has a contact list of researchers and their fields, and sends out requests for reviewers. They usually require 2 or 3.
The reviewers read the paper making notes on questions they have and recommend revisions before publication. Reviewing is an unpaid service researchers do because we know that’s how it works. The irony is that it challenges the academic notion of the tragedy of the commons. You could be a freeloader and never review, but enough people do it that the system keeps rolling.
You revise, reviewers approve, publisher accepts and schedules date. There can be some back and forth here (this is a legitimate publisher expense, but the level of effort and interaction isn’t like with a book editor).
Your paper comes out.
As you can see, the role of the publisher is very small in the overall amount of effort put into getting an idea from my head into yours. At one point publishers had an argument that the small circulation numbers for things like The Journal of Theoretical Biology justified their $21k/year institutional subscription price.
And I shouldn’t have saved this til the end, but for the one person who skimmed down to see where all of this was going:
Any science article / press release that cites a paper whether or not you have access to it at least is citing something that has undergone peer review. Peer review can only do so much and journal quality has a wide range, but it’s about the best we have. If it’s a big enough deal to actually matter and the media in question has wide enough reach to care, then it will get back to the author who can then clarify.
Appreciate the thoughtful and in-depth response. My worry is more that a science article’s editorialized interpretation of the paper may be wrong or misleading, than that the public isn’t very able to scrutinize the quality of science in the paper itself. Waiting for a possible email response from a researcher is pretty much always going to be a little too high effort for someone wanting to spend a few minutes comparing claims in the article and claims in the paper to potentially call bullshit on discrepancies between them in an online comment.
I absolutely agree with you there. I just commented a short time ago on an article about the effects of primate vocalizations on the human brain. The article not only got the conclusion of the paper wrong, they got the very nature of evolution wrong. I didn’t even have to read the paper - I haven’t gotten to it yet. It’s admittedly the kind of mistake non-biologists make. Journalists should probably avoid drawing conclusions that aren’t specifically in the source material. My point is that, going off of the author’s quotes the pulled and my own knowledge of evolutionary dynamics, I knew it was wrong. However, I am not at all sure that someone without a background in biology would be able to understand the paper well enough to catch the error in the article.
I am all for open access, and I share your frustration. I think you should be able to access any paper you want for free. But I’ll also say that if you don’t have the background in the subject to know what the underlying paper will have said, the chances are pretty good that you’re not going to understand the paper well enough to find the flaws.
I used to talk to a physicist named Lee Smolin who proposed a Darwinian model for universe formation. I can follow the evolutionary part, but when it gets down to the physics of it, I’m lost at sea. So when I read an article about him - I read something about him recently - I mostly have to go on my basic understanding because there’s no way I’d make it through that paper.
And literally the only reason I’m throwing this out there at all is that, unlike a physics paper that’s totally incomprehensible and obviously so, people believe in their own interpretations on social science or public health papers. I see more kinds of cherry-picking abuses and simple misunderstandings there than elsewhere.
I think most of the time it’s really not going to be as hard as all that, because the problem is something like, article makes broad claim based on a very easy to understand study where the data is results of survey questions. The paper clearly and explicitly outlined caveats and qualifications for their results, but the article chose to ignore these, so all that would be required to call them out on it is basic reading comprehension and the ability to copy paste a brief quote from the paper. Or maybe there are stark, obvious differences between the question asked in a survey and the claim of a clickbait headline.
Even for something more complex, if the paper is well written I think people without a background in the field could get stuff out of it, at least enough to spot direct contradictions between it and a summary. It’s just reading. A lot of people can read and have some higher education.
For that wikipedia article, I think it would make more sense if it expanded on “may differ slightly” and how that interacts with this criticism of black hole information transfer being impossible. Would that criticism imply the parameters for new universes must be always the same? Have infinite variance with no reference point? Not exist at all? Is “may differ slightly” a claim that each universe is a reference point around which the cosmological constants of child universes randomly vary a little bit and then there could be drift based on which constants result in a universe with more black holes? If that stuff was concisely clarified it would probably seem less arcane.
I’ve had a field day while writing my thesis recently, realising I could bypass the paywalls by accessing the papers through the university proxy. It’s still bs, though, because it leaves this stuff only accessible to researchers and not your regular people who may be interested.
Though like PrinceWith999Enemies said, many paper writers will happily send you a copy if you email them about it.
To add onto that, whenever a newspaper says “based on the findings of researchers at [Random University]” but they don’t list the citation anywhere at all. That is just evil, but somehow industry standard.
The term is metonym. It is when you use a characteristic or associated attribute of a thing as the name of that thing. A classic example would be “the crown” when talking about the monarch or “The Whitehouse” when talking about the president.
Indeed. Oftentimes they kinda resolve their cognitive dissonance by saying ‘Ah, you got a fiance, you have to say that wink’. As if there is no other logical explanation.
AFAIA, The pudding part is because pudding referred to meat dishes long before it was used for sweet dishes, and yorkshire pudding used to be exclusively served with meat - which is likely tightly linked to the original meaning of toad in the hole!
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