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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • JoBo@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzCommunity
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    2 months ago

    The fact of higher protein content appears to be true (without going back to find and critique all the original studies). Explanations are much harder to ‘prove’ for questions like this.

    We can’t do experiments on the evolution of tears, so all we can do is come up with plausible theories and look at how they fit with the body of evidence. With enough evidence, from enough different angles, we might one day be able to say which proposed explanations fit the facts (and which don’t). It’s how we (eventually) proved smoking was killing people (another question we cannot do experiments on human beings to prove one way or the other) but not all questions are as important as smoking was and there isn’t necessarily a neat, single factor explanation to find even if someone was willing to fund all the necessary research.

    Not my area but, for example, I recently saw a study claim that sniffing women’s tears makes men less aggressive. That’s an angle that might help build some support for, or knock down, the theory that emotional tears are useful for social communication (ie help get women killed slightly less often). Did those studies use sad stories or onions? Did any study compare sad stories to onions? If we’re seeing hints of differences between sad stories and onions, that would tend to support the social communication element of the explanation. Unless we think there’s a difference between sad tears and frightened tears, which there probably is, so we should check that too. And the rest of the literature on tears, if it’s considered important enough to get the theory right. And we need to remember that sticky tears are not the same thing as smelly tears, so can we do experiments where non-emotional tears are made sticky, and non-sticky tears made to smell frightened?

    Etc etc.

    Explaining things we observe but cannot directly experiment on is a process, a process which typically takes many years and dozens of research groups. And a lot of funding. And decades of exhausting battles, if there is a lot riding on the answer (as it did with Big Tobacco vs Public Health).




  • Batteries are too heavy for many applications (including, arguably, cars).

    That doesn’t make hydrogen the only solution but it is at least a currently available solution. I posted a link about why the Orkneys (population 23k) are producing hydrogen and switching much of their transport to it: they have so much wind the UK (population 70m) national grid can’t take all the power they generate from it.



  • That is true of all colours of hydrogen other than green (and possibly natural stores of ‘fossil’ hydrogen if they can be extracted without leakage).

    Green hydrogen is better thought of as a battery than a fuel. It’s a good way to store the excess from renewables and may be the only way to solve problems like air travel.

    How hydrogen is transforming these tiny Scottish islands

    That’s not to say it’s perfect. Hydrogen in the atmosphere slows down the decomposition of methane so leaks must be kept well below 5% or the climate benefits are lost. We don’t have a good way to measure leaks. It’s also quite inefficient because a lot of energy is needed to compress it for portable uses.

    And, of course, the biggest problem is that Big Carbon will never stop pushing for dirtier hydrogens to be included in the mix, if green hydrogen paves the way.



  • JoBo@feddit.uktoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlAmazon
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    3 months ago

    If you are forced to use them:

    1. Do not use the app
    2. Find what you want on the website
    3. Copy the description with a reasonable amount of detail
    4. Paste description into your less evil search engine of choice
    5. Click through and buy

    That way, Amazon has to pay the search engine.



  • JoBo@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzWe're sorry.
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    3 months ago

    They do not include the peer reviewers in their list of people who missed it. Which means that either the peer reviewers did pick it up and for some reason it didn’t get addressed (unlikely) or this was a straight up pay-to-play and whoever runs that particular bit of the racket for Elsevier fucked up.




  • JoBo@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzdegree in bamf
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    4 months ago

    Because the 'splaining phenomenon is about perceived but unearned superiority which leads the 'splainer to 'splain to someone who knows a great deal more than they do and, crucially, someone who the 'splainer ought to realise knows more than they do but doesn’t because of the illusion created by the society they live in.

    I’d have added “(born) middle-class” because that’s an important part of it too.



  • JoBo@feddit.uktoScience Memes@mander.xyzA modern paper
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    4 months ago

    That’s why you need the appendices, so that you can check the details behind what is in the paper.

    Journals have word limits, due to the restrictions of print, and because a 200 page paper is too much for most readers. But some of them will need some or all of those 200 pages (which is usually a shed load of tables and figures, not much text apart from protocols etc).

    The quality of the research, and the way it was written up, cannot be assessed by those readers unless all the information is published. And the research cannot be implemented in practice unless it is described in full. There are thousands of papers out there that test a new treatment but don’t give enough detail about the treatment for anyone else to deliver it. Or develop a new measurement scale but don’t publish the scale. Or use a psychometric instrument but don’t publish the instrument. This research is largely useless (especially if the details were never archived properly and there’s no one still about who knows how to fill the gaps).

    We don’t (or should not) publish papers for CV points. We publish them so that other researchers know what research has been done and how to build on it. These days we don’t just publish all the summary tables and all the analyses, we ideally make the data available too. Not because we expect every reader to want to reanalyse it but because we know some of them will need to.