ReHacked #95: Giant, free index to world’s research papers released online, Find Your True Love of Coding Fonts, Obscure Rector Predicted Black Holes a Century Before Einstein and more

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Giant, free index to world’s research papers released online #science

In a project that could unlock the world’s research papers for easier computerized analysis, an American technologist has released online a gigantic index of the words and short phrases contained in more than 100 million journal articles — including many paywalled papers.

The catalogue, which was released on 7 October and is free to use, holds tables of more than 355 billion words and sentence fragments listed next to the articles in which they appear. It is an effort to help scientists use software to glean insights from published work even if they have no legal access to the underlying papers, says its creator, Carl Malamud. He released the files under the auspices of Public Resource, a non-profit corporation in Sebastopol, California that he founded.

Coding Font by Typogram – Find Your True Love of Coding Fonts #programming #software

As software engineers, we spend a lot of time skimming, reading, making changes to code. The coding font that we spend 8 hours a day staring at has a lot to do with our productivity and comfort. That is why I created this gamified experience to help you find your true love of coding fonts!

Blog | codeamigo #programming #learning #career

I've applied to work at Codecademy three times, once in 2014, again in 2015, and most recently in 2020. I've been rejected all three times. I wanted to prove to myself I was capable of building something like it, so I decided to build my own version. I was living in Spain so I thought codeamigo.dev would be a good name. Here's why I created it and what I've learned so far.

Learning site

This Obscure Rector Predicted Black Holes a Century Before Einstein #nature #pshysics #longread

If you've never heard of John Michell, you're not alone. This 18th-century natural philosopher is described by some as one of the most underappreciated minds of the Scientific Revolution.

Touching on fields like geology and chemistry, Michell has, in more modern times, been given the titles of Father of both seismology and magnetometry, but his accomplishments don't stop there.

Perhaps most incredibly of all, Michell is the first person ever known to make the connection between gravity, escape velocity, and light that leads to the creation of black holes. In fact, Mitchell predicted the existence of black holes more than 130 years before Karl Schwarzschild deduced their existence using Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity in 1916.

Noise #psychology #health

“Noise is good,” writes Andrew Smart in his book Autopilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing. “This might be one of the most counter-intuitive things to understand about the brain.”1 Noise can be anything you hear (or do not hear) when you’re trying to work intellectually. You might be hearing the neighbor drilling the walls or the sound of the traffic while sitting outside in your favorite coffee house. It can be your colleague sitting next to you and asking you a question or the office sounds2 that we tried to avoid at all costs before the pandemic. Even the music we listen to on our high-tech noise-canceling headphones to avoid the sounds surrounding us is noise. Every soundwave that triggers our neurons to light up is noise.

Forget "Best" or "Sincerely," This Email Closing Gets the Most Replies | Boomerang: Email Productivity #psychology

The difference a simple “thanks” makes in getting a reply was even clearer when we compared emails with “thankful closings” to all others. Emails where we detected a thankful closing saw a response rate of 62%.  This compared to a response rate of 46% for emails without a thankful closing. Closing with an expression of gratitude thus correlated with a whopping 36% relative increase in average response rate compared to signing off another way.

Why do placebos work? Scientists identify key brain pathway | Science | AAAS #health #psychology

Scientists have known about the placebo effect for more than 400 years. In 1572, a French philosopher wrote that “there are men on whom the mere sight of medicine is operative.” Yet researchers have struggled to understand why patients given a nonactive therapy such as a sugar pill still feel relief. They’ve also been confounded by the opposite phenomenon: When patients are told a placebo has harmful side effects, they often feel bad afterward—the so-called “nocebo” effect.

To find the signature of these two effects in brain, researchers brought 27 participants—13 men and 14 women with an average age of 23—into their laboratory at the University of Melbourne. The scientists strapped a device called a thermode to their arm, which heated up to a moderately painful temperature. Afterward, the researchers told the participants they were applying one of three creams to the affected area: a pain reliever, a pain inducer (which would make the heat feel worse), and a control cream with no effect. In reality, all three substances were petroleum jelly.

Is Your Exoskeleton Ready for Primetime? - NEO.LIFE #technology #futurism

While at the mention of exoskeletons—or wearable mobile apparatuses, as they are called in marketing brochures—scenes of Tony Stark in his Iron Man armor elegantly zipping and hovering start to flicker in our minds, we often forget the test scenes where he struggles to control his flight and shoots himself straight into a wall. And this highlights the often overlooked, burdensome reality of exoskeletons: You can’t just slip on a mechanical, superpower-enabling exoskeleton “suit” (several types of which already exist) and operate it without burning lots of brain power to control the damn thing.

Although constantly evolving and improving, past iterations of exoskeleton mechanized gear have been abandoned for their inaccessibility and difficulty of use, after they have been shown to frustrate the user by making simple tasks more cumbersome and draining, requiring them to expend considerable mental energy to carefully control movements—and leading to herky-jerky robotic responses if they do not.

Taiwan builds ‘ironman’ suit to cut fatigue for troops on the ground in wartime | South China Morning Post #technology #futurism

Taiwan has unveiled the first generation of a battery-powered exoskeleton suit that could enhance the physical endurance of soldiers and increase mobility in various military operations.

This comes amid a spike in tensions across the Taiwan Strait, with record air force sorties from mainland China, that has raised concern internationally.

Autonomous Boats Seem More Solvable Than Autonomous Cars - IEEE Spectrum #futurism #technology

Where autonomous vehicles have had the most success is in environments with a lot of predictability and structure, which is why I really like the idea of autonomous urban boats designed for cities with canals. MIT has been working on these for years, and they're about to introduce them to the canals of Amsterdam as cargo shuttles and taxis.

MIT's Roboat design goes back to 2015, when it began with a series of small-scale experiments that involved autonomous docking of swarms of many shoebox-sized Roboats to create self-assembling aquatic structures like bridges and concert stages. Eventually, Roboats were scaled up, and by 2020 MIT had a version large enough to support a human.

Low-income parents receiving universal payments spent more on kids – WSU Insider #psychology #economy #society

When given cash with no strings attached, low- and middle-income parents increased their spending on their children, according to Washington State University research. The study, published in the journal Social Forces, also found that the additional funding had little impact on child-related expenditures of high-income parents.

For the study, WSU sociologist Mariana Amorim analyzed spending by recipients of the Alaska Permanent Fund payments. Funded by state oil revenues, the fund is the closest program in the United States to a universal basic income. Every resident in Alaska receives a payment called a dividend; the total amount varies each year, but during the time span of this study, 1996-2015, payments averaged around $1,812 a person, or $7,248 for a four-person family, when adjusted for inflation to 2014 dollars.

Meta – Stratechery by Ben Thompson #internet #economy #socialnetworks

The obvious analogy to Facebook’s announcement that it is renaming itself Meta and re-organizing its financials to separate “Family of Apps” — Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp — from “Facebook Reality Labs” is Google’s 2015 reorganization to Alphabet, which separated “Google”, including the search engine, YouTube, and Google Cloud, from “Other Bets.” The headline for investors is just how much Facebook is spending on Reality Labs — $10 billion this year, and that amount is expected to grow — but next quarter’s financials will also emphasize just how good Facebook’s core business is; if it plays out like Alphabet, this could be a boon for the stock.

Ukraine, Not Russia, Has Control Over a Major Trove of Ancient Crimean Gold, a Court Has Ruled | Artnet News #politics #culture

A Dutch appeals court has ruled that Ukraine, not Russia, has legal control over a famous cache of gold artifacts from Crimea.

The ancient treasures, often collectively referred to as the “Scythian gold”, were on loan to the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam in 2014 when Russia moved to annex the Black Sea peninsula. They have remained in the Netherlands since then, while Russia and Ukraine have battled over ownership of the objects in court—a dispute that has come to symbolize the precarious state of Crimea today.

The metaverse is already here, it's called the internet - Can's blog #internet #cyberculture

Facebook is betting big on the metaverse. But, what is the metaverse, anyway? The term metaverse was coined by sci-fi author Neal Stephenson in his 1992 book Snow Crash. Simply said, it’s a copy of the real world, but everything is virtual and on steroids. You log in with your VR headset, create your avatar (that can look like anything you want) and spend all your time in there because it’s so much better than your pathetic real life.

Another related article: The metaverse is bullshit

Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's #history #career

The peasant's free time extended beyond officially sanctioned holidays. There is considerable evidence of what economists call the backward-bending supply curve of labor -- the idea that when wages rise, workers supply less labor. During one period of unusually high wages (the late fourteenth century), many laborers refused to work "by the year or the half year or by any of the usual terms but only by the day." And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall). A thirteenth-century estime finds that whole peasant families did not put in more than 150 days per year on their land. Manorial records from fourteenth-century England indicate an extremely short working year -- 175 days -- for servile laborers. Later evidence for farmer-miners, a group with control over their worktime, indicates they worked only 180 days a year.

Programmer’s emotions – sidebits #psychology #fun

From the outside, programmers seem to resemble the machines they program – cold, emotionless, unmoved.  But the reality is different – most moments in programming are full of emotions.

This resume got me an interview! : recruitinghell #career

Phi Beta Phi - fraternity record for most vodka shots in one night - this phrase can help you get hired. How broken is HR screening system?

Rediscover Prague, one brutalist building at a time — The Calvert Journal #architecture #history

Transgas was a testament to Prague’s mostly forgotten brutalist epoch. The Czech Republic — then part of Czechoslovakia — was under communist rule from 1948 to 1989. And while socialism changed the country’s social fabric, it also shaped its urban landscapes. During those four decades, Prague underwent one of the most intense waves of development in the city’s history, largely driven by brutalist and socialist-modernist projects similar to those in the Soviet Union. Even close to Prague’s main thoroughfares, prefabricated housing estates sprouted up everywhere. These buildings still provide homes to roughly a quarter of all Prague residents today.

How to help a student get unstuck #learning

Once you understand how it works, it’s extremely challenging to imagine not understanding it. This can be problematic when teaching because it creates a gap between teacher and student. Even the most empathetic teachers can’t quite imagine themselves in a student’s shoes.

Getting a student from naivety to mastery takes a lot of work from the student and the teacher. But the work is asymmetrical. As a teacher, your role is to accompany, you can’t walk the student’s path for them. All you can do is support them through the journey as best you can.

Lidar reveals hundreds of long-lost Maya and Olmec ceremonial centers | Ars Technica #history

An airborne lidar survey recently revealed hundreds of long-lost Maya and Olmec ceremonial sites in southern Mexico. The 32,800-square-mile area was surveyed by the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia, which made the data public. When University of Arizona archaeologist Takeshi Inomata and his colleagues examined the area, which spans the Olmec heartland along the Bay of Campeche and the western Maya Lowlands just north of the Guatemalan border, they identified the outlines of 478 ceremonial sites that had been mostly hidden beneath vegetation or were simply too large to recognize from the ground.

“It was unthinkable to study an area this large until a few years ago,” said Inomata. “Publicly available lidar is transforming archaeology.”

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