Sal

Sal , 2 days ago to science_memes in Money, please!

Publishing in a more prestigious journal usually means that your work will be read by a greater number of people. The journal that a paper is published on carries weight on the CV, and it is a relevant parameter for committees reviewing a grant applicant or when evaluating an academic job applicant.

Someone who is able to fund their own research can get away with publishing to a forum, or to some of the Arxivs without submitting to a journal. But an academic that relies on grants and benefits from collaborations is much more likely to succeed in academia if they publish in academic journals. It is not necessarily that academics want to rely on publishers, but it is often a case of either you accept and adapt to the system or you don’t thrive in it.

It would be great to find an alternative that cuts the middle man altogether. It is not a simple matter to get researchers to contribute their high-quality work to a zero-prestige experimental system, nor is it be easy to establish a robust community-driven peer-review system that provides a filtering capacity similar to that of prestigious journals. I do hope some alternative system manages to get traction in the coming years.

Sal , 7 days ago to science_memes in Elsevier

That’s really cool, I will use it

Sal , 7 days ago to science_memes in Elsevier

Some time last year I learned of an example of such a project (peerreview on GitHub):

The goal of this project was to create an open access “Peer Review” platform:

---

Peer Review is an open access, reputation based scientific publishing system that has the potential to replace the journal system with a single, community run website. It is free to publish, free to access, and the plan is to support it with donations and (eventually, hopefully) institutional support.

It allows academic authors to submit a draft of a paper for review by peers in their field, and then to publish it for public consumption once they are ready. It allows their peers to exercise post-publish quality control of papers by voting them up or down and posting public responses.

---

I just looked it up now to see how it is going… And I am a bit saddened to find out that the developer decided to stop. The author has a blog in which he wrote about the project and about why he is not so optimistic about the prospects of crowd sourced peer review anymore: theroadgoeson.com/crowdsourcing-peer-review-proba… , and related posts referenced therein.

It is only one opinion, but at least it is the opinion of someone who has thought about this some time and made a real effort towards the goal, so maybe you find some value from his perspective.

Personally, I am still optimistic about this being possible. But that’s easy for me to say as I have not invested the effort!

Sal , 7 days ago to newcommunities in [email protected], for beautiful data!

Thank you being around, bringing this nice community here, and helping with the federation!! 😁

Sal , 9 days ago to fediverse in How does Lemmy (Mander in particular) sort "hot" and "active" posts?

I find it satisfying to see the graph come down :)

Sal , 9 days ago to fediverse in How does Lemmy (Mander in particular) sort "hot" and "active" posts?

Yes, sorry, there was some serious lagg in fetching posts from Lemmy World that persisted for several days and accumulated a 1-week delay.

But after upgrading Mander it is now fetching data from LW quite rapidly and it should be back in-sync in about a day and a half from now.

If you are curious about the ranking algorithm, there is some info here: join-lemmy.org/docs/…/07-ranking-algo.html

Sal , 3 months ago to asklemmy in What would you bring to an adult show and tell?

If the timing is right, I would bring a mushroom grow bag with mushrooms sprouting.

If not… probably my radiacode gamma spectrometer and some of my radioactive items. Maybe a clock with radium painted dials and a piece of trinitite. I think that there are many different points of discussion that can be of interest to a broad audience (radioactivity, spectroscopy, electronics, US labor law story of the radium girls, nuclear explosions, background radiation… etc). As a bonus I can bring a UV flash light and show the radium fluorescence. Adults love UV flash lights.

Sal , 3 months ago to science_memes in mycology

I think that they are referring to Paxillus involotus

It is quite an interesting mushroom. It was considered “safe to eat” for a long time, but it contains an antigen that a human’s immune system can learn to attack.

The antigen is still of unknown structure but it stimulates the formation of IgG antibodies in the blood serum.

I once looked into whether this immune response builds up over many exposures, or if it is a random event that has a probability of happening for each exposure. I don’t remember finding a convincing answer… If it is a random event, then mushroom could be considered a “Russian roulette” mushroom that will usually provide a nice meal, but, if unlucky, you may experience the following:

Poisoning symptoms are rapid in onset, consisting initially of vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, and associated decreased blood volume. Shortly after these initial symptoms appear, hemolysis develops, resulting in reduced urine output, hemoglobin in the urine or outright absence of urine formation, and anemia. Hemolysis may lead to numerous complications including acute kidney injury, shock, acute respiratory failure, and disseminated intravascular coagulation. These complications can cause significant morbidity with fatalities having been reported.

I agree with you that this is probably unrelated to the “generally similar to humans” comment. I feel like this fantasy is a combination of the above fact mixed in with the fact that the Fungi belong to the Opisthokonts, which places them closer to animals than plants, and so they share some interesting cellular characteristics with us. This places them closer to animals than plants, but “generally similar to humans” is perhaps a bit of a stretch ^_^

But, it is just a meme about a guy being hyped about mushrooms. Hopefully people don’t expect memes to be super accurate 😁

Sal , 3 months ago to fediverse in Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative

First of all, congratulations for bringing a baby girl into this world!! You must be really excited! I am very happy for you!

This looks very cool. I set up a wiki (ibis.mander.xyz) and I will make an effort to populate it with some Lemmy lore and interesting science/tech 😄 Hopefully I can set some time aside and help with a tiny bit of code too.

Sal , 3 months ago to fediverse in I am extremely grateful to everybody involved with Lemmy. That includes you!

Thank you for the positivity 💚 I wholeheartedly agree!

Drama and negativity drives engagement, and this form of engagement can easily trigger a feedback loop in which negativity keeps piling on and voices of support are practically muted.

We are participating in an open source project that has some very ambitious goals. Things can be messy, mistakes happen, there are risks, and people have many different opinions and moods. Heated discussions can be a healthy part of the process. But, once the dust is allowed to settle for a bit, it is good to remember that we are humans and that we are here because we have some shared goals.

I think the majority of people around here are kind and have a positive outlook, but perhaps it is more motivating to speak out when we have negative comments than positive ones. So, thank you for taking the time to write this positive message!

Sal , 3 months ago to science_memes in Hatzegopteryx

Woah - I had never heard of the Hatzegopteryx. I spent some time today watching videos of this guy today (and its relatives, Quetzalcoatlus and Argentinosaurus). They are really cool.

I know that there is a lot of arguments about what dinosaurs actually looked like - I hope that in the videos they make these guys scarier than they actually were… This video is especially: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYniD_MQ7Rg

Personally, this style (from a great PBS Eons video) is my favorite interpretation:

https://i.imgur.com/Hptc0jc.png

https://arbordalekids.files.wordpress.com/2021/11/ihatz_09_soar.jpg

And artists apparently like to emphasize that these guys could eat small dinosaurs!

https://i.imgur.com/C6gZxgn.png

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/624b94e0a1971679b2a1d8da/1658165737287-UB7NR8B4IE0N5HVFTW5X/pablo-rivera-hatzegopteryx.jpg

https://a-z-animals.com/media/2022/06/shutterstock_1362863072-768x461.jpg

https://d.furaffinity.net/art/renfriammon/1704472255/1704472255.renfriammon_img_4649.png

https://image.pbs.org/video-assets/5kg0O0I-asset-mezzanine-16x9-RIS0K1C.png

Sal , 4 months ago to asklemmy in [Urgent] How do you know your computer or phone isn't spying on you ?

I am also quite interested in this. It is not something that keeps me awake at night, and I am not particularly paranoid about it. But I find that working towards answering this question is a fun frame from which to learn about electronics, radio communications, and networking.

Since this appears to be something that is causing you some anxiety, I think it is better if I start by giving you some reassurance in that I have not yet managed to prove that any electronic device is spying on me via a hidden chip. I don’t think it is worth being paranoid about this.

I can explain some things that could be done to test whether a Linux computer spying. I am not suggesting that you try any of this. I am explaining this to you so that you can get some reassurance in the fact that, if devices were spying on us in this manner, it is likely that someone would have noticed by now.

The “spy” chip needs some way to communicate. One way a chip might communicate is via radio waves. So, the first step would be to remove the WiFi and Bluetooth dongles and any other pieces of hardware that may emit radio waves during normal operation. There is a tool called a “Spectrum Analyzer” that can be used to capture the presence of specific radio frequencies. These devices are now relatively affordable, like the tinySA, which can measure the presence of radio frequencies of up to 6 GHz.

One can make a Faraday cage, for example, by wrapping the PC with a copper-nickel coated polyester fabric to isolate the PC from the radio waves that are coming from the environment. The spectrum analyzer antennas can be placed right next to the PC and the device is left to measure continuously over several days. A script can monitor the output and keep a record of any RF signals.

Since phones are small, it is even easier to wrap them in the copper-nickel polyester fabric alongside with the spectrum analyzer antenna to check whether they emit any RF when they are off or in airplane mode with the WiFi and Bluetooth turned off.

What this experiment may allow you to conclude is that the spy chip is not communicating frequently with the external world via radio frequencies, at least not with frequencies <= 6 GHz.

Using frequencies higher 6 GHz for a low-power chip is not going be an effective method of transmitting a signal very far away. The chip could remain hidden and only emit the signal under certain rare conditions, or in response to a trigger. We can’t rule that out with this experiment, but it is unlikely.

A next step would be to test a wired connection. It could be that the spy chip can transmit the data over the internet. One can place a VPN Gateway in between their PC and the router, and use that gateway to route all the traffic to their own server using WireGuard. All network packets that leave through the PC’s ethernet connection can be captured and examined this way using Wireshark or tcpdump.

If one can show that the device is not secretly communicating via RF nor via the internet, I think it is unlikely that the device is spying on them.

Sal , 4 months ago to technology in Are search engines, like Google, relevant at all anymore? Why use them? A relevant debate. It's not 2010 anymore.

You can take a lot of control by using search commands. Here is a list of commands for Google, for example: www.lifewire.com/advanced-google-search-3482174

By using commands like these you can narrow down your searches to the point that the impact of SEO is small. You give a much greater weight to the conditions that you have chosen.

It can be a bit of work to write a good search query, but the database that search engines search through is massive, so it makes sense that it would take some work to do this right.

Sal , 4 months ago to technology in Are search engines, like Google, relevant at all anymore? Why use them? A relevant debate. It's not 2010 anymore.

Search engines like google aggregate data from multiple sites. I may want to download a datasheet for an electronic component, find an answer to a technical question, find a language learning course site, or look for museums in my area.

Usually I make specific searches with very specific conditions, so I tend to get few and relevant results. I think search engines have their place.

Sal , 4 months ago to nostupidquestions in Why were so many people believers in the conspiracy that 9/11 was an inside job

Fair enough. I just looked it up and if the scale in this image is correct, I agree that the size of the hole looks small in comparison. I also looked at the security video of the crash itself and it is frustrating how little we can see from it.

https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/6d4db3da-2bbe-49f2-89fe-ce271328bd6b.png

Since this was such an important event and there seems to be a lack of specific pieces of essential evidence - either because of bad luck or because of a cover-up - I understand the skepticism. And I am not a fan of blindly believing any official narrative. But, without any context, if I see that photo and someone tells me that a plane crashed into that building, I would find it probable simply because the shape is so similar to the photo of the Bijlmer accident that I’m familiar with. A plane crash seems to me like a very chaotic process, so I don’t have a good expectation of what the damage should look like.

Maybe I’ll look for a pentagon crash documentary some time.