Xi'an's Og

Some quick breakfast reads from the 22 August issue of Nature, beyond the nice pun in the cover title (which reads like Lonely Planet at first glance!) capturing a rare blooming of plants in the drylands of the Judaean Desert in 2015, discussing the higher diversity of plants in dry environments,

• a tribune about the declining number of junior researchers in South Korea (with a supplementary Nature Index on its remarkable achievements), due to lower birth rates. The government is trying to make postdoc positions more attractive, to attract international students and postdocs. It has also signed with the EU to become an associate member of the Horizon Europe program, hence potentially benefitting of ERC grants.
• looking for the hottest temperature compatible with humans, alas soon in a theatre near you… (With a heatwave chamber that was driven from Brisbane to Sydney!) I did not understand, though, how the limit of 31⁰C as the minimal temperature at which a healthy, young person would die after six hours of exposure. But agreed with the immediate benefits of skin-wetting, which I use almost constantly on hot days and nights.
• the false good idea of wood pellets, reminding me of a freezing August in Christchurch back in 2005!, as pellets (and other biomass energy) generate more carbon than coal, favour deforestation, impacts the health of communities surrounding facilities, and takes decades to reach neutral outcomes.
• another possibly false good idea, floating and sustainable settlements in coastal regions threatened by sea rises. Not only floating cities are expensive to build, but they are more exposed to extreme weather events, compete with the preservation of wetlands and mangroves, and cannot function without adapted infrastructure, from water and sewage treatment to means of transportation, and enough nearby services.
• the ERROR project that pays for spotting mistakes in published papers, developed by the Universities of Bern and Leipzig. ERROR stands for Estimating the Reliability and Robustness of Research. At 2,500 Swiss francs per paper, this is hardly sustainable…
• the problem of artificial neural networks losing plasticity in continual-learning settings and a potential solution via back-propagation.

This entry was posted on September 19, 2024 at 12:24 am and is filed under Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel with tags backpropagation, Bern, Brisbane, Christchurch, climate change, deforestation, demographics, ERC, ERC Starting Grant, ERROR, Judean Desert, learning rate, Leipzig, Lonely Planet, Nature, Nature Index, neural networks and learning machines, plasticity, refereeing, South Korea, sustainability, Sydney, US academia, wood pellet heating. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.