Almost everyone I know in chemistry. Almost no one I know in physics. Things are weird that way.

Say that to Styrian arsenic eaters. Cyanide and uranium though are fair. Though there was an “energy drink” with thorium once.

And there’s also the practice of mithridatism, but at least there is some evidence to support some of its instances.

I’d say (a couple years ago) the service is also supposed to be access via DOI in perpetuity and presence in all the relevant databases, so that’s gotta cost some money for the reassurance as opposed to a pdf file “hosted” on Google Drive. But after Heterocycles fiasco I am not sure about that anymore.

Well, and some mark that this is likely a valid piece of research if it’s at www.reputablejournal.com as opposed to this likely being half-baked something at www.somerxiv.com or this likely being absolute lunacy at www.anyothersite.com.

Still, yes, billions in revenue vs millions spent essentially on essentially simple tasks like hosting and cataloguing (plus matching authors to reviewers I guess, though with how often I am asked to find them myself it’s doubtful) does not compute indeed.

By the way, in almost 100% of cases (the rest being just OA where the published version could be sent by anyone to anyone or something legally really dubious), the authors have a right to send their paper, even if it is published in a paywalled journal. Basically, the only thing the journal has a right to for subscription-based (aka those that cost $35) articles is content plus page layout. If the authors have the exact same text but formatted differently, they are free to distribute it wherever and however they want.

Preprint servers or lab/personal websites are best first choices for that.

edit: a small disclaimer on the exact same text meaning exact same text the authors provided; if the editor in the journal has corrected some typos and inserted a/the here or there (a common thing for non-natives to miss), then this becomes more of a grey area, because technically at this point it’s not a 100% authors’ text).

I’d say yeah, I agree with you, at least in some cases that must be true. It’s so hard to imagine what must go through their heads.

I can’t even say they aren’t doing it for science, because at times there’s such insistence that you can’t help but feel they are sincere in their beliefs (well, same applies to ‘psychics’ or ‘telepaths’, so ehh).

Fair. But this is an example of something egregious by all standards. Sure, we can also remember Jacques Benveniste. Or recent ivermectin fiasco. And are we considering that superconductor story from last year fraud or just negligence?

Maybe a handful others can be found active today, but the number of those that attempted such a risk would be very small — probably several hundred bold enough to disrupt their area, virtually unnoticeable from outside perspective, and a couple dozens willing to try to act at a scale visible by popular media (well, like example you provided).

That’s what I mean by rare. I would call these outliers in terms of scale/frequency because incidents like these were allowed to happen and did not pop out of thin air. They are not a root of the problem, but rather a byproduct of how academic publishing, financing, and recognition work as a system. The random article you would try to replicate would with a certain far-from-zero probability fail not because the authors had a grandiose idea of how to fool the academic community and gain fame, but likely tried to fit in their poor results in the publishing process that requires novelty and constant publishing regardless of the quality of research, or else they lose their position/group/lab/not gain tenure/not gain next grant/not close the report etc. And that is more problematic and brings far more distrust in science, even among academics themselves, than any vaccine- or water memory-related nonsense.

Well, this is extreme.

But in all seriousness, it’s rare for someone to commit fraud on this scale, and even rarer for someone to expect fame from it.

It’s much more common to be in a position where your grant obligations require you to publish 4 articles in a year, and the topic didn’t turn out to be as good as you initially expected, so what do you do? Just take the samples that actually worked at least barely, at least once, apply the logic of “well, it did work once, it doesn’t matter that two other replication attempts brought the catalysis efficiency twice as low, one sample is enough for a proof of concept, let’s write a whole paper based on that”, and here we have a manuscript that contains inflated data, maybe because the conditions were successful this time, or maybe because someone had previously polished platinum on the same surface that the electrode for the catalysis was polished on. Who knows? Who cares? At least you won’t starve for a year until you have to do it again.

Not trying to justify such behaviour, just providing some sort of explanation of why this happens at least in some cases.

Isn’t that how the setup works for any relatively large company? I admittedly haven’t worked in many, but that’s usually the case for corporate computers at least.

I guess it’s one of those “on a spectrum” things — for me, an ADHD person, reading before bed works.

It’s just other things mentioned in the post, like movies, games, are stimulating and not recommended before sleep even for neurotypicals, and even they still can’t live without screens before bed, that was my point.

I thought reading is actually often recommended though instead of all those other activities. Knitting too. Relaxing things like that.

It might be a specific “stay alert” trigger for some, but not generally.

Why isn’t Brazil on the list of countries that have their fees waived? Are they on the “rich” side of the spectrum for that to be considered or is there simply no agreement between Brazilian government/publishers?

Yes, I know this is treating a symptom rather than illness itself, but for the sake of today’s science and not the science of tomorrow, at least such an option should be available.

“Real” scientists try to put a spin on it akin to “You can’t properly hypothesise, reason or make predictions about anything based on a sample size of ~200 countries that are totally outside of your control and are very different from each other”. Few more arguments get thrown into a pot.

Doesn’t stop political scientists from mostly accurately describing things, so no harm is done here. The harm lies within pushing that opinion on general public, highlighting the that “proper” scientists don’t see any value in social “sciences”, hence contributing to public ignorance about societal problems.

And with how lousy political views of “rational”, “logical”, “critically thinking” people in STEM sometimes are, it’s awfully ironic.

Speaking as a disgruntled Russian STEM scientist who is horrified how willingly some of his collages ate Putin’s reasons for actions both against Ukraine and within Russia, including against fellow scientists (WTF, where’s professional solidarity?!).

A bilingual person would to a certain extent. I’ve noticed a tendency of English-speaking societies to gradually eliminate the gender from professions, while the languages with grammatical gender, like Russian or German, tend to incorporate previously missing feminine suffixes to the words that previously were male-gendered only.

Though your question (a rhetorical one I guess) regards English only, I suppose, and then yes, the combination is weird.

edit: from what I gather, German is already content with the use of “-in” suffix, so not much change needed, except the push for the use of a “gender gap” or “gender asterisk” (Genderstern) for language to be more inclusive when using plurals [looks extremely clunky to me, but I get the spirit]. In Russian, however, even the suffixes meet significant resistance, both from society and, especially, government, to the point that feminitives are considered “LGBT propaganda”, and since “LGBT is an extremist organisation”, that is extremism apparently. Anyway, “gender gaps” (usually as underscores) are also used in more “left” (for lack of a better label) communities, but are absolutely not accepted and misunderstood be the wider audience.

Both on Android, and iOS, opting out of notifications solves most of the problems. You can do all on your own time without constant nagging, and leave notifications on for the communication channels you really need.

However, what I hate with passion are shopping and delivery apps that suffer with disabled notifications (I don’t know when things arrive, and that would ideally be good to know within seconds), but enabled notifications mean that there would be a lot of spam notifications about ordering and buying more.

So, podcasts are not ADHD-friendly, it seems. Because for me it’s either full focus or none at all.

en passo on quaso

EU usually frowns upon that though. Sure, the fines are so small that it’s negligible for Meta, but there should be some fines. But all I find via quick googling are this year’s sanctions over personal data processing in Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp. The nature of these data is not clear though.

I am not trying to say that WhatsApp is safe to use, mind you. I am pretty sure they will hand over all the info along with encryption keys at first government’s request (or any other highest bidder for that matter), but that’s only my perception of them as a company, with no hard proof at hand.

Why is it legal for them to advertise it as end-to-end encrypted then? I thought the main danger lies in WhatsApp insistence on backing up non-encrypted history to Google Drive/iCloud.

Of course, the existence of backdoors is usually not disclosed (duh), but can they actually read any message?

Don’t warn. Act. Fine him. It won’t hurt him much, but would generate additional funds for European needs. Actively create Fediverse accounts that interact with the public. And so on…