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New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

arstechnica.com

61–70 of 74 posts

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#61
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because being cheap has no correlation with being a bad scientist?

If you can't be bothered to communicate clearly then you have expressed a lack of interest in being understood clearly. If you don't want to publish in English then don't publish in journals that require English.

Can you write fluently on a deeply technical subject in a foreign language?

Are you judging them in their English because you dont have the skills to actually judge them on the merits of scientific work?

Why should all of society lose on scientific progress just to appease your linguistic sensitivities?

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#62

"Essentially, the scientists took some lithium and shot protons at it." How does this actually work? Presumably it's a very small amount of lithium. What is it held in? How are the protons so accurately steered towards it? The accelerator ring is comparatively very wide, right?

Lithium is cheap. It prob'ly has to be chilled while it's being blasted so they can do it long enough. Steering proton beams is what accelerators are for. You need a small target spot just so the detectors get things from a fixed angle.

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#63
post #4

This will probably get much more traction once an independent group confirms it. I don't believe this article presents any new information on X17 that we haven't already heard.

Meaning they said they got it from He, too, before?

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#64
post #23
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a better comparison would perhaps be the faster-than-light neutrinos.

Fair.. Absolutely fair, personally I don't believe faster-than-light neutrinos exist. It will be an incredible change, if something else happens: that's really all, I'm not pushing some agenda.

> personally I don't believe faster-than-light neutrinos exist.

You don't have to believe they they exist, they were quickly and conclusively disproven. As I recall, GPS was used as a time source and there was timer inaccuracies on Earth due to relativistic effects.

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#65
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is not. Research institutions do not explicitly pay people to do peer reviews and it is not generally (ever?) in the job description. It is essentially an etiquette concern. Peer review is important so generally you should do peer review if you every publish papers.

> it is not generally (ever?) in the job description. You're wrong! Just one counter-example I could find in seconds - 'participation on program committees, advisory panels, and editorial boards'. And that's not even an academic position - it's industry. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/careers/ In fact I'm literally reviewing a paper myself... right now... while being paid.

None of those activities are actually the act of peer reviewing papers.

It’s well known that getting sufficient peer reviewers is a problem in computer science (and I’d bet most fields) specifically because it’s not actually anyone’s job. Anyone doing peer review is either doing it on their own time or taking the time away from their “real” job. I’m sure there are employers that will say “yes, you should be doing peer reviews as part of your job” but those same employers probably won’t reward you any differently regardless of whether you do peer reviews.

You are also technically getting paid for browsing Hacker News right now. The company employing you probably wouldn’t say it pays you for that.

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#66
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is not generally (ever?) in the job description. You're wrong! Just one counter-example I could find in seconds - 'participation on program committees, advisory panels, and editorial boards'. And that's not even an academic position - it's industry. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/careers/ In fact I'm literally reviewing a paper myself... right now... while being paid.

None of those activities are actually the act of peer reviewing papers. It’s well known that getting sufficient peer reviewers is a problem in computer science (and I’d bet most fields) specifically because it’s not actually anyone’s job. Anyone doing peer review is either doing it on their own time or taking the time away from their “real” job. I’m sure there are employers that will say “yes, you should be doing pee…

> None of those activities are actually the act of peer reviewing papers.

Being on a program committee is reviewing papers. That’s what the program committee do.

> you should be doing peer reviews as part of your job

If it’s part of your job, which you agree it is, and it’s literally in the job description that companies post, which we saw that it was, then you’re being paid for it. Baffling that people still say it isn’t.

> those same employers probably won’t reward you any differently regardless of whether you do peer reviews

I’ve got a colleague at another company who gets a bonus for every program committee he’s on. He is literally rewarded more if he reviews papers than if he doesn’t.

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#67
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those activities are actually the act of peer reviewing papers. It’s well known that getting sufficient peer reviewers is a problem in computer science (and I’d bet most fields) specifically because it’s not actually anyone’s job. Anyone doing peer review is either doing it on their own time or taking the time away from their “real” job. I’m sure there are employers that will say “yes, you should be doing pee…

> None of those activities are actually the act of peer reviewing papers. Being on a program committee is reviewing papers. That’s what the program committee do. > you should be doing peer reviews as part of your job If it’s part of your job, which you agree it is, and it’s literally in the job description that companies post, which we saw that it was, then you’re being paid for it. Baffling that people still say it…

Shrug. Once I was a published grad student I got asked to do a fair bit of peer review and was always told they really needed help because they didn’t have enough peer reviews and that most people avoided it because it was not actually their job (not in reality, regardless of whether it hypothetically counted). Maybe I was misinformed.

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#68
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not unusual (at least on some fields) seeing specific questions about grammar. It must be checked and maybe fixed, and in some extreme cases it can even imply rejection independently of content, but in most cases a revision is enough.

Oh, by field I meant it as a field in a record, not an area of study. For example in some reports I had to check a box for unambiguous text but I had no check box for grammar or spelling. That's some ambiguous text from my part! :)

Your text was fine! I understood what you mean. I have seen the specific box about grammar in some journals. But my field is not computer science or physics, so my experience may be quite different from most people here.

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#69

Not really directly related to the article, but YouTube recently recommended to me a series of videos from "Strange Loop" which is some kind of tech conference. One of the talks was "Jagged, ragged, awkward arrays" by Jim Pivarski [1]. It is fairly narrow in scope talking about a very particular data modelling problem but it introduced me to the kind of data processing physicists do to make these kinds of discoveries…

Heh, I went to grad school with him. Haven't heard what he's been up to in over a decade.

I was solidly in the "C++" column back then, but have since become a data scientist who now uses numpy/Python for all machine learning. That talk was a very interesting, helped me to understand what they're doing in my old field these days. Thanks for sharing.

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#70
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those activities are actually the act of peer reviewing papers. It’s well known that getting sufficient peer reviewers is a problem in computer science (and I’d bet most fields) specifically because it’s not actually anyone’s job. Anyone doing peer review is either doing it on their own time or taking the time away from their “real” job. I’m sure there are employers that will say “yes, you should be doing pee…

> None of those activities are actually the act of peer reviewing papers. Being on a program committee is reviewing papers. That’s what the program committee do. > you should be doing peer reviews as part of your job If it’s part of your job, which you agree it is, and it’s literally in the job description that companies post, which we saw that it was, then you’re being paid for it. Baffling that people still say it…

I get review requests from journals and it is my personal decision to accept them. My employer (university) does not even know if I review papers or not. I do not have any obligation or get any kind of compensation for doing them. This is normal, and I consider it not being paid for reviewing. Baffling that you find it baffling.

And, although it is true that being in a program committee may involve reviewing, that is not the same thing as peer review for a journal. I find weird that you have so strong opinions about this if you do not understand the difference.

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