Tim Gould

Much more the latter than the former. It's "unmanly" to not drive.

Outside Sydney our PT demographic/bias is a bit weird compared to the US - mostly young, immigrant (from places where PT is default) and female. Adult men (regardless of income bracket) tend to drive.

I don't know if we collect data on gender/age but my observation in Brisbane's nearly-free transit experiment has been interesting. First I noticed more working women on the buses. And even more recently more working men.

Make it more desirable and even car lovers (working men) will switch.

I bet us still funds universities better than we do.

ARC EOI no!

Would be nice if Australia upped its grant assessment to world standard. But in its absence, I can accept below-par assessment with less effort: I didn't have to spend as much time writing and no assessor's time was wasted prior to the panel vetoing anyway.

Maybe ongoing maintenance costs come out of someone else's budget. Which moves the rube to a higher pay level.

Colour me better: fixing figures for colour blindness Images can be made more accessible by choosing hues, shapes and textures carefully.

Don't use red and green data lines/surfaces in the same panel please #chemsky. It can be difficult for some colorblind readers to differentiate them. I've accepted (in principle) 2 papers today, and both sets of authors were asked to remove red/green colour contrasts www.nature.com/articles/d41...

In case you missed it👇

Reducing Numerical Precision Requirements in Quantum Chemistry Calculations The abundant demand for deep learning compute resources has created a renaissance in low-precision hardware. Going forward, it will be essential for simulation software to run on this new generation o...

#compchem Good read: Reducing Numerical Precision Requirements in Quantum Chemistry Calculations #compchemsky pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Worst thing is it's totally bipartisan to the extent that I don't know which party introduced which stupid metric. Only that the number grows.

Kudos to the current Minister for canning some of the dumbest research metrics. Been a long while since that happened. Needs extending to teaching.

Yeah, fully agree. I don't really care that someone uses a computer to produce a valid outcome - they've demonstrated competence. But (unless it's the point of the assignment) they shouldn't get the same marks as someone who did it on their own since I'd prefer to hire the latter over the former.

Could be worse, you could introduce funding schemes that punish unis unis for doing poorly on nonsense metrics.

Oh wait...

Excellent point. I should have remembered the groupthink cycles that dominate in educational "thinking". I'm a fan of one lesson per student, followed by throwing the (as large as possible) book; as I think you are too. But that's not 'pure' enough...

I've got evidence on that. When I took over 1st year maths I basically made the case that letting students pass without demonstrating understanding (as had been the case) just set them up to fail in future courses, so got a de facto exemption from getting told off.

More failures, lower success.

Yeah. The admissions/graduations is essentially the Government/electorate's doing, so outside the sector's hands (see, e.g., ANU which rejected it).

What I'm concerned about is why there's such a widespread delusion within the sector that it's somehow not like that. Especially re. integrity.

But there's a prevailing delusion that you can. Which is why even smart people twist themselves into knots to support bad ideas or deny the obvious truth.

It's like claiming that climbing Kosciusko is like climbing Everest because reasons.

LOL. No. I can probably stretch your analogy to fit but only in >260 characters.

What I mean is that letting in more people with lower preparation will inevitably lead to lower outcomes and 'dumbing down' because you can't teach to all levels.

@ccguerilla.bsky.social After seeing some _hard_ old exam questions from HS it got me thinking that classroom education actually _is_ a (nearly) zero sum game. I think people denying that reality explains a lot of the nutty thinking within tertiary education. Your thoughts?

Data Quality in the Fitting of Approximate Models: A Computational Chemistry Perspective Empirical parametrization underpins many scientific methodologies including certain quantum-chemistry protocols [e.g., density functional theory (DFT), machine-learning (ML) models]. In some cases, th...

#compchem Good read: Data Quality in the Fitting of Approximate Models: A Computational Chemistry Perspective #compchemsky pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

Can't get into Nature or Science if you do that.

Machine Learning Scientist (Material Simulation) Company Description: Materials contribute to 50% of the world’s CO2 emissions, those critical to the net-zero transition being the biggest culprits. Our AI platform leverages quantum calculations to m...

Interested in using ML to accelerate sustainable materials discovery? We’re currently recruiting at MatNex - especially interested if you’ve worked on MLIPs! jobs.smartrecruiters.com/MaterialsNex... #chemsky #compchem #ml

International students unlikely to be capped from start of next year as Labor fails to win Coalition support The Coalition has announced it will oppose the government's bill to limit the number of international students able to enrol from next year, just weeks out from when the caps were meant to come into f...

Not sure how the coalition's political calculus works here. But I like it.

www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11...

Saying the blue-tick idiots are shitposting is an insult to shitposts. They're basically the incels who weren't funny enough for 4chan.

Just migrated to Bluesky and I have to say it's a breath of fresh air seeing a classic linux v windows argument instead of a bunch of incels virtually polishing Trump/Elon's knob.

Our key element of novelty is to approach the problem from non-thermal ensembles. Most of the prior work (Harbola excepted, but only for x) tried to extract excitations from thermal models.

Cheers :-)

I don't remember reading that one but Stefano checked out a fair bit of prior literature to conclude that our approach is fundamentally new. What I'm less confident about is whether or not it's useful - but the idea is out there now and someone (maybe us) can refine.

Local Density Approximation for Excited States The ground states of homogeneous electron gases have been used to predict material properties for nearly a century. A new formulation extends this to excited states.

It has only taken a year and a bit to get this one out - LDA for excited states. It's a long and comprehensive treatment that we hope will be useful.

[experimenting with copying posts between twitter and BSky]

journals.aps.org/prx/abstract...

Minister agrees department acted unethically over $30m purchase of Western Sydney airport land Paul Fletcher has been accused of ‘ministerial incompetence’ by Labor after federal government paid $26.7m too much for land

I'm no fan of my tax dollars being used for PsiQuantum but also he's far from the best person to trust...

www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...