Category Archives: Software

Philosophy, Software

At least one positive advice?

Is there at least one positive advice of all that Musk utterance?

https://archive.ph/TcxaF#selection-1319.0-2987.210
  1. Avoid large meetings
    Large meetings waste valuable time and energy – They discourage debate – People are more guarded than open – There's not enough time for everyone to contribute. Don't schedule large meetings unless you're certain they provide value to everyone.
  2. Leave a meeting if you're not contributing
    If a meeting doesn't require your: – Input – Value – Decisions Your presence is useless. It's not rude to leave a meeting. But it's rude to waste people's time.
  3. Forget the chain of command
    Communicate with colleagues directly. Not through supervisors or managers. Fast communicators make fast decisions. Fast decisions = competitive advantage.
  4. Be clear, not clever
    Avoid nonsense words and technical jargon. It slows down communication. Choose words that are: – Concise – To the point – Easy to understand Don't sound smart. Be efficient.
  5. Ditch frequent meetings
    There's no better way to waste everyone's time. Use meetings to: – Collaborate – Attack issues head-on – Solve urgent problems But once you resolve the issue, frequent meetings are no longer necessary. You can resolve most issues without a meeting. Instead of meetings: – Send a text – Send an email – Communicate on a discord or slack channel Don't interrupt your team's workflow if it's unnecessary.
  6. Use common sense if a company rule doesn't make sense
    Contribute to progress – Apply to your specific situation Avoid following the rule with your eyes closed. Don't follow rules. Follow principles.

Warning : 2) and even other x) only suitable for slightly autistic, self obsessed and excellent scientists.

 

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Philosophy, Software

Brave new AI science world

AI works well in some areas while results are very mixed or even dangerous in others [1, 2].

But what about AI in generic scientific areas?

I have recently looked at scite.ai, a service that claims to analyze a paper if the references have been supported or contrasted the findings — any references that have been retracted in the meantime or received an expression of concern? While the latter isn’t really a big question, I was not very much impressed by the results as most references could not be classified.

But there are now more companies off the ground. Let’s have a look at some.

One is SciScore

16/11/2022 screenshot https://sciscore.com/index.php#pricing

SciScore claims

SciScore generates three reports and a score for every submission. These materials assist researchers, editors, and funders in improving the quality and reliability of scientific research by automatically reporting detected criteria of interest for future review. Researchers signing up with their ORCID get ten free reports. Reports can take as little as 1 minute!

The next one is Prophy, another reference finder.

16/11/2022 screenshot https://www.prophy.science/

and there is Galactica.

16/11/2022 screenshot https://galactica.org/

and well also copy.ai

28/12/2022 Screenshot https://copy.ai

I have no idea if we really need this kind of stuff – any AI to write my blog even faster?

Also others commented earlier this month that it is “not obviously wrong but wrong in subtle ways”.

28/12/22 Screenshot https://mastodon.social/@tommorris/109460645976102033

Fortunately Copyleaks released now even an AI detector just to fight back…

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Software, Theology

Katzenjammer II

Seltsam, was gerade auf Twitter los ist wenn wir CT Bergstrom glauben, der eine Team Email von Musk geteilt hat.

putative chief twit email as distributed by CT Bergstrom https://archive.ph/ZNWIN

Es sieht so aus als sei Twitter nun in der Gewalt von einem reichen Mann, der einem pseudoreligiösen Mars Kult angehört – nachzulesen in dem aufschlussreichen Artikel von Dave Troy

This is a reference to "longtermism" the heavily marketed philosophy being promoted by Musk and his friend William MacAskill that asserts the only thing that matters is humanity's future in space, and that the only goal of the living is to maximize the number of future humans alive, as well as the number of artificial intelligence instances that could possibly exist in the future. This mandate is most often used to brush aside calls for improving conditions and alleviating suffering among the living here on Earth now. Because, the theory goes, giving a poor person a blanket isn't likely to be as useful for the future of humanity as building a rocket to Mars. Longtermism is heavily influenced by "Russian Cosmism" and is also directly adjacent to "Effective Altruism." Musk's stated mission, which he intends to fulfill in his lifetime, is to "make humanity a multiplanetary species." The anti-democratic urge in longtermism is rooted in the belief that "mob rule" will lead to nuclear annihilation; we should, Musk thinks, be guided by "wiser" minds.

 

 

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Philosophy, Software

Surveillance Publisher

Capitalized value? Personalized PDFs? DFG warning? User tracking? Forced marriage? It is incredible how scientific publishers are expanding their business. Here is a new paper

This essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing, with special attention to the example of Elsevier. A scholarly publisher can be defined as a surveillance publisher if it derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from prediction products, fueled by data extracted from researcher behavior. … The products' purpose, moreover, is to streamline the top-down assessment and evaluation practices that have taken hold in recent decades. A final concern is that scholars will internalize an analytics mindset, one already encouraged by citation counts and impact factors.

Sure, this already happens as some committees look only at lists of impact factor and grant sums. In the near future, they will switch to Elsevier`s “human ressources” management system Interfolio to compare candidates.

Founded in 1999, Interfolio supports over 400 higher education institutions, research funders and academic organizations in 25 countries, and over 1.7 million academic professionals and scholars. Theo Pillay, General Manager of Research Institutional Products, Elsevier, said: "Interfolio has a proven track record in supporting the academic community, thanks to its deep understanding of faculty needs, institutional workflows, research assessment and academic careers, combined with its agile technology and experienced leadership.

Back to the original article

the publishing giants have long profited off of academics and our university employers-by packaging scholars' unpaid writing-and-editing labor only to sell it back to us as usuriously priced subscriptions or article processing charges (APCs). That's a lucrative business that Elsevier and the others won't give up. But they're layering another business on top of their legacy publishing operations, in the Clarivate mold. The data trove that publishers are sitting on is, if anything, far richer than the citation graph alone.

Data is the new oil, indeed.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Joke, Software

Ein mathematischer Gottesbeweis

Ein mathematischer Gottesbeweis geht zurĂĽck auf Guido Grandi und wurde vor kurzem wieder mal ausgegraben von u/Prunestand bzw Cliff Pickover.

0 = 0 + 0 + 0 + ...
  = (1-1) + (1-1) + (1-1) + ...
  = 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + ...
  = 1 + (-1 + 1) + (-1 + 1) + (-1 + 1) + ...
  = 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + ...
  = 1

was letztendlich einer Schöpfung aus dem Nichts entspricht wo doch eigentlich “nihilo ex nihilum” gilt.

Die Grandi-Reihe hat nur leider keinen Summenwert, weil sie nicht konvergent ist. Anders gesagt

0 + 0 + 0 + ...                          # N Elemente
(1-1) + (1-1) + (1-1) + ...              # 2N Elemente
1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + ...              # 2N Elemente
1 + (-1 + 1) + (-1 + 1) + (-1 + 1) + ... # 2N + 1 Elemente
1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + ...                      # N + 1 Elemente

dh die 4. Zeile enthält eine falsche Aussage.

Frustriert oder erleichtert? Auf arXiv geht es weiter mit Gödels Gottesbeweis.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Philosophy, Software

increasing complication

Another famous article from the past: P. W. Anderson “More is different” 50 years ago

… the next stage could be hierarchy or specialization of function, or both. At some point we have to stop talking about decreasing symmetry and start calling it increasing complication. Thus, with increasing complication at each stage, we go up on the hierarchy of the sciences. We expect to encounter fascinating and, I believe, very fundamental questions at each stage in fitting together less complicated pieces into a more complicated system and understanding the basically new types of behavior which can result.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Software

Glad to help

Raspberry Pis are small single-board computers. As I have two of these devices already up and logging solar power production on my roof they could do even more: They are not only supporting a green environment but can also help people from countries with repressive governments by installation of another software package.

Snowflake is a system to defeat internet censorship. People who are censored can use Snowflake to access the internet. Their connection goes through Snowflake proxies, which are run by volunteers.

https://www.wjst.de/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/FdWznhmXgAMwDgO-1.png

Setup takes only 2 minutes – full instructions are at kuketz-blog.de

# sudo apt-get install git
# sudo apt-get install golang
git clone https://git.torproject.org/pluggable-transports/snowflake.git
cd snowflake/proxy
go build
nohup /home/pi/snowflake/proxy/proxy > /home/pi/www/snowflake.log 2>&1 &;

and this is the result

2022/09/25 17:44:19 In the last 1h0m0s, there were 16 connections. Traffic Relayed â†' 33 MB, @ 5 MB.
2022/09/25 18:44:19 In the last 1h0m0s, there were 27 connections. Traffic Relayed â†' 170 MB, @ 48 MB.
2022/09/25 19:44:19 In the last 1h0m0s, there were 11 connections. Traffic Relayed â†' 61 MB, @ 28 MB.
2022/09/25 20:44:19 In the last 1h0m0s, there were 19 connections. Traffic Relayed â†' 90 MB, @ 27 MB.
2022/09/25 21:44:19 In the last 1h0m0s, there were 10 connections. Traffic Relayed â†' 41 MB, @ 12 MB.
...

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Philosophy, Software

The currency of the New Economy won’t be money, but attention

Time to revisit the groundbreaking 1997 @mgoldh paper in Wired “Attention Shoppers! The currency of the New Economy won’t be money, but attention”

As is now obvious, the economies of the industrialized nations – and especially that of the US – have shifted dramatically. We’ve turned a corner toward an economy where an increasing number of workers are no longer involved directly in the production, transportation, and distribution of material goods, but instead earn their living managing or dealing with information in some form. Most call this an “information economy.”

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Software

WordPress displaying Jupyter notebook

I could not find any plugin but a step-by-step guide at a blog commentary

1. Download your notebook as .ipynb file
2. Upload to https://jsvine.github.io/nbpreview/
3. Open your browser dev tools and copy the element id="notebook-holder" from the DOM
4. Paste it in your WordPress post as raw text
5. Grab CSS from https://jsvine.github.io/nbpreview/css/vendor/notebook.css

Maybe a true notebook in an iframe is a better solution?

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026
Allergy, Philosophy, Software

So many asthma papers under fire

As an avid PubPeer reader, I found a new entry by Elisabeth Bik recently about Andreas Pahl of Heidelberg Pharma who has already one retracted and several more papers under scrutiny.

Unfortunately there are now also many asthma trash papers from paper mills. Another example was identified by @gcabanac, distributed by @deevybee and published at Pubpeer.

In total there are 386 asthma entries at PubPeer. What is really happening in this field? When I started the field there was just one misconduct case – Ranjit Kumar Chandra. That’s an increase from 1 to 386…

What makes it even more complicated that there is no border anymore to predatory journals if also respected scientists drop their names at predatory journals. Only recently I received an email addressed to one of my former technical assistants as “professor” inviting her to send a paper…

 

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 24.08.2026