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OMG, it's the ultimate mechanical_fish pet peeve collection! TL;DR: I rant. ONE: I can't find the citation of the scientific paper on ExtremeTech. (Let alone a
by mechanical_fish 15y ago
OMG, it's the ultimate mechanical_fish pet peeve collection! TL;DR: I rant.
ONE: I can't find the citation of the scientific paper on ExtremeTech. (Let alone a link. Who would dare to dream of a link?) They do refer obliquely to "the paper" once. (What paper?)
And they link to MIT's press office, whose brand is really solid, so everything they write is almost like science! And there you can skim the article twice and finally spot the citation:
Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT and lead author of the study reported online today in the journal Nature.
Okay, gotta go find an online Nature subscription to find out what's going on. There's an hour of my day spoken for. At least they're trying to ensure I get some exercise.
Why is the actual journal article important? Just look at this thread here on HN. We have people doubting all sorts of things, but these may well be things that are addressed in the actual work. The content of the popular articles means very little: They leave out most of the details. The details matter. The whole point of this study is to try and tease out more details.)
TWO: But, wait, there's more. I first tried to read ExtremeTech on an iPad (original edition). The article popped up in one of those insufferable iPad-only JS-powered "mobile editions" with Swiping Action. Unfortunately, there was only the first page of the article. It cut off in midsentence. I tried pressing the giant button marked "Next" on the right side of the screen. I got a big white screen. I flailed around with my fingers. A completely different article eventually rendered itself. I flailed around with my fingers some more. Eventually the original article reappeared, still incomplete. Fortunately, one more roundtrip to the next article and back and I finally got the whole thing to render.
Then I pressed the back button and everything seemed to hang. I closed the browser window and thanked the gods for my escape.
Why on earth do publications use these broken things, when simple web pages render so nicely on the iPad? The site does have something like a dozen tracking cookies on it; does this imply that they have data showing that swipability is so important that it doesn't even have to work in order to attract more ad impressions/clicks/Tweets/whatever? Or does it merely suggest that they are so busy struggling with glass-cockpit syndrome that they can't perceive that their site is broken on the iPad?
- bigiain 15y agoCynical-me thinks "screwed up page rendering and swiping just achieved 4times more page views to claim to advertisers - mission accomplished, goals met!"
- obituary_latte 15y agoIt crashed my browser too. Twice. Big tower-computer-thingy with a couple of meg-joules of RAM and Pewter web browser. Thankfully, I was able to spot the problem after visiting the page with my lawnmower: http://i.imgur.com/4jnGv.png http://i.imgur.com/4jnGv.png
- mrsebastian 15y agoI will add a link to the paper itself; sorry about making you jump through hoops.
- polyfractal 15y agoHey, props for responding to criticism! As a (now ex-)neurobiologist, it's maddening when journalists don't cite the paper they talk about. I helped start ResearchBlogging.org way back in the day to help fight this very problem. If I may make a suggestion: wrap your citations in OpenURL COinS format. ResearchBlogging.org provides this functionality automatically, but you can do it yourself too. It provides a lot of useful meta-data, citation information and the ability for plugins to interact intelligently with the web-page [1]http://ocoins.info/ http://ocoins.info/
- mrsebastian 15y agoIs this similar to the DOI thing? I have been thinking about doing that, too.
- polyfractal 15y agoIt's related. DOI is basically a universal identifier that acts as a "domain name" for academic literature. This is to prevent broken links over time. The big providers (Elsevier, etc) are obligated to maintain the DOI no matter what happens on their end. E.g they may completely change their site architecture, or change domain name, but as long as they keep the DOI updated with the current location of the paper nothing goes wrong. DOI's all around the internet will still continue to point at the paper. It's a lot more robust than directly linking to the paper itself. COINS is a way to embed bibliographic meta-data into a webpage. There are a number of plugins/extensions that will grab this metadata and do useful things. One example is an extension which automatically redirects links through your library's link resolver so you get the paper and not the paywall page.
- mechanical_fish 15y agoThanks so much. It's awesome to see this practice start to change. At this rate maybe I'll soon be able to control my pet peeve with medicine.
- Alex3917 15y ago"Just look at this thread here on HN. We have people doubting all sorts of things, but these may well be things that are addressed in the actual work." Presumably if MIT had actually discovered the nature of consciousness we wouldn't be reading about it in some tabloid. The research may be less bad than the article suggests, but there's no way it's as good as the article suggests either.
- onemoreact 15y agoThe fact that consciousness runs on neurons is hardly breaking news.
- xyzzyz 15y agoActually, it would be a breaking news for people who subscribe to mind-matter dualism. There are quite a lot of them, for instance followers of many Christian religions.
- ithkuil 15y agoI doubt that many of them will accept any scientific proof which disproves mind-matter dualism, and thus this one woudn't be breaking news for them neither.
- NickM 15y agoI don't happen to believe in mind-matter dualism, but at the same time, I also don't believe it's possible to scientifically prove it one way or the other. Can science truly explain where consciousness comes from? I would argue it cannot, because consciousness is a subjective experience, and is not objectively measurable.
- ma2rten 15y agoActually, can science truly prove anything about the world with certainty? I think claiming that would be ignorant of the way science works: You make assumptions, based on those assumptions you build a model and then (optionally) you show that your model correctly predicts some effect. If the assumptions you made do not hold, your proof does not hold either. Related to that question: Is consciousness really subjective? Is it not the only thing I as a person can experience objectively? EDIT: I don't understand why I am beeing down voted? I am just trying to explain my point of view. I don't think religion can prove anything with certainty, either. Nobody can. You can just make more or less strong assumptions.