I think it depends who reviews the complaints. Every single time I've responded, my complaint (which I always word calmly, non-aggressively, and politely) are met with the response that "2-day shipping only guarantees that the package ships to your nearest Amazon warehouse within 2 days. The actual delivery time can vary, and while it is typical that the delivery will arrive on the same day it arrives at the warehouse, there's no guarantee." And nothing more. Well, one time I was offered a $5 credit. But that's the most I've ever been offered.
I guess pared down to its absolute core, this is what Monte Carlo is - you just generate many a large ensemble of possible states.
But this simplified explanation misses out on one key aspect of Monte Carlo: sometimes different kinds of Monte Carlo moves can be designed that can allow it to more efficiently sample the phase space than other methods such as gradient descent.
Unfortunately, doing so is can be very involved, and is not always very general, so it isn't as easy to do as using other methods for exploring phase space.
Your answer feels like its saying "its only partly random, you use the outcome of your experiments to walk the space of possible solutions more carefully, in the light of experience" which would make it more like GLMM or something markov-y
My success rate over chat is 0%. I just get told over and over that 'Prime guarantees shipping, not delivery. So your package will be shipped within 2 days [or 1 day for 1-day] to the nearest Amazon distribution center. Usually this matches with the delivery date, but not always. The updated delivery date for your order is when you will get it, so we are following our end.'
Give them a link to the terms of service and say "please direct me to the language in your terms of service to that effect." Follow up with "as a paying prime member, I insist on compensation for Amazons failure to meet their guarantee". This has always worked for me. Some reps have pressed back when I insisted on two instances of compensation for one order with two late packages. I replied "I have no sympathy for a multi-million dollar company that fails to meet its obligations." Have gotten several months of prime and gift cards through chat in this way.
They tried that on me today (I've had a bad run this month - I usually have about an order a day)...
Item bought on Monday, with expected -delivery- Wednesday. Late Monday status said "Package has left seller facility and is in transit to carrier".
It's Friday morning now, no package, and status is still "in transit to carrier".
I argued that "Shipped" means the carrier has it. Not that it may or may not be sitting in a corner of a truck for the last week forgotten or unnoticed.
Your option 1 is incomplete. It should read more closely to:
You go to grad school and spend ~6 years working extremely long hours at nearly minimum wage with no benefits. You then spend 2-3 years on a postdoc still with relatively low compensation. There still are far too few academic positions available. You now either become an adjunct (and get caught in that vicious cycle) or you do another postdoc. Repeat ad nauseum (or until you give up and move to industry anyway)
Analysis being determined by a(n essentially) democratic vote is actually just replication of results.
While the system is highly flawed now, I would argue that collaborating to build perfect experiments carried out by multiple labs would not be a good idea. You point out if people made the same sorts of choices then perhaps everyone just has the same biases and errors. But if all the people on one experiment collaborate, then they'll definitely all have the same biases. Instead, independent verification in which the nitty-gritty details are abstracted away for a more general methods section would allow for more alternate takes at approaching a problem.
This would not be a realistic solution, because the time it can take to do experiments might be an extremely long time. This would make it so that everyone would be (at best) half as productive as before, since they would have to spend the time necessary to carry out the replication. This would only be worsened if what you were required to replicate was not in a similar area to the researcher's area of expertise.
The authors actually do point out that their sampling method collects data in a way that is independent of the hypothesis they test, so it is not an example of cherry-picking examples that support their ideas.
While I cannot comment on how valid the model is because I'm definitely not an expert in that area, it seems pretty solid; they gave neighboring areas the capability to develop military techniques of certain strengths, the capability to lose it, and saw where civilizations tended to develop the different areas would "fight it out" and transfer military technique back and forth, and the result of their simulation appeared to be quite similar to the map of that time period.
There was also some talk in the comments about overfitting, and while as a person who works in chemical simulation I understand those concerns, this work seems to involve simply their taking initial conditions and plugging it into their simple simulation, and obtaining a result which was a remarkably good match to the actual world map of the time.
I do think the Ars article, like most scientific reporting, restates the conclusion in a way that is a stronger statement than the actual paper. Unfortunately, the way it was said changes the meaning of what was said in a subtle but important way. But.. that's typical scientific reporting, I guess. Overall the work is pretty cool, showing a computational model for studying the spread of military technology in a field that doesn't tend to frequently use computational models (according to the paper).
But despite appearing primarily in popular culture as extremely small robots, nanotechnology simply refers to the scale of the technology, so actually, this is by definition, nanotechnology. It is actually the popular representation of nanotechnology which has always been too specific.
That's what 'nano' means, but 'nanotechnology' is a set phrase with a specific meaning. You have to be manipulating matter at that scale, not simply using particles that size. Smoke is not nanotechnology.
Well, there goes my proposal for an ingenious plan to apply nanotechnology to the field of communications. I was thinking of calling them "smoke signals".
