Interesting Links: June 6, 2019
The opportunity cost of a larger particle collider; The case for publishing scientific integrity findings; Disease tolerance instead of eradication; Microsoft and Oracle ink a deal for cloud interoperability; and more...
Business, News, Science, Technology, or whatever gets my attention.
Straight from my RSS feed:
Ten links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
- If we spend money on a larger particle collider, we risk that progress in physics stalls. - Sabine Hossenfelder argues that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) cost $10 billion and failed to deliver the anticipated observation of particles outside the standard model of particle physics, and anticipates arguments in favor of a new, $20 billion collider. She says advocates will (i) fail to acknowledge that their predictions for the LHC were wrong; (ii) failing that, try to convince people that the failure is interesting; and (iii) neglect to compare the expense against other possible uses of that $20 billion. She also highlights the opportunity cost, suggesting that money would be better spent on experiments that cost less and have a higher discovery potential, such as: "astrophysical searches for dark matter, table-top searches for quantum gravity, 21cm astronomy, gravitational wave interferometers, high-precision but low-energy measurements."
- “Our current approaches are not working:” Time to make misconduct investigation reports public, says integrity expert - An interview with scientific integrity expert, C.K. Gunsalus, who argued for decades that integrity investigations should be private. Reversing course, Gunsalus now argues in Nature that the results from investigations should be public. Gunsalus makes the case that this would create a "virtuous circle" where institutions learn from each other, and also argues that institutional secrecy under the current paradigm has been very harmful to some great institutions. To accomplish this, she suggests creation of a Research Integrity Advisement Board under the sponsorship of the National Academies of Science.
- Could Tolerating Disease Be Better than Fighting It? - Researchers are exploring the idea of "tolerance to infection", where instead of trying to eradicate an infection, you change something about the body so that the infection becomes less harmful. An example is given of mice, who receive a quantitatively lethal dose of a pathogen, but are able to survive it after iron supplementation A challenge to this idea is that the method for promoting disease tolerance seems to vary according to the unique microorganism. h/t RealClear Science
- Top execs at longtime rivals Microsoft and Oracle explain why they just came out of nowhere with a new cloud partnership: 'This is the start of a beautiful friendship' - Microsoft and Oracle signed an agreement that enables applications to make use of Microsoft's Azure cloud when connecting to databases in Oracle's cloud. Although the companies compete on many fronts, executives say it's a good deal because it makes life easier for customers, which should drive sales for both companies.
- Political Influence and Merger Antitrust Reviews - A Harvard working paper studies a large sample of merger activity from 1998 through 2010 and finds that regulatory outcomes are systematically tilted in favor of firms who are constituents of politicians with positions on the judiciary committee.
- LibreOffice 6.3 hits beta, with built-in redaction tool for sharing those █████ documents - The new beta software includes a redaction function and a fourier spread-sheet function. It's important to understand the correct redaction mechanism, though. It is easy for someone who is unfamiliar with it to accidentally deliver a redacted copy where the redactions can be easily overridden.
- The ambitious plan to reinvent how websites get their names - Like namecoin, the handshake network aims to protect the Internet naming system by putting it on a blockchain to decentralize it. To accomplish this, and avoid name squatting, it makes use of a Vickrey auction (second price auction). Instead of competing with the current standard Domain Name System, it interoperates with it.
- 8 key principles of effective negotiators - Eight principles for negotiation include the suggestions to "work towards a win-win", "study and understand your counterpart", and "avoid bravado". Click through for more detail and the rest of the principles.
- STEEM The History of Mendeleev and the development of the Periodic Table. - From ancient Greece through modern times, @empressteemah describes the interesting history of chemistry leading up to the establishment and use of the periodic table of elements. The post also points out how the organization of the periodic table illuminated the periodicity of chemical properties, and that gaps in that listing pointed out missing elements and spurred discovery of new elements. (5% of the rewards from this post will go to @empressteemah)
- STEEM The Time, I Got 2nd Place in a Demolition Derby. - @whatsup tells an entertaining story about participating in Plains, Montana's Sanders County Demolition Derby in order to destroy an out of use 1969 Buick Electra. (@whatsup will receive 5% of the rewards from this post.)
About this series
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This is great. I didn't know something of such is going on. Keep up the good work, @remlaps-lite. More power to your elbows.
Finally, thanks for featuring my post.