They just increased the fees for their general purpose publication, PLOS ONE. Here's their reasoning:
"PLOS ONE has not increased its Article Processing Charge (APC) since 2009, for the past six years absorbing increasing publishing costs without raising author fees. Its new price reflects the work involved in shepherding the volume of papers PLOS manages from submission to published work; PLOS invests significant resources to improve the quality of PLOS ONE output, thoroughly checking for ethics, competing interests and robust science."
They also say they're updating their terrible article submission system. I don't see how any of this costs as much as it does. PLOS ONE alone publishes ~30,000 articles a year, that's a huge amount of money in fees, even if not everyone pays. On top of all of that, they accept and publish 70% of all articles. That's a really leaky sieve that shouldn't be so expensive to maintain.
As a result of this article, I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of groups engineering this bacteria's systems into something that could survive and grow at lower temperatures. Or maybe they'll try to encapsulate the two enzymes in nanoparticles.
> So basically you thwack all the cells with something that pushes their lifecycles towards a similar schedule, and then later-on they tend to all still be on the same cycle?
> Isn't that like saying two pendulums in the same house have a "collective memory" of an earthquake?
The important point isn't that there's memory (which seems pretty easy to explain), it's that it's collective. Using your analogy, it would be like finding that two pendulums in the same house have memory of an earthquake, but if there's only one pendulum then there's no memory.
> So, the only question is what people agree that it means
The details make this more complicated, so we're never going to agree.
Just like most people agreeing that alcohol okay, but heroin isn't, we'd have to decide what's "free from pollution"? Exactly how many lead atoms/day is okay? And are smokers violating your human rights?
> Even n > 20 can be difficult for certain studies.
For some expensive experiments even n=3 is difficult to reach. "Should we do another replicate and go from n=2 to n=3, or should we hire another post-doc?" is a relatively common (rhetorical) question.
It's better to wait for multiple, large randomized controlled trials to be performed before making claims about improved brain function.
But maybe, for now, we can eat more chocolate for another ~proven benefit: "Flavanol-rich chocolate and cocoa products may have a small but statistically significant effect in lowering blood pressure.."
> As a white person from a white family in the middle of the US, no one that I care about values me based on my salary.
As someone of the same background and also from the middle of nowhere mid-US, I can say this is certainly true. It seems a bit different on the coasts.
That said, even my family doesn't think too highly of the unemployed, which seems a bit inconsistent.
> I live by myself and barely even speak out loud at home.
Not sure how other people feel about talking out loud at home, but as someone who also lives alone (in a 250 sqft apartment) and always wears headphones, I can't really imagine talking out loud. Just seems weird for some reason. I never use Siri either.
Wonder if that's a living alone thing, or a small apartment thing, or ...?
That's true, I shouldn't have compared my experience as a grad student in science to a project like Varnish.
> Code is a liability is not ab asset.
That's a great quote. I guess there's a sweet spot. Maybe, if only a handful of people need to be able to understand what you wrote, then the sweet spot can be skewed toward the terse end of the spectrum.
>> And eventually I no longer think about code lines as an asset to be accumulated, but rather as an expenditure to be avoided.
Maybe I'm a bit odd, but I got into programming with code golf, using lots of J, K, and others. So my growth has been the opposite. It was just last year that I realized it's okay (and maybe necessary?) for other people to read/understand my scripts.