What Happens When Nobody Proofreads an Academic Paper 170
An anonymous reader writes: Drafts are drafts for a reason. Not only do they tend to contain unpolished writing and unfinished thoughts, they're often filled with little notes we leave ourselves to fill in later. Slate reports on a paper recently published in the journal Ethology that contained an unfortunate self-note that made it into the final, published article, despite layers upon layers of editing, peer review, and proofreading. In the middle of a sentence about shoaling preferences, the note asks, "should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?" When notified of the mistake, the publisher quickly took it down and said they would "investigate" how the line wasn't caught. One of the authors said it wasn't intentional and apologized for the impolite error.
Crappy Gabor paper citation citation here? (Score:3, Informative)
If anyone cares to read the passage with the insert here's a twitter pic [twitter.com] of it in use.
Have seen this several times as reviwer... (Score:5, Interesting)
There are two types of reviewers: The valuable ones that actually read a paper and try to understand it, and the worthless ones that look at title, abstract and who wrote it (usually easy to find out even in anonymous review). The first type catches these things, the second does not and quite often lest bad papers in and keeps good papers out. The second type is much more common.
Or to put it short: Peer review is broken, as there is no quality control in most cases.
Re:Have seen this several times as reviwer... (Score:4, Interesting)
Granted, the average quality of "journals" has probably plummeted in recent decades as there are far more PhDs, papers, and journals than in the past. But by the same token, the quality of the top 100 journals (or any fixed number) has probably increased. I say that because the ease of communications now helps, and because of all the progress and recent focus on repeatability and avoiding statistical pitfalls. (A lot of reporting on this implies it is somehow a new problem, but there is no reason to think that).
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http://www.the-scientist.com/?... [the-scientist.com]
Despite a lack of evidence that peer review works, most scientists (by nature a skeptical lot) appear to believe in peer review. It's something that's held "absolutely sacred" in a field where people rarely accept anything with "blind faith," says Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and now CEO of UnitedHealth Europe and board member of PLoS. "It's very unscientific, really."
http://www.ecnmag.com/blogs/20... [ecnmag.com]
As soon as we receive a paper, we publish it," after a cursory q
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I couldn't have said it better.
Re:Have seen this several times as reviwer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Peer-review is as good or bad as the individual journal.
While this is probably true, I would go further and say that this particular issue (from TFS) has relatively little to do with peer-review.
Most peer reviewers are not paid. When I've written reviews for articles, I'm assuming that I'm volunteering my time as an expert on the subject matter. So my primary purpose is to critique the argument, look at the design, see whether the conclusions are justified, etc.
Things like fixing commas, rewording sentences, and proofreading for some sort of stupid error where the authors forgot to delete something -- that's not my primary purpose. If I have time and I see pervasive problems of style, I might say something in the review. If those stylistic things end up confusing the argument or making the thing hard to read, I might say something.
But if I were reading this article, and there were a half-dozen comments or questions I had about methodology or argument on this page, would I bother saying, "Oh yeah, and don't forget to fix the stupid missed citation!" Maybe. But it wouldn't be my highest priority.
I don't know what happens at this journal, but most high-quality journals have at least some copyediting done before publication. If the author didn't catch this error during revision, it should have been caught by the copyeditor. But the peer reviewer? Are we going to ask for expert volunteers in some academic discipline to fix commas next?
Granted, the average quality of "journals" has probably plummeted in recent decades as there are far more PhDs, papers, and journals than in the past. But by the same token, the quality of the top 100 journals (or any fixed number) has probably increased.
It depends on what you mean by "quality." If, by "quality," you mean the level and rigor of articles and research in major journals, maybe you have a point.
But, if by "quality" of a publication, you mean the copyediting -- that has absolutely DECREASED in recent years. I can't tell you how many sets of proofs I've seen with all sorts of idiotic formatting errors, places where an editor tried to fix prose or move something in the layout and caused an absolute disaster to happen, etc. Heck, this isn't just articles -- I've seen recent books from major university presses that seem to have the same level of copyediting a cheap romance novel would have received 40 years ago. And heaven forbid that you have some complex set of figures or images that need to be laid out in a specific way -- the designers seem to go out of the way to screw things up by resizing or moving things about, even if you send them images designed to fit the page layout precisely.
I haven't read the article referenced in TFA. But this all sounds like a proofreading and a copyediting problem. Peer reviewers? Yeah, I suppose they should have caught it if that citation would actually make a difference in the argument. Otherwise, I'm not sure what this has to do with peer review quality AT ALL.
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There are two types of reviewers: The valuable ones that actually read a paper and try to understand it,...
I actually had a look at the paper in question.
I've probably got some details wrong but it was mainly an experimental study where they look at two closely related populations of fish - one in a toxic sulfur hot string and the other not. They find that females in the sulfur hot springs have a preference for (male) fish with spots while the other females don't have a preference.
But then they launch into a pages of random speculation about what this observation might, or might not, mean (i.e. they had no idea)
Re:Have seen this several times as reviwer... (Score:4, Informative)
So what do you do if you're reviewing the paper? Do you try to take the random speculation seriously and spend days trying to make some sense of it and give it a meaningful review?
If you're going to do peer review, then yes, you should try to make sense of it. How is that even a question?
Secondly, if the paper has serious problems with most of the content, of course you should reject it and explain why. Then the author can fix it and resubmit. It's not like rejection is some kind of permanent, damaging thing.
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And then there's The Third Reviewer [youtube.com].
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What Happens When /. Headlines... (Score:4, Insightful)
and the articles they reference are wildly inaccurate. From TFA:
[Emphasis Added]
So the paper was proofread, peer-reviewed and copyedited. Sigh.
People make mistakes. Life is like that sometimes. The authors of the paper will face consequences for this. Hopefully, they'll learn from them.
Nothing to see here, unless you wrote the paper or are the person referenced.. The post and the linked TFA are a waste of time.
Re:What Happens When /. Headlines... (Score:4, Informative)
A more useful article than TFA is over at retractionwatch [retractionwatch.com].
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A more useful article than TFA is over at retractionwatch [retractionwatch.com].
It certainly is. Thanks!
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To their credit it does mention 'despite layers upon layers of editing, peer review, and proofreading' right in the summery, so I assume it must in TFA (which I, as per tradition, have no intention of actually reading), but as we all know /. editors sure as shit don't have any room to criticize other people's mistakes in editing.
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That's kind of obvious. The fact that you're trying to defend it shows you might have some cognitive biases to fix.
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The point is, if that's the quality of proofreading, peer review, and copyediting, then none of those were very effective. That's kind of obvious. The fact that you're trying to defend it shows you might have some cognitive biases to fix.
Please tell me if anything I said was untrue. And I'm not exactly sure what cognitive bias you're ascribing to me. Please explain.
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This is what happened to you man:
--------point------------>
O
|
/ \
The point is, the proofreading was so bad, it wasn't worth to be called proofreading. It's hilarious, and it shows what a lousy job everyone involved did. Furthermore, you say "there is nothing to see here," but you are wrong, there most certainly is something to see here. You can't se
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Untrue? Let me quote your sig, it's a good one: "No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr" This is what happened to you man: --------point------------> O /|\
<--- you
|
/ \
The point is, the proofreading was so bad, it wasn't worth to be called proofreading. It's hilarious, and it shows what a lousy job everyone involved did. Furthermore, you say "there is nothing to see here," but you are wrong, there most certainly is something to see here. You can't see it because of your cognitive biases. So fix that. Relax and accept that sometimes scientific processes go hilariously wrong.
Firstly. Proofreading isn't a scientific process. Secondly, as I and several others pointed out (as we *actually* read TFA) that the "comment" was added bery late in the process, after initial proofing, after peer review and, apparently, shortly before the article went to press.
As for my "cognitive bias," I said:
What is more, a minor error in editing (albeit an embarrassing one) isn't a "failure of the scientific
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because you never, ever make mistakes do you?
That's true, I don't.
But... (Score:2)
But do people really expect Slashdot articles to be proofread? For that we'd need to employ editors to replace the scripts currently posting stories.
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But do people really expect Slashdot articles to be proofread? For that we'd need to employ editors to replace the scripts currently posting stories.
My point was more about the headline. Which was copied verbatim from the awful TFA. The titles of both completely misrepresent the situation. As for /.'s editors, I make not comment. Their work speaks for itself.
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Going through a proofread process doesn't necessarily mean it was actually proofread.
Error: They did not use LaTeX (Score:2)
This could have been avoided if the authors had used LaTeX for writing their paper. It allows for comments in the text that don't become part of the formatted output.
% Should we cite the crappy Gabor paper here?
There are also various LaTeX packages for writing comments, adding annotations and tracking changes that could be useful when peer-reviewing a paper.
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Ten years ago I would've agreed with you, but word processors have caught up and they all have very good commenting systems now.
This was technically weak authors (not using comments in the first place), a poor internal review process, and a terrible peer review process. Thinking about it more, it's not that surprising. Inventing some percentages, say 10% of authors don't use comments and 5% of peer reviews would miss it (1 internal, 2 external). You would have a roughly 1 in 10,000 chance of this slippin
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That is why I simply say "insert statistical method here" and continue on.
Here is a fine example of usage. [link [nih.gov]]
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The nature of the file format (binary/text-based, open/closed/proprietary) has nothing at all to do with the quality of the commenting system. For example, the commenting system associated with docx or pdf are excellent. Latex commenting system fails lamentably... its actually not a system at all.
And I am not a fan of Microsoft nor of Adobe and I do most of my work (unless forced to by project specifications) with Latex.
Re:Error: They did not use LaTeX (Score:5, Informative)
This could have been avoided if the authors had used LaTeX for writing their paper.
Hardly. This would have been avoided if the authors had written:
(************ SHOULD WE CITE THE CRAPPY XYZ PAPER HERE *************)
And then it wouldn't have gotten missed even in Notepad. In anything more advanced than notepad I'd also format it bold, and in red too.
Arguing for the commenting features of latex presume they would actually know about the feature, AND choose to use it. For all I know they did use latex, but didn't bother to mark it as a comment. (I mean, they probably used Word, and they didn't mark it as a comment with that either, which they could have done -- so why would switching to latex make them use the feature??)
But using the commenting feature would also potentially be a detriment. They may well WANT their own review, and internal reviewers to see this stuff, so that they can render an opinion. Having it simply omitted from the PDF or printout they are looking at means they don't see it, and can't mark a note ... "Hey -- you should cite that paper" or "don't bother with that"... in their review notes.
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Arguing for the commenting features of latex presume they would actually know about the feature, AND choose to use it.
It would be surprising if anyone who has spent any time formatting with LateX didn't know about the commenting feature.
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exactly, if my student writes the paper, I might not read the latex file myself. What I typically do is that all things that are not meant to be part of the article is either a \note{} or a \todo{} which resolve to write in bold, red, and change background color to yellow (or green). That way, it is impossible for me to miss it before it is sent to the reviewers.
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Inline comments are awkward in latex. It's one of the biggest flaw of tex IMO. A commenting method that comments out everything to the next line break will inherently break the text flow in the source file. This make production difficult and authors often fall back to non-commented notes in-line -- with the consequences seen here.
This also the reason I will never to text iterations with co-authors (especially in the later production phases) on the tex files, but always and only with pdf files.
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Even if they use Microsoft Word, they could use the "comment" feature that puts up a comment in the margins with a arrow and highlight. And which can be
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That said the error might not have been prevented with LaTex. If it was a conversion error from different versions of word, in which a comment was exposed, that might have been prevented. If it was a human error, a comme
Lap dog (Score:3)
Happens all the time. We had a report that had one project member with a title of SRP Lap Dog. It was put there in jest about 6 months earlier, along with some swear words that actually did get caught int the final edits, but not the title. Professionals are human too, and stuff happens.
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Yes these things happen all the time. Which is why anyone with a shred of professionalism and experience doesn't add crap like this to a paper that will be read by external people at some point. If you have a habit of doing this, it will catch you out eventually.
This is why liberal educations are still required. (Score:2)
The more you specialise, the less you are understood. It is not without reason nature is biased against species who can only survive in specific environments.
How could this happen? (Score:5, Funny)
The lesson we can all learn from this: (Score:5, Insightful)
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On the plus side, think what this will do for the journal's impact factor!
Evidence that society is in decline... (Score:2)
Just kidding, but people will make a big deal out of this because they can twist it to whatever "everything is falling apart" worldview they hold. The statement got added post peer review accidentally and people that had read the paper a million times missed it. As they use to say at the height of the Roman empire, "Pol fit."
Frankly, I bet that crappy Gabor paper gets a lot more interest now than it would have garnered with an appropriate reference.
My rant (Score:2)
Nothing to do with peer review (Score:2)
According to the article, the comment was added in revisions after peer review. It should have been caught before publication, but it's not the reviewers' fault.
One other thing: to catch this reliably, you need to have someone read through it who knows that it's the final version. Otherwise they may well assume that it's still an active question, waiting for views. And of course, you should always word your notes more politely!
Relevant Question (Score:3)
Is the Gabor paper crappy?
Bad response...its a feature not a bug! (Score:2)
Clearly, they should have claimed this was merely an attempt at something new, a device to engage the reader. What do you think reader? Should we have cited the crappy Gabor paper here? Its a discussion point; not an error!
Had that happen to me. (Score:3)
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``Real Programming''
With those quotes, surely it was a LateX paper
Inspection paradox (Score:3)
In manufacturing there is a tendency to add extra inspectors after each slip up (well in defense related manufacturing anyway, from what I saw). Eventually every inspector comes to believe that what they are supposed to inspect ihas either already been inspected numerous times, or would get inspected by someone else later. Soon there are so many inspections that nobody actually does a real inspection, as they all believe their inspection is redundant. With multiple levels of proof reading I imagine a similar failure mode is going on here. Just one inspector should be tasked with QA signoff, not a crowd of them.
They get hired as writers for... (Score:2)
the NYT, MSNBC, and the Daily Show.
Try to be error-resistant (Score:2)
This story is exactly why I've encapsulated my self-notes and comments in c-code-style markings: /*this is a note to myself */
It's trivial to skim a document for the existence of such markups. Yeah, it takes a little-self-discipline while writing, but it sure pays off.
Alanis Alert! (Score:2)
Wait, slashdot is posting a story about lack of "editing, peer review, and proofreading"? That, good sirs, is irony.
China as usual gets something for nothing (Score:2)
Remind me again what china gave up here? no more increases of emissions by 2030?... yippy.
"Crappy Gabor" (Score:2)
Sounds like a character from the newspaper comic strip, "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith".
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That's why you have some review features of a document.
However it is proven earlier that even deleted text often lingers around in the Microsoft Document file format, so the only way to make sure that you come clean is to only publish as a PDF.
In addition to this - use some kind of "keyword" in your texts for sections that you need to revisit when writing. Use a word that's unlikely to be in the final document that you can search for.
And even when you write - don't use words like "crappy" unless actually re
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If you ever look at a document.xml extracted from a .docx file you'll be astonished at how much crap there is in there just to support revision tracking.
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I do not agree. The "reviewers" were probably the lazy, incompetent type that gets more and more common these days.
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This was not in the version that went to the reviewers.
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Indeed, I missed that because it makes this a complete non-story.
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When did they stop writing papers in LaTeX?
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The paper in question was most likely not written in LaTeX, or they would have put a percent sign in front of the comment when they first put it in.
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Not necessarily. In my cooperations with others we never hid comments to co-authors in LaTeX comments. Otherweise, co-authors who work on a printed copy first would have seen them too late or not at all.
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In that case I'm sure you're doing something like this:
\newif\ifdraft
\drafttrue % or \draftfalse
\ifdraft
(should we cite the fine Gabor paper here?)
\fi
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That makes sense, and we have *sometimes* done something like it.
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In LaTeX (and Word for that matter), I always prefix my notes with @@@ because that is a string that nnever occurs in normal text (easoly searchable) and that sticks out visually like a sore thumb.
Percent-sign-prefixed comments ("this needs an update") are much easier to overlook, or even guaranteed to be overlooked during proofreading. At least, I don't proofread my LaTeX markup, but rather the typeset document.
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In LaTeX (and Word for that matter), I always prefix my notes with @@@ because that is a string that nnever occurs in normal text (easoly searchable) and that sticks out visually like a sore thumb.
Percent-sign-prefixed comments ("this needs an update") are much easier to overlook, or even guaranteed to be overlooked during proofreading. At least, I don't proofread my LaTeX markup, but rather the typeset document.
Word actually has a "comment" feature that attaches comments to particular locations in the text, and a flag that lets you show/hide them. It's been there for quite a long time. It works quite well.
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"The Computer made me do it."
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[..] When you have a million versions of closed-source MS Office files floating around, this shit happens. Another reason to use open formats.
Is there an Internet Law that says "Whatever the real cause of the problem, there is always someone who will blame Microsoft"?
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Is there an Internet Law that says "Whatever the real cause of the problem, there is always someone who will blame Microsoft"?
Welcome to slashdot. You must be new here.
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LaTeX and Word are two different things - or, more precisely, LaTeX, true to the Unix tradition, doesn't do everything Word does. You don't compose with LaTeX, you use a text editor to compose in LaTeX.. Since LaTeX is essentially in a text format, it will work well with any version control system.
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This is important "news for nerds" because of the fact that this "peer reviewed" article had a such an egregious error in it that should have been easily spotted if, in fact, the paper was ever actually reviewed.
What does this imply for OSS that is "peer reviewed by millions" as we are wont to point out?
Re:Big woop (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the point is that standards and professionalism are slipping, even in science.
No, the point is that standards and professionalism are low. To show that they are "slipping" would require showing that they were higher at some point in the past. Crappy, poorly edited papers are nothing new.
Re:Big woop (Score:4, Insightful)
On a slight tangent, I've been wondering about this "things are getting worse" meme as it relates to just about anything related to humanity that can be tracked over time. You read so much today about worldwide atrocities, NSA snooping, domestic crime, political skullduggery, and one starts to develop the impression that things truly are getting worse. I think it would be interesting to see if that's actually the case or whether it's a mirage perpetuated by the changing nature of how we're interconnected via the Internet, or perhaps because world events went through a sort of unusually calm period in the 80s and 90s, or perhaps it's as simple as the notion that we were mostly sheltered by our parents as children to some extent and didn't truly open our eyes to the reality of the world until we got older...
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"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers."
Widely attributed to Socrates, ~450BC.
Middle aged and elderly doomsayers love to bitch about how their generation were upstanding citizens but today's kids are nothing but morally bankrupt punks who are
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Middle aged and elderly doomsayers love to bitch about how their generation were upstanding citizens but today's kids are nothing but morally bankrupt punks who are letting civilization go to shit.
Not true. Nearly all people from my generation (35-40) I know complain how well-behaved and submissive today's youngsters are.
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Not true. Nearly all people from my generation (35-40) I know complain how well-behaved and submissive today's youngsters are.
Yes this is exactly why my generation thinks. That today's youngsters are far less wild than we were.
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That, or all the estrogen mimicking compounds in our plastics! YAY BPA (and friends)
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Because as we all know, feminists love nothing more than having women being dominant in the workforce only in traditionally-female, low-wage jobs like non-management positions in lower education.
Re:Big woop (Score:4, Insightful)
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SJWs are by no means killing /b/. If anything, they give the men-children there something to rant about.
Re:Big woop (Score:4, Interesting)
There are a few objective measures that can be made. We know that professional employment was once considered to be life-long. We know that employers used to offer on the job training and actual entry level employment. We know that at one time retail employers believed 6 days a week and observance of national holidays was just fine. We know that single income families was once the norm.
That's not to say things were perfect. The red scare and blacklists were real. We don't really know if the various spy agencies were more scrupulous at the time or if they just didn't have enough technology and manpower to behave as badly as they do today.
I do know that for whatever reason (simple ability increasing or moral decay) every year the U.S. does more and more of those things that my 4th grade teacher said the 'Russians' (meaning the USSR) were bad for doing. It's not just childhood sheltering. I know for a fact that at one time you really could just walk through the airport with suitcase and ticket in hand and get on a plane with no form of ID whatsoever. Your suitcase would be run through an x-ray and you would pass through the worlds least sensitive metal detector. If you had a video camera that looked like an Uzi on an X-ray, you and the security guy could have a good laugh about it (once he looked in the bag, naturally).
Mysterious objects found in public created funny urban legends (if they were even noticed), not civil panic.
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There are a few objective measures that can be made. We know that professional employment was once considered to be life-long.
Not true. Average job tenure is higher today than in the past [marketwatch.com]. "Lifetime jobs" are a myth that never happened for most people.
We know that employers used to offer on the job training and actual entry level employment.
Citation please. Can you provide any evidence that job training was more prevalent in the past?
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You do know the link you gave goes back to only 1983, don't you? And that it reflects only a difference of 1 year? Look back to the '50s and '60s (that I spoke of the red scare should give you some hint of the timeframe).
Read some recent history. Ask your dad.
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Read some recent history. Ask your dad.
No. I ran out on his mother for a reason.
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Look back to the '50s and '60s
Job tenure in the 1950s and 1960s was EVEN LOWER. Look, when you post unsubstantiated nonsense, and someone provides a citation that shows you are wrong, the proper response is not to post more unsubstantiated nonsense, but to provide your own citation, if you can find one.
The whole "job for life" myth has no basis in reality. It never happened. People think it did because "The Dick van Dyke Show" and "I Love Lucy" showed people in the same job for years. Those shows were fiction. Sure, some people had
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Did your dad hold a job in any of the relevant decades?
Since your citation didn't cover the time period in question, it has no substantial meaning in the context.
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Dad got a Post Office job shortly after WWII, and kept it until he retired. There actually were quite a few people I knew who had what were essentially lifetime jobs. I know fewer people with lifetime jobs nowadays, but still some.
These are observations from a very restricted viewpoint. I'm not going to try to extrapolate them. It may well be that there were more lifetime jobs at the time, and everybody else had much less job stability.
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On a slight tangent, I've been wondering about this "things are getting worse" meme as it relates to just about anything related to humanity that can be tracked over time.
This is a natural consequence of random changes to personal and social preferences over time. You grow up with the particular set of preferences that is accepted by the majority and they become your norm. Over time the preferences in society change and the majority opinion changes so you naturally move from being in the majority to the minority. What was once the accepted majority view becomes a minority view and your opinons become out of step with the rest of society. The older you get, the more this happ
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Whatever bad things have happened at least the existential threats facing us now are long term ones.
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It is interesting that fears of nuclear war have disappeared almost entirely. The arsenals are still in place, almost as powerful as they were at peak. More countries have significant amounts of nuclear weapons and there are doubts about the maintenance procedures in at least some of the countries.
Re:Big woop (Score:4, Informative)
The arsenals are still in place, almost as powerful as they were at peak.
No. Nuclear arsenals have dramatically declined, in both number and average warhead yield. In the 1960s, America had more than 30,000 warheads. Today we have less than 5,000. The Russian arsenal has declined even more. Here is a nice graph [wikipedia.org].
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True. I was definitely wrong about that.
Still, I think the number of weapons ready for use is cause for concern.
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because nobody's finger is on the proverbial trigger anymore.
the cold war was scary because russians are fucking crazy...
holy shit, fucking Putin is 50 kinds of batshit insane all by himself. You ever see any of those damn dashboard cams? you know why they even have dashboard cams? holy fuck.
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Nobody back then worried about being nuked by the Chinese, only the Soviets. In the 50s and 60s, we didn't have reliable second-strike capability, since so much of the deterrent was bombers that could theoretically be caught on the ground. There was also the question of how many losses the Soviets were willing to take to knock out the US, particularly after WWII.
Once we got reliable second-strike capabilities (long-range SLBMs, for example), the threat seemed to be a lot weaker. I also no longer wen
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when i google "deadly conflict 1980s" this is the first thing that pops up.
http://www.economist.com/conte... [economist.com]
apparently the 1980s sucked. But you didn't hear about it, because the US "-doesn't care about black people."
We are living in the least deadly period in recorded history, violence by all metrics is dropping per capita.
I don't see nothing terribly out of place in regards to worldwide atrocities... if you're talking about gaza. Keep in mind that the death of 2000 palestinians fell in the middle of a 2
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or perhaps because world events went through a sort of unusually calm period in the 80s and 90s
sure as shit ain't that...
or perhaps it's as simple as the notion that we were mostly sheltered by our parents as children to some extent and didn't truly open our eyes to the reality of the world until we got older.
and that's where I'd put my money.
Re: (Score:2)
I would have even said that; the thing that happens when no one proof reads a paper is; The press or some other organization get hold of it and declare it SCIENCE or quote it as a "study". Especially before any reasonable revue.
Science is a tool, not a solution (Score:3)
There are major problems in the world (e.g. poverty, disease, and conflict). Our best hope for reducing these problems is factual observation and logical reasoning - i.e. science.
No, science is just a tool that can be used to predict the outcome of any changes that we make to the world. Science is amoral and has been been used to create the issues you describe as much as it has alleviated them.
Science does not say that poverty, disease or conflict are "problems" so it cannot give "hope" that they can be reduced.