133arc585

So in order to discourage crossing at non-official crossings, the only answer is passive barriers.

Completely visible barriers would do the trick.

You've somehow, again, managed to miss the point: the purpose was not just deterrence, the purpose was to hide them and cause unexpected harm. I'm not using booby trap to evoke any legality relating to the word; I'm using the word to evoke the horrendously inhumane use of hidden weapons meant to cause harm to those who accidentally stumble upon them.

You're defending a horrific practice in the guise of it being a necessary evil, when in all actuality, it's just one horrific out of many not-horrific implementations of something that you're overtly in favor of.

For $500k USD, you can get the low quality ArXiv article; for free, you can have this high quality teardown of said article.

Thank you for the amount of effort this took to put together. I've done only a quick skim but I'm going to give it a full read. Some stuff that definitely stood out to me is: the horseshoe theory nonsense; and the "rude words mean evil person" nonsense. Use of charged words or negative sentiment don't make you bad or wrong; arguably, negative sentiment is the only rational response to a lot of the topics at hand.

There is no legal distinction.

Using legality as a gauge for morality is not always the best thing to do, especially when these are law enforcement agencies operating entirely within the law.

no where are barbwire or “razorwire” considered a “booby trap.”

So you're being wilfully obtuse. Nowhere was anyone implying the use of barbed wire is what makes it a booby trap. Every single time it was mentioned, it was clear: it is a booby trap because it is a purposefully hidden device meant to cause harm to those who stumble upon it by accident.

It also does matter the distinction between razor wire and barbed wire. Barbed wire you can hold in your hand. You can grip it, move your hand along it, and indeed are unlikely to be very harmed by encountering it; it is designed as an unpleasant deterrant, not a dangerous one. Razorwire, on the other hand, is designed to cause harm: every part of it is dangerous, and an encounter with it would result in deep lacerations.

But again, it could be barbed wire and my point would stand: the concealment of it is what makes it a booby trap, and what makes it a problem.

"Booby trap" is a description of its concealedness. These are concealed, on purpose. That's the issue.

Moreover, they're not barbed wire, they're razor wire. There's a massive difference between barbed wire and razor wire.

Oh good god. I had given them the benefit of the doubt and assumed there was no way an actual professor would be any of the names on it. I figured such poor work could only be explained by being ignorant undergrads. I genuinely would question their previous work if they are comfortable publishing this garbage.

This is downright shameful. I'd be embarassed to be a student of these profs, or of the department.

Now I'm genuinely curious if they embezzled some of the NSF money, or are otherwise being paid for this? I extremely rarely take up the whole "paid shill" angle, because frankly it's almost never the case, but how in the everloving shit would these people produce and publish such trash and not feel embarassed?

but I wonder whether some form of dehumidification specifically, rather than just cooling, could also aid survival?

The issue is that in general, dehumidification is energy intensive, just as cooling is. In fact, one of the best ways to dehumidify air is to cool it down. Other non-mechanical solutions, like chemical solutions (e.g., dry hygroscopic material with large surface area) don't have an energy cost during their use, but they have an energy cost in their production and renewal. For example, to dry the hygroscopic material back out to recycle it and re-use it, you must supply a lot of heat energy.

I would be interested in an energy consumption comparison though, between: cooling air to keep it under the red area of the curve; dehumidifying air to keep it under the red area of the curve; and some combination of the two (as most air conditioning units do). It may be the case that dehumidifying is less energy intensive.

It's a grift on supposed support for "data-driven" analyses. It's just a specultive opinion piece. Its data handling and analysis is anything but academic.

The stated goal is killing the Ukrainian identity, a.k.a. genocide.

Is it? Can you point me to anywhere that that's the stated goal?

Never has the stated goal included wanting to genocide Ukrainians. To say that's the case is to pretend your imagination is reality.

As someone who did some natural language processing research in undergrad, they obviously have no idea what they're doing. To get meaningful data you need[^1] to remove words such as "the", "is", "it", etc. And that's not the only normalization you need to do.

What's offensive for something claiming to be an academic paper is their lack of explanation of their data processing techniques. Meaningful conclusions can only be made if your data is reasonable. And to make sure you have meaningful data, especially when the source is extremely noisy human-generated online comments, you need to do several things to process your data before you can feed it into an analysis. The goal of publishing academic research is not only to publish a result, but to publish methodology to enable independent reproducibility: if you have the paper, and the data, you should be able to follow the methods and come to the same conclusions; if you can't, the paper's bad. Yes, these details are boring, and a lot of people will put them in an appendix instead of in the main body of the paper, but if you're being honest you do provide these details.

They also don't even pretend to be objective; the paper reads more like a speculative opinion piece on sociology than it does a "data-driven" paper. Their assumptions drive their analysis and thus their conclusions. Moreover, when they attempt to make the distinction between TOXICITY and SEVERE_TOXICITY, they are not making these objective categories: the definitions they give are pure air and the distinction between the two categories is purely subjective.

It's honestly an embarassment; I wouldn't want my name on a paper of such poor quality. I wouldn't want my university to be named on a paper of such poor quality (nor would I think the university would want themselves to be named on such a paper).

Either these are genuinely ignorant undergrads who don't realize that they're producing wildly questionable and meaningless "research", or they're dishonest grifters taking federal taxpayer money[^2] and producing garbage.

Being published in ArXiv is not automatically a bad thing; but it makes me wonder if they were rejected from peer-reviewed journals. There's no argument that they didn't want to or were unable to spend money to submit to a "real" journal since they are receiving outside funding.

[^1]: Stopwords aren't totally useless at early stages in the pipeline or depending on what you're doing. For example, being grammatical terms they can help get a proper parse tree. But this type of analysis, sentiment analysis, is not using a full parse tree and the leaving in of stopwords only increases noise and decreases the ability of the model to produce meaningful results. [^2]: The researchers have received nearly a half a million $USD in federal taxpayer money through an NSF grant.

Yeah, in case of Ukrainians they know that if they surrender it still won’t be over, the next thing will be killing them

The constant refrain of "Russia wants to kill every Ukrainian". It's never made sense. There has never been any reason to believe that the goal is to kill Ukrainians.

Can you lay out exactly why you think that Russia will kill Ukrainians once the war is over? Can you lay out why you think the goal is to kill Ukrainians?

ArXiv doesn't filter anything afaik (or maybe they have policy against really egregious stuff). If you take a peek at their mathematics section, any nutjob who think he's solved the collatz conjecture can export their microsoft word ramblings to PDF and publish it on ArXiv.

ArXiv does have value because journals overcharge authors for publishing, overcharge other researches for access to journals, hold strict opinions on what they will or will not publish or censor, among other complains. ArXiv levels the playing field a bit by being basically fancy PDF file hosting. Not every valuable piece of thought comes from a "prestigous university", and restricting access to knowledge is overall a bad thing.

Indeed. Seems they got paid nearly a half a million $USD of federal taxpayer money.