https://newlinesmag.com/ has been a favorite of mine lately if you wanna give that a try, it's got global coverage and there's always something interesting to read
doing some reason.. uhh intuitioning i imagine brazil and portugal might have some sort of a visa-free deal going on in which case llama 4 might actually be right here?
AFAIK Schengen has a common visa policy, so there couldn't be such a deal between Brazil and Portugal. It'd also be extremely surprising if two countries not in a common travel area had a deal where you didn't have to clear customs at all, I suspect that doesn't exist anywhere in the world.
Brazilians don't need a visa for Portugal, France, or any Schengen country. But everybody has to pass through immigration control (at least a passport check even if you don't need a visa) when entering the Schengen zone. My question was which country would that happen in.
anecdotal, but my experience a year ago when i travelled international was: 2/2 delays by OEBB that made me miss connections (and absolutely rude and inconsiderate customer service reps in Vienna HBF on top of that), 1/1 on time trains by DB ICE
a desk rejection is when the editor in chief (or managing editor, or whoever is the one first receiving the submitted paper) decides to reject the submission without sending it out for peer review
basically a judgment call by the person in charge of a journal that the paper is not interesting or impactful enough to warrant going through with the rest of the review/publishing process
ouch. but also, surely that has to happen to the majority of papers, meaning the snap judgment call of effectively one person greatly colors the quality of the whole process. as a conference organizer this is something i worry about. is there a better process proposed out there - that respects the constraint that high value people have limited time to review things?
I think preprints provide a good way to solve this problem, but it requires some cultural shifts.
Imagine a world where all papers start their life as preprints. Researchers read these preprints (like arxiv) and comment on them (like PubPeer). Journal editors then search for the best papers (or hear via word of mouth within their field) and journals compete for the rights to publish the most interesting papers. When an agreement is reached, the journal organised reviewers and asks for any changes to the paper.
I may be missing something critical but I dream of a day when the actual people producing academic output have power over journals who produce nothing but fees.
Historically journal controlled peer review didn’t exist and science still progressed perfectly well.
It’s an appealing vision. Distributing the early review process across time and the whole community would solve a lot of problems with the current model.
I do suspect that this would strengthen the winner-takes-all dynamics in academic publishing. Like whoever has the biggest twitter following gets all the attention, then gets Nature and Science competing for their paper, which allows them to get funding to hire a publicist, who increases their profile.
I suspect the opposite since winner-take-all-dynamics are partly driven by gatekeeping. A famous scientist (like Francesca Gino) gains a following _because_ she is anointed by journals and institutions, which causes positive reinforcement via better jobs / grants / book opportunities etc. If top journals reject a researcher, they languish until they get lucky or the value of their work becomes unquestionable (like Katalin Karikó).
In my utopia, publication success would be driven by interest within a field which means lesser known researchers who haven't had breaks in high impact journals are more likely to break through, because the community acts as the gatekeepers, not a small group of journal editors.
sadly no, it is an unsolved problem of scholarly publishing imo. on the one hand you have the reputable journals following the traditional publishing process that take pride in their high rejection rates -- these require a large percentage of desk rejections to avoid flooding their reviewers with sub-par papers. thus they'll inevitably have some quality papers fall through the cracks + some flashy sub-par papers making the cut.
on the other hand you have the pay-to-publish journals that have a financial incentive to push as many papers through peer review -- these thrive on sub-par papers that are technically just barely 'good enough', but the upside is that the real good ones will also make it through. however, they inevitably face reviewer fatigue, and the most valuable ones will quit reviewing if they often send them low-quality papers. so basically once in a while they'll publish top notch research without being aware of it.
i'm not aware of any middle-ground solutions out there and it certainly feels like a tough problem to solve.
GP is getting downvoted because it's a shit take. ethnic tensions in Kosovo date back to before the break up of Yugoslavia -- like early 1980s at the latest. Serbia may feel that now is an opportune moment to stir shit up again, and Russia may be supportive, but to suggest that Kremlin is pulling all the strings here is plain wrong.
other commenters in this thread display much more nuanced and informed perspectives.
This piece of investigative journalism has been posted on HN some 9 months ago. I'm reposting it now because a) it's a really thoroughly researched article, and b) it's presented in an interesting and engaging way (edit: on desktop at least; I haven't checked how it looks on mobile).
So, dear HN: trust me when I say it's worth spending some of your time on this one even if you're not interested in the subject matter itself
it's 2/2 real world cases so 'all cases' seems like a legit conclusion to me, but if you can come with an ethical hypothetical a-bomb dropping scenario i'm all ears
shown themselves to you maybe, but have in mind that post 1945 plenty of couped/invaded countries around the world could come up with a convincing case painting US as a bad actor too
this is where you should search for nuance and complexity, whereas dropping a-bombs on civilians is a clear cut case of an immoral act no matter how many lives it supposedly saves
where does this notion of 'protecting the whole Europe from fascist hordes' come from? has there been any indication that Russia genuinely intended to steamroll Europe if they had taken Ukraine as planned?
From Putin himself. His speeches in the last 20 years. He was quite upfront with his ambitions: restauration of the last Russian Empire, the Soviet Union.
Eastern Europe and ex-USSR republics have been trying to warn the world for quite a while, it's the West who refused to listen.
Read Kasparov's "Winter is Coming" book to understand more.
i haven't heard / read his speeches but isn't that just regular political speech? 'we'll make x great again' where they invoke some mythical glorious past x and make grand promises to appease the masses?
i'll check the book out, but if there's less speculative stuff like leaked cables, war plans, fact based reporting etc out there i'd be more receptive to the idea that the Russians were genuinely about to blitzkrieg Europe if all went well in Ukraine
