How to read those papers: very carefully. Start with Discussion section (last part of the paper). Read it to find out what new knowledge is being reported. Note the papers that have been cited to buttress the conclusions and plan to at least read the abstract of those papers. Now go back and read the paper from the beginning (starting with the title and author order/affiliations). For natural science papers (in general), the first author is the trainee who did the work. The last author is the professor/principle investigator (i.e. the person who you want to connect with). The middle authors are listed from left to right in order of the magnitude of their contributions to the work. Often there is a note at the end of the paper that lists who did what work by their initials. Note this also. As you read the paper pay particular attention to each figure and its associated figure legend. Those figures are the heart of the paper. It is particularly important to look at each figure critically. Does it actually support what the legend is purporting? Read the paper in its entirety twice. At the end of the last read, immediately write down for yourself what scientific questions have been ‘opened up’ by the publication of the paper. In other words, what should the next experiment be? You’ll need this for the next steps.

I learned this from my parents (who were both faculty at Caltech). It has continued to be good advice through the years. Step one is to decide who to connect with. Make sure your horizons are broad enough. Look beyond your major at your university. Look beyond your school. Connections, particularly as mentors, can be global. Realize that a more junior faculty person may have more time for you, but eventually has to actively put their own interests first–they are trying to get tenure. A more senior faculty member, might have less time, but have a more altruistic agenda. Above all, look for faculty members who are doing research/scholarship in areas that you could visualize yourself being passionate about.

Prune your list. It should be no larger than 10 individuals. You can prune your list based on various constraints: information that you’ve gleaned from other students/peers, googling and similar due diligence, interest in their research. Make certain that they are still actively publishing in the field you think you are interested in (people change directions). Then, make an appointment with google scholar or pub med and download the most recent two papers for each person on your list. Read those papers very carefully and make notes.

Stay tuned for the next blogpost.

Hat tip Tyler Cowen, the link is here. A couple of thoughts on this:

• I’m not sure NSF is aware of the crypto-side of this new ecosystem
• I’m pretty sure that university sponsored program offices aren’t either

So it may be quite challenging for established academic scientists to play in these sandboxes because of reporting/compliance requirements of the legacy funding systems. How do you make a list of your current and pending funding in bitcoin?

From independent AI researcher, John Wentworth, at the blog Less Wrong, here.

And John’s version of his bio with some gentle editing for salty language:

I’m an independent researcher working on AI alignment and the theory of agency. I’m 29 years old, will make about $90k this year, and set my own research agenda. I deal with basically zero academic bull&%$& – my grant applications each take about one day’s attention to write (and decisions typically come back in ~1 month), and I publish the bulk of my work right here on LessWrong/AF. Best of all, I work on some really cool technical problems which I expect are central to the future of humanity.

Many loyal readers know that I’m interested in the problem of supplying enough fixed nitrogen for our staple crops (rice, corn, wheat), none of which can fix nitrogen on their own. We are utterly dependent upon these food systems. Currently our planet is 2 billion humans over its natural carrying capacity and it is fertilizer (fixed nitrogen) that keeps us alive. The Haber Bosh Process, invented at the beginning of the 20th century, was the genius killer app of science and industrial design that has, to date, secured our food systems.

Unfortunately, there are some downsides. For one thing, agricultural runoff of fixed nitrogen pollutes our waterways and leads to toxic eutrophication. For another, the industrial process required to break the strong nitrogen-nitrogen triple bond of the abundant N2 in our atmosphere requires a lot of carbon-polluting energy and methane. Finally, one side effect of Haber Bosh was the efficient production of high explosives which the inventors deployed on the battlefields of World War One.

So it’s gratifying to see some real progress being made to clean up Haber Bosh. In this case, the big idea is to clean up the industrial chemistry. There are a lot of other potential approaches that folks are looking at–one of my favorites is the idea that our staple crops might secure a ‘deal’ with the microbes in the soil that can fix nitrogen: fertilizer in return for nourishment in the form of biochemical products that only a plant can make. We have an existence proof of this approach: legumes do this. And we know that, in the case of corn, there exists at least one distant non-domesticated ancestor that seems to have had this sort of win-win proposition in place.

Is here. Carlo is very smart and tends to think more clearly about COVID than a lot of folks. As Tyler Cowen would say, highly recommended.

• Francis Collins strikes the tent
• Harvard professor found guilty
• Pan-COVID vaccine?
• James Webb Telescope launch set

My Dad sampled quite a few universities and colleges before settling on Amherst College–among them the University of Wisconsin and St. Johns College in Annapolis. By the time he had finished his training he had added Harvard and McGill to the list. And then after that he was at UCLA, Michigan and Caltech. So quite a smorgasbord.

I’ve also been around the block including some of the same schools. For my Dad, the question of what higher education should offer was a constant question with evolving answers. As I look out at the waterfront of places these days, it seems to me that the question still is out there–as central as ever to our collective work–and still evolving, albeit not in the directions that I might have hoped several decades ago when the Internet was new and full of promise.

This week, we hear of a new place in Austin that is attempting to reframe both the question and the answer. Several folks I know are associated with the effort. I wish them good luck. We used to answer the sub-question of “what is liberal arts” with the pithy: it’s learning how to learn. But of course, learning is one of the shared experiences for many human beings from the earliest age. We mostly all know how to learn.

So I can’t even answer the sub-question on liberal arts–although (like the duck), I know it when I see it. But I do think that the big question is still important. Increasingly the job of the college president is to manage crises. So there’s less time for the big question and maybe it should be more of a focus on high.

Map to the atoms of knowledge. Link here. The idea is to take the corpus of all published papers and extract n-grams (lots of them) with pointers to the DOI or its equivalent. Interesting new approach I think.

First, I’m glad to see serious consideration for the financialization of the global response to climate disruption. I still think Kim Stanley Robinson’s idea of a Central Banks-backed Stable Coin that can be mined (as in bitcoin) by carbon sequestration is the best approach. Second, I think these conferences are useful in that they create frameworks that can offer a scaffold for a multitude of separate actions–that in spite of the “no teeth” complaints. I feel the same way about the Hague Court and the UN. Finally, it seems to me that some actors (national and others) will eventually try to geoengineer and it would be useful to think about what that will mean in terms of the scaffolding.

My economist colleagues continue to argue in terms of GDP loss. In that GDP doesn’t value ecosystem services, I think that’s a big problem.