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LilB0kChoy, in Scientists Identify The Optimal Number of Daily Steps For Longevity, And It's Not 10,000

Saved you a click: Per the article it’s closer To 6,000

lemonflavoured,
@lemonflavoured@kbin.social avatar

Which is what the app on my phone is based on already. I manage it most days easily by walking from the bus station to work and back, which is ~1 mile. And that doesn't include the time I'm actually at work, because I can't wear my smart watch actually in the office.

Pons_Aelius, in Scientists Identify The Optimal Number of Daily Steps For Longevity, And It's Not 10,000

Not surprising. The 10K steps idea was first set by a Japanese maker of pedometers as a marketing exercise with zero research to back it up.

GigglyBobble,

The pedometers are all so imprecise though that it showing 10k may well be 6k real steps.

bedrooms,

6k would be too easy to motivate buying pedometers, I guess.

FaceDeer, in Academic journal forced to retract peer-reviewed AI-generated paper after "rat penis" pics go viral
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

It's the "peer-reviewed" part that should be raising eyebrows, not the AI-generated part. How the gibberish images were generated is secondary to the fact that the peer reviewers just waved the obvious nonsense through without even the most cursory inspection.

Nawor3565,

In another article, it said that one of the reviewers did being up the nonsense images, but he was just completely ignored. Which is an equally big problem.

YMS,
@YMS@kbin.social avatar

It's in this article.

bedrooms,

It's how this publisher works. They make it insanely difficult for reviewers to reject a submission.

MotoAsh,

Some of the reviewers have explained it as the software they use doesn’t even load up the images. So unless the picture is a cited figure, it might not get reviewed directly.

I can kindof understand how something like this could happen. It’s like doing code reviews at work. Even if the logical bug is obvious once the code is running, it might still be very difficult to spot when simply reviewing the changed code.

We have definitely found some funny business that made it past two reviewers and the original worker, and nobody’s even using machine models to shortcut it! (even things far more visible than logical bugs)

Still, that only offers an explanation. It’s still an unacceptable thing.

bedrooms,

Actually, figures should be checked during the reviewing process. It's not an excuse.

MotoAsh,

Yea, “should be”, but as said, if it’s not literally directly relevant even while being in the paper, it might get skipped. Lazy? Sure. Still understandable.

A more apt coding analogy might be code reviewing unit tests. Why dig in to the unit tests if they’re passing and it seems to work already? Lazy? Yes. Though it happens far more than most non-anonymous devs would care to admit!

bedrooms,

No, "should be" as in, it must be reviewed but can be skipped if there's a concern like revealing the author identity in a double-blind process.

oyfrog,

I’ve heard some of my more senior colleagues call frontiers a scam even before this regarding editorial practices there.

It’s actually furstratingly common for some reviewer comments to be completely ignored, so it’s possible someone raised a flag and no one did anything about it.

Jesusaurus,

Frontiers has something like a 90%+ publish rate, which for any “per reviewed” journal is ridiculously high. They have also been in previous scandals where a large portion of their editorial staff were sacked (no pun intended).

bedrooms, (edited )

The biggest problem with Frontiers for me is that there are some handy survey articles that are cited like 500 times. It seems that Interdisciplinary surveys are hard to publish in a traditional journal, and as a result 500 articles cited this handy overview article for readers who would need an overview.

The article I checked was in a reasonable quality, and it's a shame I can't cite it just because it's in Frontiers.

HubertManne, in Scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don't have free will
@HubertManne@kbin.social avatar

Assuming his hypothesis is true I find this rediculous from the article:

"The world is really screwed up and made much, much more unfair by the fact that we reward people and punish people for things they have no control over," Sapolsky said. "We've got no free will. Stop attributing stuff to us that isn't there."

How is it made more so. We have no free will over how we reward or punish people. If the world is screwed up and his hypothesis correct then its exactly as screwed up as its supposed to be and our lack of decision neither make it worse or better. It just is.

sheepishly,
@sheepishly@kbin.social avatar

That is a very good point. It seems like his argument is that, since we have no free will, we should stop trying to do anything to control others' actions... which in itself is suggesting to control others' actions. Furthermore regardless of whether we have free will or not, however you want to define it- punishing bad behavior discourages it and provides better outcomes for the world at large. It's like he's saying people just blindly act according to some non-free-will principle without taking in any environmental input, which just seems ridiculous. And implying that specifically applies only to bad behavior, which just seems like he's being smugly pessimistic as a gotcha. "Ha ha, the world is bad, if you disagree with me you're just a hopeless optimist" sort of thing.

palordrolap, in Scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don't have free will

Whether or not we have free will and whether this whole existence is pre-calculated, I'm going to go all meta-Pascal's wager on it and suggest that we try to act like we do have free will and try not to think about it.

Maybe I was always going to come to that conclusion. Doesn't matter.

Maybe this makes about as much sense as Wile E. Coyote staying in the air until he actually realises he has run off a cliff. Doesn't matter.

Be the Road-Runner able to run into a painting of a tunnel as if it is real and remain as happy as possible about it.

meep-meep

EmptyRadar,

Yep. On the grand scale it doesn't matter if this comment was pre-determined or if I genuinely made the free choice to write it. What matters is that, to me, the illusion of free will is complete. There is nothing other than my belief that I am free to affect my own existence.

As Rush once said, even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.

billothekid2,
@billothekid2@kbin.social avatar

Thanks for referencing Rush so I didn't have to. Lol

Sabre363, in Scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don't have free will

While our lives are largely dictated by situation and environment, this doesn’t equate to a complete lack of free will. We are constantly making decisions based on reacting to information we receive.

Even if we don’t actually have free will, it’s not really a useful argument to make. It just feels like an excuse to dismiss the problems of humanity and ignore opportunities to learn and change.

Gordon_Freeman, in 6x Tougher Than Kevlar: Spider Silk Is Spun by Genetically Modified Silkworms for the First Time
@Gordon_Freeman@kbin.social avatar

What happened to the goat that was genetically modified to produce spider silk more than a decade ago?

readbeanicecream,
@readbeanicecream@kbin.social avatar

@Gordon_Freeman As of 2019:

Well, all went a bit quiet. Partly because the Montreal-based company leading the way, Nexia Biotechnologies, a company spun out of McGill University, swiftly went bust and sold its two GM goats — Sugar and Spice — to the Canada Agriculture Museum in Ottawa, which in 2013 removed its genetically-engineered goats from display amid public pressure.

Quiet momentum continues, however, under Dr Randy Lewis of Utah State University and his team. Though he is unaware of the whereabouts of Sugar and Spice today, his lab looks after over twenty goats capable of producing silky milk.

Source: https://agfundernews.com/what-happened-to-those-gm-spider-goats-with-the-silky-milk

AmidFuror,

I haven't heard this one. Did it walk into a bar?

theKalash, in spam aren't there moderators here?

The problem seems to be that mod actions from kbin aren’t federated to other instances.

So while the spam does get deleted on kbin, it doesn’t get deleted from any other instance. I think the admin is working on a fix.

nkiruanaya,

Ah, a loop hole.

stopthatgirl7,
@stopthatgirl7@kbin.social avatar

And they are working on - Ernest said that they are rolling out a new version of kbin hopefully by the end of the month that will address some of these moderation issues.

Edit: Here’s where he was talking about it - https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/451896/Is-Kbin-dying-I-wanted-to-address-the-deleted-thread

palordrolap, in For first time in a billion years, two lifeforms have merged into one

How sure are they that his hasn't happened in the last billion years?

Maybe it happens once every 1,000 years but they've all died out before humans were able to observe it. It's not like things like this tend to leave much of a fossil.

And if you don't like 1,000, there's a few orders of magnitude to reconsider between there and 10^9.

Lightborne,

Some real fucking pedantic bitches on this site.

palordrolap,

The scientific method is pedantry made manifest.

HeartyBeast,

It’s certainly possible that it is happening constantly, and we’ve only started looking for it recently. I’ve had a tinker with writing a better headline and it’s not easy. What would your short, pithy, accurate and unambiguous headline be - suitable for a non-technical audience?

palordrolap,

"New bacteria/plant cell symbiosis discovered"

And if "symbiosis" is too much, "combination". I also like "meld(ing)", but that might be somewhere in the middle.

I wouldn't use "hybrid" because that word has definitely made it into common vernacular and implies they've bred which isn't strictly accurate, and "chimera", while more accurate, is probably the more terrifying-sounding, if not still technical alternative.

Ferk, (edited )
@Ferk@kbin.social avatar

"First evidence in a billion years of two lifeforms merging into one"

It's slightly shorter and more accurate.. it does not state absolutely that it happened for the first time, but rather that it's the first evidence we've found from the last billion years.

HeartyBeast,

Spot on

pineapplelover, in Scientists Identify The Optimal Number of Daily Steps For Longevity, And It's Not 10,000

Damn. Guess I’m gonna die. I really gotta change my routine

Scio,
@Scio@kbin.social avatar

@pineapplelover Which way though? Increase or decrease?

Big_Boss_77,
@Big_Boss_77@kbin.social avatar

You and me both, neighbor.

doctorn, in ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis
@doctorn@r.nf avatar

*The world 3 months ago:*AI is growing exponentially and might take over the world soon. It can do everything you can, but better, and some even seem almost centient.

*The world today:*Turns out the large language model made to fool us tried to fool us by ‘unexpectedly’ exhibiting behavior it was made for.

😅

wildncrazyguy, in Ancient technology turns plant-based cheese into 'something we want to eat'

I’m surprised this is news. I mean how else do you make cheese? Isn’t most dairy cheese just fermented milk and rennet?

Likewise, weren’t a lot of the original vegan cheeses different forms of tofu?

Itty53,
@Itty53@kbin.social avatar

Ancient. Technology.

Yorick, in Does a volcanic eruption emit more carbon dioxide than human activity?

2 Sentence Summary: No, we emit about 40 to a 100 times the CO2 of a volcanic eruption (peer-reviewed study) in a year. Though they still have quite an impact with the particulates they throw off in the atmosphere, such as sulphur dioxide.

Pons_Aelius, in Harvard astronomer's "alien spherules" are industrial pollutants

I feel it is important to publicise refutations of extraordinary claims widely.

The media generally loves to publish the extraordinary claims. especially ALIENS!! but is silent when the results comeback as "Sorry, they were wrong."

spacecowboy,

It’s super important, especially in todays media climate.

The media world follows the “If you ain’t first, you’re last” philosophy.

outer_spec, in Scientist, after decades of study, concludes: We don't have free will
@outer_spec@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Sapolsky, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, is extremely aware that this is an out-there position. Most neuroscientists believe humans have at least some degree of free will…

Theirs is very much a minority viewpoint. Sapolsky is “a wonderful explainer of complex phenomena,” said Peter U. Tse, a Dartmouth neuroscientist and author of the 2013 book “The Neural Basis of Free Will.” “However, a person can be both brilliant and utterly wrong.”

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