periheli0n

I think it is easy to produce vague allegations of a lack of integrity, but I would really expect more substance to such a critique.

> ... desires of the state. The dollars come from somewhere and there are always strings attached.

Is this suggesting that the public funders influence the outcome of research? It is not something I have ever witnessed. They sometimes may seek to take influence on the direction of a research programme, especially when the performance is below expectations. but I have yet to see an example where a public funder has attempted to influence research results.

> I think we’d quickly learn that academia of today is not at all what it presupposes itself to be

What does it presuppose to be? Academia of today is 1) a place of teaching and knowledge dissemination, 2) a place of research and knowledge creation, 3) a multibillion dollar business that sells tickets to successful professional lives. The latter leads to overinflated self-marketing, and unfortunately this affects how research results are communicated.

Those who hold the "purse strings" have little interest in influencing research outcomes. Rather, they care about the reputation of their course (students), their own reputation (alumni), recruiting talent and/or outsourcing research (businesses), or actual research results (public funders).

This is at least the case in most institutions in the US and the UK, and most of western Europe.

The type of "career scientist" that the article portrays is part of the problem. In order to get ahead with a science career, one needs to pursue an extremely narrow specialisation. Otherwise it is impossible to build a stellar reputation. And reputation is the key determinant for being offered a permanent position at a high-ranking institution.

However, many interesting and relevant problems live at the interface of several disciplines. Unfortunately, those working between disciplines will have a hard time getting a permanent job at top universities: Whatever faculty they apply to, there will always be other applicants who are super-specialised and therefore appeal more to the super-specialised faculty members in the hiring committee. That is why true interdisciplinary research still doesn't happen very much, even though it has been praised and encouraged for more than two decades now.

Coming back to the article, in my opinion the solution to overwork is to cut back on elitism. Less famous universities tend to be more relaxed in their recruitment and tenure criteria. Less pressure means more mental flexibility, which can help maintain a wider network of researchers across disciplines. And the wider the network is, the better the chances of being invited to collaborative projects, especially when one has a record of successful interdisciplinary collaboration.

The price to pay is that one will not be able to impress with the name of one's university when doing small talk. But one will be a much more interesting conversation partner — and have free time to meet people outside work with whom to talk.

First thing we did after moving to the UK was to buy a bread baking machine. Not quite bakery-level bread, but good enough for daily consumption, and it leaves a nice smell in the house.

> but is still just a web page

> doesn’t support pagination

Isn’t that exactly the point? Please, no pagination on a screen. A web page will do just fine. In fact, that was what the www was conceived for: publishing science.

> open the accompanying PDF, […] of much higher quality.

The only thing that is higher quality in the PDF is the justified alignment and pagination. The figures have the same (poor) resolution.

The bottom line is: * it is perfectly possible to publish technical papers in a format that is accessible on a phone. * non-paginated, free flowing output also works better on larger screens (e.g) I can resize the window and have my note-taking app open next to the paper. * PDFs are still great for annotating and printing, if required.

Computer science, and academia in general, has always adapted to technical progress, although slowly.

In the case of ChatGPT and similar LLMs, these should become part of the toolbox that students are being taught. I.e., how does it work, what can it do, what are its limits, how can it be used to help solve a problem or complete a task.

An exam question could then be e.g. to ask ChatGPT for an essay on a topic, critically discuss its shortcomings, and improve the essay e.g. by adding references and deeper discussion, which will be graded.

Alternatively, use ChatGPT to iteratively discuss and improve the essay. The whole chat transcript should be included and will be graded.

The bottom line being, you don't need to hire engineers anymore, just ChatGPT operators?

> I think if layout mattered as much as you imply, scientists would have to use a too that offers more control like indesign.

Yes, precisely that. As a scientist I don't even want to have to deal with layout. That's what publishers are paid extremely well for. When I self-publish content I want the process to be as simple as possible. If this means ragged margins, browser-default styles for headings etc., default colors and fonts — so be it.

(but to be fair, optimising the layout is an excellent way to procrastinate on doing hard research)

> I don't think we need a website, but a js-free webpage with hyperlinks

Wasn't this precisely the use case for HTML and the WWW as originally conceived by Berners-Lee and his fellow internet pioneers?

Sure, one can write a thesis in MS Word. It has come a long way with support for large documents. But I still find its referencing clumsy, opaque and unstable.

For example, automatic updates of figure numbers in captions and references: Countless times it failed on me and I had to manually recreate the fields, bookmarks, cross-references, and whatnot is needed.

Bibliographies are hardly doable without an external tool that comes with its own headaches.

Typography in MS word is quite decent these days, though. Anyway, the content of a PhD thesis shouldn't be judged by its typography (as long it maintains a readable standard).

To be fair, there is no better free tool than LaTeX to typeset PDFs. But it fails at non-paginated, free-flowing content.

It is possible to find Open Access articles with math on ieeexplore with little effort. Have a look here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6767058

Does this live up to your maths standards?

Thanks for the pointer, that looks interesting. Especially because it is open source!

I see it supports Jupyter notebook. Math support in those isn’t too bad at all, so it might just work for many cases.

Yet, by far the vast majority of content produced today, technical or prose, is read on screens.

Responsive webdesign has been around for quite a while. I don’t see a reason, other than lack of effort/investment, why we shouldn’t be able to read technical papers on variable-width screens, in a non-paginated form.

Dealing with the technical challenges should not be the task of the author, but the publisher. And indeed, most publishers are on it.

What‘s missing is a standardised format that can be downloaded, annotated, re-shared like a PDF.

O‘Reilly‘s online offer has not only O‘Reilly books, but ones from other publishers as well. Some of them have equations. However, they are often rendered as images.

IEEE explore does a good job rendering equations on phone screens. Therefore, it is possible.

There is no technical reason why equations couldn’t be rendered on a screen just as well as on a PDF. Sure, canvas size constraints might interfere, but this problem exists in principle also on paginated output. Plus, horizontal scrolling is a thing.

I‘m not saying a phone is the ideal platform to read a paper containing free energy-like math, but it can go a long way. Much longer than with the artificial restriction to paginated output like PDF.

> nobody is going to read a complex technical paper in practise on a phone

I do, in fact. Or rather, I often would like to but with PDF? No chance. IEEE explore online reading sometimes works, but it would work better if they cleaned up their UI to be compatible with phones.

I have read thousands of pages of fiction on a phone and quite enjoyed it. Phones are great for reading if the content reflows properly.

Now publishers and content creators would need to embrace non-paginated, reflowing output. This would not only facilitate reading on phones, but also on tablets and laptop screens.

O‘Reilly‘s online platform does a good job with their app.

There is zero reason why paginated output should be the default in 2022.

The real shocker is that it’s 2022 and LaTeX is still the best writing environment for a PhD thesis. It has so many downsides: the markup syntax is ugly, it really works best only if one used paginated output such as PDF, a zoo of partly incompatible packages, need for compilation, obscure figure placing algorithms that are difficult to control, and so on.

It still beats the competition because of rock-solid referencing, both to in-text elements like equations, chapters, etc as well as citing literature with bibtex.

Plus, it’s extremely stable, so someone who learnt LaTeX 20 years ago, like yours truly, can download the newest TeX distribution and feel at home immediately.

Nevertheless, I would prefer a Markdown-based system that can use CSS and MathML, and has a 100% bibtex clone for references.

Yes, pandoc goes quite a long way along this route, but setting up such a pipeline is still too complicated for many.

Parsing ASCII simply takes time. What you describe sounds like a use case for SQLite. Parse once when building the database. When indexed properly, searching should be much faster.

“Keep it simple”—something I keep repeating to everyone I work with. I myself have been bitten too often by the temptation to use the latest tech, even when a trusted but less “sexy” alternative was available that could do the job perfectly.

But this post could have been made a lot simpler by using SQLite. Do away with all the docker stuff, a simple file- based database will do for starters. If you need concurrent access later, it will be easy to port the DB to Postgres or similar.

And upgrade to Duke Nukem.

Don't be so hard on him (and your fellow compatriotes). His english is perfectly fine.

Wouldn't it be weirder if he had no perceptible accent whatsoever?

I find it quite refreshing to be able to tell where someone is from, judging from their accent alone. When I was a kid, growing up in a rather rural area, I could tell with an accuracy of about 20km which area around my hometown someone I just met was from, just from by the fine differences in their accent. But in fact very few people like being identified like that.

I get it, breach of privacy and all that... but on the other hand, is it so bad to know where someone is from, when having a conversation with them

The real problem is of course the biases in people's head... "dutch people are such and such", and so on. I say we should fight the biases, not the fact that one's geographical origin can be guessed.

This is likely the result of an overworked and underpaid academic being asked to quickly draft a few questions for the online exam tomorrow. It is definitely a sign of insufficient quality control.

Questions like this, where you must have attended the class to know the answer, are often introduced to penalise no-shows. It can also expose suspected contract cheating in online exams.

However, it is quite risky, since it probably wouldn’t stand in court, e.g. when a failed student sues the school.

> The difficulty being, of course, that the world and its knowledge isn't as simple to represent as a go board.

Humans suffer from the exact same limitation. The limit to correct inference and prediction is often the amount and quality of input data.

A language model that can extract information from text and interact with the user to refine and clarify that information could be tremendously useful for experts who understand how the model works.

Without that understanding it will be rather disappointing though, as we see with some of the reactions to chatGPT and also Galactica (RIP).

So one should use chatGPT as a frontend to Google v1!

My point is, there are frameworks and languages for reasoning which are mature. But they require formalised input (e.g. code) and deliver formalised output.

As a language model, chatGPT can translate back and forth between natural language and those formal languages. Part of that ability is evident in the numerous examples that demonstrate how it writes or explains code.

The version of ChatGPT that is public is quite restricted; it can‘t browse the web or run code.

A version of chatGPT that can translate a logic query I to Prolog, run the code, and translate the result back to the user should be perfectly capable of logic reasoning.

The only reliable path to a permanent contract at a German university is to join the administration. Everything else is fixed-term, with the exception of the professorships, which are a lottery with an incredibly high ticket price.

Where are these universities where an academic senate holds admin accountable? I want to apply!

> We are a very long way from AGI.

In fact it has just gotten closer.

Logic reasoning is a pretty solid branch of AI since it’s inception. Robust solutions exist for most problems; even a programming language based on its principles (Prolog).

With ChatGPT there is now a system that can express the results from automatic logic reasoning in language.

The next step would be to combine the two, i.e. tell chatGPT to explain the result of a logic reasoning program in natural language. It could of course also be asked to translate a natural language query into Prolog code.

This will probably require retraining the model, but I guess the demo we are given by OpenAI leaves little doubt that this is perfectly doable.

ChatGPT has the potential to plug the gap between GOFAI and natural language, which is quite a feat.

That would then be „Zwieback“ in German, which refers to a kind of crispy mildly sweet bread that children get fed when they are ill :)

University of Hertfordshire, greater London area, UK, Research Fellow, data science/machine learning, tinkering with electronics and robots encouraged, part-remote possible if working from within the UK. International applicants welcome.

https://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/CVG745/vice-chancellors-research-...