Daniel Lemire's blog

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Science and Technology links (February 22nd 2020)

6 thoughts on “Science and Technology links (February 22nd 2020)”

  1. me says:

    If there is doubt on results published somewhere, you should at least note the doubts in pubpeer.com for example. So that others can see there was doubt if they can’t reproduce the results.
    We’re now seeing post-publication peer review to become more and more important, and this seems to be the right place to use them.

  2. RAD says:

    RE 2. the earth is getting greener

    Modelling indicates that greening could mitigate global warming by increasing the carbon sink on land and altering biogeophysical processes, mainly evaporative cooling.

    As much as I like and agree with this paper’s non-alarmist stance, I think any model that indicates an increased carbon sink without a new mechanism to precipitate carbon out of the system is flawed. Carbon emissions are outpacing the carbon cycle’s capacity to adapt. That fact is captured in atmospheric concentration measures. The answer to flawed models is not equally flawed models.

  3. RAD says:

    RE 4. Robot Blood Samples
    The original paper says:

    The device demonstrated results comparable to or exceeding that of clinical standards, with a success rate of 87% on all participants (n = 31), a 97% success rate on nondifficult venous access participants (n = 25), and an average procedure time of 93 ± 30 s (n = 31). In the future, this device can be extended to other areas of vascular access such as IV catheterization, central venous access, dialysis, and arterial line placement.

    That is cool and especially interesting when compared to the Theranos 1.0 device (failed microfluidics) and 2.0 device (failed robotic automation). This device is the front-end to a Theranos 2.0 style system and removes the need for the specialized walk-in clinic partners that Theranos depended on. As a side note, it is a shame that the Theranos debacle has distracted us from the key lesson from the failure of the 1.0 microfluidic device: independent microfluidic test interact in unexpected ways when combined in close proximity to one another. Lab-on-a-Single-Strip is still achievable I think.

  4. RAD says:

    RE 5. Heated Disk Drives

    I wonder why the energy requirements are not mentioned; it seems like a key constraint along with thermal characteristics.

  5. Marcos says:

    Since universities do not care about experiment data, and publishers care a lot and really do not want the data to be included with articles, what really did anybody expect?

    Do people really expect researchers to keep the data forever by themselves, with no help and nobody even caring about it?

    1. Some journals ask for the data and the software. I have published some papers where someone actually looked at my data and my software and vouched for reproducibility.

      I cannot speak for all fields, but there are certainly communities in computer science where making your data available is viewed positively.

      Overall, you are correct that the incentives are not aligned to favour data conservation.