Magnus Borgh

@Hassaan_PHY Yes and no. The arXiv came into existence in 1991, when the print journal was still considered the “official” publication and was an Internet extension of the tradition of sharing physical preprints, which was already strong. But it does serve the purpose of democratising access.

Putting your paper on arxiv after publishing isn't meaningless or redundant. The original aim of arxiv was to democratize research and provide anybody with an internet connection access to research papers. If your published version is behind a paywall, not everyone can access it, and putting your paper on arxiv after publishing makes it available to a wider readership. #research

@Kaju_Nut @WKCosmo And Hawking and Penrose were/are widely and deservedly known for very solid and important scientific results. Maybe Kaku deserves to be, but he is not. Should Hawking and Penrose have been called out more? Probably. But their public track record probably helped them.

@WKCosmo To be fair, Kaku got a pass for a pretty long time too. Also, Penrose at least doesn't seem to be saying things for clout

The thing that I wonder about is how Hawking and Penrose repeatedly got away with saying equally stupid shit — nobody complains that Hawking was a publicity hound or a "science populist", even though he was one of the worst offenders.

@PhysWiz @peterrhague Maybe, but a more interesting question (to me) is how many have (or could somewhat easily get) ability to charge at home, yet opt for non-plug-in hybrid. The real advantage for the plug-in is regular home charging, surely?

@peterrhague Lack of confidence in charging infrastructure, so seen as a pointless additional expense?

The popularity of non-plugin hybrids in the UK is perhaps something to ponder. Why aren’t buyers going for the plugin option which overall saves money?

@Quasilocal I have a subscription. I would love for us to have a cite licence, but we don’t and I won’t hold my breath. And yes, it means I “own” some collaborative projects because I’m the one with the subscription.

For years I've avoided Overleaf, but somehow recently got sucked in. Do you people who use it regularly actually have subscriptions or just find some friend to "own" all your documents so you can add more collaborators? (Kinda like Netflix)

@NyteOwlDave1964 @peterrhague Also not just when the command means actually irretrievable data loss, but also when reversing the action is costly (restoring from back-up can cost both time and hassle) making the confirmation step worth it. Cost v. benefit.

@peterrhague Dynamic state sometime exists in RAM only. Flushing RAM without writing to persistent storage can happen. Granted it's rare in modern software, yet it can happen.

How did we allow popups to become a thing? When you flick a light switch, it doesn’t refuse to turn the light on until you’ve confirmed that, no, you don’t want to sign up for a month free LightSwitchPro. When you press the lever on your toaster, it doesn’t inform you the toast will get hot and ask if you’re sure. The correct interface choice is always, every single time, that the Do The Thing button should Do The Thing.

@Quasilocal @CburgesCliff @Science_George Yes, I was going to quip that “poster does not believe people over 40 exist”. 😁 And I very vaguely remember my dad writing a cheque when I was a small child. After that I never saw one again until I came to the US in the early 2000s, and only wrote one myself in UK later.

@SpinVector @CburgesCliff @Science_George Yep basically anyone over 40 ticks every box here. The cheque is the only weird one because it feels more American than old 😅

All 20 for me.

@CburgesCliff @Science_George And Gen X and the oldest Milennials. Type writers, cheques and fax machines are marginal cases (the latter two only because cheques were still a thing in the UK when I moved here and APS bizarrely insisted on fax for DAMOP-registration < 10 yrs ago).

@Science_George Me too. Though I'm sure he knows that the same holds for essentially every boomer

@erikssondan Braveheart har jag inte sett på minst 20 år – definitivt dags igen! – men såg hela Terminator-serien för ett par, tre år sedan. T1 och T2 håller båda fortfarande utmärkt. Resten är, som väntat, mellan meh och rent skräp.

Såg Braveheart med min son igår. Den håller än. Ikväll ska vi se Terminator (första alltså). Där är jag mer osäker...

@DannyDrinksWine That’s one of the most impressively missed points I have ever seen! And what a depressingly narrow-minded, distrusting view of audiences!

John Cassavetes on why he is against movies like Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" (1971): "There’s a difference between being violent and having violent emotions. There’s a difference between anger and the act of shooting somebody in the face. I’ve never known anyone in my life that ever shot anyone in the face. And I’ve seen it on the screen too many times. There’s no morality there, no feeling of anything for anyone. It’s a lie to say that people are violent. There are more good people than there are bad people. To see constant terror builds a nation, builds moviegoers that can only love constant terror. We become used to it, inured to it like doctors knowing they have to be tough. They can’t think of that person with tenderness, but must be dispassionate. There’s a lot of violence in 'Minnie and Moskowitz' (1971) but violence that I can understand. Violent feelings, but nobody ki!!s anybody or shoots anyone or knifes anybody. Without having seen 'A Clockwork Orange' (1971), I know, because I know the story. I really couldn’t go to see it, because I don’t want to see people ki!! each other. I don’t want to see any more hostility toward one another. I just don’t want to see that reflected any more. I’m tired of violence and dehumanization. I think the artist has a tremendous obligation to bring trust to people. Because the only thing we don’t have time for is ourselves. We can’t live with ourselves if we have no respect for our life and the human condition and the foibles that exist in all of us – then we have no tolerance, we’re all Nazis. We can’t survive with people being that inhuman. It’s impossible. I look at 'A Clockwork Orange' and ask, why did Stanley make it? Did he make it for anyone in particular? Why did he choose a story like that, in this day and age? For what: to incite a revolution, to stop everything? Maybe that would be OK, if he really believed that, but I don’t believe it. I don’t know why he made it. The more films are made about insanity, the more fashionable it will become. And, eventually, as we become more and more dehumanized, there will be no answers for anyone. You can’t get any pleasure out of being an animal. There should be a Kubrick who can make that film and show that life can be violent and harsh. But, on the other hand, where are the equalizing forces of happiness? Art films, in stressing the weakness of society, have lost their balance. The majority of people would rather be filled with illusion than disillusion. And we just have to find some way to reflect that. Not just to constantly say, ‘Oh, God, things are wrong and all, and I don’t know what to do about it.’" ('Cassavetes on Cassavetes', edited by Ray Carney, 2001)

@arthistorynews For what job? If he’s hiring someone to design aeroplanes and prefers an English literature graduate over an engineer, he’s a certifiable moron, for other jobs the English grad was always the obvious choice. For what job is there a genuine question?

There was an employer on the radio only this morning saying that in an AI age, he's going to be favouring humanities graduates over STEM.

@wartsandbrawls @MarieofGuise @amwilson_opera This is where I see the biggest problem with AI cheating: hand-in assignments and similar that count for a proportion of module marks but not enough to make it worth the investment of setting up a full essay + viva exam.

@wartsandbrawls @MarieofGuise @amwilson_opera I had something similar on a semi-advanced maths module back when I was a student in Uppsala. There are many ways to do oral exams but most don’t work for large student numbers and not when added as vivas *on top of* hand-ins and written final exams to be marked.

1. AI cheating is real. 2. Yes we can design assessments to include AI at the outset. 3. Those assessments are shit.

@wartsandbrawls @MarieofGuise @amwilson_opera But an important function of the PhD viva is to establish that you know what you’re talking about, i.e., that it’s your own work. This has been proposed as a way of mitigating AI-cheating in hand-in assessment. The problem is that it’s ridiculously resource intensive.

@wartsandbrawls @MarieofGuise @amwilson_opera Sure, but we’re clearly using “exam” in the established undergrad-context shorthand for in-person, invigilated, written examination here, which is the obvious AI-proof assessment form already in use in much of undergrad HE.

@wartsandbrawls Not sure why you would conclude 3. I’ll concede that we (myself very much included) suck at constructing AI-inclusive assessments, but I don’t see why it should be fundamentally impossible. On the contrary, there are good reasons it will be necessary, not to do with cheating.

So yeah, we should watch DPS and feel that poetry, beauty, romance, and love are things to stay alive for, and that an anti-authoritarian streak is not a bad thing sometimes. And absolutely read “The Secret History” in first year of uni. Then learn from real teachers.

Even the fictionalised versions of actual teachers such as Gruwell in Freedom Writers or Riley in October Sky are unlikely as literal pedagogical role models, but the films have a point (and the latter is a very good *and* inspirational film to boot).

Almost as if Keating is a fictional character. Taking him literally as a pedagogical model is a category mistake. Keating in DPS, Watson in Mona Lisa Smile, Hunham in The Holdovers – none would work as literal models in real life, all have a point in works of art.

@drianpace One could almost be led to think he’s a fictional character 😉 You’re right, of course, but taking DPS literally as a proposed pedagogical model would a mistake, regardless of whether you’d propose to do what Keating does or oppose it.

Agree. Keating is a charismatic demagogue, not a teacher who provides pupils with the skills to read poetry.

@TSHamiltonAstro @aryehazan And the thing here is that the technique in this case is both simple and useful (and many of us just invent it ourselves because it’s quite obvious), but the “pedagogical” illustration makes such a hash of it that *that* becomes complicated to decipher. Complete failure.

@aryehazan This was our experience, too. We both have Ph.D.s in physics, but we were frequently mystified by our daughters' math homework assignments. no textbook to bring home, only worksheets. These used jargon that wasn't explained & techniques that were unnecessarily complicated.

I am no Expert in Education, but here is a pedagogical hill I'm willing to die on if the parents can't make sense out of an elementary school math problem then it has no business being assigned whatever it is you think you're doing, you're doing it wrong