I know we like to hate on sensationalism, but "confuse and excite" is very tame. In fact, it's pretty applicable. "Interesting and didn't match previous expectations" is a near-synonym. It doesn't really warrant the eye-rolling.
I really dislike "confuse" in this context. I don't believe they were confused. Read the definition of confused and it's not a synonym of processing new and unexpected information.
Words change meaning of course, but this kind of headline isn't trying to change the meaning, it's using the wrong meaning on purpose to make a story that doesn't need to be made.
What I read each single time is: "Again a new version of scientists are not so smart as they say. Lets mock them. ha-haaa".
This journalist work should be done by a chatbot; no need to pay a real human for this.
Common skeleton to fill in the article. History that could be taken from a science abstracts repository. Predictable outcome and the history always is focused in how the scientists feel about something. A short list of emoticons to choose at random would be more than enough. Digital newspapers are losing money by not automatizing this.
Hum. Maybe Nature or Science could start a scientibot service and offer it to the newspapers for a regular fee. The bot could be designed easily to write in the style of the journal. Would be still cheaper and easier than hiring a human for doing this lazy work. You don't need to pay healthcare or buy a chair for a bot.
> This journalist work should be done by a chatbot; no need to pay a real human for this.
Is that chatbot magically immune from all the subpar headlines that went into its training dataset?
Genuinely baffling take, given this 1) doesn’t achieve the desired outcome while 2) harming the culture of people getting rewarded for doing original work.
> Is that chatbot magically immune from all the subpar headlines that went into its training dataset?
All scientific articles are curated. Have been reviewed in a peers system. Science can be wrong, and for sure some scientists cheat but if they would have subpar headlines, or any orthographic mistake, wouldn't be allowed in Nature in the first time. Peers will require to fix any ambiguous or clickbaity title before it ends in the journal.
Even more, articles are conveniently ranked yet by citations. Would be trivial to put a trigger to select automatically hottest scientific articles or to talk only about something with more than X citations. You don't even need an human to browse the journal and select the interesting news. Then all that you need is a title and an abstract.
How is doing original work writing about how much "scientists" are stunned by each natural phenomenon or each trivia found in their job?. Is predictable, stupid, it harms society and a bot browsing three thousand scientific journals in minutes and then writing a resume "in the style of BBC news" and other "in the style of Fox news", etc, could do a much better job.
> How is doing original work writing about how much "scientists" are stunned by each natural phenomenon or each trivia found in their job? <…> a bot browsing three thousand scientific journals in minutes and then writing a resume "in the style of BBC news" and other "in the style of Fox news", etc, could do a much better job.
A human, in your view (which not everyone shares), has done a bad job in this particular case, but a bot would be liable to the same faults simply because it’s trained on results of human work. So no, it wouldn’t automatically raise the quality of headlines, but it would save money for the company in near term while making the already underpaid writers unemployed. I’m not sure I see a net positive.
Here’s a hint: to get better writing, instead of “fire writers and have chatbot do it” try “pay writers more”. If there’s no one practicing and perfecting the art of original writing then its quality can only go downhill, and since chatbot is trained on human writing you can see there’s a vicious circle that gets us nowhere good.
Is not just one journalist. Mocking the scientist Is a school of writing, is pandemic.
> “pay writers more”.
Why? Being cynical, the authors of the article gave it for free. Why the journalist should be paid for just making a resume of it and maybe copypasting some photos and graphs done in weeks by other people? what qualifies him/her to earn more money than the real scientist while doing 0.00001% of the effort?
The sad truth is that people don't care about science, they want to be entertained and have their points of view reinforced. You write a stupid song?, you are paid for the rest of your life. You discover a new species?, you end losing money.
> Orbiting near Ganymede and Europa, two of the other largest Jovian moons, and the planet itself, Io’s mineral composition is constantly pulled and pushed by gravity, creating frictional heat deep inside the moon. This makes it extremely volcanically active
I don't see how this can be true. The description obviously fits Ganymede and Europa just as well as it fits Io. Why aren't they extremely volcanically active?
They are! Europa and Ganymede have cryo eruptions! Europa from geysers and cryovolcanoes for Ganymede, but more evidence is needed for Ganymede. There are missions planned to fly through the plumes of these worlds.
Io is close enough to Jupiter, that thanks to the inverse square law, the forces it experiences cause substantial heating that then results in hot, classical volcanism.
> The observation could help to guide future study of Io, including preparations for NASA’s Juno space probe, which has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016 and is scheduled to fly only a couple hundred miles from the Jovian moon this December.
This will be very interesting. I need to follow this more...
https://archive.ph/mnTzc
Did it really confuse and excite them? Were they left wandering around in a daze? Or was it just interesting and didn't match previous expectations?
I know we like to hate on sensationalism, but "confuse and excite" is very tame. In fact, it's pretty applicable. "Interesting and didn't match previous expectations" is a near-synonym. It doesn't really warrant the eye-rolling.
I really dislike "confuse" in this context. I don't believe they were confused. Read the definition of confused and it's not a synonym of processing new and unexpected information.
Words change meaning of course, but this kind of headline isn't trying to change the meaning, it's using the wrong meaning on purpose to make a story that doesn't need to be made.
This too left me baffled.
Perhaps “New IO images STUNS NASA scientists!”
"The worst kind of emergency is a geological emergency"
-Unknown
What I read each single time is: "Again a new version of scientists are not so smart as they say. Lets mock them. ha-haaa".
This journalist work should be done by a chatbot; no need to pay a real human for this.
Common skeleton to fill in the article. History that could be taken from a science abstracts repository. Predictable outcome and the history always is focused in how the scientists feel about something. A short list of emoticons to choose at random would be more than enough. Digital newspapers are losing money by not automatizing this.
Hum. Maybe Nature or Science could start a scientibot service and offer it to the newspapers for a regular fee. The bot could be designed easily to write in the style of the journal. Would be still cheaper and easier than hiring a human for doing this lazy work. You don't need to pay healthcare or buy a chair for a bot.
> This journalist work should be done by a chatbot; no need to pay a real human for this.
Is that chatbot magically immune from all the subpar headlines that went into its training dataset?
Genuinely baffling take, given this 1) doesn’t achieve the desired outcome while 2) harming the culture of people getting rewarded for doing original work.
> Is that chatbot magically immune from all the subpar headlines that went into its training dataset?
All scientific articles are curated. Have been reviewed in a peers system. Science can be wrong, and for sure some scientists cheat but if they would have subpar headlines, or any orthographic mistake, wouldn't be allowed in Nature in the first time. Peers will require to fix any ambiguous or clickbaity title before it ends in the journal.
Even more, articles are conveniently ranked yet by citations. Would be trivial to put a trigger to select automatically hottest scientific articles or to talk only about something with more than X citations. You don't even need an human to browse the journal and select the interesting news. Then all that you need is a title and an abstract.
How is doing original work writing about how much "scientists" are stunned by each natural phenomenon or each trivia found in their job?. Is predictable, stupid, it harms society and a bot browsing three thousand scientific journals in minutes and then writing a resume "in the style of BBC news" and other "in the style of Fox news", etc, could do a much better job.
> How is doing original work writing about how much "scientists" are stunned by each natural phenomenon or each trivia found in their job? <…> a bot browsing three thousand scientific journals in minutes and then writing a resume "in the style of BBC news" and other "in the style of Fox news", etc, could do a much better job.
A human, in your view (which not everyone shares), has done a bad job in this particular case, but a bot would be liable to the same faults simply because it’s trained on results of human work. So no, it wouldn’t automatically raise the quality of headlines, but it would save money for the company in near term while making the already underpaid writers unemployed. I’m not sure I see a net positive.
Here’s a hint: to get better writing, instead of “fire writers and have chatbot do it” try “pay writers more”. If there’s no one practicing and perfecting the art of original writing then its quality can only go downhill, and since chatbot is trained on human writing you can see there’s a vicious circle that gets us nowhere good.
Is not just one journalist. Mocking the scientist Is a school of writing, is pandemic.
> “pay writers more”.
Why? Being cynical, the authors of the article gave it for free. Why the journalist should be paid for just making a resume of it and maybe copypasting some photos and graphs done in weeks by other people? what qualifies him/her to earn more money than the real scientist while doing 0.00001% of the effort?
The sad truth is that people don't care about science, they want to be entertained and have their points of view reinforced. You write a stupid song?, you are paid for the rest of your life. You discover a new species?, you end losing money.
Maybe it was. Did you run it though that GPT detector that was posted here the other day?
@dang can we have the post title changed to match the headline. A new view of the most explosive moon in the solar system?
Thanks!
"Recent strange activity around Jupiter’s volcanic moon, Io, confused and excited scientists."
Echoes of
Lights All Askew in the Heavens: Men of Science More or less Agog ...
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times/Lights_All...
The Grey Lady knew how to write click-bait headlines in 1919 too. In that case the purple prose did reflect an actual scientific revolution.
Back in the days when Einstein still needed an introduction.
> Orbiting near Ganymede and Europa, two of the other largest Jovian moons, and the planet itself, Io’s mineral composition is constantly pulled and pushed by gravity, creating frictional heat deep inside the moon. This makes it extremely volcanically active
I don't see how this can be true. The description obviously fits Ganymede and Europa just as well as it fits Io. Why aren't they extremely volcanically active?
They are! Europa and Ganymede have cryo eruptions! Europa from geysers and cryovolcanoes for Ganymede, but more evidence is needed for Ganymede. There are missions planned to fly through the plumes of these worlds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)#Plumes
https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/LPSC98/pdf/1666.pdf
Io is close enough to Jupiter, that thanks to the inverse square law, the forces it experiences cause substantial heating that then results in hot, classical volcanism.
> The observation could help to guide future study of Io, including preparations for NASA’s Juno space probe, which has been orbiting Jupiter since 2016 and is scheduled to fly only a couple hundred miles from the Jovian moon this December.
This will be very interesting. I need to follow this more...
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA.
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.
USE THEM TOGETHER.
USE THEM IN PEACE.
I don't remember the last two sentences, to what were "they" referring to?
Ok so we’re not alone then I guess?