In my experience, there are some niche conferences that have no name recognition, but are amazing. A lot of people haven’t heard of the Gordon conferences, and some of the other top ones in my field are open source package user group meetings and company hosted conferences, which could easily appear low-value at first glance.

The 10K+ attendee conferences have lots of name recognition, but I found them to be effectively useless for accomplishing any goal (they’re not even that great for networking), and they could easily be a series of recordings for what you get.

So, I think it’s reasonable for folks to roll the dice on some conferences, because some of them are really hidden gems (and if they suck you can always audible it to a free vacation).

What in the world is the original context here? Have these people never encountered a puddle before? Her foot is completely immersed in gutter water and his white pants are about to be soaked and gross.

According to the article they're spending $17 billion to increase production.

Good catch. I've updated it. Thanks!

(somehow got 12 upvotes without a working link... hmmm)

A very cool idea, however the headline is misleading - NASA has not even remotely committed to running this mission. They've selected the swarm project as one of 13 projects in their innovation program and given it up to $175k to study feasibility. That's roughly a postdoc for two years. This is far, far from committing the hundreds of millions or billions needed for the execution of this mission.

This is a really cool read with lots of very strong results, but "show" doesn't seem like the right word for the specific claim the article makes from the paper. In grad school we had a professor who led the first year seminar who drilled into us the importance of using the right word to communicate inferential strength. "Is consistent with" is weaker than "suggests" is weaker than "shows" is weaker than "proves" (really only mathematicians should use "prove"). Section E3 on this website has a similar hierarchy.

My "speak up in seminar" reflex was going off here because this article jumps one - possibly two - whole levels of inferential strength from what's actually written in the paper.

In the paper, the inferential claims in the "communal effort' part are:

These differences clearly suggest a lack of evident social stratification...

further revealed no clear signs of social stratification

It's possible I missed a stronger inferential claim about the communal aspect - Please correct me if so!

I think "are consistent with" or "suggest" would more accurately communicate the strength of the results. The evidence presented that the drainage system was a communal effort is that the houses were the same size and the graves didn't seem to be differentiated. This seems like absence of evidence for a state authority/hierarchy, not evidence of absence.

I love that more and more open source science projects are streamlining deployment and encouraging folks to just try it. This one has a binder link in the README (though it seems to be failing... may need some TLC). I really think this is a positive template for what academia could eventually become!