periheli0n

I think it is easy to produce vague allegations of a lack of integrity, but I would really expect more substance to such a critique.

> ... desires of the state. The dollars come from somewhere and there are always strings attached.

Is this suggesting that the public funders influence the outcome of research? It is not something I have ever witnessed. They sometimes may seek to take influence on the direction of a research programme, especially when the performance is below expectations. but I have yet to see an example where a public funder has attempted to influence research results.

> I think we’d quickly learn that academia of today is not at all what it presupposes itself to be

What does it presuppose to be? Academia of today is 1) a place of teaching and knowledge dissemination, 2) a place of research and knowledge creation, 3) a multibillion dollar business that sells tickets to successful professional lives. The latter leads to overinflated self-marketing, and unfortunately this affects how research results are communicated.

Those who hold the "purse strings" have little interest in influencing research outcomes. Rather, they care about the reputation of their course (students), their own reputation (alumni), recruiting talent and/or outsourcing research (businesses), or actual research results (public funders).

This is at least the case in most institutions in the US and the UK, and most of western Europe.

The type of "career scientist" that the article portrays is part of the problem. In order to get ahead with a science career, one needs to pursue an extremely narrow specialisation. Otherwise it is impossible to build a stellar reputation. And reputation is the key determinant for being offered a permanent position at a high-ranking institution.

However, many interesting and relevant problems live at the interface of several disciplines. Unfortunately, those working between disciplines will have a hard time getting a permanent job at top universities: Whatever faculty they apply to, there will always be other applicants who are super-specialised and therefore appeal more to the super-specialised faculty members in the hiring committee. That is why true interdisciplinary research still doesn't happen very much, even though it has been praised and encouraged for more than two decades now.

Coming back to the article, in my opinion the solution to overwork is to cut back on elitism. Less famous universities tend to be more relaxed in their recruitment and tenure criteria. Less pressure means more mental flexibility, which can help maintain a wider network of researchers across disciplines. And the wider the network is, the better the chances of being invited to collaborative projects, especially when one has a record of successful interdisciplinary collaboration.

The price to pay is that one will not be able to impress with the name of one's university when doing small talk. But one will be a much more interesting conversation partner — and have free time to meet people outside work with whom to talk.

First thing we did after moving to the UK was to buy a bread baking machine. Not quite bakery-level bread, but good enough for daily consumption, and it leaves a nice smell in the house.

> but is still just a web page

> doesn’t support pagination

Isn’t that exactly the point? Please, no pagination on a screen. A web page will do just fine. In fact, that was what the www was conceived for: publishing science.

> open the accompanying PDF, […] of much higher quality.

The only thing that is higher quality in the PDF is the justified alignment and pagination. The figures have the same (poor) resolution.

The bottom line is: * it is perfectly possible to publish technical papers in a format that is accessible on a phone. * non-paginated, free flowing output also works better on larger screens (e.g) I can resize the window and have my note-taking app open next to the paper. * PDFs are still great for annotating and printing, if required.

Computer science, and academia in general, has always adapted to technical progress, although slowly.

In the case of ChatGPT and similar LLMs, these should become part of the toolbox that students are being taught. I.e., how does it work, what can it do, what are its limits, how can it be used to help solve a problem or complete a task.

An exam question could then be e.g. to ask ChatGPT for an essay on a topic, critically discuss its shortcomings, and improve the essay e.g. by adding references and deeper discussion, which will be graded.

Alternatively, use ChatGPT to iteratively discuss and improve the essay. The whole chat transcript should be included and will be graded.

The bottom line being, you don't need to hire engineers anymore, just ChatGPT operators?

> I think if layout mattered as much as you imply, scientists would have to use a too that offers more control like indesign.

Yes, precisely that. As a scientist I don't even want to have to deal with layout. That's what publishers are paid extremely well for. When I self-publish content I want the process to be as simple as possible. If this means ragged margins, browser-default styles for headings etc., default colors and fonts — so be it.

(but to be fair, optimising the layout is an excellent way to procrastinate on doing hard research)

> I don't think we need a website, but a js-free webpage with hyperlinks

Wasn't this precisely the use case for HTML and the WWW as originally conceived by Berners-Lee and his fellow internet pioneers?

Sure, one can write a thesis in MS Word. It has come a long way with support for large documents. But I still find its referencing clumsy, opaque and unstable.

For example, automatic updates of figure numbers in captions and references: Countless times it failed on me and I had to manually recreate the fields, bookmarks, cross-references, and whatnot is needed.

Bibliographies are hardly doable without an external tool that comes with its own headaches.

Typography in MS word is quite decent these days, though. Anyway, the content of a PhD thesis shouldn't be judged by its typography (as long it maintains a readable standard).

To be fair, there is no better free tool than LaTeX to typeset PDFs. But it fails at non-paginated, free-flowing content.

Thanks for the pointer, that looks interesting. Especially because it is open source!

I see it supports Jupyter notebook. Math support in those isn’t too bad at all, so it might just work for many cases.

Yet, by far the vast majority of content produced today, technical or prose, is read on screens.

Responsive webdesign has been around for quite a while. I don’t see a reason, other than lack of effort/investment, why we shouldn’t be able to read technical papers on variable-width screens, in a non-paginated form.

Dealing with the technical challenges should not be the task of the author, but the publisher. And indeed, most publishers are on it.

What‘s missing is a standardised format that can be downloaded, annotated, re-shared like a PDF.

O‘Reilly‘s online offer has not only O‘Reilly books, but ones from other publishers as well. Some of them have equations. However, they are often rendered as images.

IEEE explore does a good job rendering equations on phone screens. Therefore, it is possible.

There is no technical reason why equations couldn’t be rendered on a screen just as well as on a PDF. Sure, canvas size constraints might interfere, but this problem exists in principle also on paginated output. Plus, horizontal scrolling is a thing.

I‘m not saying a phone is the ideal platform to read a paper containing free energy-like math, but it can go a long way. Much longer than with the artificial restriction to paginated output like PDF.

> nobody is going to read a complex technical paper in practise on a phone

I do, in fact. Or rather, I often would like to but with PDF? No chance. IEEE explore online reading sometimes works, but it would work better if they cleaned up their UI to be compatible with phones.

I have read thousands of pages of fiction on a phone and quite enjoyed it. Phones are great for reading if the content reflows properly.

Now publishers and content creators would need to embrace non-paginated, reflowing output. This would not only facilitate reading on phones, but also on tablets and laptop screens.

O‘Reilly‘s online platform does a good job with their app.

There is zero reason why paginated output should be the default in 2022.