BorisBarbour

BorisBarbour, 11 days ago

@neuralreckoning @elduvelle

Optimised for cost...

Oddly, I don't much mind the one I have.

BorisBarbour, 11 days ago

@neuralreckoning @elduvelle

Any self-respecting bean-counter needs only the smallest difference! However, having just sourced components for an instrument box, I'd say that large, physical, 3d things are becoming a good deal more expensive, relatively, also because they are used much less.

BorisBarbour, 11 days ago

@neuralreckoning @elduvelle

Totally. But how to move away from purchase price as the main differentiator?

Only vaguely related, but I was day-dreaming that in a move to improve product quality the EU imposed a standard guarantee of 5 years instead of 2.

BorisBarbour, 1 month ago

@glynmoody

Absolutely insane. All of it: the violence, the incompetence, the cover-up.

BorisBarbour, 1 month ago

@MarkHanson @deevybee @albertcardona

I'm pretty certain they publish (or at least have published in the past) quite a transparent breakdown of their costs. I'll see if I can find it...

BorisBarbour, 1 month ago

@steveroyle @andrewplested

There is also a ghostscript command line for different pdf compression levels.

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

where "screen" is probably too compressed. Alternatives are "ebook", "printer", "prepress". (It may be possible to bump the CompatibilityLevel to 1.5). Not very fine-grained, but it can compress a lot and all elements are compressed consistently for the output

BorisBarbour, 2 months ago

The "research" is at times risible. Key experimental results appeared suddenly in a manuscript version upon which lab members were given a couple of hours to comment before submission to Nature.

"When the students asked Dias about the stunning new data, they say, he told them he had taken all the resistance and magnetic-susceptibility data before coming to Rochester."

Just nonchalantly sitting on proof of room-temperature superconductivity for a few years, as one does. /2

BorisBarbour, 2 months ago

The students are definitely not the villains of the piece, but if they "did not suspect misconduct at the time" and "trusted their adviser", they seem somewhat naive under the circumstances. /3

BorisBarbour, 2 months ago

For the first paper, Nature engaged three referees and there were three rounds of review. One referee was strongly positive, the other two did not support publication. Nature went ahead anyway.

I can't think of a previous black on white example where Nature have admitted allowing impact to override quality, although that's always been the tacit implication of their editorial policy. And this is exactly the result they risk with that policy. /4

BorisBarbour, 2 months ago

Nature did try to deal with the mess when they received complaints about the data, and they ended up retracting the paper. Gone are the days of stonewalling all such problems, and good riddance.

Procedures can certainly be improved, though. Co-authors (students) had been kept out of the loop during the investigation, which they only discovered when asked if they agreed with the retraction. Obviously they should have been contacted as soon as the investigation began. /5

BorisBarbour, 2 months ago

Incredibly, Nature then accepted another paper from Dias about a new superconducting material.

EiC Magdalena Skipper: "Our editorial policy considers every submission in its own right”. That policy is shown to be dangerously naive.

Also: "decisions should be made on the basis of the scientific quality, not who the authors are." This paper was an embarrassing failure of evaluation. How do Nature aim to improve their processes? /6

BorisBarbour, 2 months ago

Nature were not helped by the institution, Rochester University. They conducted four investigations and only the fourth identified any problems. During none of the first three were any of the students contacted! Simply pathetic. Nobody, including journals, should rely on (non-transparent) institutional investigations. /7

BorisBarbour, 2 months ago

@moritz_negwer

Short-term and short-sighted management of reputation and finances.

BorisBarbour, 2 months ago

@MarkHanson @brembs

The experts they showed the reports to for this article shared your view and don't appear to have found the decision shocking.

Still, deciding to run with one positive report seems dangerous.

And your comment raises the interesting question of the level of expertise of the professional editors.

BorisBarbour, 2 months ago

@MarkHanson @brembs

Does the policy pass the honesty test: would they publish if they had to post the referee reports alongside, with only a single positive one? I'm guessing no.

I think Rochester and the funders come out of this affair far worse than Nature. But there are plenty of things Nature can improve upon:

• do more to resolve scientific issues between referees before accepting
• bear in mind track records for quality/integrity
• contact all authors in an investigation