So you get a few benefits from being a reviewer but it's pretty limited.
One benefit is that you generally get free access to the journal in question for a month or two while you are reviewing. So if you are regularly reviewing papers, you get free access to that journal. If you are part of a big org you probably already have access but it is a nice little benefit for people outside big academic orgs.
You can also include it on your CV if you want and there are a variety of small recognitions you can get for doing it.
And some publishers will also give you a fairly substantial discount (25+%) on texts purchased through that publisher as well as similarly substantial discounts on publishing and editing services provided by the publisher. Sage does this for example and their services include things like translation services, editing, infographic & artwork design, and animating video summaries for papers. They seem like they are quite nice services so getting discounts on them would probably be a good selling point for some people.
Another reason is just because you'd be reading the journal anyways and you don't mind doing a deep dive every once in a while on a random paper in your field. This reason is mostly a "well why not I'm already spending the time" kind of reason but it's a decent justification.
And the main reason is just because it's kind of expected of a lot of PhDs and being good at reviewing is a useful skill to have, especially if you are going to eventually be someone else's advisor or just in general if you want to be able to effectively critique your own works and the works of those around you. Being a reviewer for at least some times means you know the system and you can help keep your own papers and the papers of your colleagues from getting rejected for dumb reasons or oversights.
It's part of the culture. I write a paper. I want to get it published. Journals need someone to review it. If I refuse to peer review others' papers, then in principle people may refuse to review mine and we both lose.
Sure, it'd be nice if publishers passed some of the profits to both authors and reviewers, but that would create other perverse incentives.
> and what real care do they take when they are doing it for free?
Not much. They sometimes sit on it for months before reviewing it.
Pardon my ignorance, I’m very much not an academic, but what the heck do the publishers bring to the table here? Suppose you just published your paper on a free site, and solicited your peer reviewers to annotate a Google Doc or whatever? I can see why journals and their publishers mattered 50 years ago when they were needed to physically publish the information by printing it on paper and distributing it. But I don’t get it now. Why does anyone gift them their papers? To me this sounds like a store where the customers bring in all the merchandise and give it to the store, who then sells it back to other customers. In other words, crazy.
> but what the heck do the publishers bring to the table here?
Name recognition. Top journals are harder to publish into - you (supposedly) need a higher impact piece of work to get published in it.
Same idea with universities. The top ranked universities don't necessarily give you a better education. But that certificate sure helps.
> But I don’t get it now. Why does anyone gift them their papers?
Same answer as above. You're a researcher who is trying to get tenure. You published in Nature. Good chance you'll get tenure. You published on your own site and have a Google Doc of reviewer feedback? Anyone can create that. You won't get tenure.
At least in my field, being on the program committee for top conferences is prestigious and can help with promotion, increases your visibility and profile in the community, is a good networking opportunity with other experts in the field, and for early career researchers provides a valuable perspective on how other experienced researchers evaluate research. The latter is less important in cases where conferences publish all reviews.
> At some point, the people who tent to leave a mess in Waymos just... won't be allowed to ride in Waymos any more.
This would reductively mean a more effective form of punishing vandalism, which would in of itself be a slight net good overall.
In the ideal case, there would be a recompense program to pay for the damages made + extra, in return for being able to ride them again.
Meta-point: This discussion has significant overlap with busses/trains/public transportation. How we deal with bad actors in that space would translate well into this space.
At some point, the people who tent to leave a mess in Waymos just... won't be allowed to ride in Waymos any more.
Starting to sound a bit like a credit system or some other dystopian shit show. You do something dumb, drunk while in college and you're cut off...sounds amazing.
No, the point was that billing the damage to the malicious actor in question will prevent damage.
But for some people, a fine is just the cost of doing the thing. And for every bad actor you ban, there's another bad actor willing to take their place.
They'll accept cash if you fork out a $300 deposit, and the people who are likely to both pay cash and trash a room rarely have that much extra money on hand.
A friend of mine works night audit in a rough part of the valley. As soon as he says the magic words 'we require a major credit card or a $300 deposit', they immediately hang up.
This heavily depends on the country, plenty of places in the US and other credit-card-loving countries are credit (and specifically credit, NOT debit) card only for this reason. Plenty of tourists from countries where such cards aren't as popular get bitten by this.
> Some taxis have that too. Where does it get them?
The keyword there being "some". If an account is tied to the person, recourse for negligent/malicious behavior can be applied, but that only works if there's an account to add the penalty to.
On Waymo's part, requiring an account to use the service would be in the benefit of the service as a whole.
Plenty of things can be a “real condition” without measurable physical sources. That’s just practical/pragmatic medicine. Ala chronic fatigue syndrome.
The difference between those and more fringe stuff like chronic Lyme disease is much more of a grey area than most doctors would ever admit publicly without a huge amount of well organized backlash that largely can be summarized on “you just don’t care about sick people”. So the alternative is much more palatable to just to quietly treat them, play the game by kicking the can and deferring with “I hope science will one day advance to finding a real cause”. Wikipedia is always going to play this same game by the nature of it being a public forum attempting to appease a wide audience, it’s almost always going to play it safe.
Ultimately these are people, for the most part, who are legitimately unwell and may legitimately need care regardless, but that doesn’t make it the same as having cancer or HIV. Nor does it mean going to a doctor will give you the medicine you need.
I don't think this is correct. Meta and Google don't sell direct access to your data. They sell advertising targeting you, based on your personal data.
I'm pretty sure it's illegal to sell users email address to a data broker under GDPR.
Direct marketing is not explicitly banned. If you have a reason to believe that the data subject in question (a B2B person operating in the context of their work) is interested in buying your stuff then you could claim "legitimate interest" and process their contact details/market to them.
That's what people are relying on at the moment. Whether all the data protection authorities in all the member states will agree with the market's assessment of this remains to be seen...
Not really... they're just vertically integrated and have their own ad networks.
Consequently, they're not protecting data because they care about privacy -- they're protecting data because the wider they share the raw data, the less value it (their product) is.
It's economic self-interest, not ethics.
If they didn't have ad networks, they'd sell anything and everything in a heartbeat.
Be that as it may, their object-level behavior is still far less shady. And in fact this is an argument that it is good that they exist, because in the counterfactual world where they don't, their niche would be filled by these non-vertically-integrated data brokers and advertisers who ARE financially incentivized to leak and sell and share far more information.
I used to be all gung-ho about being anti-FAANG, those evil privacy violators, but having now talked to friends who have worked at places like FB and Google, their internal data security practices are far more stringent than I had imagined (my friends complain about how difficult these rules make their jobs!). And yeah, sure, they are scooping up as much information about you as they can, and I'm not a big fan of that fact. But I have been convinced that they are actually somewhat decent stewards of that information, and the alternative is far worse.
All that being said, this is a pretty loosely-held belief, and all the surveillance and so on is quite icky to me. I'm still trying to slowly de-google my life and all that, just with a bit less paranoia and urgency.
> their niche would be filled by these non-vertically-integrated data brokers and advertisers who ARE financially incentivized to leak and sell and share far more information
I look at it a slightly different way.
Absent the vertical integration, they wouldn't dominate the market.
Absent dominating the market, they wouldn't wield as many resources.
Absent as many resources, they wouldn't have been able to build a panopticon in the first place.
And even if there were excesses in an alternate world... there would be a market of competitors, which would encourage different behavior.
And possibly even (gasp!) regulation because of the worst excesses.
Instead, FAANG wield vast resources, culled from entrenched monopoly positions, and act just responsible enough (plus lobbying) to avoid regulation.
Outside of using a Meta product or a Google product it's all completely shady. I shouldn't be tracked going to the DMV website or purchasing something online or using a dating app or going into a store or...
Stock grants are typically vested quarterly, sometimes after an initial waiting period of 1-2 years. RSUs are just cash, I don’t see how they would not be considered being paid. They certainly show up on my W2.
I didn’t say they aren’t considered being paid; I said that they’re speculative instruments in a way that a paycheck isn’t.
In other words: 700k is 700k when realized, but there’s no particular guarantee that so-and-so many units of stock are worth that much; it depends on the market. Comparing TC as if 700k is guaranteed is misleading.
Having known many conspiracy theorists... yeah. Given the US troop presence in Korea, they would say "absolutely," and they'd then adjust their tinfoil hats.
You’re not paying attention if you think this is the first evidence of long covid. There’s been significant strides towards understanding long covid in terms of microclots and viral persistence.
Parent is saying it's the first evidence of TREATMENT.
Incidentally, my bet is that many other viruses and bacteria have similar post acute symptoms. I wonder if these can also be measured and treated, perhaps even with metformin. I wonder how much of metformin's magical anti aging capabilities are actually due to fighting off latent infections.
Metformin doesn't have any "magical" anti-aging properties. It is effective for treating certain metabolic conditions such as type-2 diabetes but it has never been proven to extend lifespan in otherwise healthy humans (or any other higher primate). There are some significant negative side effects.
I meant the magical part as tongue in cheek. I guess that doesn't come across well in text. My conjecture is that the anecdotal or limited evidence could be conflated with an improvement of latent infections, which would be an inconsistent effect.
They’re quite clearly saying that the effectiveness of the treatment is actually “the first” solid evidence of the disease.
Which is wrong, it’s not the first, but it is also pretty darn good evidence to add to the pile, so it’s not that wrong. It’s just the evidence that appears to have convinced GP, which is cool to see happen in real time!
