KV the Apostate: Faith-Based Computing Versus the Unnatural Science - Communications of the ACM

Some preprint servers report being flooded with submissions. Credit: Michael Szebor/NatureIn a bid to tackle the deluge of manuscripts it now receives, the preprint server arXiv has announced a cap of two papers per month for each submitting researcher, which began on 1 October. The move follows a steep rise in submissions driven mainly by the slop generated by artificial-intelligence tools, says Steinn Sigurðsson, an astrophysicist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park and scientific director of arXiv. In September, 40,000 preprints were uploaded to arXiv, up from about 30,000 between March and July. Closing the floodgates The cap is the latest measure introduced by arXiv to prevent its nearly 300 voluntary moderators from being completely overwhelmed by submissions, says Sigurðsson. They are now collectively checking about 1,000 manuscripts per day. This step is “holding up too many legitimate papers,” Sigurðsson says, noting that nearly 4,000 submissions are currently waiting to be posted on the site. Some see the limit as entirely reasonable.

Evidence for intelligent design in nature may be clear to you, while other matters relevant to faith remain far more perplexing. Our physicist colleague Brian Miller talked with Jana Harmon on the eX-skeptic podcast, in a very personal conversation, and offered a helpful analogy. He agreed that, for him, there are “tensions” and “unanswered questions.” But here’s the difference. When you have, let’s say, a magnifying glass and you use that magnifying glass to see the small print on your medicine bottle, what happens is that [with the] magnifying glass, what’s in the center is very clear.

The spacecraft delivered materials and equipment for new research studies to the station.

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.