#OTD 24 January 2025. Rerunning this one while the power is still on.

It's slim pickings today, so I have no good stories except about my own error.

Today I picked a marriage from Württemberg and this evening went online to verify the village. The couple wasn't in the marriage book with a January wedding. Looking forward a couple of pages, they showed up. My database had JAN, but it was wrong. The family register looks like JAN, but the marriage book definitely says JUNI.

And that is why it's so important to check the primary sources whenever possible and not rely only on secondary sources.
#genealogy #researchFail #researchTip

Ah, the scientific community's latest marvel: turning sleep-inducing papers into sleep-inducing videos 🎥📄. Because if you can't read them, why not watch them fail to hold your interest in a new medium? Bravo, academia, for making sure we don't miss a wink of boredom 😴👏!
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05096 #sleepyvideos #academicboredom #researchfail #multimediainnovation #sciencehumor #HackerNews #ngated
Paper2Video: Automatic Video Generation from Scientific Papers

Academic presentation videos have become an essential medium for research communication, yet producing them remains highly labor-intensive, often requiring hours of slide design, recording, and editing for a short 2 to 10 minutes video. Unlike natural video, presentation video generation involves distinctive challenges: inputs from research papers, dense multi-modal information (text, figures, tables), and the need to coordinate multiple aligned channels such as slides, subtitles, speech, and human talker. To address these challenges, we introduce PaperTalker, the first benchmark of 101 research papers paired with author-created presentation videos, slides, and speaker metadata. We further design four tailored evaluation metrics--Meta Similarity, PresentArena, PresentQuiz, and IP Memory--to measure how videos convey the paper's information to the audience. Building on this foundation, we propose PaperTalker, the first multi-agent framework for academic presentation video generation. It integrates slide generation with effective layout refinement by a novel effective tree search visual choice, cursor grounding, subtitling, speech synthesis, and talking-head rendering, while parallelizing slide-wise generation for efficiency. Experiments on Paper2Video demonstrate that the presentation videos produced by our approach are more faithful and informative than existing baselines, establishing a practical step toward automated and ready-to-use academic video generation. Our dataset, agent, and code are available at https://github.com/showlab/Paper2Video.

arXiv.org
🐸🔬 Oh, the Herculean task of explaining the obvious: a newt so toxic even Mother Nature cringes. 🤦‍♂️ Doug Muir's "occasional" paper is like watching paint dry, but with more newts and zero explanations. Maybe next time, Doug, save us from the cliffhanger and just Wikipedia it. 🧠💡
https://crookedtimber.org/2025/06/05/occasional-paper-the-impossible-predicament-of-the-death-newts/ #toxicnewts #DougMuir #sciencehumor #natureexplained #researchfail #HackerNews #ngated
Occasional paper: The impossible predicament of the death newts — Crooked Timber

🚫 Oh, the sheer cosmic irony of a deep dive into LLM behavior that's as accessible as a locked diary on a deserted island. 🤔 The only thing emerging here is a big, fat "403 Forbidden." 🚪🔒 Nice work, Sherlock, hope you didn't hurt yourself with all that "research"! 🕵️‍♂️✨
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3T8eKyaPvDDm2wzor/research-question #cosmicirony #LLMbehavior #403forbidden #techhumor #researchfail #HackerNews #ngated
Tied Crosscoders: Explaining Chat Behavior from Base Model — LessWrong

Abstract We are interested in model-diffing: finding what is new in the chat model when compared to the base model. One way of doing this is training…

Going through the sinking feeling when your brilliant idea turns out to be not-so-brilliant after all. It stings 100%. Back to the drawing board. 💭💔 #ResearchFail #researcherlife #creativestruggles

OK, so #ResearchGate actually did something useful. It told me a journal article I cited was retracted. However, I'm coauthor on a lot of different types of manuscripts in various sub-fields, because I do the data analysis.

But they don't tell me which of my own manuscripts cited this retracted article. And there are only 707 articles that cite the retracted one.

#ResearchFail

Datenpolitik in Ö: Eine Bundesbehörde stellt Daten zur Verfügung. Bearbeitungszeit nach Anfrage? Ein Werktag. Ah, sie sind eine Uni und kein privates Unternehmen. Braucht Rechtsprüfung. Kann Wochen oder Monate dauern. Wie lange genau, kann man nicht sagen. #researchfail