April video poll
leave a comment if there is something specific within one of these topics you would be interested in.
Comments (13)
NASA’s $30 Billion Moon Base Plan
Vera Rubin, the person and the telescope?
in my grant writing class in grad school, there was a day where we discussed problems with academic publishing/journals and pretty much everyone agreed that it's completely fucked. the horrible ratio of # of papers submitted to # of reviewers, predatory journals, and of course the costs associated with submitting/publishing. Elsevier makes an obscene profit and any time something that seems like it should be "for the public good" is actually done for-profit, I just wanna yell "nationalize it!!" but obviously that won't work when fascists gain power every couple of years. quite the tricky situation.
Re: celestial mechanics, have you ever played Kerbal Space Program? From what I understand, it gets alot correct.
Academic publishing! And if I can add: I would highlight the 'replication crisis' or how we politely talk about the torrent of crap that journals are dealing with. I think you've talked about the modern ai paper problem a bit, but it's been a long decade or two of fake journals, fake peer reviewers, and fake papers to make number go up for researchers whose careers depend on number going up. Thinking of it, that's probably it's whole own four hour long video.... or series. It's a mess.
By academic publishing, I think you mean journals. But, thinking more broadly, what has become of academic textbooks? And can/will they be replaced by other media? If we need and want textbooks (as I do), I wonder who will pay to have them written, edited, corrected, revised, etc, as publishers used to do.
In addition to academic publishing, it would be nice to hear about how industry is similar or different.
In computer science, there isn't much of a difference between Academic and Industry. I've published papers about specific projects where we used some innovative approach and when I was in research groups we always tried to get real users to use the research prototypes to give us real feedback. If you go to a Computer Science conference or open a Computer Science journal you'll usually find around a 60/40 distribution, apx. 60% university profs/students or academic research institutes like the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and apx. 40% industry practitioners and industry labs like IBM labs and Google DeepMind.
While it's a worthy topic, I'm not sure anything can be done to improve the state of academic publishing in this anti-education government climate. So celestial mechanics would be an interesting one I'm sure you'd have fun with, and could be helpful as we watch NASA try to manage missions over the next 18 months that are clearly beyond the current leadership's understanding...
this is how I feel so often. I go around and give talks about science communication but it's like expecting to have an impact on climate change giving talks about recycling while standing in the middle of an active forest fire.
I'd be tempted by another Arthurian thing but only if it was about earlier French sources, so academic publishing gets my vote.
i learn so much nuance when you conversationally discuss complicated physics concepts. Your proof on my electricity to magnetism must be the same thing; that made so many things tangible. I was furious about the statement "magnetic fields do no work" and was really happy about that video. You make a lot of complicated topics super fun to learn and talk about, and I don't happen to have any physicist friends so it's nice to get that insight. I like when you talk about dark matter in a chill way and I want to know more about bars. I am super interested in learning about bar formation and galactic dynamics and how dark matter actually plays into that. The dark matter video that people didn't understand, is because it was like so much information you could've made 80 videos on it. i'll say I wish you were my physics professor haha sorry this is awkwardly long
Kepler please.