The Crazy Years

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The New York-based co-working company reported liabilities of $10bn to $50bn in a Chapter 11 petition filed in New Jersey.

What’s a factor or five in liabilities, or US$ 40 billion when…

The company had been struggling with a huge debt pile and massive losses incurred during the pandemic that led to its shares falling around 96 per cent this year. Shares of WeWork, which cost more than $400 two years ago, could be had on Monday for less than $1.

This has to be the bottom—snap 'em up. Oh, wait:

Trading in shares for the company was stopped on Monday.

WeWork chief executive David Tolley said, “Now is the time for us to pull the future forward by aggressively addressing our legacy leases and dramatically improving our balance sheet.”

Sounds like the future has pulled you forward, back into the Reality Zone™. “It’s a whole new era in real estate valuation!”

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Yup, looks like it to me.

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Interesting that it was up well into the Covid era.

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It added that the day before the flight, the plane had been used during a filming event where high-power lights were active for up to five-and-a-half hours.

Thermal damage and window deformation were subsequently observed in the area around the overwing emergency exit, which the AAIB attributed to extended exposure to elevated temperatures.

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Here we go again!

Nature retracts controversial superconductivity paper by embattled physicist”.

This is the third high-profile retraction for Ranga Dias. Researchers worry the controversy is damaging the field’s reputation.

Nature has retracted a controversial paper claiming the discovery of a superconductor — a material that carries electrical currents with zero resistance — capable of operating at room temperature and relatively low pressure.

The text of the retraction notice states that it was requested by eight co-authors. “They have expressed the view as researchers who contributed to the work that the published paper does not accurately reflect the provenance of the investigated materials, the experimental measurements undertaken and the data-processing protocols applied,” it says, adding that these co-authors “have concluded that these issues undermine the integrity of the published paper”. (The Nature news team is independent from its journals team.)

It is the third high-profile retraction of a paper by the two lead authors, physicists Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester in New York and Ashkan Salamat at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Nature withdrew a separate paper last year2 and Physical Review Letters retracted one this August3. It spells more trouble in particular for Dias, whom some researchers allege plagiarized portions of his PhD thesis. Dias has objected to the first two retractions and not responded regarding the latest. Salamat approved the two this year.

“It is at this point hardly surprising that the team of Dias and Salamat has a third high-profile paper being retracted,” says Paul Canfield, a physicist at Iowa State University in Ames and at Ames National Laboratory. Many physicists had seen the Nature retraction as inevitable after the other two — and especially since The Wall Street Journal and Science reported in September that 8 of the 11 authors of the paper — including Salamat — had requested it in a letter to the journal.

For earlier adventures of “physicist” Ranga Dias of the “University” of Rochester, see “arXiv Preprint Server Cancels Papers, Bans Researcher over ‘Inflammatory Content’” (2022-03-16) and “Nature Retracts Room Temperature Superconductivity Paper” (2022-09-28).

Sure, the “humanities” departments in academia have become a sewer of moonbattery, but at least the “hard sciences” are still healthy. Right? Right?

“The highly qualified expert reviewers we selected raised a number of questions about the original submission, which were largely resolved in later revisions,“ says Karl Ziemelis, chief physical sciences editor at Nature. “What the peer-review process cannot detect is whether the paper as written accurately reflects the research as it was undertaken.”

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Most people who have been involved in “peer review” would lean towards the view that it is a seriously flawed process, trapped between rushed incompetence on one hand and academic axe-grinding on the other. It generally does not add value.

Particularly in these days in which sharing voluminous data is cheap & simple on-line (versus having to print it in a journal), full access to all the underlying research data would be much preferable to the theater of “peer review”. And probably more resistant to abuse.

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Warning! @johnwalker turn your variable MBAspeak BS shunt to max. before reading:

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Ramaswami goes gonzo in GOP “debate”.

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When I lived in New York, it was said that only the tourists ate outside at sidewalk tables in the City. but I suppose in recent years, the Refugees, a.k.a., Future kitchen staff candidates, also eat outside.

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Necroposting, just drove from the freezing far north to the 80+F deep south with a thousand mile side jaunt to see the oldest daughter in her house of grandchild chaos…

Not only is there a replication crisis in scientific papers supposedly wrong results are the most read so there’s little incentive to do better. Or perhaps the incentive is to be wrong to get all those eyes on papers that inevitably end in “more research is necessary” to keep the funding rolling in

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https://twitter.com/HenMazzig/status/1723819227398779064

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