With my modest experience as an expert witness in courts, I am against this. It is very difficult to make judges understand, for example, how science works - one can only be so sure, and we go ahead with that, for example, in medicine, as well as cryptography. Judges have a hard time appreciating this nuance.
I agree that something stricter should be done, but it should not be about bringing the legal system into play. I see a fundamental issue with bringing science to trial courts, where rhetoric, appeals to emotions, and other different priorities are paramount, not technicalities about overenthusiastic interpretations, data fudging, p-hacking, empirical anomalies and wilful data manipulation.
Science works by different norms of truth (I would call this statistical) than the judicial system does (beyond reasonable doubt/preponderance of evidence). I believe an international peer scientific committee ostracising a person from publication for X number of years, or forever, might be a better measure than a criminal trial and punishment in open court.
I think if it were to make sense, it would have to be similar standards to perjury: wilfully making a materially false statement about your data or process in a published paper. I.e. only targeting outright fraud in statements of fact about what you did and observed. The conclusions from that data would not make sense to include in that umbrella: firstly because as you mention they are difficult to judge and are in fact for pretty much any paper up for debate, and secondly because that's the part that is expected to be assesed by the process of peer review and pulishing anyway.
I'd say that at the moment there's a bit of an issue with the way the community handles this kind of thing, in a way which is akin in structure (I'm not comparing severity/morality) to sexual assault in many communities (science also among them): it's sadly common that someone is widely known or suspected within their field to engage in scientific fraud, but it's only known within that because that person has enough power to make it dangerous to overtly make an accusation, as well as a general fear that it will discredit the field in general. And someone with a bad reputation there still often gets to engage with the community. It seems that only in the really high-profile cases are there actual consequences, and even then they often only come out long after the offender has retired.
(I'm not entirely convinced criminalising it will actually reduce the problem, though. The idea that harsher punishments = less misbehaviour is a bit of a fallacy in part because people who do this don't expect to be caught)
Courts and judges may not understand how science works, but they understand how false statements work. They have centuries of experience with that. Libel, slander, lying under oath, false testimony, perjury... they've seen it all, over and over and over and over.
Willful data manipulation? They may see it more often with financial data, but they've seen it, rather often. And they aren't finance experts either, but they still deal with it competently.
The alternative is that science exists outside the legal system. A scientist can engage in misconduct in a way that gets believed for a while and results in multiple deaths, with no legal consequences? That can't be right.
The legal system is incompatible with this very concept. The legal system works on precedent. Once something is established by the court, it is treated as fact, forever, with an EXTREMELY high bar to get changed. US courts still impose polygraph testing (at significant cost to those forced to take them) on people on probation even though polygraphs are no longer allowed to convict and just plain don't work.
It's not about crimes against science any more than financial fraud is about crimes against money. Science fraud is about falsification, same as financial crime.
There seems to be an article on confabulations - seems to be a concept from neuroscience. From the abstract of the article:
"Confabulations are inaccurate or false narratives purporting to convey information about world or self. It
is the received view that they are uttered by subjects intent on ‘covering up’ for a putative memory deficit."
It seems that there is a clear memory deficit about the incident, so the subject "makes stuff up", knowingly or unknowingly.
--
cited from:
German E. Berrios, "Confabulations: A Conceptual History",
Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, Volume 7, 1998 - Issue 3
Just a quick note: Rahul Ilango is a phenomenal theoretical CS researcher who has made great progress towards understanding the "Minimum Circuit Size Problem" [MCSP], long believed to be, but not yet proven, NP hard. Needless to add, "the username checks out".
Assuming that you trust that the regulatory agency does not have leakers back to the respective companies. When there's a revolving door between regulatory agencies and companies, it gets tricky.
It's quite understandable, imho. Immigration is being allowed precisely for cheap labor, especially when citizens are not prepared to go through the extra hardship - for example, I remember reading that the fatalities when the bridge fell in Baltimore around 1 am, were all immigrants, all on duty at that hour.
For specialized labor, there is always a question of possible espionage and back-channel tech transfer. This is not so much perhaps for India as opposed to other technological rivals, but it may be one of the considerations in the immigration policy being counterintuitive.
As an example of how strict immigration policy is, the crew were made to stay on the boat throughout, including while parts of the bridge were blown up.
pfft people who want to find a way around what anyone "allows" will do so. To desperate people rules dont matter.
There are more than 50 countries right now standing with begging bowls outside the IMF cause their economies have no hope of growing without help. As long as that list has no hope of shrinking, people who live there and recognize that reality, are going to find ways to get out by hook or crook.
Immigration is a symptom of growing global inequality. Without inequality reducing no rules or walls are going to stop the incoming waves.
The title sounded condescending. But the overall theme seems to be that we must not lose trust in others since it may be better for us professionally. I think it is also better for us psychologically.
Just curious: Sussman and Wisdom have written a book called "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics" following the classic SICP Scheme book. Has anyone attempted a similar approach for electromagnetics?
Maxwell's equations are a classical field theory (no quantization). That means Maxwell's equations are one of the theories of the body called classical mechanics. So if you wanted to, you could write down the Lagrangian (density) or Hamiltonian for various experimental configurations (eg charged particle in a field) and derive Maxwell's equations (there are a couple of papers like this). Nothing stopping you from using SICM's formalism either. Would it be a useful exercise? No clue.
I don't think you need to understand a concept deeply to use it. The "do..." syntax in Haskell is something that comes naturally to many programmers. It is introduced only at the end of a Haskell course since it uses monads, but many iterative-style programmers switch to that syntax exclusively afterwards. And it actually takes a while to construct the desugared monad syntax.
For a common example of this phenomenon- I took a look into the innards of printf to see how printf("%f",...) and printf("%g",...) works. I am still clueless how it actually works. Does not prevent even beginners from using these.
==
Also for what it is worth, I think the most useful analogy of monads is "monads are pipes with types", even though it does not give a full understanding of bind.
I think this is from the traditional "Trivium" - grammar, logic, rhetoric - which was considered to be a well-rounded education (presumably for scions of wealthy families).
These constituted the "seven arts". But it was perfectly fine just to be educated in the trivia, if math wasn't your cup of tea.
See the "Yes Minister" clip where Sir Humphrey vehemently denies being so low-standard as to be educated in the sciences - he was good enough to study the classics.
By the way, Molitor 5901 is the phone number used by the Jackal to know if he could move, in "The Day of the Jackal", if I remember right.