"There are only two bits in the universe. 1b0 and 1b1. All instances of 0 and 1 are merely the same bits, traveling forward and backward through time."
Little Timmy came into his parents room one afternoon and said "mommy, daddy, where do babies come from?"
His parents were surprised, he's a little young for that, so that sat him down and explain gently "when two people love each other very much, sometimes, a stork flies in carrying a baby wrapped in blankets in it's bill, and it leaves the baby on the new parents doorstep!"
Little Timmy scrunches up his face, confused, then asks "well then who fucks the stork?"
They always have been able to. It's called a blog, personal or company.
But everyone knows why "serious research" isn't mostly published on blogs:
Corporations like Elsevier have successfully executed takeovers of research centers (universities) and made journal submission a mandatory rite of passage for academics joining the state-mandated academia funnel. Don't publish? No postdoc for you. No professorship for you. No grant approval or news coverage.
Do publish in an academic journal? All the work you did, all the IP you invented, is assigned to the university and/or the grant funder. You're basically a non-shareholder: a contractor.
Researchers who do publish on their own tend to be viewed as cranks, since they generally don't use "journalese" and aren't required to cite from the same pool of "officially published" articles. Consequently, they also can't really get cited outside of the blogosphere - a blog post isn't "legitimate literature."
Researchers who don't publish in official journals and are labeled cranks generally can't afford to do research long term.
So how do you divorce yourself from academia?
Start a research company or project
Get funding via grants, product sales, donations
Use your research to directly build products and get a return on R&D invested
Decide to not publish your research in the open because doing so would take away the information asymmetry keeping you ahead of the competition
> Corporations like Elsevier have successfully executed takeovers of research centers (universities) and made journal submission a mandatory rite of passage for academics joining the state-mandated academia funnel.
I...think the causality on this is wrong.
"Publish or perish" long predates Elsevier's rapacious consumption of journals. The reason they did that in the first place is because they already knew it was, in effect, a captive audience.
I lost a lot of respect for science when my advisor explained that it didn't matter that the cutting edge work I wanted to extend was being done by Some Guy On A Forum, I wasn't allowed to to cite them, and a pity too, because it was probably correct.
To be honest and judging by the amount and quality of emails I receive weekly from people claiming to have a discovery or sharing this last unification theory, this is a safe assumption. The problem that peer-review solve it not to waste your valuable little time seeing if this is following reasonable scientific methods or not. It does not tell you that this wrong or correct.
I ready about 30 papers weekly (below average) and I spend 2 days out of my week reading them. This without having to read anything, it would be a much worse situation where I have to read too many just to find that many of them are just written by cranks.
Someone can say we can can pay for people to have some sort of verified aggregate feed of articles. Yes that is possible and congratulations, you just reinvented peer-review system.
> I lost a lot of respect for science when my advisor explained that it didn't matter that the cutting edge work I wanted to extend was being done by Some Guy On A Forum, I wasn't allowed to to cite them
My strong guess is that your advisor was wrong (or you misunderstood him). I've often seen citations to random web sites. Even citations to conversations. The purpose of citation is to give credit, not rack up points.
Perhaps he was saying it was too risky to base your work off of some blog post, as his work was not yet "established" because it hadn't been published.
I think it depends on how the reference is used. Something like “here is a proof or an explanation, it’s great and I am going to repeat it here but it came from that website over there so don’t think I came up with it” is very different from “there is a proof over there so I will accept it as true and you should too” (i.e., how citations tend to be used most of the time, unfortunately).
Even as a referee I would be happy with the former, provided that there is a permanent link or a pdf of the webpage in the supplementary material. I really would not let the latter fly.
> is very different from “there is a proof over there so I will accept it as true and you should too” (i.e., how citations tend to be used most of the time, unfortunately).
I have seen exactly this. A (famous) professor at my university had a manuscript for a textbook that he had been working on for years, but had not yet published. A number of people wrote papers citing the (unpublished) book.
Of course, this is a bit of an outlier as the author had over the years given people drafts of his book.
Still, I would say that as long as the referee can access the web site and verify it, it should be allowed (and I'll still assert that it has been allowed on numerous occasions). May vary with discipline, though.
I was in Greenwich Public Schools from K-12 and graduated GHS 2016.
One kid in my elementary school, Alessandro Espa, brought his first-gen iPod Touch to class in 4th or 5th grade. He was showing off the magic trick apps of the age: the lighter, soda/beer.
The only tech hardware we'd used before then was old iMacs with yellowed vinyl keyboard covers and ancient Windows XP desktops. The Touch was like a magic alien object. Everyone was magnetically attracted to looking at it. It looked like a shiny stainless steel candy bar. Everyone in the room knew immediately they'd be the coolest if they got a phone by high school.
Previous generations got flip phones in high school - around the time they got their learner's permit. The only apps were calling, SMS, or tetris. You could tell how cool a phone was by its color. Forget swappable screen backgrounds; the coolest phone of 2006 had colorful swappable front and back plastic plates.
Sending text messages was powerful before phones arrived. It was basically telekinesis. I missed that entire era.
My generation was not satisfied with just SMS. They needed to be organizing parties through emails. They needed to be trading drugs and candy through Snapchat. They needed to be covertly taking photos of classmates and teachers and emailing them to each other. They needed to be coordinating fractal-style bullying strategies through group chats.
By the time I got to 9th grade, every one of my peers had phones: first gen Androids, Blackberries, Samsung S, their parents' old iPhones. Everything happened at once. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Temple Run. Minecraft. Tumblr. Hidemyass. Snapchat. Pinterest.
I missed the boat on most of those, but Tumblr was fun. Some friends from Syosset and I did wacky role-playing games via the anonymous question asking boxes. It was the highlight of the year.
Bart Palosz committed suicide after some kids (whose names GPS has still managed, or been bribed, to conceal) bullied him and smashed his phone. Did they ever see any consequences?
In 11th grade, was told by a teacher that I should be happy when I scratched my laptop because it meant I wouldn't be able to worship it anymore. The teacher was right.
After my 10th grade the school instituted a Chromebook program. I never picked mine up. As far as I know students only ever used them to write Google docs, watch porn, play Miniclip flash games, cyberbully each other, and click through shitty Aplia homeworks. Did any of you HN readers work on or found Aplia? If so, fuck you. Especially you, Paul Romer.
As far as I'm concerned the $250 the Chromebooks cost apiece would have been better spent on $100 of books, $100 of legal pads, and $50 of nice pens and pencils and erasers. But tragically, one just can't hustle your way to the top of GPS IT and earn a six-figure salary in Connecticut by promoting old-fashioned tech that has worked for hundreds of years. No; you need to be selling Silicon Valley dogwater HTML and plastic.
The district has a history of being dependent on technology to appear forward thinking. It aims to appear 2-3 years ahead of the rest of the country, so nobody can say "GPS should have known better!"
The only reason they're so happily agreeing to "ban" phones is that nothing has changed in the last 5-6 years. Students have gotten dumber and more addicted to technology. There's no more new technology to get a raise from introducing except maybe LLMs.
P.S. I would bet $10,000 GPS won't genuinely enforce the ban due to threats from the 20ish students in the system with paranoid billionare helicopter parents.
Haha, I'm certainly from your generation and feel the same.
But the tech isn't going away, and it can be pretty useful, empowering, cool and democratisering.
We just need to learn how to deal with the tech in a healthy way, and these bans are progress if you ask me.
I think the smartphone is just too much of a slotmachine, but we are just learning about that, and learning about what to do against it. Smartphones took a whole generation by surprise, the kids, but also their parents. I received rotten.com style videos on the family email address, havging a good conversation about it with my flabbergasted father... then smartphones came. That generation grew up quickly, and differently, and the parents were just slapped in the face with it. But it's changing, we're learning.
Edit: You deleted your comment, anyway, was going to answer this:
Hmm, now that I look more closely indeed I'm probably >10 years older. We had our first dumbphones at around 16-17 (Ericsson GF768 at ~17).
I do remember the thrill of sleeping with it next to my bed and receiving a text during the night. Magic.
You sound like my generation though ;) I bet you had a hard time in between your year mates. The current generation also has people like you btw. Not many though.
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