Ha! I’d never thought about it like that but…yeah.
I suspect another big part of it is that marketing and sales are relatively easy to measure and to scale.
You can hire one, two, or three new salespeople and expect that revenue will change more or less proportionately. Fixing (or ignoring) a handful issues doesn’t scale so smoothly—-there are jumps where the product suddenly seems much better/worse.
And I’m sure those companies also have “backlogs" due to limited labor/labor costs. There are always shelves to face, vehicles with deferred maintenance, and so on.
Obviously, there are limits: I’m not sure what my local grocery store or bus line would do with 100 new workers, but I have no doubt they could put a few people to work right away.
Well, but they aren't doing so right now, because labour has costs.
If your existing labour suddenly gets more productive, there's still a trade-off between cost and benefit to be made. And it would be a great coincidence if the optimal trade-off were exactly at the same headcount as the old trade-off under the old productivity figures.
It's more likely that the optimal trade-off for the business under the new conditions is at some other headcount.
I wouldn't say "called into question", as if the whole idea is bunk.
MRI is, in general, a lot harder than people often imagine. It uses complicated physics to measure convoluted physiological changes to indirectly measure brain activity, which is obviously stupifying involved--and then relate that to other, often complicated factors like behavior, lifestyle or disease state.
I think it's reasonably well-known that the BOLD response is complex and doesn't directly reflect "average" spiking activity. Some studies find that it's sensitive to the amount of synchrony (=more neurons firing together in time) rather than the rate. The paper you mention shows another dissociation: neurons can get more fuel by extracting oxygen more efficiently OR have having more overall oxygen to extract at the same rate. Thus, it's not noise, but it is complicated.
I'd be surprised if it were possible to directly measure muscle activity with millimetre wave radar. It looks like they're detecting motion, which is related to motor activity, of course.
EEG "spellers" c. 2000 required a cooperative participant who's actively engaged in a behavioural task: you attend to the letter/word you want to send and thereby produce a different response when it (vs the other letters) flash.
Implanted electrodes can do a lot better but it's still not something that will let someone "slurp" your thoughts out of you -- it'd be like subvocalizing them.
In case you were wondering - exactly this is what I've been listening to for 2.5 years every day 24/7 https://pastebin.com/raw/4AaidkHk it's AI generated slop in Latvian language, ran through voice synthesizer, filtered and attenuated down to hide imperfections. I do think authors have some sort of feedback mechanism whatever that may be. If not straight up "slurping thoughts", then perhaps overall emotional state changes, perhaps just heart rate - don't really have a way of telling. One thing I'm sure about is that it's external. I'm well familiar with sound, signal processing, programming. I'm also familiar with audio hallucinations - what I'm forced to experience is not that. Despite that such suffering is taking quite a toll - I don't believe it's schizophrenia (that's a whole new rabbit hole). Mainly because said disease is supposed to develop much earlier, because I've been living non-intoxicated and because whole voices thing started suddenly as per light switch (end of 2003 right when Russian Internal Revenue Service got hacked allegedly by Ukrainian hackers).
As an Aussie, it’s always amused me that we managed to name a public swimming pool after a Prime Minister who (at least as the official story goes) died whilst swimming.
The automated ones don't care, but it absolutely matters for the informal credit assignment process that actually runs academia.
I really wish we had a better way to "name" papers. Big clinical trials often have an acronym (often hilariously forced: "CXCessoR4"). That takes the emphasis off (one) lead author but it's implausibly hard to make up one for every research paper.
the one where i think of a particular piece of work, and i know who did it, then tell a student "oh, see if $author's group published anything else about this."
i'm not using software for this if this is off the top of my head, and it's the sort of thing that, at scale, hurts the forgotten author and their students
There’s a cute study demonstrating this effect by comparing career success in economics and psychology.
The author lists for economics papers are traditionally alphabetized, so more of your output will be known by your name if it occurs early in the alphabet. Abbie Ableson gets lots of mentions as "Ableson et al." while Zhang Zhu will almost always be relegated to the "et al". If name recognition matters, you’d expect successful academic economists to be clustered at the beginning of the alphabet—-and this appears to be true.
I don’t know that everyone would label it like that, but it’s inarguably true that success in academia comes from your reputation/name recognition.
Metrics are often attempts to formalize this but they’re not how most people actually make decisions: nobody is inviting seminar speakers or choosing collaborators because they have a high h-index. If anything, it goes the other way: name recognition gets you invited to speak or collaborate, which makes more people aware of your work, which boosts metrics.
That is false. The first thing everyone (at least everyone in CS---IDK about other fields) looks at are h-indexes, impact factors, number of papers per year, university rankings, and similar metrics. Researchers are most definitely selecting collaborators with a high h-index.
Cmon…We’re saying that a certain style of reference gives her less credit than might be due. Not none at all.
One paper doesn’t make a career (she wrote many dozens), it’s not always cited weirdly, and even if it is, some people may remember the coauthors (as they should).
But since you mention lived experience, I’ll add that I’ve certainly been asked if I’m "even aware" of results from co-authored papers where my name was listed second—-and I don’t think this is very uncommon experience.
The plain water hurts because it's causing cells to swell or even burst as water rushes into them to equalize the osmotic pressure. Adding a little bit of salt to that helps remove that pressure because the environment inside and outside of the cells are both equally salt.
Well, not so much rediscovered it as reasoned that that might be the cause of the pain and then confirmed it. The shocking part is that no doctor advises to use this after a tonsillectomy (or other kind of mouth or throat procedure).
My dad (also a doctor) called it a typical case of "the nurse's wisdom": the kind of quality of life interventions that typiqally get discovered by nurses and passed down orally, but never make it to official medical journals.
I wasn't sure how old the story or where the OP is. But yes it was pulled from human usage in most countries. I don't fully understand why, although I suspect it is primarily because ibuprofen is effective enough
Willian Proxmire was a Senator from Wisconsin who was strongly opposed to government spending on basic research. He gave out "Golden Fleece" awards for studies that he thought were absurd. Unfortunately, it is very easy to make meaningful research sound ridiculous: bread mold as a cure for STDs? Pencil dust computers?
This is likely because The Onion was purchased by Univision in 2016 and then bounced around in a couple more acquisitions over the next decade. Ben Collins got the helm in 2024 and has been doing, in my opinion, a fantastic job with the brand.
When I worked at an ISP we had a lot of landline phone customers too and I'm sure they will continue to for a long time.
At least as long as their current customers keep breathing.
You can run a business off inertia/nostalgia for quite a long time.
People are confused about what I said. Success and Relevance are not the same thing. National Lampoon still has a business too, but I doubt that any of you have seen a new movie of theirs since Van Wilder/Repli-Kate came out in 2002.
A million dollars a year for a domain name is quite a lot. And I know what was paid for the sales of some big (in the keyword marketing/leadgen space) domain names...Sale, not lease.
> You can run a business off inertia/nostalgia for quite a long time.
They only reintroduced print editions in 2024 after an 11 year break. Those 65,000 print subscribers are all people who decided they wanted to start paying money for The Onion in the last 2 years.
If "people are confused" I think it's because you are rejecting empirical evidence that The Onion is relevant without offering any counter-evidence of your own. Is it possible it's just no longer relevant to you personally? (I myself am a proud print subscriber...)
Inertia doesn't really seem like it would lead to 300% YoY growth...
OTOH, National Lampoon hasn't put out a magazine since 1998 or a film since 2015 (and that was a retrospective on the magazine).
I guess I'd agree that, in absolute terms, The Onion might be less of a cultural force than it was in 2005 (say), but part of that has to be that culture is a lot more long-tailed: music, movies, and TV aren't dominated by a handful of works either.
I suspect another big part of it is that marketing and sales are relatively easy to measure and to scale.
You can hire one, two, or three new salespeople and expect that revenue will change more or less proportionately. Fixing (or ignoring) a handful issues doesn’t scale so smoothly—-there are jumps where the product suddenly seems much better/worse.
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