Robert Insall

Oh Lordy. It's true. GPT-5 really is that bad. This is quite spectacular.
PMs of the UK since the first world war. PhD level indeed. **shrug**

Please just make sure as many as your colleagues as possible are aware and don't fall for this. Worth some work...
(and well done to yourself)

Well, you have to be smart enough to foresee who will be one of the greatest architects, when they're not one, don't you?

I did that once. Bought a ring from someone who became a famous jeweller. It was extraordinarily beautiful.

A man standing on what appears to be a balcony of his home.

The man's living room. There's a couch, coffee table, and foot stool, as well as some tall windows. Lots of wood.

Another living space with a fireplace and bookshelf. Possibly a compression hallway leading to this room.

The outside of the home.

Incredible.

Roland Reisley is 101 years old, the last original client of Frank Lloyd Wright. He still lives in the 3,200 square foot home that Wright built for him in 1952.

The price? $40,000. Or a little less than half a million in today's money.

I think Altman assumes that “PhD-level expert” means someone who speaks confidently on everything as opposed to saying “it’s nuanced,” losing their keys, and getting maniacally fixated on their current topic to the point of seeing it in everything.

PPT is unarguably evil

Postdoctoral Research Associate: Modelling Neural Crest Anomalies (mouse/human) - the Node The Liu lab is looking for a postdoc with a love of embryos and developmental biology! This post is part of an MRC-funded collaboration between Karen Liu’s lab at King’s College London and Marco Trizz...

Dev biologists! 3-yr postdoc position at King's, collaboration with Trizzino lab @marcotrizzino.bsky.social modelling CHD3 neural crest. We are looking for postdocs with mad embryology skills @the-node.bsky.social #developmental @ccrb27.bsky.social

thenode.biologists.com/jobs/postdoc...

A #MathOnco conference in beautiful St Pete Beach, FL in the Tampa Bay Area you say? in late October when the weather will be wonderful you say? organized by @sandy and the folks at @math.onco you say?

https://mathematical-oncology.org/mathonco25

Yay! Good work...

Photo of Tom Lehrer

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

Seconded. Tom Lehrer RIP. A veritable genius.

extraordinary Ray. Almost the same.

Yes, being able to talk about an "extraordinary ray" while keeping a straight face is also an advantage

I can answer his question, having trained & interacted with a few.

YES. Enough physics.
How much is enough? Depends what they want to do. But you have to be able to choose what experiment to do...

Yes, I tried to incentivise my kids to hack their way to better internet etc., but they just got better at tweaking the ecosystems. Same end result, less good learning outcome.

This (as usual) makes me think AI is not especially bad. It does things the same we do, that's why it works. It's just when a human does it we accept it. When an AI does it we say "this is awful and has to be stopped".

See also "self-driving car has crash" shock horror...

I several times asked "why has your advice reversed so completely and rapidly?".
The answer was always "if you don't do what we say you will harm or kill your baby". Argumentum ad verecundiam, argument from authority.
It was impossible to get justification or nuance.
./

...which is exactly what human doctors and medical staff do.

It was very funny being a new parent who was a scientist. Nurses, midwives, doctors instructing us to do things as absolute irrefutable fact when their advice had been irrefutably opposite ten years earlier.
./

(PS - extremely disappointing how far "Dundee was mismanaged" is being used as a get-out-of-jail-free card, by governments and research organisations alike. It was weakly run, not aggressively driven into disaster. A round of poor managers doesn't cause that kind of catastrophe in a viable system)

Also completely absent - what is the strategy for maintaining UK vigour in life sciences when the universities where most discovery work is done are consistently making extreme, research-unfriendly decisions in order to stay afloat?

You must surely see there is a continuum here.
One end of the continuum is excellent. The other is immoral and unsupportable. The devil: telling the difference.

The whole thread is people pointing at one or other end of the continuum to support a point.
(gosh, it must be social media...)

Depends on how prescriptive you are?

There are many valid ways to be a scientist. But having someone else write your grants and claiming them as yours isn't.

There's also nuance. Help cleaning your English is obviously OK. Grant written from scratch is obviously not OK. How to tell the difference?

Ahhhh excellent news. Congratulations. To @crg.eu (for a wise choice...) and to you.

We'd better enjoy the rain while it's here, 'cos it's all we're getting for ages...

For years the answer to any proposal like this has always been "but the established old white male scientists would crap on anyone who disagreed with them!".
Don't understand why the response is "keep everything anonymous" rather than "build a society where people don't crap on one another".

Seems to me one system would work - refereeing is published, with your name attached, & expected to show judgement; when you look for jobs, promotions & grants, the panels would look at your refereeing & ask "is this a good scientist?".
Recognise refereeing as part of the science process.
./

Maybe that's the complete point & all else is subordinate?

We used to think as a community. I went to meetings & met the people I was refereeing, & the editors too. It was my duty, as part of that community, to support it by peer review. If I didn't the community would be harmed.

Why referee now?

Very interesting.

Question (for them not you, but maybe you can answer)

Why am I going to take half a day doing a line-by-line edit and science critique of a random paper from Biorxiv? What is my incentive? My reward? Motivation?

Peer review used to work because we felt we were a community...

just not that good at the harder part. But when we discuss peer review we often fixate on the rigour, and the loss of rigour if there isn't peer review, when actually it's doing a rotten job at rigour and all about coolness and extensions.