I suspect another big part of it is that marketing and sales are relatively easy to measure and to scale.

You can hire one, two, or three new salespeople and expect that revenue will change more or less proportionately. Fixing (or ignoring) a handful issues doesn’t scale so smoothly—-there are jumps where the product suddenly seems much better/worse.

Obviously, there are limits: I’m not sure what my local grocery store or bus line would do with 100 new workers, but I have no doubt they could put a few people to work right away.

MRI is, in general, a lot harder than people often imagine. It uses complicated physics to measure convoluted physiological changes to indirectly measure brain activity, which is obviously stupifying involved--and then relate that to other, often complicated factors like behavior, lifestyle or disease state.

I think it's reasonably well-known that the BOLD response is complex and doesn't directly reflect "average" spiking activity. Some studies find that it's sensitive to the amount of synchrony (=more neurons firing together in time) rather than the rate. The paper you mention shows another dissociation: neurons can get more fuel by extracting oxygen more efficiently OR have having more overall oxygen to extract at the same rate. Thus, it's not noise, but it is complicated.

EEG "spellers" c. 2000 required a cooperative participant who's actively engaged in a behavioural task: you attend to the letter/word you want to send and thereby produce a different response when it (vs the other letters) flash.

Implanted electrodes can do a lot better but it's still not something that will let someone "slurp" your thoughts out of you -- it'd be like subvocalizing them.

The author lists for economics papers are traditionally alphabetized, so more of your output will be known by your name if it occurs early in the alphabet. Abbie Ableson gets lots of mentions as "Ableson et al." while Zhang Zhu will almost always be relegated to the "et al". If name recognition matters, you’d expect successful academic economists to be clustered at the beginning of the alphabet—-and this appears to be true.

In most psychology journals, the author list is instead ordered by contribution/senority, and this effect disappears. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/08953300677652608...

One paper doesn’t make a career (she wrote many dozens), it’s not always cited weirdly, and even if it is, some people may remember the coauthors (as they should).

But since you mention lived experience, I’ll add that I’ve certainly been asked if I’m "even aware" of results from co-authored papers where my name was listed second—-and I don’t think this is very uncommon experience.

Metrics are often attempts to formalize this but they’re not how most people actually make decisions: nobody is inviting seminar speakers or choosing collaborators because they have a high h-index. If anything, it goes the other way: name recognition gets you invited to speak or collaborate, which makes more people aware of your work, which boosts metrics.

I really wish we had a better way to "name" papers. Big clinical trials often have an acronym (often hilariously forced: "CXCessoR4"). That takes the emphasis off (one) lead author but it's implausibly hard to make up one for every research paper.

The plain water hurts because it's causing cells to swell or even burst as water rushes into them to equalize the osmotic pressure. Adding a little bit of salt to that helps remove that pressure because the environment inside and outside of the cells are both equally salt.

OTOH, National Lampoon hasn't put out a magazine since 1998 or a film since 2015 (and that was a retrospective on the magazine).

I guess I'd agree that, in absolute terms, The Onion might be less of a cultural force than it was in 2005 (say), but part of that has to be that culture is a lot more long-tailed: music, movies, and TV aren't dominated by a handful of works either.

Willian Proxmire was a Senator from Wisconsin who was strongly opposed to government spending on basic research. He gave out "Golden Fleece" awards for studies that he thought were absurd. Unfortunately, it is very easy to make meaningful research sound ridiculous: bread mold as a cure for STDs? Pencil dust computers?

https://www.fastcompany.com/91502944/the-onion-most-innovati...

I've reviewed for a few "replication tracks" at ML Conferences and there are a surprising number of reports where people are simply unable to replicate published results. The reasons are all over the map: sometimes the original authors' code just needs to be fixed (new libraries, different environments), but other results simply don't seem to hold up.

The battery compartment had a rubber gasket and some very tight screws.

"The special names becquerel, gray and sievert were specifically introduced because of the dangers to human health that might arise from mistakes involving the units reciprocal second… "

Citrus fruit itself is generally regarded as fine to eat. Concentrating the oils can make them irritating (and flammable, etc) but that’s essentially undone by diluting them into a syrup and then diluting the syrup into an actual drink.