Reading.am | Chris Aldrich

👓 Why I left Academia: Part II by Allison Harbin, Ph.D.

Read Why I left Academia: Part II by Allison Harbin, Ph.D. (Post-PhD)

The two weeks leading up to emailing my dissertation to the entire committee plus my outside reader (a professor from a different university who also need to approve your dissertation, a requirement for most humanities Ph.D.s) are a blur. Every waking moment was spent writing, editing, and emailing drafts that never received comments, or even acknowledgement that they had been read. This was followed by proof-reading and re-writing my dissertation entirely on my own. This was nothing new. I had to email my dissertation mostly un-read by my advisor to my entire committee (a scandal in and of itself), because, as my advisor wrote in a terse email to me, they did not have time to read it.

The harrowing plot thickens…

👓 Why I left Academia: Part I by Allison Harbin, Ph.D.

Read Why I Left Academia: Part I by Allison Harbin, Ph.D. (Post-PhD)

This is my personal story of why I decided to leave Academia. While sad, I know I'm not the only one to have experienced this. This is why I am sharing the story of my Ph.D, my dissertation, my dissertation committee members, my experience with the dean, how my defense went, and why.

A gut-wrenching story with a brutal ending. I’m hoping that multiple outlets will pick up this entire story and give it greater exposure.

👓 If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? | New York Times

Read If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? by Jenna Wortham (New York Times)

The platform offered a public space with monetization as an afterthought. Now it could simply be deleted.

What does it mean if someone can delete hundreds and thousands of hours of sound culture overnight?

Jace Clayton, musician and the author of Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture
in If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? in the New York Times

👓 Big names in statistics want to shake up much-maligned P value | Nature

Read Big names in statistics want to shake up much-maligned P value by Dalmeet Singh Chawla (Nature)

One of scientists’ favourite statistics — the P value — should face tougher standards, say leading researchers.

The related articles listed at the bottom, many of which I’d previously read, also give some great additional background.

👓 First Support for a Physics Theory of Life | Quanta Magazine

Read First Support for a Physics Theory of Life by Natalie Wolchover (Quanta Magazine)

Take chemistry, add energy, get life. The first tests of Jeremy England’s provocative origin-of-life hypothesis are in, and they appear to show how order can arise from nothing.

Interesting article with some great references I’ll need to delve into and read.

The situation changed in the late 1990s, when the physicists Gavin Crooks and Chris Jarzynski derived “fluctuation theorems” that can be used to quantify how much more often certain physical processes happen than reverse processes. These theorems allow researchers to study how systems evolve — even far from equilibrium.

I want to take a look at these papers as well as several about which the article is directly about.

Any claims that it has to do with biology or the origins of life, he added, are “pure and shameless speculations.”

Some truly harsh words from his former supervisor? Wow!

maybe there’s more that you can get for free

Most of what’s here in this article (and likely in the underlying papers) sounds to me to have been heavily influenced by the writings of W. Loewenstein and S. Kauffman. They’ve laid out some models/ideas that need more rigorous testing and work, and this seems like a reasonable start to the process. The “get for free” phrase itself is very S. Kauffman in my mind. I’m curious how many times it appears in his work?

❤️ Bitcoin propaganda posters in Brighton | Jeremy Keith

Liked Bitcoin propaganda posters in Brighton. by Jeremy Keith (adactio.com)

I love the overall advertising concept here–particularly for such a modern product.

I’m almost half-tempted to commission someone to re-purpose old war propaganda posters like this to promote the Indieweb movement.

He controls his own website–and they love that.

Don’t let that shadow touch them. Own your domain.

She may be… accepting Webmentions.

INDIEWEB

First they ignore you.

Then they laugh at you.

Then they fight you.

Then you WIN

👓 In Game Theory, No Clear Path to Equilibrium | Quanta Magazine

Read In Game Theory, No Clear Path to Equilibrium by Erica Klarreich (Quanta Magazine)

John Nash’s notion of equilibrium is ubiquitous in economic theory, but a new study shows that it is often impossible to reach efficiently.

There’s a couple of interesting sounding papers in here that I want to dig up and read. There are some great results that sound like they are crying out for better generalization and classification. Perhaps some overlap with information theory and complexity?

To some extent I also find myself wondering about repeated play as a possible random walk versus larger “jumps” in potential game play and the effects this may have on the “evolution” of a solution by play instead of a simpler closed mathematical solution.