The kids at private schools are specifically primed for every part of the application process, including the interview and interview questions in a way that state schools simply cannot. It does not matter how smart you are if your competition is able to practice in a way you cannot.
Went to private school and gotta say I went into the whole thing entirely blind - zero priming or coaching, just a begrudging allowing me to escape the prison camp for a night to go for my interview.
To me, the whole Oxbridge education must be distorted by this fierce competition to improve one's "personal brand" by getting a prestigious school on your c.v /resume (or misperception that going to Oxbridge gets you in contact with the best people to learn the subject from, which is clearly untrue, as for starters many great academic staff stay away, unable to afford a family home in such areas). It just means your peers will be rather "type A" , pushing very hard. but does it mean they're actually brilliant minds with novel ideas? Some of them for sure but Oxbridge hardly has a monopoly on that. There must be people whose parents sent them to amazing private schools, and they got pushed towards Oxbridge and one day they wake up and say "I've no idea why I'm doing any of this, its not making me happy and I wish I could be around normal people" ;)
How exactly? the way it's managed at the moment is that the admissions tutors keep an eye on what different schools are doing in terms of prepping their students and keep that in mind when assessing them. Which is exactly what causes the 'bias'. I am significantly more impressed by someone who manages to get good grades with little help than someone who manages to get excellent grades with the most effective teaching of the test that money can buy (having gone to an independent school, I was one of those being 'discriminated' against, but I can well understand that many of my classmates, who primarily good at cramming for the exam and not understanding the material, got very good grades but would not do nearly as well at university. Heck, I got in and struggled way more than I had done before, and more so than many in my year who had worse grades in less good schools)
(I would, in general, be in favor of fixing GCSEs and A-levels. They have persistently moved in a direction that rewards memorisation of particular keywords, something which especially rewards teaching the test, as well as getting easier and especially less good at discriminating the top end of ability accurately. But it's still not going to be enough to remove this difference)
It is, via the interview. This is why A-level results are a coarse filter, and why they have different standards for state vs private schools; state school kids with 3 A's presumably excel in the interview to the same extent as private school kids with 3 A*'s.
It cannot be understated how much of an advantage someone who went to a private school has over someone from a state school, with respect to the entire process (exams/admissions tests/interview prep).
Honestly, when it comes to hacking things together with matplotlib I outsource all of my thinking to chatgpt to do the 80% of doc hunting that is honestly not worth it since everything in matplotlib is labelled inconsistently.
More to the point, when you write an article like this foretelling the doom of the american economy, why would you think you are able to brain drain any country? What stops the countries you are trying to drain from offering better incentives to stay?
Also consider that the US is now threatening direct (even neighboring) allies with military intervention (Canada, Denmark). It is very hard to drain brain which considers the US an enemy country.
Meanwhile, China is playing the long game and is building infrastructure projects all over the world, including the EU [0]
"Trump has repeatedly spoken of making the neighbouring country the 51st state of America." [0]
"Trudeau more recently suggested behind closed doors that Trump’s sustained annexation calls may not be just light talk and appear to be “a real thing.”" [1]
"Trump refuses to rule out use of military force to take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal" [2]
"US will take Greenland ‘one way or the other,’ Trump says" [3]
"Trump has previously spoken of using "economic force" to make Canada the 51st state of America. But he said he was not considering using military force - an assurance he has not given while stating his ambitions of taking the Panama Canal and Greenland."
At this point in time, US is the global leader in personal freedoms, culture and financial opportunities. These are the things people are looking to immigrate towards.
Personal freedoms can't be manufactured. They are a product of the underlying system governing a country. The US has very strong institutions and legal framework in the form of the constitution (again, at this point in time; I expect the current admin to weaken those, either directly or by eroding public trust in them).
Culture is something that's very hard to replicate. The language of the world in English, Hollywood is American, Hip hop is American and I can't really think of any other country in a position to globally influence and create an ethos in the same way US can. You can call it branding. US fully controls the societal narrative around the world.
Financial opportunities is the easiest one to manufacture (see Dubai). You can give incentives left and right and in few years attract investors and high earners. But without #1 and #2, you'll just attract transients, not people who want to become influential citizens.
> These are the things people are looking to immigrate towards.
In the academic world, I am definitely seeing brain-drain from the EU towards China now. 10-20 years ago, it was almost exclusively the US. I expect this shift to rapidly continue now. From a European perspective, China appears to be more stable than the US at the moment.
> The language of the world in English, Hollywood is American, Hip hop is American and I can't really think of any other country in a position to globally influence and create an ethos in the same way US can. You can call it branding. US fully controls the societal narrative around the world.
You are describing the world 20 years ago. A large and respected German newspaper (FAZ) had an article today, titled: "Is the US our enemy now?" [0]. The Financial Times had an article last week titled: "The US is now the enemy of the west" [1]. This would have been completely unthinkable just a few weeks ago. 27% of Canadians already see the US as an enemy state [2].
Would you get your daily entertainment from the enemy? China is already the major trading partner for most of the world. Why shouldn't it became the major entertainment provider?
If I've learned anything in my 60 years, it's that China can do the USA better than the USA can. Give it a few more short years, and "Hollywood" will be recognized as Chinese. I used to work at a Los Angeles based Academy Award winning VFX studio, now bankrupt because that is how Hollywood treats it's own, and everyone that remained in the business is now in China, developing their VFX and film industry. They even dropped their personal western names and now use Chinese names. They report life is far better there.
Wether the US is a beacon of freedom is too much of a landmine, I'll just point out that there's about a few dozen countrjes around the world where you'll enjoy enough personal freedom.
> Culture is something that's very hard to replicate.
You are highlighting the global influence of the US. By definition, you'll get access to that global shine almost wherever you live. Nobody will immigrate to the US to watch Disney movies or eat McDonalds. On the other hand, you might need to be in Korea to get most of the Korean culture. You'd need to assert that the US local and exclusive culture is more attractive than other countries own culture, and that sounds like a hard debate.
To your point, it's easier to move to the US if you already know the culture a bit, but that still presumes wanting to move there.
It's called the American Dream rather than American Reality for a reason. People follow this dream into the country. If China had enough of a hold on Western culture, it could too manufacture this perception which would draw immigrants in.
Or not. Unsurprisingly US immigration dropped a lot during the first Trump presidency, which coincided with COVID making things worse. In numbers Germany was also getting more influx than the US, but they sure weren't happy with it either.
Assuming that China wishes for more population to come in sounds pretty weird to me. They fought an incredibly unpopular fight on their own citizens for decades to reduce population growth, a foreign influx of people is probably the last thing they want IMHO.
As an EU er: fat no on this one, sorry. Personal freedom is available in most western countries. Hollywood is in decline for a while now, with in the EU at least a lot of local productions going mainstream.
The big pros of the USA are 1) the unified market, where everyone shares the language, most laws and regulations, a lot of culture and political vision. Also 2) the ability to take risks. Starting a company is easy, and failing it is not carreer-terminating. You don't need a piece of paper for absolutely everything.
Also, I've learned first French and later English, by osmosis, as that's the language of whatever came into the country. I noticed recently I am starting to osmosis-learn Chinese now, and I am not the only one. Also, I've seen brain drain to the USA in my student years, but today, people also choose to go to China
>They are a product of the underlying system governing a country. The US has very strong institutions and legal framework in the form of the constitution
Thought experiment: swap Americans with a country that is dysfunctional, the result would be that there would be only a marginal improvement in the quality of living for the swapped population. On the other hand the originally dysfunctional country with the new Americans occupants will soon strengthen the institutions and legal framework.
The point I'm trying to make is that institutions and legal framework are far less relevant compared to the personal ethics of the population at large.
The cultural dominance is ending quickly. Most American TV shows are re-hashes of British shows from the year prior. Today's hip hop for non-geezers is called Phonk, and it doesn't come from the US. Hollywood is making Yet Another Comic Book Movie, over and over again. The source material for these is almost 100 years old.
The US is a global leader in personal freedom? According to whom?
Anecdotally I don't consider the US a particularly free country, nor do most people I know. Americans might have all these nice sounding rights on paper but they're all blatantly undermined in practice.
> What stops the countries you are trying to drain from offering better incentives to stay?
Nothing! And that is sort of the point. If the US can provide freedom, rule of law, education, good salary, etc... and the other countries do the same to keep the best at home that's a win for everyone.
This is not really as simple as just going through the permutations. What this is in practice is a triumph of instrumentation. Before this, no one has imaged altermagnetic domain structure. The behaviour of these materials is intrinsically linked to what happens in the micro- (or nano-) structure.
There are two challenging things here that makes this a discovery. One, making the material, which is extremely difficult to verify as altermagnetic due to the nature of measuring these materials. Two, the measurement, which combines two techniques to distinguish this as separate from antiferromagnetism.
It is a huge push forwards for the budding field since it provides a really nice way to go to a large-scale synchrotron with your altermagnet and study it in detail.
This would have to scale down to the quantum domain to be an actual thing and scaling back up means we bring non-commutative physics into the classical world.
To add a bit more to this, it's really a new class of magnetism. Traditionally we might think of ordered magnetic materials as being one of two: ferromagnets, which is what you think of when you think of magnets, and antiferromagnets. Antiferromagnets locally order their magnetic moments antiparallel so any which way you measure it, you measure no magnetization.
The application is this: We would like to use ferromagnets and spin currents to make spin-electronic devices ("spintronic") where only the spin information is transferred without any large electrical currents. The goal of this is to save energy from Joule heating as spin can flow with significantly lower energy dissipation.
Ferromagnets run into a lot of problems: they have a stray field, so patterned elements will interact and interfere with each other that sets a limit on how dense each nanostructure can be. Antiferromagnets have a big problem: they are extraordinarily difficult to measure and that is a challenge to overcome.
So the benefit that altermagnetic materials presents is a clear union that tries to overcome the problems of both while retaining the strengths of both.
The exact definition of the ordering of an altermagnet is a bit subtle and it mostly comes from an understanding of how the electronic band structure is different as compared with normal antiferromagnets.
Ultimately they still live in the country. They have ties to it. Their assets and wealth may be tied up in the country which is difficult to extricate. And, most importantly, their friends, family and life are in that country. It is absurd to think that it is so easy for people to just pack up and leave a country.
I admit to not really being familiar with either, but it seems that this allows you to display comments alongside the paper in the browser, which is a very nice feature (and overall has a nicer coat of paint). At first blush, I find it a bit more difficult to figure out what the point of scirate is and how it should be used.
The operator of the kiwifarms is himself a US citizen with a US business. It is an advertised fact that if a police force comes after or shuts him down with a legal reason, it will cease to exist and he himself has stated he wouldn't operate it out of any other country than the US.
Pirate bay and sci-hub get affected by copyright law more than anything else and, to the best of my knowledge, kiwifarms is protected by section 230 in that respect and has always complied with legitimate takedown requests.
I think Kiwifarms is (borderline) criminal. Null, the admin of the site, outright said he was ok with users posting stolen financial information, such as Social Security Numbers and Credit cards. Source: https://archive.is/0fOcS . There are many examples of private financial information being posted on the site.
I would describe them as operating with a paper thin layer of "plausible" deniability. Officially you aren't allowed to harass or interact with the targets. But posting their home address, stolen passwords, phone numbers, and information about relatives is all allowed. Obviously, if they didn't want their targets harassed, they wouldn't post that. Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).
But even the rule against interacting with "lolcows" (called "cowtipping") is haphazardly enforced. For example, one user had sex with a "lolcow" and posted photos. The admin explicitly said they would allow the content to remain up: https://archive.is/zYnpK#35%
I could probably post many other examples. Null is entirely willing to host revenge porn on his website. He's also willing to host nudes that he knows were stolen by hackers.
People probably aren't going to want to send takedown requests, when that requires revealing their identity to a site that is known for doxing and harassing people.
Transparency I assume. I understand the admin likes free speech and maintains some transparency, to explain why content has been removed, and giving away your information is always a risk in legal issues.
