zlatiah

joined 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 24 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Yes, I already did, even before this particular news broke out...

I tried to individually tell every one I know IRL (which is not too many ppl sadly), basically told every single one of them to consider back-up career options... There are a couple of 1-year exchange students from Europe in my floor and I have not-subtly hinted at them to make contingency plans for PhD training back home. I've been following the news very carefully recently so I can share relevant items as soon as possible... The people need to know. I've even considered making know-your-rights printouts before they claimed they're doing an ICE raid in Chicago, but realized how little resources I have for that... I absolutely will do something. Not sure what it is but I can't see society go this way.

I just feel bad that as a non-US citizen there is only so little I can do... I don't even know if I could join a protest without being considered for deportation at this rate. Am planning my leave as well so there's that.

Funny incident, I blurted out to my family 2-months ago that Trump will probably build a concentration camp and was told to shut the F up... Murphy's law I suppose

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Conventional AI/ML: I... don't think so, unless they are models specially designed for playing games (with extreme examples being the likes of AlphaZero for chess/shogi/go). Actually I guess you could say that whatever DeepMind was doing was technically training/improving their models using video games? Case in point, their innovation on AlphaZero led to AlphaFold (which literally got a Nobel Prize) and the recent weather prediction tool

Generative AI: The field seems to have a major existential crisis due to running out of high-quality training data. So maybe there would be a way to use games to augment training data? I'm not an expert in Generative AI/LLM training so I'm not sure of the details

AGI: I'm certain an AGI model can be improved using video games but I don't think researchers even remotely have a concept of how to build an AGI model yet

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Sadly nothing yet, maybe just a couple of T-shirts... Mainly because I had to move/relocate every 1-2 years for my entire adult life until now & had to sell/give/throw away anything I couldn't bring with me every time I move

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I currently work as a postdoc in biomedical research, so my line of work was directly in the line of fire of recent Trump administration nonsense... Not great.

Beyond this though, I'm just impressed at how almost delusional my boss and some of my lab members has been. Lab PI/group leaders are responsible for bringing in grants, yet they don't seem to even care about the fact that almost all grant reviews are paused (and some of their grants are due early Feb!)... Not to mention they seem almost happy about RFK and Bhattacharya; I do not approve of such behavior as a researcher... Especially since another student in the lab is fucking suffering from long COVID-induced chronic fatigue. I don't understand how could some other ppl in the lab be so insensitive

To be fair, I've been essentially "fired" from the lab anyway. Not actually fired, but was on an 1-year contract and PI refused to renew (and it's more difficult to fire someone than not renewing contract in Illinois law anyway). Pretty shitty behavior but I guess I should have expected a newer PI to not know how to properly lead a lab... Partly due to that, I've started applying for jobs in Europe two months ago and have just recently started getting interviews. All of them are scheduled early morning for me, I'm not a morning person, and at least one or two have been somewhat disrespectful so... At least I'm hoping to get at least one offer I hope?

Also am worried about selling some large possessions (furniture, hobbyist items) since I'm probably leaving the US soon. So a bit stressed recently between work and personal matters

All in all, I'm... surprisingly calm for the amount of bullshit I need to deal with. No ideal why. Maybe it's just the power of video games lol

 

Includes quotes from UChicago provost's letter:

As we do so, we are requesting that all University researchers working on federal grants temporarily suspend their non-personnel spending on federal grants as much as possible during this period of substantial uncertainty. For example, do not make any additional spending commitments, purchase new supplies or equipment, start new experiments, embark on funded travel, etc.

Screencap of the letter itself: https://imgur.com/a/UIh6zks

Depaywalled: https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.chicagobusiness.com%2Fpolitics%2Fuchicago-pauses-research-spending-after-trump-funding-freeze

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

There are a few active discussions on Reddit/Bluesky... I think the short answer is none of us are really sure. However, I read comments saying that language from the memo seems to suggest that they would stop disbursement of funds, which would be the absolute worst case scenario (since that would straight up terminate a lot of ppl's jobs)

If there's any lawyer here who can parse/interpret the original memo I'd appreciate some insights...

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 days ago (3 children)

It was just HHS a few days ago... Then it came for NSF... Then this happened

I know the official memo claims this is "temporary" but there is literally no way this would end well. Heck there was at least one clinical trial terminated because of the "temporary" HHS pause, and this burden is on the entire country now

I envisioned for the worst when Trump was elected... and somehow this administration has managed to exceed some of my wildest expectations

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Technically my primary computer activities are gaming, but these days I game exclusively on the Steam Deck or the tablet (for mobile games)...

My most speced-out computer was actually purchased for work related reasons. I wanted a decent GPU because I thought I'd be working in deep learning. Well current job doesn't require training models and I was required to use a dedicated work laptop so... This high-spec one I mainly use for just about everything else other than gaming

 
[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Yeah no joke. The biomedical community is probably in collective ourage now, since NIH straight up cancelled most grant reviews and all types of outreach... which is unprecedented

The official NIH website banning specific words is just... cherry on the cake, I suppose. Hence only mildly infuriating

spoilerI swear goodness this gives me way too much of the great China firewall vibe...

 

A couple of things I tried... Please validate to tell me I'm not crazy. Searches done on www.nih.gov (linked in post).

These are blocked:

  • "diversity"
  • "diversity "
  • "equity"
  • "inclusion"
  • "DEI"

These are not blocked:

  • "diverse"
  • "diversit"
  • "diversity*", "inclusion*", "equity*"
  • "diversitya"
  • "equity and diversity"
  • "diversity and equity"
  • "diversity equity inclusion"

What is the meaning of this

 

... Memes referring to cats as liquid have been circulating online for several years. And they caught the eye of physicist Marc-Antoine Fardin of the Jacques Monod Institute, now at Paris City University and the French National Center for Scientific Research. “I spend some time on the Internet,” he said in a 2019 TEDx talk, “for research purposes, of course.” In the spring of 2014, Fardin began to scientifically study the fluid behavior of cats—a pastime that allowed him to avoid his real work. “This procrastination actually led to some success,” he explained in his talk. “It won me the Ig Nobel Prize of Physics, which rewards research that makes you laugh as well as think.”

The question is not so easy to answer. “If we wait long enough, everything eventually flows. That’s the motto of rheology,” Fardin said during his TEDx talk. For example, the solid asphalt of a sloping road continues to flow very slowly, which can be observed after several years or decades. Solids can also be deformed if enough pressure is applied to them. On the other hand, liquids can also have solid properties. Ketchup, for instance, only flows out of an open glass bottle after it has been shaken several times.

In work published in the journal Rheology Bulletin in 2014, Fardin had proposed that the relaxation time of young adult cats is between one second and one minute. This estimate allows the Deborah number to be calculated: if, say, a cat squeezes itself into a small cardboard box within five seconds and is observed for one minute, then De = 0.0833.... That is significantly smaller than 1: the cat is clearly exhibiting fluid behavior.

In other words: this is actually an article about the fuzzy definition of solids/fluids, and how under this definition cats do, in fact, exhibit liquid properties

Article is from Scientific American and may have soft paywall

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I guess if I am nit-picking, it's very hard for a statistician to claim anything as having a zero possibility... of course a statement like that helps no one. These are my actual thoughts:

non-zero possibility

It is technically possible that Musk's gesture was not a Nazi salute but rather something that looks similar. Fun fact, this is something that happened with S. Korea's Megalian hand gesture issue (for example see this case: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2621gzvkdo), where ppl found the gesture in a lot of unexpected places. However, the Megalian gesture is a pretty common hand movement, whereas the Nazi salute... I mean I guess it could happen due to a really bad out-of-context dance choreography?? But that clearly wasn't Musk's case

"But I am just wondering if everyone else sees this that way with no room for it being a result of autism and definitely that."

... I mean maybe?? I have weird Autistic intrusive thoughts sometimes but even then this is a bit... Honestly though, I don't know if I should put any respect to someone who willingly know what a Nazi salute is, and then choose to do it in front of one of the most important political events in the world, twice in a row nontheless. I find it hard to believe such an act to be a faux pass and non-intentional. Heck even if it is completely unintentional, this would be ground for job termination and put on a blacklist for life for most job positions I know

"Is this where we are? I feel more scared to be in America now."

Yeah I know... I seriously wonder why I am still in the US as well.

 

Postdoctoral training is a career stage often described as a demanding and anxiety-laden time when many promising PhDs see their academic dreams slip away due to circumstances beyond their control. We use a unique dataset of academic publishing and careers to chart the more or less successful postdoctoral paths. We build a measure of academic success on the citation patterns two to five years into a faculty career. Then, we monitor how students’ postdoc positions—in terms of relocation, change of topic, and early well-cited papers—relate to their early-career success.

One key finding is that the postdoc period seems more important than the doctoral training to achieve this form of success. This is especially interesting in light of the many studies of academic faculty hiring that link Ph.D. granting institutions and hires, omitting the postdoc stage. Another group of findings can be summarized as a Goldilocks principle: It seems beneficial to change one’s direction, but not too much.

Paper linked in post, is open access. Citation:

  • Y. Duan, S.A. Memon, B. AlShebli, Q. Guan, P. Holme, T. Rahwan, Postdoc publications and citations link to academic retention and faculty success, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (4) e2402053122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2402053122 (2025).

Related news article from Nature News (soft paywall): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00142-y

 

Reference (passed peer review btw):

Muhammad Salman Hameed, Hongxuan Cao, Li Guo, Lei Zeng, Yanliang Ren, Advancements, challenges, and future frontiers in covalent inhibitors and covalent drugs: A review, European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry Reports, Volume 12, 2024, 100217, ISSN 2772-4174, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejmcr.2024.100217

Try this link if the above doesn't work (not that it's worth visiting in the first place...): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277241742400089X?via=ihub

 

Mew discovered the wonder of pillows and insist on sitting on one

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

Well the bigger question is, would you buy it? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Jokes aside... Not attractive enough. Even if I'm attractive, OF creators are quite competitive as it's kind of a "winner takes all" market. So probably not worth it... Besides, for conventionally attractive people shouldn't there be easier ways to make money off looks? For example landing a modeling gig that has a more steady pay or something like that

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Isn’t it the publisher’s job to promote their work

You are correct

What are the publishers even doing at this point?

I... honestly don't know. But with how the academic bureaucracy works, a lot of people will be stuck in the system for the time being as it's extremely difficult to have a grass-roots movement to move away from Springer Nature; academia is hard enough and there's no way junior academics would willingly sabotage their careers that way... So I have no clue.

 

Additional context for non-scientists:

Nature is the highest-cited (extremely high impact factor, a.k.a. how many times the average paper in a journal gets cited) basic sciences journal, and is one of the most-cited only behind some clinical study-specific journals like Lancet. Nature is also widely regarded as one of the (if not the) most elite journals to publish in. Lots of scientists' careers hinge on them publishing papers in journals like Nature or Science.

Springer Nature also operates a lot of Nature-branded journals (like Nature Genetics, Nature Cell Biology, Nature Protocols) that are commonly regarded as some of the best field-specific journals. Not to mention Scientific American, a highly rigorous science news source aimed at the general public.

 

Context is that I had to register for a lot of accounts recently and some of the rules really make no sense.

Not name-and-shaming, but the best one I've seen recently is I might have accidentally performed an XSS attack on a career portal using a 40-digit randomly generated password...

 

Earth’s temperature has surged in the past two years, and climate scientists will soon announce that it hit a milestone in 2024: rising to more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. But is this sudden spike just a blip in the climate data, or an early indicator that the planet is heating up at a faster pace than researchers thought?

Some scientists argue that the spike can be mostly explained by two factors. One is the El Niño event that began in mid-2023 — a natural weather pattern in which warm water pools in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, often leading to hotter temperatures and more-turbulent weather. The other is a reduction over the past few years in air pollution, which can cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space and seeding low-lying clouds. Yet neither explanation fully accounts for the temperature surge, other researchers say.

Some say that the massive temperature spike might end up being a blip in the climate data, owing in large part to new regulations covering air pollution from ocean-going ships... Not everyone is convinced, however. If the pollution reduction was the primary explanation, warmer temperatures should coincide with the areas most frequented by ships... Nor do the numbers necessarily add up.

Soft paywall so see summary above. The two studies cited in the news:

  • Goessling, H. F., Rackow, T. & Jung, T. Science https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq7280 (2024). (about the El Nino effect)
  • Gettelman, A. et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 51, e2024GL109077 (2024). (about the reduction in ship tracks)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

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