The choice between "dense urban core" and "suburb" is distinctly American. Especially in Europe, city (in the sense of "not suburb or rural" != center of a large (1M+) population.
In America, any region with a population the order of 100k or less is basically a shopping area surrounded by suburbs. The same is not true in Europe.
In Europe, you can definitely find walkable, breathable, friendly cities while still living in an area that is safer than (and has a smaller population than) the typical Chicago suburban area.
The fact that burbs are the most desirable places to live in STL is pretty much the reason I'll never move back. It's an incredibly depressing metro area.
Out of curiosity, have you spent time in academia?
> The rationale behind publishing in long-form journal articles is not really valid in our century.
No, it's perfectly valid. Some ideas can't be expressed in short form. A 5-page long proof requires a 10-20 page article to properly motivate and provide context/explanation. An evolutionary or piece-by-piece doesn't make any sense; you'll end up with fragmented dead ends. Waste of everyone's time.
> and findings are typically summarized in their 3-4 figures anyway
I'm not really sure which fields you're referring to, but I assure you that you're over-generalizing. This isn't even remotely true even for very empirical sciences.
> There are proposals for new approaches
Usually these are appropriate only for a single subdomain or methodology and only provide one particular and extremely opinionated view on the results. Such as the proposal in the article you posted.
The overhead isn't worth it and there's a huge risk the relevant field(s) move quickly enough that the presentation method becomes obsolete before it becomes useful.
> It should be possible for each finding to cite other findings it relied on
...I don't know what to say to this...
> thus creating a graph of influence/significance
Yeah, we have this. It's called bibliometrics. UNIVERSALLY HATED by anyone who's not a bean counter. Good people ignore them. Bad people optimize for the metrics and it becomes a stupid game that has nothing to do with the thing you're trying to measure.
> The current situation with citations often involves friends citing friends , so i don't consider it reliable
This is just one reason among many that bibliometrics (a.k.a. any necessarily poor attempt at "a graph of influence/significance") are a poor mechanism by which to judge science...
> It should also include open questions , thus giving research directions.
In many fields literally every paper includes this. In most it's rather obvious to anyone who comprehends the paper what the next steps are.
And also all the other resources the university library offers. Especially in summer months, uni libraries are amazing and massively under-used resources. Working/learning is a public library is usually a drag, but uni libraries are awesome.
I used to live a couple blocks from a uni library, and I practically lived there. In the summers I drove straight there from work, got lost in the stacks learning about random things, and only left when it closed.
Fortunately that library was completely free to the public, but if it weren't I would have happily paid $100/mo during the summer months for access (Probably saved that much just in utilities anyways.)
Teen pregnancy rates will be higher than teen birth rates in jurisdictions that are not hostile to abortion. But teen birth rate is probably a far easier statistic to gather.
As of this post, three of the 20 comments on this story conjecture that obesity plays some role, and a full half of the comments are on subthreads discussing this hypothesis.
Interesting because I've never heard this hypothesis before and other online discussion of this article does not mention obesity.
The library at the university I attended as an undergraduate threw out (3 or 4?) volumes of TAOCP but kept "the magna guide to SQL" or some crap like this.
Their justification was that TAOCP had never been checked out. Which is funny because the year prior when I tried to check out a volume, they told me it was a reference book and could not be checked out.
I'm still completely confused about how that decisions was actually made, and why the books weren't given away or sold.
In America, any region with a population the order of 100k or less is basically a shopping area surrounded by suburbs. The same is not true in Europe.
In Europe, you can definitely find walkable, breathable, friendly cities while still living in an area that is safer than (and has a smaller population than) the typical Chicago suburban area.