As someone on the outskirts of Data Science, probably something along the lines of “Just what the fuck does my customer actually need?”
You can’t throw buzzwords and a poorly labeled spreadsheet at me and expect me to go deep diving into a trashheap of data to magically pull a reasonable answer. “Average” has no meaning if you don’t give me anything to average over. I can’t tell you what nobody has ever recorded anywhere, because we don’t have any telepathic interfaces (and probably would get in trouble with the worker’s council if we tried to get one).
I’m sure there are many interesting questions to be debated in this field, but on the practical side, humans remain the greatest mystery.
Super interesting! I watched an explainer last night about a theory that consciousness arises from space-time collapse quantum wave functions in microtubules.
The vast majority went straight over my head but the host stated that the theory was seen as completely insane by their peers and just recently it’s gaining credibility because of some new research in the past few weeks.
Is this theory what you’re referring to? Just curious because it always seemed interesting to me but I’m not educated enough to even know how to approach the subject beyond going, “huh neat.”
Sounds like they really don’t want their lives to be deterministic. I’m skeptical of anyone who jumps to quantum mechanics to explain consciousness. Would love to know what research you are referencing.
Thanks! Very interesting. Looks like we have some quantum activity going on after all. Though, there is a large chasm between observing activity and proving its necessity for our consciousness.
How to accurately estimate signal crosstalk and power delivery performance without FEM/MoM simulators.
For people and companies that can’t afford 25k-300k per year in licence and compute costs, there is yet to be a good standard way to estimate EM performance. Not to mention dedicated simulation machines needed.
That’s why these companies can charge so damn much. The systems are so complex that making a ton of assumptions to pump out some things by hand or with bulk circuit simulators often doesn’t even get close to real world performance.
If someone figured out an accurate method without those simulations, the industry could also save a shit ton of compute power and time.
I feel inappropriate near all the very universal questions here, but as a paleontologist specialised in some reptilian groups, the question would probably be “where the fuck do turtles come from?!” The thing is that fossil evidence points to different answers when compared to genetic evidence, and thez separated long enough from other extant groups that we keep on having new “definitive” answers every year
Genomics makes this answerable though? It’s just a matter of whether DNA is preserved or not in fossils. Genomics is more reliable than comparive anatomy. Comparative genomics can accurately place turtles in animal phylogeny. Sorry if I misunderstood your post. Or am I wrong here?
In phylogeny, genomic is just another tool. The point is that turtles are os course animals, but they do branch off of different reptile groups if you look at morphological evidence (which includes fossil data) or at molecular (genetic) evidence (which only includes extant species). This is not something frequent, as usually molecular evidence tends to strengthen previous morphologically established evolutionary relationships. And even though molecularists are more numerous today, their methods are neither better or worse than anatomy.
Phylogeny is not as straightforward as some people make it seem, and especially molecular phylogeny tends to rely on abstract concepts that can’t always be backed up by biological evidence (I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s very often very good, juste that a lot of people doing it do not understand the way it works, and thus can’t examine the process critically).
And so turtles’ origin are still very much an active debate!
Tbh a core multi gene ML tree to all other reptiles would prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt, maybe someone’s done that already but I haven’t been able to find it.
The diapsid part is very likely indeed, as fossil skulls of early stem turtles do show some temporal openings ( annualreviews.org/…/annurev-ecolsys-110218-024746 ) The point is more where do they nest within Diapsida, more closely to the Lepidosauromorpha, or to the Archosauromorpha, and where precisely if within one of those clades. The point is that can’t quite be proven using only extant species, whether by DNA or morphological evidence. And concerning ML, the methodology is often criticised, not because it’s bad, but because it’s opaque and thus it is difficult to justify and understand as a process
1,113 single-copy coding genes, robustly indicated that turtles are likely to be a sister group of crocodilians and birds: www.nature.com/articles/ng.2615
This level of genetic evidence is an overwhelmingly strong signal, regarding relationships and recent common ancestry to extant species. I would say it is undeniably strong. You cannot possibly get evolutionary convergence over this many genetic loci.
My brother works in molecular biology; he tells me the field’s understanding of peptides have only just begun and it’s only through machine learning that they are now starting to make progress. 99% seem to be post-translational garbage, the other 1% is likely to be the basis of a revolution of treatment options.
I work in computational biophysics. The field has been slowly chipping away at the structure and function of every protein for decades (it’s a solvable problem, it’s just going to take a lot of time and energy) and recently a bunch of clueless SF tech bros have bumbled their way into the field and declared that they’ve solved everything.
Yeah, I get the same impression from my brother; he’s active on the science side of the field (recently published in Nature Communications about AI and peptides) and his pet hate is Kurzweil and their ilk.
How to get supervisors, superintendents, school boards, and even politicians to let teachers teach. It’s understood that overtesting reduces learning. It’s understood that rigid curriculums don’t work, and you really should be tailoring lessons to the capabilities of the class. All kinds of educational philosophy is understood well and in depth… but being permitted to apply any of it?
As someone who does hiring for tech, the problem is things are metric driven. You can’t extract metrics from letting teachers “teach their own way” without standardized tests, and if you don’t have metrics, you don’t know if “teaching their own way” is working in practice (you can extend this logic down to understand the rigid ciriculums).
By the way, I think this is all bullshit, but that’s why
Oh yeah, I fully understand why the stupidity happens/happened. I don’t know how to fix it or if it can be fixed… that’s why I posted it here, in the unsolved problems in your field thread!
I watched two twelve-year-old children take a four-hour reading exam today. They ran out of time without finishing. Please can North Carolina to get their metrics some other way.
My current theory is that the state of NC so wants to say that public schools are failing that they are giving students near impossible exams.
I have a question about rigid curriculums. This is mostly for high school. Many of my teachers had curriculums and syllabi that they had been using for years and kept them basically the same, and then there were the AP classes where the curriculum was determined by the AP exam. I felt that I learned really well in AP classes and we would get through much more advanced material in the AP classes than in others. And I also felt that the teachers who had developed somewhat fixed curriculums from experience taught much more efficiently than those who hadn’t. It never felt like the teachers were changing their curriculum for each class whether it was an AP class or not because most had their curriculums kind of figured out over the course of teaching for many years. And most of the teachers I had in high school were excellent. So my question is, why is it believed that rigid curriculums don’t work? Because in my schooling experience, whether the rigid curriculum was developed by the individual teacher or by an external organization (like AP), the class seemed to benefit from having fixed goals for the year.
As a software engineering researcher, I strongly agree. SE research has studied code comprehension for more than 40 years, but for that amount of time, we know surprisingly little about what makes really high-quality code. We are decent in saying what makes very bad code, though, but beyond extreme cases, it’s hard to come to fairly general statements.
we become programmers because we lack creativity. my brain short circuits when i have to come up with something other than “foo”, “bar”, or maybe even “baz”
I have the opposite problem, my variables are sometimes too descriptive. I even annoy myself at times with VariableThatDoesThisOneThing and VariableThatDoesDifferentThing just because I want to be able to come back later and not wonder what I was smoking.
When I was a graduate student, I studied magnetism in massive stars. Lower mass stars (like our sun) demonstrate convection in their outermost layers, which creates turbulent magnetic fields. About 1 in 10 higher mass stars (more than ~8x the mass of the sun) host magnetic fields that are strong and very stable. These stars do not have convection in their outer layers (and thus can’t generate magnetic fields in the same fashion as the sun), and it is thought that these fields are formed very early in the star’s life. Despite much effort, we haven’t really figured out how that happens.
My field of expertise is bacterial pathogenesis with a particular interest in pneumococcal pneumonia.
And it’s true, immunology is ridiculously complex that no one person can ever hope to fully understand it. Immune cells are helpful or detrimental depending on the context, and sometimes even both. And we don’t really fully know why. The problem is that pathogens and humans have been in an evolutionary arms race for billions of years, and unraveling all of that evolutionary technical debt is Fun™
To give an example, Toll-like receptors are one of the most important pathogen-detection mechanisms, and they were discovered just about 25 years ago and people only really figured out their importance about 20 years ago. There are researchers who have spent the majority of their careers before the discovery of one of the most crucial immune pathways.
We really don’t know what’s going on with immunology and to say otherwise is, as I’ve said, an outright lie. People seem to overestimate how much we know about the immune system, not knowing that we are still very much in the “baby phase” of immune research. The fact that we are able to do so much already is really kind of a testament to human ingenuity than anything
My personal experience is that people who claim to know completely about how the immune system works is more likely to be a science denier (or more likely, naive)