I wonder if they are profitable, or if some sort of government support is involved. I don't think power for all those lights is particularly cheap in Singapore, and the competition in the surrounding countries has cheap labor and lots of free sun and rain.
Bringing necessities (water, food, energy) local is worth subsidizing. For those who doubt, just look at current events. Two morons with the right levers can upend countless critical processes.
This could be positive. So far things were gamed and manipulated to some extent, with some fake content, but it was never too obvious, and a bit of a cat and mouse game with filters and whatnot. Now, it's so easy to fake content that robust systems will have to evolve, or most social media sites will become worthless, and advertisers will catch up eventually when they are paying for bot-only sites.
The downside of course is that these robust systems are hard to imagine without complete loss of anonymity of the users.
Web of trust weakens anonymity, but doesn’t eliminate it.
- You know who your online invitees are, but not your invitees-of-invitees-of-…
- You can create an account, get it invited, then create an alt account and invite it. Now the alt account is still linked to you, but others don’t know whether it’s your friend or yourself. (Importantly, you can’t evade bans with alts; if your invited users keep getting banned, you’ll be prevented from inviting more if not banned yourself)
The article's discussion of how the open access mandate works is wrong. Federally funded research, when published (even in a closed-access journal) must be deposited in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ or a similar repository.
Edit: OA advocates have won pretty much everything we wanted, there's not much left to be outraged over.
But that's what the article says? The (correct) criticism of that system is that the publishers just replaced the subscription fees with article processing charges for OA publication, and still profit from public funding the same as before.
Post-mandate, I've been submitting to closed access journals and getting OA on the side for free due to the mandate. Pre-mandate, I only submitted to paid OA journals, and paid ~ $3k each time for it.
The article claims the solution is "every government grant should stipulate that the research it supports can’t be published in a for-profit journal. That’s it! If the public paid for it, it shouldn’t be paywalled." That's an equivocation fallacy. Whether a for-profit journal publishes the work at some point is orthogonal to whether it is available un-paywalled, which it now must be.
You say that publishers replaced subscription fees with APC charges, but I haven't seen this happening when I've submitted papers recently. Journals need new submissions or they lose mindshare. Authors are price-sensitive and will shop around. Starting a new journal isn't that hard (it can been done as a side project) so high margins will likely be undercut. I have no idea why the author chose to pay a $12k APC; they probably didn't need to. Finally, closed-access journals will have residual subscription income from their closed-access archives for many decades; if the author wants to kill that income stream off, their proposed solution will not do it. So while I agree with the article's condemnation of the publishers, who are certainly no friends of science, I think it's wildly off-base on pretty much every other point.
Author-pays APCs are even potentially a good thing as long as they aren't much higher than the cost of publication. Universal APCs would provide some pressure against publishing many low-value papers that aren't really worth the time it takes to read them. The paper spam is kind of getting out of control.
I don't think authors are very price sensitive. If they can get their paper into a good journal they will pay the charges, as long as they are not absurdly high. After all, it's not their personal money, often the employer also pays, as they also need high impact papers to generate funding. Nobody who can get their paper into Nature will publish with PLOS Biology instead because it's cheaper. I'm pretty sure if I went to my institute director and said I need 10k APC to publish this in Nature but ran out of funding they would be annoyed, but still find the money.
In the end the details do not really matter, it is still absurd that a high percentage of the money paid in whatever way is just profit for company investors, for a system in which 80% of the skilled work is done for fee by the scientists.
I'm not sure if APCs will reduce the paper flood. Especially if the APCs are near the real cost of publishing, having a published paper will always be worth more to the authors. This is how we get all the junk journals that publish anything as long as you pay after all.
You grab a "rough amount" and by using weight all you need to do is diff 2,3,4? Ideally 5 and under.
it's very easy to count <=5 visually, but if your package requires 12 nuts, repeatedly counting up to 12 is so stressful the poster built an entire counting machine.
Yes, the question is how exactly you grab a "rough amount"? If you need 4 parts in each bag, is it really much easier to construct a system that can dispense 4-6 parts, than one that can dispense exactly 4?
Sorry i completely missed this. If you don't see it, it's okay - I probalby miss any replys going forward.
Being upfront, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Just some arm chair engineer.
The poster needed 6 parts which is JUST into annoying. My personal thoughts are what they need isn't dispensing but alignment. Thinking deeper I can agree that weight might not the most efficient here.
They're building the aligning and dispensing tool but I argue that's over engineering the problem. If it's aligned it's VERY easy to count 6 via a mark along the track and just push it to the end against your finger and based on the mark you know you have exactly 6.
To me the hardest part to make "just work" is the dispensing, but if you remove that it becomes a much easier problem. There's enough sales volume, you can make a vertical fixture that is a stack of fixed aligning tracks. Your fingers become the dispenser. Sweep and move to the next track.
They just announced a while ago that they performed their 100 millionth battery swap, and just now "Nio's 3,750 battery swap stations delivered 2,073,500 battery swap services between February 10-23" (Chinese new year). Seems to work fine.
So this can only do the full 1000 W power? Kind of a one trick pony, no way to melt butter or a dozen other things that need lower power. For a restaurant that only needs to heat a few different items at high speed it's probably fine.
I think the advantage is that hot water loses heat over time, depending on how good the insulation is. However with phase change materials, the heat is trappped in the phase change and is stable until you release it.
