Tootfinder

Interesting piece that challenges the metaphors we use (usually unconsciously) to describe biology:
"What I wish to point out is the lack of other metaphors. Precisely because no metaphor is perfect, we should employ multiple metaphors, each explaining certain aspects of the cell. Unfortunately, the centralised and hierarchical metaphor, so pervasive in textbooks, is often the only one for the internal workings of the cell."
#ScientificWriting
#PhilosophyOfScience
https://aeon.co/essays/biology-is-not-as-hierarchical-as-most-textbooks-paint-it

Interesting piece that challenges the metaphors we use (usually unconsciously) to describe biology:
"What I wish to point out is the lack of other metaphors. Precisely because no metaphor is perfect, we should employ multiple metaphors, each explaining certain aspects of the cell. Unfortunately, the centralised and hierarchical metaphor, so pervasive in textbooks, is often the only one for the internal workings of the cell."
#ScientificWriting
#PhilosophyOfScience
https://aeon.co/essays/biology-is-not-as-hierarchical-as-most-textbooks-paint-it

I've finally started browsing #Piketty's Capital. It's quite accessible. You can sample a few pages here and there depending on your interest. The first 30 or 100 pages of introductory chapters probably give a better general idea of #macroeconomics than some of the textbooks most used in

"Real American History That The ‘Woke’ Left Doesn’t Want You To Know"
"So-called 'indigenous' people crossed the Bering land bridge a mere 40 years ago, when shoulder pads were everything and MTV was all the rage!"
https://www.…

Real American History That The ‘Woke’ Left Doesn’t Want You To Know
It’s no secret that school textbooks don’t cover the whole of American history, and that important facts about this great nation are often omitted to serve a narrative. In the name of keeping truth alive, The Onion presents these real accounts from American history that the “woke” left doesn’t want you to know.

NumLLM: Numeric-Sensitive Large Language Model for Chinese Finance
Huan-Yi Su, Ke Wu, Yu-Hao Huang, Wu-Jun Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00566 https://

NumLLM: Numeric-Sensitive Large Language Model for Chinese Finance
Recently, many works have proposed various financial large language models (FinLLMs) by pre-training from scratch or fine-tuning open-sourced LLMs on financial corpora. However, existing FinLLMs exhibit unsatisfactory performance in understanding financial text when numeric variables are involved in questions. In this paper, we propose a novel LLM, called numeric-sensitive large language model (NumLLM), for Chinese finance. We first construct a financial corpus from financial textbooks which is…

Incredibly sad to see Prof Ross Anderson has died. I thought it must be a hoax at first, because surely if one of the most towering figures in infosec died it would make the news, and be all over social media? But it appears to be for real. Very, very sad news.
#RossAnderson

Evil use of LLM that is almost definitely already happening: Automatically making meaningless changes to textbooks to try to force students to buy the new edition.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13131 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXi…

The process of constructing new knowledge: an undergraduate laboratory exercise facilitated by a vacuum capacitor-resistor circuit
The process of constructing knowledge is typically taught to students by having them reproduce established results (e.g., homework problems). An alternative pedagogical strategy is to illustrate this process using an open problem, such as voltage decay in an RC circuit as described below. Analyzing data from this circuit in an undergraduate physics laboratory course reveals a discrepancy between the data and the exponential decay model found in textbooks. As students attempt to reconcile this d…

"Dirty Books": "1974. A church minister's wife in West Virginia learns of a brand new curriculum being introduced into her children's school. So she decides to read all 325 new textbooks herself. What she discovers horrifies her so much she instigates a State-wide insurrection. But were some of her concerns based on a misunderstanding?"
– "Things Fell Apart" #podcast

MIMO in network simulators: Design, implementation and evaluation of single-user MIMO in ns-3 5G-LENA
Biljana Bojovic, Sandra Lagen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17472

MIMO in network simulators: Design, implementation and evaluation of single-user MIMO in ns-3 5G-LENA
MIMO technology has been studied in textbooks for several decades, and it has been adopted in 4G and 5G systems. Due to the recent evolution in 5G and beyond networks, designed to cover a wide range of use cases with every time more complex applications, it is essential to have network simulation tools (such as ns-3) to evaluate MIMO performance from the network perspective, before real implementation. Up to date, the well-known ns-3 simulator has been missing the inclusion of single-user MIMO …

https://phys.org/news/2024-04-scientists-nitrogen-organelle-1.html

Scientists discover first nitrogen-fixing organelle
Modern biology textbooks assert that only bacteria can take nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into a form that is usable for life. Plants that fix nitrogen, such as legumes, do so by harboring symbiotic bacteria in root nodules. But a recent discovery upends that rule.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.16066 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_hepp…

The Low soft-photon theorem again
It is shown that contrary to claims of Ref. [1] the formulated in the proper physical variables Low theorem [2] for soft photon emission does not require any modification. We also reject the criticism in Ref. [1] of the papers [3,4]. At the same time, we identify some inaccuracies in Ref. [3] in the presentation of the soft-photon theorem for the case of spin-one-half particles. We also point out shortcomings in consideration of the Low theorem in the classic textbooks [5,6].

Designing Problems for Improved Instruction and Learning -- Linear Algebra
Ryan H. Allaire, Margaret Reynolds, Andrew C. Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06648

Designing Problems for Improved Instruction and Learning -- Linear Algebra
One of the grand challenges of Mathematics instruction is to provide students with problems that are both accessible and have a reasonably elegant solution. Instructors commonly resort to resources like course textbooks, online-learning platforms, or other automated problem-generating software to select problems for exams and assignments. However, reliance on such tools may result in limited control over problem parameters, potentially yielding intricate solutions that impede students' understa…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06109 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_…

Constructing Wavefunctions for One-Body and Two-Body Gravitational Orbits in Classical Mechanics
The circular orbits and elliptical orbits of moving objects in a gravitational field are essential information in astronomy. There have been many methods developed in the literature and textbooks to describe these orbits. In this report, I propose to use the vis-viva equation to construct a complex function to store the state of a moving object in elliptical orbits such that one can calculate its near future numerically. This state function is constructed by splitting its momentum into real and…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.06510 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

On non-monochromatic plane-wave solutions of Maxwell's equations
In electrodynamics courses and textbooks the properties of plane electromagnetic waves in both conducting and non-conducting media are typically studied from the point of view of the prototype case of a monochromatic plane wave. In this article the more general, non-monochromatic case is examined, which better exploits the independence of the Maxwell equations and offers new insights in the study of electromagnetic waves.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.12043 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Introducing Quantum Entanglement to First-Year Students: Resolving the Trilemma
While quantum mechanics (QM) is covered at length in introductory physics textbooks, the concept of quantum entanglement is typically not covered at all, despite its importance in the rapidly growing area of quantum information science and its extensive experimental confirmation. Thus, physics educators are left to their own devices as to how to introduce this important concept. Regardless of how a physics educator chooses to introduce quantum entanglement, they face a trilemma involving its my…

Research and teaching in physics at the University of Franche-Comt\'e 1845-1970
John M. Dudley, Jeanne Magnin, Luc Froehly, Jerome Salvi, Pierre Verschueren, Maxime Jacquot
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09271

Research and teaching in physics at the University of Franche-Comté 1845-1970
Recently uncovered archives at the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon (France) reveal a rich history of research and teaching in physics since the Faculty of Science was first established in 1845. Here, we describe a selection of notable activities conducted by the named Chairs of Physics during the period 1845-1970. We uncover a long tradition of major contributions to physics education and research, including the production of highly regarded physics textbooks that were widely used in …

Language Models as Science Tutors
Alexis Chevalier, Jiayi Geng, Alexander Wettig, Howard Chen, Sebastian Mizera, Toni Annala, Max Jameson Aragon, Arturo Rodr\'iguez Fanlo, Simon Frieder, Simon Machado, Akshara Prabhakar, Ellie Thieu, Jiachen T. Wang, Zirui Wang, Xindi Wu, Mengzhou Xia, Wenhan Jia, Jiatong Yu, Jun-Jie Zhu, Zhiyong Jason Ren, Sanjeev Arora, Danqi Chen

Language Models as Science Tutors
NLP has recently made exciting progress toward training language models (LMs) with strong scientific problem-solving skills. However, model development has not focused on real-life use-cases of LMs for science, including applications in education that require processing long scientific documents. To address this, we introduce TutorEval and TutorChat. TutorEval is a diverse question-answering benchmark consisting of questions about long chapters from STEM textbooks, written by experts. TutorEval…

Constructing Wavefunctions for One-Body and Two-Body Gravitational Orbits in Classical Mechanics
Jixin Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06109 https://

Constructing Wavefunctions for One-Body and Two-Body Gravitational Orbits in Classical Mechanics
The circular orbits and elliptical orbits of moving objects in a gravitational field are essential information in astronomy. There have been many methods developed in the literature and textbooks to describe these orbits. In this report, I propose to use the vis-viva equation to construct a complex function to store the state of a moving object in elliptical orbits such that one can calculate its near future numerically. This state function is constructed by splitting its momentum into real and…

Language Models as Science Tutors
Alexis Chevalier, Jiayi Geng, Alexander Wettig, Howard Chen, Sebastian Mizera, Toni Annala, Max Jameson Aragon, Arturo Rodr\'iguez Fanlo, Simon Frieder, Simon Machado, Akshara Prabhakar, Ellie Thieu, Jiachen T. Wang, Zirui Wang, Xindi Wu, Mengzhou Xia, Wenhan Jia, Jiatong Yu, Jun-Jie Zhu, Zhiyong Jason Ren, Sanjeev Arora, Danqi Chen

Language Models as Science Tutors
NLP has recently made exciting progress toward training language models (LMs) with strong scientific problem-solving skills. However, model development has not focused on real-life use-cases of LMs for science, including applications in education that require processing long scientific documents. To address this, we introduce TutorEval and TutorChat. TutorEval is a diverse question-answering benchmark consisting of questions about long chapters from STEM textbooks, written by experts. TutorEval…