Yes, there are often strong reasons to have peers as gatekeepers. Scientific writing is extremely information-dense. Consider a niche technical task that you work on -- now consider summarizing a day's worth of work in one or two sentences, designed to be read by someone else with similar expertise. In most scientific fields, the niches are pretty small, The context necessary to parse that dense scientific writing into a meaningful picture of the research methods is often years/decades of work in the field. Only peers are going to have that context.
There are also strong reasons why the peers-as-gatekeepers model is detrimental to the pursuit of knowledge, such as researchers forming semi-closed communities that bestow local political power on senior people in the field, creating social barriers to entry or critique. This is especially pernicious given the financial incentives (competition for a limited pool of grant money; award of grant money based on publication output) that researchers are exposed to.
I think if you leave authors alone they will be more likely to write in the first category rather than the second. After all, papers are mainly written to communicate your findings to your direct peers. So information dense isn't bad because the target audience understands.
Of course that makes it harder for people outside to penetrate but this also depends on the culture of the specific domain and there's usually people writing summaries and surveys. Great task for grad students tbh (you read a ton of papers, summarize, and by that point you should have a good understanding of what needs to be worked on in the field and not just dragged through by your advisor)
Agreed: information-dense isn't bad at all. It's a reason for peer review, though: people other than peers in the field have a much harder time reviewing an article for legitimacy, because they lack the context.
It's a fair point. In the ideal setting, peer review can really be a very informative and important gate. And who better to be the gatekeeper than someone who understands the context?
However, there are still big issues with how these peers perform reviews today [1].
For example, if there's a scientifically arbitrary cutoff (e.g., the 25% acceptance rate at top conferences), reviewers will be mildly incentivized to reject (what they consider to be) "borderline-accept" submissions. If the scores are still "too high", the associate editors will overrule the decision of the reviewers, sometimes for completely arbitrary reasons [2].
There's also a whole number of things reviewers should look out for, but for which they neither have the time, space, tools, nor incentives to do. For example, reviewers are meant to check if the claims fit what is cited, but I can't know how many actually take the time to look at the cited content. There's also checking for plagiarism, GenAI and hallucinated content, does the evidence support the claims, how were charts generated, "novelty", etc. There are also things that reviewers shouldn't check, but that pop up occasionally [3].
However, you would be right to point out that none of this has to do with peers doing the gatekeeping, but with how the process is structured. But I'd argue that this structure is so common that it's basically synonymous with peer review. If it results in bad experiences often enough, we really need to push for the introduction of more tools and honesty into the process [4].
[1] This is based on my experience as a submitter and a reviewer. From what I see/hear online and in my community, it's not an uncommon experience, but it could be a skewed sample.
[3] Example things reviewers shouldn't check for or use as arguments: did you cite my work; did you cite a paper from the conference; can I read the diagram without glasses if I print out the PDF; do you have room to appeal if I say I can't access publicly available supplementary material; etc.
[4] Admittedly, I also don't know what would be the solution. Still, some mechanisms come to mind: open but guaranteed double-blind anonymous review; removal of arbitrary cutoffs for digital publications; (responsible, gradual) introduction of tools like LLMs and replication checks before it gets to the review stage; actually monitoring reviewers and acting on bad behavior.
Yes, this is true. Realistically, a "charging station" for a ship this size would have a large pierside structure to transform/regulate, and a very large cable array that would probably be moved to the ship via a crane. The connectors would almost certainly require manual fitup and the operation would require several personnel.
(Similarly, refueling a ship is substantially more complicated than refueling an automobile.)
Maritime engineers and workers can get this job done.
A long time ago (maybe in the mid-90s) I knew an elderly radio amateur who could not just "copy" CW by ear, but also RTTY. He could also pretty much tell what a teleprinter was printing just by listening to the noises it made, like he'd be facing away from it on the other side of the room reading out entire words from what was coming through.
Apparently in the 50s when he did his National Service he'd been in the Signals but "not in the regiment that's on his papers", make of that what you will.
I have noticed that with PSK modes and particularly PSK31 you can hear "CQ CQ CQ" as a distinctive pattern much in the same way as it is with CW.
IBM spent a fortune developing ATM keypads that - when correctly mounted - had keys that made the exact same noise no matter how you pressed them or how worn they were.
So I don't doubt that someone suitably clever could extract audio from a room and work out what was being typed.
One really-cool way to solve that problem is to embed a 7-segment LED under each keycap. You walk up to the keypad and the 0-9 digits appear in random order. No one can shoulder-surf, look for wear or IR emission from the buttons, or train on the click sounds.
Dell had those on every lab door in the building back in the early 90s. You felt like 007 every time you punched in your access code. I've never seen them anywhere since.
And now days I can't put in my card's pin without 10 overhead cameras aimed at the register area. All the cameras of which are network-connected, video stored persistently, and high res/fidelity enough to here the little beeps as I press the keys, and to know that I've hit the enter because the screen indicates it immediately. But then Dell cared about its own security, and the grocery store doesn't give a single shit about whether my life is ruined by identity theft.
That's why I always cover the pin pad with my other hand (probably also holding my wallet) when putting in a pin. However, I think the more likely scenario to defend against is shoulder surfers - the pin by itself is useless until combined with the card, so physical presence is needed to lift the card from me.
The Austin airport has, or used to have, such keypads in places. (Doors from the baggage carousel area through to the airside ground staff areas, for example.)
Maybe. They were necessarily very cagey about it back then, but I might have some documentation kicking about in storage. I tended to keep copies of every service manual I could get my hands on back then.
It would take an especially perverse mind to keylog using audio on a KVM, though. The KVM basically has access to everything, any secondary spying using a microphone or a camera would provide very little added value.
They mean the K in KVM could trivially have a keylogger. For the computers attached to that KVM. Audio is for logging for computers not attached to the device in question. Which could be up to and including a whole server room save a couple machines.
This article appears to have some political bent to it based on comments about immigration.
I was made curious about the possibility of an "intentional backdoor" in ELD (Electronic Logging Devices) that allowed truckers to misreport their hours.
Worked over a decade in transport logistics, various forms, tech in the latter half.
ELD manipulation is as old as the first ones were introduced on the market.
Check the previous FW [0] article regarding undercover DOT officers, uncovering real-time manipulation of ELDs, and the blatant freight theft, mostly with corporate identity theft on top of that.
Paper logs - as known back then - were literally written out daily. To rewrite, you would just tear it out, and redo 7-10 days worth, right?
Well electronic manipulation is even easier, especially when outsourced to Eastern European countries with teams who work 24/7 in providing that service.
USDOT announces which ELDs aren’t allowed to be used - regularly. Usually because of backdoors, but in other times, the sucky software.
It is odd that they mention several plausible reasons for the problems they see but really seem to single out immigration as the key problem. That seems backwards to me. If safety regulations are no longer being enforced as they claim, where the drivers were born is irrelevant.
Sure but that still gets back to training drivers and enforcing regulations as the core issue. We don’t allow people who can’t pass proper medical training to be doctors no matter how many undocumented people may apply.
There are also strong reasons why the peers-as-gatekeepers model is detrimental to the pursuit of knowledge, such as researchers forming semi-closed communities that bestow local political power on senior people in the field, creating social barriers to entry or critique. This is especially pernicious given the financial incentives (competition for a limited pool of grant money; award of grant money based on publication output) that researchers are exposed to.