I don't see a reason why science couldn't flourish on a non-anonymous message board such as reddit or twitter in place of peer review. This is all matter of momentum. And of fear of open criticism.
I dare you when you use your real name to criticize a recent paper of top guru in field is total garbage and never has a moment worrying about subsequent funding application which the guru usually serves the reviewing board.
A professor of mine (of philosophy of economics and scientific methodology) was effectively banned from several major journals in his field for roughly ten years because he made an argument about labourers' stock ownership in a Marxist economist conference—and one of the audience members was an influential chairman in those journals.
People seem to think that there is no politics in academia and science, and that everybody is automaton-rational people with no ulterior motives. Very, very wrong...
I have much doubt that criminal penalties would change anything. People would just put much more energy in avoiding them. I think that state a priori regulation is a more effective tool than state a posteriori punishment.
> "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."
I don't see why we can't have both. But, for it to really work, you can't throw them in Country Club Resort prison. They have to go to Pound-Me-In-The-Ass prison. They need to be locked up with some really bad people. Because, let's face it, most of these white collar criminals are really bad people.
Wait, so wouldn't Country Club prison work then, since that's where all the existing imprisoned white collar criminals already are (and, per your description, they are “really bad people”.)
Not if they're all only around each other. I'm talking they need to be locked up with genpop at a medium or high security prison. With gang members and such.
Some parts of physics might stretch the ELI5 to its limits. I like to explain science to my non-science friends, but I'm always hitting the issue that parts of the specialized knowledge become intuitive, and then it's difficult to go back. Say, my understanding of how electrons behave in matter is a category on its own (let's call it quantum), and it's difficult to translate to common terms.
The more I try to learn physics, the more I need to see the mathematics to understand the ideas. Without the math, I don't believe it is possible to break beyond the surface 'armchair' level of understanding.
I started by building an intuitive understanding of advanced physics before I really dug into the math. It is absolutely possible. That being said, I did have a very good understanding of advanced mathematical concepts to start with, so I could think intuitively about things like high-dimensional spaces and eigenfunctions.
You could replace "plain text" in the article with "non-binary", and it would probably make more scence. Markdown is also not plain text in the most strict sense. Or HTML is plain text in a vague sense. In the end, what really matters is how easy it is to build parsers and tools for a format. Being non-binary is a huge plus. I think that was the point of the article, and I agree with that.
I don't think anyone would claim that HTML was easy to parse, would they? It took decades for the HTML5 consensus to emerge.
I like text-based formats, but I'm not convinced that "Being non-binary is a huge plus" for parsing. With binary formats you can assume that documents are generated by a tool, which is at least trying to be compliant with a spec, so barfing on noncompliance is more acceptable. With text you have to be prepared to cope with any kind of rat dance imaginable.
Parsing semistructured text as markup is a problem solved over 30 years ago [1].
SGML has the SHORTREF feature which allows custom Wiki syntaxes such as markdown, but also casual math. It works by applying a context-dependent (parent element dependent) mapping of tokens (such as the `_` token for markdown emphasis) to replacement text (eg. the `<b>` start-element tag). Within the `<b>` context, the `_` token is mapped to the `</b>` end-element tag, in turn, ending the emphasis. In combination with tag omission/inference (such as in HTML) and other markup minimization and processing features, SGML is a quite powerful plain text document authoring format.
We may be talking about different things. Parsing valid, standard-conforming HTML/Markdown/whatever is a solved problem. Getting multiple parsers to deal with arbitrary tag soup, authoring errors, variously-supported extensions etc in a consistent way is a lot uglier. The problems may be commercial/political/educational/organizational rather than technical, but that doesn't mean they aren't real.
Personal experience: My general language-to-go is Python, and I'm very fond of Rust. But Fortran has no competition in numerical computing at native speeds in terms of convenience. I was just recently rewriting a small Fortran library (that I usually but not always call from Python) to C, and it was a pain. So, as a result of that, Fortran is still used heavily in scientific computing. (On the other hand, Fortran is a pain for anything else than numbers and arrays.)
It is also the only language I'm aware of that has a special syntax for distributed memory [1], making parallel distributed computing potentially extremely convenient.
What do you think about Julia language? It's a modern take on a language for number crunching that has support for C and Python code. Also uses some Fortran libraries that are optimized.
Far as distributed, see Cray's Chapel and Taft's Parasail for languages trying to improve on that. Chapel's competition was IBM X10 and Fortress languages. Im not sure if those two are maintained any more, though.
You are a European citizen, but you want to live in Taiwan, or NZ, Canada, or US. I don't blame you, but that seems to be the source of your struggles. I'm sure I might have problems getting into those countries as well. Any particular reason you don't want to live anywhere in EU?
My dad worked at CERN, an EU research institute, for over 30 years before retiring last September. He bought a house in France, but his office was in Switzerland. We crossed the border every day - him to go to work, me to be born/go to school. It's a Geneva thing. He couldn't get French nationality because he wasn't working in France.
Now the UK is leaving the EU, he is likely to lose the right to live in France. He finally paid off the mortgage on his house, but he's probably about to lose it all. He's also considering New Zealand, but immigration there becomes much more difficult after age 55.
Trying to get PR in an EU country would take at least 5 years. The Express Entry and Skilled Migrant Category visas for PR in Canada and NZ are much faster (about 6 months of processing time if I have the prerequisites).
Rent is also much cheaper in Taiwan (only 20% of my salary). Electronics are cheap, so that saves some personal expenses. When I did summer jobs in Switzerland and Austria before, I had less net income, after rent & food. At least here I'm breaking even. I just don't expect that I can ever find a place where I could earn enough to pay to learn to drive/marry/buy a house/etc.
> Now the UK is leaving the EU, he is likely to lose the right to live in France.
This is very unlikely. While much about Brexit is unclear, it seems nearly certain that there will be provisions that British nationals can continue living in the EU and vice versa. No country involved wants to change the status for people who already emigrated. Discussions focus more around the exact rights (e.g. if the European Court of Justice remains responsible for EU citizens in the UK) and about movement of people after Brexit.
And even if you only move to Europe in a few years, it's likely that you will get a visa much easier than with a non-European passport.
Thanks! I didn't know this was possible. I was locked in Facebook because of the Messenger: that's how I communicate with most of my friends. I just deactivated my Facebook account and kept the Messenger.
"A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming -- 3rd Edition - you can download the 2nd edition as a pdf but it's missing the new chapters in the 3rd edition on Mysql and Python."
I don't see a reason why science couldn't flourish on a non-anonymous message board such as reddit or twitter in place of peer review. This is all matter of momentum. And of fear of open criticism.