The beginning of the conclusion of the original study [1] is worth repeating:
No one should try to reform or rehabilitate the ranking. It is irredeemable. In Colin Diver’s memorable formulation, “Trying to rank institutions of higher education is a little like trying to rank religions or philosophies. The entire enterprise is flawed, not only in detail but also in conception.”
Students are poorly served by rankings. To be sure, they need information when applying to colleges, but rankings provide the wrong information. As many critics have observed, every student has distinctive needs, and what universities offer is far too complex to be projected to a single parameter. These observations may partly reflect the view that the goal of education should be self-discovery and self-fashioning as much as vocational training. Even those who dismiss this view as airy and impractical, however, must acknowledge that any ranking is a composite of factors, not all of which pertain to everyone. A prospective engineering student who chooses the 46th-ranked school over the 47th, for example, would be making a mistake if the advantage of the 46th school is its smaller average class sizes. For small average class sizes are typically the result of offering more upper-level courses in the arts and humanities, which our engineering student likely will not take at all.
I think it is pretty standard practice to keep cheating confidential (indeed, I think for a lot of universities professors aren't allowed to publicize student names in incidents of cheating). I understand where you're coming from, but college can be an extremely stressful place that can lead students to do actions they otherwise wouldn't have done (or so goes the typical reasoning from universities).
While it won't be able to image more sharply on its own, JWST can still help to constrain certain factors in their modeling, thus obtaining better images.
Yes, but you have more variables than necessary. Why model all the observables independently when you can model the system with one complex wave function?
It's the interaction between variables that is key.
3. They go through a panel to be peer-reviewed and compared to other proposals (similar to how grants are allocated by the government). I'm fairly certain this process also includes review by instrumentation experts. The process is double-blind and the first cycle has already been allocated: https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/science-execution/approved-progra....
Interesting, although I struggle to see how this could be. The collapse (from our point of view, at least) of the wave function is pretty necessary in the math of QM. You can only observe the eigenstates of a wavefunction, which is what collapse is. To me, it seems that other theories are just disputing what the "collapse" fundamentally means. For example, Many Worlds theory (from my admittedly limited understanding) says that the wave function's eigenstates each become the new reality in different universes. Please correct me if I'm wrong here though.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding some of the philosophical aspects here, but the Copenhagen interpretation seems to just a label for the (now) undisputed basic facts of quantum mechanics, so the "interpretation" part of it seems to be a bit historical now. The Wikipedia page gives the following "principles" of the interpretation:
> Quantum mechanics is intrinsically indeterministic.
> The correspondence principle: in the appropriate limit, quantum theory comes to resemble classical physics and reproduces the classical predictions.
The Born rule: the wave function of a system yields probabilities for the outcomes of measurements upon that system.
> Complementarity: certain properties cannot be jointly defined for the same system at the same time. In order to talk about a specific property of a system, that system must be considered within the context of a specific laboratory arrangement. Observable quantities corresponding to mutually exclusive laboratory arrangements cannot be predicted together, but considering multiple such mutually exclusive experiments is necessary to characterize a system.
These are universally accepted facts now (it would be silly for any physical theory to contradict the second one). Even a kind of "out there" theory like many worlds theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation) would not dispute these facts (it just reinterprets the indeterminism of quantum mechanics as taking different "branches" in a multiverse). The "interpretation" part of it is a bit historical, as no "interpretation" should contradict these facts (a la Bell's theorem).
Edit: As a philosophy, any "interpretation" built off of these facts is cool, but until you calculate anything, it's essentially useless as a physical theory.
I think this is a great idea theoretically, but in reality for most papers I don't want to see the data/underlying code. While it would be great to publish data/code with the paper (in the field I've worked on the most, astronomy, most data is already published with the paper anyways), I don't want/need to look through a notebook with the underlying code of the paper in order to just read the intro/conclusions (and maybe one key methods section). Interactive figures are a great idea, but again, oftentimes I don't really care to interact with the figure, or fiddle stuff around, I just want to know why the paper is important and how I should use its conclusions. The two-column format of most papers is very useful for skimming. So instead I would argue notebooks shouldn't replace papers, but supplement them (as they sometimes do already, in fact, but perhaps journals could make it an actual requirement to create a supplementary notebook).
As the article mentions, scientific fields are gigantic nowadays, and skimming papers is critical when you're citing 100+ references in your paper.
An interesting take. You can see the huge gap between infection rates and deaths yourself by just googling "South Africa Coronavirus" and switching between the infection/death plots.
That being said, there is definitely a lag between infection/death (which I think media outlets are being cautious in making such a dramatic take yet, for instance see this CNBC article: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/09/south-africa-omicron-crisis-...), so we'll see if this holds up.
And not just disastrous for James Webb, disastrous for the possibility of future funding of space missions in the near future. Congress would be much more hesitant to fund anything as large as the James Webb in the future if it failed.
No one should try to reform or rehabilitate the ranking. It is irredeemable. In Colin Diver’s memorable formulation, “Trying to rank institutions of higher education is a little like trying to rank religions or philosophies. The entire enterprise is flawed, not only in detail but also in conception.”
Students are poorly served by rankings. To be sure, they need information when applying to colleges, but rankings provide the wrong information. As many critics have observed, every student has distinctive needs, and what universities offer is far too complex to be projected to a single parameter. These observations may partly reflect the view that the goal of education should be self-discovery and self-fashioning as much as vocational training. Even those who dismiss this view as airy and impractical, however, must acknowledge that any ranking is a composite of factors, not all of which pertain to everyone. A prospective engineering student who chooses the 46th-ranked school over the 47th, for example, would be making a mistake if the advantage of the 46th school is its smaller average class sizes. For small average class sizes are typically the result of offering more upper-level courses in the arts and humanities, which our engineering student likely will not take at all.
[1]: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation... (section 8)