zlatiah

This is... A bit of a dumb question, but I am really curious

100 random people because I think due to personal beliefs/political orientation the answer would differ, maybe someone would really like the Nordic countries, some would like China/Japan for good infrastructure, some would like the US due to extreme wealth...

Also I don't mean what their favorite country is, but whether what their favorite country "should be" given their beliefs

Leaving the US but still have a couple of things tied down to a US address (remaining bank accounts, tax return, potentially one or two work-related stuff), so I'm wondering it any one of you have used one of those things...

Both professional activities and hobbies

For example... If a new hire is introduced as "good at Python and C++" at work, what does this imply about the person's skill level in your opinion? Or if someone says they are a "good runner", what would come to your mind? Or is it field-dependent?

Asking because sometimes I'm not sure if I am under/over-exaggerating my own abilities when meeting new ppl at work/etc....

Asking because not only did I suspect my (now former) boss to be like that, there was also a massive meltdown in a specific content creation space where an otherwise extremely kind CC was exposed as... being a bit special. So I thought I should try to get better at spotting ppl like that in order to not burn myself

Edit: Thanks everyone. I guess I didn't word it correctly but my goal wasn't to "diagnose" someone. I'm Autistic & am working in a field that allegedly attracts lots of hyper-competitive/toxic ppl, so I want to protect myself. That's why. I already saw tons of useful comments so

The top 10 (more than half of these have estimated citation counts over 100,000):

1. Deep residual learning for image recognition (2016, preprint 2015)
2. Analysis of relative gene expression data using real-time quantitative PCR and the 2–ΔΔCT method (2001)
3. Using thematic analysis in psychology (2006)
4. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5 (2013)
5. A short history of SHELX (2007)
6. Random forests (2001)
7. Attention is all you need (2017)
8. ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks (2017)
9. Global cancer statistics 2020: GLOBOCAN estimates of incidence and mortality worldwide for 36 cancers in 185 countries (2020)
10. Global cancer statistics 2018: GLOBOCAN estimates of incidence and mortality worldwide for 36 cancers in 185 countries (2016)

The article went in-depth on some trends... but in brief:

• 1, 6, 7, 8 are all papers that are foundational to the current generation of deep learning/AI research, so naturally they got cited a lot. Among these 6 may be less relevant than the others, but random forest is still incredibly important as a method
• 2 and 5 were random (but extremely important) methods that got written into papers so ppl can cite them
• 9, 10 are extremely important cancer statistics/reviews that are cited by just about every and any cancer researcher
• 4 is the "psychiatry's bible" and is meant to be a foundational work to this field of research
• 3 was meant to be a brief guideline for a psychology research method, but accidentally blew up in popularity

Link to the supplementary infomation of the top 25 papers. Note that this will open a link to download the Excel spreadsheet

I did not realize this was a thing until I just switched to AZERTY which... despite being marketed as being "similar" to QWERTY, is still tripping me up

Edit: since this came up twice: I'm switching since I'm relocating to the French-speaking part of the world & I just happened to want to learn the language/culture, so yeah

Maybe you guys have heard of recent news mentioning how the wealthiest Americans live shorter than the poorest Western Europeans. This is the base study that supported that claim.

We performed a longitudinal, retrospective cohort study involving adults 50 to 85 years of age who were included in the Health and Retirement Study and the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe between 2010 and 2022. Wealth quartiles were defined according to age group and country, with quartile 1 comprising the poorest participants and quartile 4 the wealthiest. Mortality and Kaplan–Meier curves were estimated for each wealth quartile across the United States and 16 countries in northern and western, southern, and eastern Europe...

... Although all the countries showed an association between wealth and mortality, the United States had the widest gap in mortality between the bottom and top wealth quartiles. Mortality among the wealthiest Americans appeared to be higher than that among most northern and western Europeans and the wealthiest southern Europeans and similar to that among the poorest northern and western Europeans and most eastern Europeans. The poorest Americans appeared to have the lowest survival among all wealth groups in the study sample. U.S. regional differences in mortality were minimal, except for the finding of lower mortality among the wealthiest participants in western states than among the wealthiest participants in the other U.S. Census regions.

The DOI link doesn't seem to be working quite yet.

An artificial intelligence (AI) system has for the first time figured out how to collect diamonds in the hugely popular video game Minecraft — a difficult task requiring multiple steps — without being shown how to play. Its creators say the system, called Dreamer, is a step towards machines that can generalize knowledge learned in one domain to new situations, a major goal of AI.

Collecting a diamond is “a very hard task”, says computer scientist Jeff Clune at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who was part of a separate team that trained a program to find diamonds using videos of human play. “There is no question this represents a major step forward for the field.”

An even bigger target for AI, says Clune, is the ultimate challenge for Minecraft players: killing the Ender Dragon, the virtual world’s most fearsome creature.

The associated preprint

Associated blog post

~~Neuro-sama: finally a worthwhile opponent~~

On health economist Jay Bhattacharya’s first day as head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the chiefs of four of the 27 institutes and centres that make up his agency — including the country’s top infectious-diseases official — were removed from their posts. The unprecedented move comes amid massive cuts to research at the NIH.

The directors of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) and the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) were informed late on 31 March that they were being placed on administrative leave. Together, these leaders were in charge of US$9 billion in funding at the NIH.

Try this archive.org link if there is soft paywall

The United States has ordered consular offices to significantly expand their screening processes for student visa applicants, including through comprehensive social media investigations, to exclude people they deem to support terrorism.

It specifically targets new and renewing F, M and J student visa applications, providing explicit instructions for consular officers to conduct mandatory social media reviews digging into applicants’ lives online. Officers are directed to examine the social media of all students applying to a visa for evidence of activities the administration defines as a threat to national security or terrorism.

So I guess this is a thing for people who want to study/do research in the US now

Since this wasn't apparent the last time I asked... no, I'm actually not a US citizen or green card holder (permanent resident). Just happened to be in this country for a long time due to career reasons.

The massive changes in US research brought about by the new administration of President Donald Trump are causing many scientists in the country to rethink their lives and careers. More than 1,200 scientists who responded to a Nature poll — three-quarters of the total respondents — are considering leaving the United States following the disruptions prompted by Trump. Europe and Canada were among the top choices for relocation.

The trend was particularly pronounced among early-career researchers. Of the 690 postgraduate researchers who responded, 548 were considering leaving; 255 of 340 PhD students said the same.

I have answered this poll myself; this is meant for scientists of all career-stages, so a lot of PhD students and postdocs along with faculty members.

I don't think the article is paywalled, but let me know if it is.