That is usually not the case, unfortunately, although it should be common practice. Journals have an incentive not to publish criticism of their own papers.
Some journals, for instance, send the criticism for approval of the authors being criticised. Imagine Reviewer Number Two with an axe to grind... (see e.g. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ade7837)

(Image from https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02711-5, of which I can't comment anything other than the above)

The MIT Libraries just announced the new MIT Open Data Prize for this year... a great opportunity for MIT researchers who "create, use, and advocate for open data."

#OpenAccess #OpenData

https://news.mit.edu/2022/celebrating-open-data-1118

There was something that bothered me about mastodon, coming from twitter, but that i was not really managing to articulate until it hit me this morning: mastodon is profoundly ephemeral.

Moving across servers is common; and when you do all of your post history remains on the old server and is probably gone. Most servers disable text search. Between the general lack of discoverability, the lack of lists, and the unaltered chronological timeline, toots from friends can just simply be lost in the flood, never to be seen.

As a result it also doesn't work as a "repository" of information, it could never be a place where dril does his thing, for instance: how are you going to find the old dril toot you want to drop in a conversation? Scroll through his history?

The only thing that matters is your transient feed. And it's not a bad thing per se! I think most of this is on purpose. This is also how a lot of people used twitter... but not how i did. And i have to get used to that.

Hey. I was banned from types.pl for having interviewed at the NSA 13 years ago, when I was 20 years old. I'm grateful for a new home on mathstodon.

While I strongly appreciate the good-natured support from many of you, I am very unhappy with anyone who is going after the types.pl moderators personally for this and not just respectfully discussing the situation, and I'm personally extremely sorry if my Tweet inspired any of those actions. If I see this at all I will be escalating to SIGPLAN CARES. (The moderators include very junior students, and the instance was not intended to be what it became.)

In a recent post I mentioned working with the department of defense as faculty. I mean that in two capacities: (1) receiving DARPA grants for verification work, and (2) organizing a workshop through the department of defense on the security risks of generative AI for code. I am always public about this with students, and I always ask students before funding them on DARPA grants, making it clear I will source funding elsewhere if the student strongly opposes defense funding.

This is the kind of thing I wanted to discuss after seeing Oppenheimer; I'm a bit bummed that instead I got banned for a post about something that happened 13 years ago, when I was not in the PL community at all, and basically lived under a rock with respect to everything except math, Dance Dance Revolution, and competitive running.

I also recognize that server admins can make and enforce their own rules. I still wish I could have just received notice to port my account so that I could have kept my followers.

Anyways, hi, please help me rebuild my friend network here.

OK, I just saw Oppenheimer. I need time to digest it, but I have to say, it hits differently as a researcher who is currently very happy to work with the department of defense because of what Russia is doing in Ukraine. It's easy to focus on the present without thinking beyond it. (I have no work that is secret, obviously, and no security clearance, or I would not be writing about this.)

If the enemies were the Nazis? Shit I would have done anything the US military asked of me in a heartbeat. (My grandparents are Jewish Holocaust survivors, and my grandfather in particular survived a Nazi death camp. He was orphaned, starving, and homeless after liberation.) And I'm not sure I would have regretted that decision, even though I would have hated myself for it.

(Simultaneously not regretting the decision and hating myself for it sounds like a strange combination, maybe, but it makes sense when you consider that I am a moral dialetheist; some things are both right and wrong. Erasing that obfuscates what really matters. Namely, when you make such a decision, how can you repair the harms you have caused? You are not free of blame even if causing harm was inevitable no matter which path you took, and even if the alternative was "worse.")

This is a good opportunity to think once again about the implications of academic ties with the military and to discuss the moral decisions involved. It infuriates me that people are hijacking this opportunity to talk about AI going rogue and destroying humanity instead.