2020 (English)

2020-10-14

Articles showing that useless knowledge can be useful

• Let’s waste more money on science (2016/12/11)

  • A story that the article mentioned impressed me. A biologist's curiosity made him investigate microbes in Yellowstone National Park. Through many scientists' efforts, the study led to the developement of PCR tests, which are now used to test people for Covid-19.

• From Blackboard to Bedside: High-dimensional Geometry is Transforming the MRI Industry (PDF) (2018/01)

  • Mathematical research driven by pure curiosity improved MRI. Through this story the author explains how basic research is worth investment for taxpayers.

An update on a repository

Modifications for a repository of a cookiecutter template were pushed.

2020-09-07

I tried Jupyter Notebook Tools for Sphinx . The result is here . This is great. Although at present it seems that the extension cannnot display outputs of sympy with mathjax, I hope it will be able to do in the future.

2020-03-20

Some economic policies are suggested in the world to fight against the economic crisis in the pandemic of COVID19.

• Thoughts on the Pandemic (2020/03/13)

• Germany Ready to Ditch Balanced Budget to Combat Coronavirus (2020/03/12)

2020-03-09

I really enjoyed reading an article on the history of scipy . I agree with a view presented in it. It is because Python is a general-purpose language that it is widely used in data science. So Julia might not be dominant in data science. That said, Julia is a promising language for scientific computation and I'm interested in it.

2020-02-22

I find the movement described in this article interesting: Science funders gamble on grant lotteries

It is difficult to foresee which research projects will succeed. So the random assignment of grants might perform better. This would also reduce workloads of both applicants and assessment panels.

2020-01-26

I made a cookiecutter template for Jupyter Docker containers.

P.S. (2020/02/22)：

I have renamed the repository because it was lengthy.

2020-01-17

According to Nature's articles, there seem to be some problems with AI at present. AI could cause disastrous results if it is used in a wrong way.

• AI can be sexist and racist — it’s time to make it fair (18 JULY 2018)

• A fairer way forward for AI in health care (25 SEPTEMBER 2019)

• Millions of black people affected by racial bias in health-care algorithms (24 OCTOBER 2019, UPDATE 26 OCTOBER 2019)

• Why deep-learning AIs are so easy to fool (09 OCTOBER 2019)

2020-01-14

Every time I hear of the expensive subscription and publication fees for electronic journals, I wonder if it would be more cost-effective to use government spending for running public open access journals than for paying commercial publishers.