I came to post essentially this. I could listen to review articles in a area I'm familiar with, but listening to primary papers could never work for me.
I agree with all you said but am not optimistic about empowering the committee as a universal fix.
Power politics in academic departments were worse than any I’ve seen in my subsequent career. My committee was firmly under the thumb of my advisor. Any discussions I had with them about the pi being unreasonable were terse at best, and “we’ll talk in the next meeting when everyone is there” at worst.
Wow. I hadn’t thought about CDNow in a long time. I spent a lot of my teen years (80’s) flipping stacks in record stores looking for obscure music. I discovered CDnow in 1995ish on Telnet and their selection blew my mind. I feel like using my credit card with them via command line interface on a dark scree was maybe the riskiest financialI thing I’ve ever done —but it worked well and I got some CDs i thought I’d never find . Great dusty memory.
Not an astrobiologist, but am a microbiologist.
IMO microscopes wouldn't be very definitive. I'd suspect they have some magnification capabilities to some extent, even for geology analysis,
For microbial life, getting chemical signatures would be much more valuable. They appear to have a mass spec. GC and laser spectrometer suite that can do some of that usefully. https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/sam/
IMO, the idea of NASA sandbagging on finding life is silly. It's like Pharma hiding the cure for cancer. there are real people in those organizations and that type of insanity wouldn't stay secret for long. (note to anyone replying I will not discuss/argue this stuff on this board, as it won't go anywhere productively.)
Peer reviewers are unpaid, curation seems like a problem the internet can solve well, and trust... deriving one's trust from Elsevier or Springer is not great model. Granted, funding is needed to ensure distribution, but multiple billions of dollars in revenue (and even profit) seems excessive for what they provide.
Is that bad? How would they get paid if all articles were free?
> curation seems like a problem the internet can solve well
"The internet" isn't anything more than a (supposedly) robust telecommunications network. Anyone can curate anything, but that is meaningless without trust.
> deriving one's trust from Elsevier or Springer is not great model
Any centralised trust model is broken by default. We've had practical web of trust security for decades at this point. But for various reasons nobody will use it. It would be perfect for things like this.
I think we agree that the current system isn't good. In posting, I was working out my thoughts on the P&L for those intermediaries, and the value they provide versus the value they extract. I'm not sure what things should look like, but my conclusion is that selling publicly funded science to publicly funded scientists at a premium seems like quite an inefficiency.
This is a pedantic note, but in general Pharma does not care about antibiotics drug development - It’s an economic desert. If it was a cancer or serious rare disease drug, they’d be grinding up buckets of ants yesterday.
Well rare disease is also an economic desert.
Its only because of Government regulation big pharma started to care about these.
Mainly the Orphan Drug Act of 1983 with provided tax incentives as well as subsidized research. There is also the Rare Disease act of 2002 but that IMO is less signifigant.
Don't forget that for rare diseases affecting children the government awards fast track vouchers. These allow you to shorten the approval time of another drug (or sell it for a few hundred million for another company to do the same.
I totally agree. Although I'm not sure similar vouchers for antibiotics would be sufficient for the same success, as there are also logistical, financial and scientific advantages that have enabled rare disease drug development. Many rare disease being targeted are monogenic, providing a very 'clean' scientific mechanism, and higher success rates. The clinical studies can be small well defined population as pre/neonatal genetic testing is now routine, and supportive Foundations are often instrumental. Financially, insurers/payers have been amenable to huge per-patient prices in rare diseases because of low volume and often impressive efficacy.
Developing antibiotics has lower technical success rates. The medical need is more acute and distributed across more broad populations with much of them poor making patients 'harder to find'. Any novel antibiotic are typicaly held in reserve until after generation of resistance to all the current drugs, limiting volume. Commonly, physician and patient over-/mis-usage of antibiotics generates resistance, generating a limited 'valuable' life span of the drug.
There are many governmental/regulatory incentives being developed, and at least one industry-backed fund (AMR action fund) supporting early research but it’s still a challenge to build business plans for this.
What use is Navalny being alive to Putin?
I’m only casually familiar with the situation, but my ignorance analysis is that Putin’s underlying message is “don’t F with me”. Navalny alive and in prison or dead that message seems to ring clear. Just curious.
I’ve assumed it’s the combination of having a lever on anyone who cares about him and keeping him around to make it harder for opposition to crystallize around someone else who isn’t as well known.
Point taken. I guess avoiding his martyrdom is the idea. It all seems as though the emperor has no clothes, since there is such little effort to mask what is going on and why — and what the possible outcomes for him are.
Yes, illegal, but so is parking in a no stopping zone.
Not making excuses for him, but I have a strong reaction to the phrase “sentenced to life” seems like the dead end of a life. Because a video got leaked. Rehab isn’t an option?
I'm not a cybersecurity guy (“non-computational life sciences” guy) but seems kid the kid is pretty talented at something.
You should read the article, the video leak has absolutely no bearing on the sentencing. He was part of a hacking group that ransomed the major telcos, and when arrested was violent.
He is currently being held for his and other people's safety, the sentence for life is "until doctors feel he is no longer a violent risk to the public".
Was it violent, or did he have a normal autistic reaction to the shitty things police do when they're on a mission?
Every autistic interaction I've ever seen with police has ended up with the police making some obvious mistake that made it impossible for the autistic person to react "properly". They always say confusing things, and they bark their orders over and over really fast so you can't think straight and thus can't follow their orders fast enough. You make one "wrong" step and they think it's okay to start touching you, something that makes many autistic folks involuntarily react in ways that can seem violent but often aren't violent at all.
Unfortunately there was a case a few years back in America where an autistic person was having a sensory overload of some sort and was freaking out in the street. The police were called but there was another person trying to help calm them down.
The police drew their guns and the autistic person and the person calming them laid on the ground and complied. Somehow, the police fired at the calming person and hit them. I believe they survived but it's crazy over here.
