zlatiah

joined 2 weeks ago
 

Let's not say the quiet part out loud.

This is a data visualization of three papers on this topic by the Nature team. The three papers are listed below (all are open access!). You are not misreading them (including the second paper), the titles mean what they say.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

Based on my understanding of how these things work: Yes, probably no, and probably no... I think the map is just a "catalogue" of what things are, not at the point where we can do fancy models on it

This is their GitHub account, anyone knowledgeable enough about research software engineering is welcomed to give it a try

There are a few neuroscientists who are trying to decipher biological neural connections using principles from deep learning (a.k.a. AI/ML), don't think this is a popular subfield though. Andreas Tolias is the first one that comes to my mind, he and a bunch of folks from Columbia/Baylor were in a consortium when I started my PhD... not sure if that consortium is still going. His lab website (SSL cert expired bruh). They might solve the second two statements you raised... no idea when though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks! I think this is it... because I guess the more important part to this trope is that "hehe this is actually the world that you - dear viewer - lives in"... the high-fantasy part is secondary and depends on the genre I guess.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 17 hours ago

I... agree. Did get a lot of great recommendations tho!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

East Asia; again, never heard anyone refer to "24/7" specifically (ok maybe at more hipster places that try to imitate American businesses?)... There might be a similar idiom for it but I genuinely couldn't think of any off the top of my head

 

I'm embarrassed to say that I have encountered this, this particular type of story on multiple occasions... So I got curious, is there a name to this trope?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I have actually never heard anyone say it this way specifically where I grew up... so technically the answer is "no"?

I tried to dug around and found a Reddit post saying this:

"The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the term as "twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; constantly". It lists its first reference to 24/7 to be from a 1983 story in the US magazine Sports Illustrated in which Louisiana State University player Jerry Reynolds describes his jump shot in just such a way: 24-7-365."

So this might be a fairly new idiom? Which would explain why it's not really a thing in a lot of cultures... but I assume they have their ways of referring to this.

number of hours and days are the same

Ok akktually Japan has a rather interesting 30-hour day thing in the context of businesses... but jokes aside, the 24-hour, 7-day week system is indeed quite universal

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I realized that I had allergies during the height of the pandemic... so the short answer is it gave me way too much unnecessary stress because I was constantly worried whether I got COVID-19.

  • Depends... I felt most times it was just "did I finally catch covid or is this just allergy?", there was once or twice when it got really bad though.
  • There was once when I had such a bad allergy that my eyes both flared up and I could barely see... It was bad enough that I reached out to the allergy department of my provider as soon as I was functional & got me into immunotherapy.
  • Not meds, but I did 3+ years of immunotherapy: 1+ year of getting allergen injections every week (thankfully still had a car back then), and then once per month of maintenance after I reached the highest dose. Had to stop because of relocation/insurance nonsense... but I think the treatment worked.
  • No you're not being a big baby, please take your health seriously and stay safe & healthy.
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Dash low sodium seasoning

No idea lol... But DASH is a real NIH-supported diet (https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/education/dash-eating-plan).

Edit: the study obviously isn't sponsored by the seasoning company, but I'm not sure if the DASH diet itself is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

“academic honorable discharge”

I am aware of this happening in multiple cases involving scientific fraud... no idea how exactly this is being done though.

But did the low sodium diet itself serve any factor in the violence that occured in this botched study?

Not sure... but even without dietary interventions, there are a lot of simple explanations to how this could have gone wrong. This was a much larger study than the Camp Calcium series this PI did, a lot of the recruited kids are low income/from problematic households, with very little to no adult oversight, and there were very few activities for entertainment/enrichment... Also the dorm they lived in was technically separated by gender, but let's just say that it is not difficult to get to the other gender dorm... So yeah.

 

"... Researchers are hoping to do that now that they have a new map — the most complete for any organism so far — of the brain of a single fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). The wiring diagram, or ‘connectome’, includes nearly 140,000 neurons and captures more than 54.5 million synapses, which are the connections between nerve cells.

... The map is described in a package of nine papers about the data published in Nature today. Its creators are part of a consortium known as FlyWire, co-led by neuroscientists Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung at Princeton University in New Jersey."

See the associated Nature collection: The FlyWire connectome: neuronal wiring diagram of a complete fly brain, which also has links to the nine papers

All nine papers are open access!

[–] [email protected] 33 points 5 days ago (4 children)

This got me into a way bigger rabbit hole than I remembered... The person is not officially "fired" since you cannot fire a tenured, distinguished professor and a former department head, but I suspect she was persuaded to leave. The incident is quite wild, I was just a random undergrad hired to do lab tests so I only knew some details.

This is about Dr. Connie Weaver, professor emeritus and former department head at Purdue's Department of Nutrition Sciences (her ORCiD). She was known for nutrition research where the institution recruits adolescents summer-camp style (similar to a clinical trial), and in 2017 she started to lead a multi-year (lasted one month before it was shut down) study on low-sodium diets in adolescents, Camp DASH. Supposed to be a gold-standard diet study... close to 10 million dollars of NIH money on the line too.

And then things went off the rail. The operation tried to cut a lot of corners: pretty much all of the employees were undergraduates who couldn't find other things to do for the summer, training was minimal or nonexistent, and the employees-to-camper ratio was very, very low... oddly similar to the recent MrBeast incident where participation oversight seems to be very bad.

This then led to sexual harassment, abuse, etc... one poor girl's nude was shared online, probably more cases of sexual assault, several adolescents got into serious fights with each other, and from what I've heard some of the undergrads who were on supervisory roles were also injured. Several lawsuits were filed, the university stepped in and stopped the study (I just remembered them stop scheduling me to work in July and was wondering what went wrong lol), the issue got elevated to the university president, and more lawsuits...

Obviously tenure means someone should be protected from being terminated at-will like most employment contracts. So the reason I have my suspicion is... Dr. Weaver became a professor emeritus not long after the incident, but is now somehow still publishing work while working from... San Diego State University? Doesn't seem like someone who retired on their own will to me.

If you are interested in the full detail... here are some news articles on this incident. Exponent is Purdue's student-run newspaper

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I have a suspicion it's not just an Alzheimer's issue but rather quite systemic to lots of competitive fields in academia... There definitely needs to be guard rails. I think the sad thing with funding is... these days you have to be exceptionally good at grant writing to even have a chance of getting into the lottery, and it mostly feels like a lottery with success rates in the teens... and apparently no grant=no lab, no career for most ppl (seriously why are most PI roles soft money-funded anyway). Hard to not try and cut the corners if there's so much pressure on the line

Not to mention, apparently even if you are a super ethical PI who wants to do nothing wrong, if the lab gets big enough, there might eventually be some unethical postdoc trying to make it big and falsify data (that you don't have time to check) under your name so... how the hell do people guard against that.

I'm honestly impressed how science is still making progress with all of these random nonsense in the field

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

It's definitely way more prevalent. There actually is this post from Retractionwatch just a few days ago too. This is kind-of a systematic issue induced by how scientific funding & the system works...

My current PI is actually co-mentoring a student who was studying scientific fraud, but the problem is... being a fraud researcher is apparently a really good way to alienate a lot of people, which ensures you never make it in academia (which is heavily dependent on networking/knowing people)... so I don't know how many ppl would seriously study this.

 

A Science News report about Dr. Eliezer Masliah (who held a highly important role at the National Institute of Aging), a 300-page dossier composed of misconducts at his lab, as well as followups... Featuring everyone's favorite research integrity sleuths (Elizabeth Bik, Mu Yang, "Cheshire", ...) and more.

Post URL points to archive.org due to soft paywall on Science News. Here's the original link

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Oh boy. I used to live in Houston, TX, a city notorious for being car-dependent...

I will present three sets of numbers. First is where I first moved to in Houston, in a supposedly highly coveted, super walkable area home to mostly medical students... Second is the place I lived before I moved out (and I used to boast to people how accessible the place was, by US standards). Third is in Chicago, close to city center ("The Loop").

And FYI I only lived in places that would be considered to be within the city, so these might be as small as they can get...

  • To the nearest convenience store: 900m | 750m | 170m
  • To the nearest chain supermarket: 700m(used to be 4.2km) | 450m | 220m
  • To the bus stop: 160m(never seen anyone there though) | 350m | 71m
  • To the nearest park: 950m | 1.5km | 1.6km
  • To the nearest big supermarket: 700m(used to be 4.2km) | 450m | 450m
  • To the nearest library: 1.2km | 450m | 1.0km
  • To the nearest train station: 7.0km | 3.8km | 2.5km

Fun story about the first location! Everything seems so walkable on paper (close to park, close to highway), until you realize that there was no fucking supermarket anywhere within walking distance... H-E-B only opened a store closeby after I moved there. However, even the super-close grocery store is across the highway and I almost never see any sane people walk there so... For parks I am only counting ones that are good enough to be tourist-worthy, otherwise the latter two locations have pretty easy access to lots of green space

And if you are asking about public transit that are not bus/train: respective distances are 1.4km | 1.0km | 280m. The last number in this series is basically how I chose where to live...

 

"Octopuses normally hunt alone, but footage captured by divers has revealed that they can collaborate with fish to find their next meal. The videos, described today in Nature Ecology & Evolution (citation 1), show that the different species even adopt specific roles to maximize the success of joint hunting expeditions."

Associated research article (open access): Sampaio E et al. Multidimensional social influence drives leadership and composition-dependent success in octopus–fish hunting groups. Nature Ecology & Evolution (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02525-2

Same news that was independently reported by Science News (might need membership): https://www.science.org/content/article/some-octopuses-treat-fish-hunting-buddies

 

Forgot what made me think about this topic but I've been considering this for a week or two... Curious what you all think.

When I mean "hardest" "video game", I mean whatever game that you find objectively more difficult than all other ones on the market, as long as it's a video game. I guess exposure to different genres/types of games can influence the answer to this question a lot so... Hence I was curious about your rationale.

I have a pretty solid answer & rationale but I guess I shouldn't share that in the main post to bias results...

 

But how did this name originally come into place in engineering??

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