• 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 23rd, 2023
  • FishFace@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.world•Ring the bells
    13·
    3 days ago

    Sir, this is a joke about how it would be awful if the sun were always up.

    But also, the UK just had its second warmest June ever (England’s warmest ever) and was over 30C in many places. During these heatwaves, the temperature rises rapidly, making it uncomfortable because people are not used to the warmer temperatures. After 7 days of warm temperatures, people get used to it.

  • FishFace@lemmy.worldtoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.world•Duke University appears to have lost research grants because they used the prefix "trans" in reference to disease transmission, transgenic material, translational studies and signal transductionEnglish
    85·
    6 days ago

    As far as I can work out about this USA, this is not true. It is certainly not true where I am from. It may be true in the case of postdoctoral researchers (but not always), i.e. relatively junior researchers who don’t yet have a permanent position. But a permanent position is just that - it’s like a permanent job, and you’re paid a salary by the university that gave you that position. You will typically also need to apply for grants in order to pay for things like:

    • travel to conferences
    • travel to collaborate in person with colleagues at other institutions
    • make papers open access
    • hire postdoctoral researchers and PhD students.

    I did two postdocs during my time in academia and both were grant funded (one awarded to me, one awarded to a more senior researcher who then took me on as a postdoc). I also applied to one postdoc position I remember which although fixed term, not permanent, was paid for by the university. I worked with many permanent staff who had salaries from the university as well as grants for other things.

    As far as I can tell in the USA the only real difference is that your salary may only be for the 9 teaching months, not the full academic year, and you’re expected to top up those 3 months if you want to be paid a proper wage.

  • FishFace@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.world•weird looking gear
    1·
    1 year ago

    I got a chef’s knife as a gift. I was a bit put out that came from Wilko (a very budget brand) and it turned out to be absolutely excellent. I think it won’t have cost any more than £20. I am astounded that anyone apart from professionals pays more than £100 for a knife, never mind the even more insane prices you can pay

  • FishFace@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.world•weird looking gear
    4·
    1 year ago

    Yep, it’s a big problem in audio and other subjective areas, because you have no way of knowing what the anonymous reviewer’s point of reference is, and most professional reviewers’ reference points are not suitable. It’s worse too, because purchaser-reviewers self-select into their category, so you expect most people to be satisfied with the subjective aspects of a product they’ve purchased, even though most people would not be satisfied with a random cheap product. This is all not helped by the fact that, in audio when differences are so minute, virtually no-one is conducting blind reviews so confirmation bias probably accounts for huge amounts of the final score. Sure, any professional reviewer is going to be able to identify a bum product that costs thousands, but I bet most of them will rate an identical product more highly if they’re told it costs 10x as much and comes from a fancier brand.

    I’ve ended up crowdsourcing my recommendations from places like reddit where people tend to make tiered recommendation lists so you at least know they have the goal of producing the best products at each price level.