CharonY

I wanted to say that I loved that, but hold on, those ain't amino acids are, they?

I don't think so. If memory serves, hirudin is a thrombin inhibitor and thereby acts as an anticoagulant (but not as an anti-platelet). D'oh. We need qualified persons everywhere. But as the Trump administration wants to destroy public goods, it makes sense to seek out the most unqualified and mission hostile person for the job. That way they can claim that the departments don't work and dismantle them and/or use them as exchemist described. That has been the modus operandi for since he got into power. It is more surprising at this point if anyone is surprised by it (other than those waking from a 20-year coma or so. They would be justifiably surprised)..

Based on those hypotheses, potentially. They are a "natural" treatment, after all. There is already a big push to fund research on harms of vaccines, while cutting research to make them better and safer.

Yes, that is why everyone sane is panicking. It is the department overseeing critical public health agencies such as the CDC, FDA and NIH. The CDC is (or was) networked across the world and is a leader in critical global efforts like the polio eradication strategy. Losing them, will create massive blind spots which will be almost impossible to fill in the short to perhaps mid-term.

I'd argue that this type of discourse is what is getting us in this mess. Apropos, would you mind cutting down on these memes? IMO they create unnecessary visual noise and clutter while adding nothing. Some of them can be humorous, if used appropriately, but overuse just makes it harder to read threads. I also feel that their overuse (among other things) contribute to the loss of attention spans. This is not about invalidation. Prior to Pasteur and the validation of the germ theory there were competing hypothese, regarding the cause of diseases. Prevalent ones were the so-called miasma and the terrain theory. What RFK describes is a bit of a fusion of both which he calls miasma, but is actually closer to the terrain theory. Therein, folks believed that disease is essentially caused by an imbalance in things like "humours" and bad diet. So basically he has the knowledge and beliefs of a quack from the 19th century.

I have heard from a colleague that admin has advised them to basically keep their mouths shut. But that historically does not go well with faculty, as they see that as part of academic freedom. In most cases they do not have the authority to do so. That would make sense for a private organization (and could be true for private universities) but generally goes against how universities used to operate. That being said, academic freedom has been under fire for a long time now and this is a move towards further restrictions.

Also, it became significantly dumber.

I do not know him so cannot speak to his situation. However, if he is tenured, he should be fairly safe job-wise, considering he is at Harvard, I believe? While I cannot say specifics to this person, I can mention things I heard from colleagues, which is not really pretty. In short, research has ground to a halt with NIH announcements now recently have started, but with severe delays, other major funding agencies are still delayed, so folks are in a limbo in terms of how to continue. Harvard specifically has been cut off from funding, from what I have heard (there are ongoing lawsuits). But especially smaller institutions are struggling with figuring out how to pay graduate students and what to do with the research portfolio. Especially non-tenured faculty are vulnerable as for many it is now virtually impossible to get the grants necessary to pass tenure review and there are ongoing discussion whether evaluation has to change. At the same time, there is also the overall budget cuts, which will fundamentally cut research and teaching in the US to a significant degree. Some institutions have advised faculty not to engage too much publicly, for fear of online backlash. As whole, the university administrations are caving in and/or are trying to keep their heads down and hope that this will eventually blow over. Fundamentally, we see an exercise in cowardice. In part, it is understandable, as they do not really have anything but moral leverage and we see how precarious elements of free speech and academic freedom really are. Whether anything of this relevant to the decision is unclear, but almost all researchers in the US will have to to rethink how things are going forward, with little support.

There are a lot of articles out there highlighting his various strange beliefs. But in short, he adheres to a kind of naturalist belief (he calls it miasma, but it actually has a different name that currently eludes me). In that system, the germ theory is not accurate, but instead the disease are mainly caused by things like toxic exposure and poor diet. It also assumes that certain things are "natural" and enhance health (such as raw milk) and others are synthetic (like vaccines) and are therefore inherently harmful. All of that while ignoring existing knowledge and data, of course. The only thing that does make sense is that there indeed an effect of things like diet and toxic exposures are very real. It is just ignoring all other aspects that is really, really problematic. The very short answer to your questions is it doesn't. A slightly longer one is that public health in the US and in the world is at severe risk.

I mean, that is just the cruelty cherry on top of the terror they are visiting up on brown folks. Not much of a shock factor there, I would say. Sure, some folks are complaining that those refugees are not properly vetted compared to all the others who are not granted asylum and waiting for years. But it certainly does not top deporting American toddlers with cancer, now does it? Edit: that was an actual question, I am not sure whether my sense of anything is tethered to reality anymore.

Sure, I get that. But what really is left? It is a bit like having the wrestlers kill each other for real, then flooding the ring and have the remaining folks eaten by sharks. And then oops I am going to be very corrupt, even more corrupt than yesterday. What shock factor could possibly be left? Has he eaten Melania?

That would be considered plagiarism, usually. There is generally no reason to cite someone citing something else verbatim. This is because you generally learn that during training, and the instructions usually assume as much. I.e. they are not supposed to be learning instructions. This does not make a lot a sense to me, unless you are suggesting that references are copied blocks of text. They are not. References are used to substantiate arguments you are making. For example you can state that "it has been well-recognized that antibiotic resistance is major threat to our ability to control infections [1-12]". But you shouldn't just copy out a sentence of one of those references and pass it on as part of your writing, even if referenced. Generic sentences such as these can read very similar across papers, but it should still be part of your writing (and can also highlight different references). In principle, yes but it depends on how you use a source. If you keep referencing it as a main part of your paper it would be weird. If you they a few important points that you make at different points in your paper it would be fine.

It is mostly to make sure that the reference is correct. If say A makes a mistake, and everyone cites A rather than B, then the mistake will spread.

Yes, you are right, B would be the one to reference, but more than that, you would have to dig B up and read whether what A cited (and you want to incorporate into your paper) is indeed what is in B. If it is, you cite B and not A. However, in natural science you almost never copy anything from a paper. Usually you summarize findings such as, B et al., found that deletion of gene X resulted in a phenotype characterized by X and Y [1]. Therefore, what you describe here should not happen. More importantly, in a paper you generally cite material either for background (i.e. in the introduction sections), methods, or discussion. The core element of your study are your results, which should be original. The only exception are reviews, where you write about other papers, but here you are supposed to do a synthesis. Copy pasting is not acceptable there, either. Rejection rates are not particularly high, except in top journals. But even in other journals at minimum you have to demonstrate original work, which is a fairly low bar. Though for sure, it is usually not possible (or shouldn't be) to randomly submit papers if you are not a researcher in the given field.

The zone is already flooded, isn't it? At this point it the water is up to everyone's noses and how is adding more being even more distracting? Exactly, if there is not access to it, it doesn't really matter that it is not formally suspended. It was the same thing regarding abortion, until they finally decided to come out and ban it outright. Not only dragging feet, but a) shuffle them around in various states so that they lawyers cannot find them and then whisk them away before it can be litigated. Once in El Salvador (or wherever) they claim that there is no legal remedy anymore. It is functionally the same as to vanish folks into a gestapo prison.

The one issue I have with this hypothesis, is that everything is on fire. The constitution is in crisis, Nazis are running the government, corruption is now open, brownshirts, I mean ICE agents are abducting folks, habeas corpus is suspended, free speech is being dismantled, the economy is tanked and the list goes on. It is incredible to me that when folks are drowning, yet everything is on fire, and probably somehow also full of sharks, there is still potential for distractions.

Yet all they will do is to counteract the drop he caused in the first place. It is like putting out a fire you started and brag about the lives you saved. I will say one thing about abilities, though. Trump and Musk are very good at grifting people. They have the rare ability to lie and and convince people of it. Trump sometimes contradicts himself in the same sentence and still folks believe both contradictory statements. These is not a common ability and I should give him credit for that. However, these abilities are great for cult leaders and dictators, and are not for jobs where one would need background knowledge (like economics).

Making "deals" is not policy. The latter requires a coherent framework with specific goals. Those were all missing. Council on Foreign RelationsTrump’s Middle East Legacy Is FailureThe president has had a handful of successes—but never anything approaching a strategy.

A little while back the US sent orders out to European companies (including French and German) demanding an and to DEI programs, which clashes with national and European standards. It is a bit funny, as for example in Germany DEI initiatives are basically just getting started whereas they have been common in the USA for a while.

Well, that is exactly the issue though. If you do not know how something works, it is difficult to predict where it likely will fail or whether it is overfitting your data. If your conditions are sufficiently simply that could likely be circumvented and cross-validation approaches might help. But the more complex it is the harder it is to figure out whether the model has issues. A huge example in ML are population data, where the model often ended up to be biased against minorities, as they were underrepresented in data sets. Especially in the medical field, this was a real issue resulting in worse outcomes for minorities which were only realized rather recently. Of course with the perfect approach and the perfect data set it might perform well. But if we had that level of certainty, we might not need Ml in the first place as more reductionist approach might be similarly successful.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have entered IDIOTCON 4: https://www.wsj.com/world/greenland-spying-us-intelligence-809c4ef2?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

As @swansont, pointed out, there are no real purely capitalist systems, every economic system is somewhere on the spectrum. The trick is to treat wherever your favourite position is on the spectrum as the best possible option. You got me wrong, it is because he is stupid he is ruining other economies, but also the US economy. He is good at manipulating people, though I don't get why folks fall for it. However, as many other folks pointed out, what he did is to take the money from a huge successful real estate company from his father and made a much smaller company from that. His real success is that he got away with a lot of dubious things, but if had just invested his father's earnings he would have earned money. His by far biggest success was not in business but as a reality TV star in the apprentice. And as the producers have stated, they needed heavy editing to not make him look like a moron https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/business/donald-trump-apprentice.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FU8.116F.OD02-jt3FsNo&smid=url-share

What you describe has been around not under the name of AI, but under the umbrella of machine learning. Neural networks as outlined by @Ghideon is an example of such an approach. The issues are also mentioned, including that most are black box approaches, which makes issues of overfitting problematic (i.e. the outcome could be heavily biased due to your training set, but you won't know why and how it affected it). In contrast to, say Newton's law which is a very reductive model (and hence is elegant, but also idealized) you'll get something that has many, many, unwieldy parameters. Trying to prune that down to something like a Newtonian equation will require significant follow-up work. Basically you will try to create a simplified system based on an overly complex ML-model. Whether that is easier than to derive them otherwise depends on the system, I guess (which is way above my knowledge level).

I mean, that's part of it, but especially in the US there is a long-established worship of capitalism, likely as a response to the red scare. It is a bit hard to explain, but there is a bit of difference in mindset compared to a number of European countries, which have moved a little bit into that direction, but are not quite as much there. But the consequence is that folks conflate capitalism with freedom so that restricting the upward motion of wealth will somehow bring the downfall of society.

In many ways I think data can be used and contextualized in different ways. But I don't think that is a philosophical difference in the use of the data. For example, weather data can be used in a host of different disciplines. But the interpretation of the nature of the data is fairly consistent. I would think that temperature is typically seen as a measure of energy input into the system, regardless whether you are looking at chemical or biological processes, for example. I.e. it is more a difference of use rather than interpretation.