Telescope Time without Tears - Numberphile

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Featuring Professor Mike Merrifield from The University of Nottingham.
More of him on two other channels...

NUMBERPHILE

Videos by Brady Haran

[iviecarp]

This video and research is very underrated. I was expecting this one to have at least a million views after all these years...

[xisumavoid]

The disagreeing penalty is a little flawed if the motive/opinion is genuine. Also you could be a little more subtle and rank it middle rather than bottom, however that probably wouldn't have much of an impact.

[ElDaumo]

love the collar. you can tell genius by a wonky collar.

[vectoredthrust]

To those who can immediately see the flaws in this system, like the "what if one person spots something stupid everyone else missed and gets penalised for it" issue, they actually address this in their extra footage video on Brady's astronomy channel "Deep Sky Videos"

The papers aren't just graded, they're also anonymously annotated so if you spot something, everyone else will be able to see it as well

[sweepingtime]

'displacement activities' - until this video I never knew that there was a term for suddenly finding household chores a lot more interesting than homework.

[TakeWalker]

This caught my attention because it's the same schema we use in a monthly writing contest I participate in. If we get more than X entries, we'll spend a week ranking slates of entries in the method described in this video, then vote on the top third or so. Last month, we turned 42 entries into 15, for instance, and that's all that people had to read to vote on (because even 30 stories is a lot to read in a week!) And we remove the need for penalizing by making the whole thing anonymous. Of course, the downside is we can call for new slates to rank again and again until we've read every entry, and the final round is just spend thumb-twiddling, but it works.

[MoronicChunk]

"displacement activities" that must be the phrase to use when you dont want to admit you're procrastinating.

[abigailcooling]

Just realised the little easter egg in 1:09: the guy wanting to look at Audrey (Brady's dog) got the telescope time!

[tetamusha]

I can't believe I follow Numberphile and Computerphile for over a year and never heard of Deep Sky Videos!

[FadeBlack]

Merrifield is one of my favorites along with Coopland. Great video :)

[MetaKaios]

Hooray, a correct use of the word 'disinterested'. Haven't seen that in the last two years.

[DeadPyro]

I love the conclusion in the actual paper.

[Pulsar]

Ugh, those dreaded proposals still give me nightmares. My former PhD advisor had his own solution: he distributed the pile of proposals among his grad students to do all the preparatory work (write a summary, highlight the important parts, check if it's original, include the main references, give a personal opinion, ...). I was one of those 'slaves', and even though I only had to read about 15 proposals every six months, it was a LOT of (boring) work.

[symb]

Not interested in astronomy but super interested in people talking about their own papers! If someone else writes a paper that can be explained to the layman and is interesting, please get them to explain it here!

[Hythloday]

Strong incentive not to cheat = Strong incentive to follow the herd.

[ozboltmenegatti]

What about an iterative process: Whoever has a list, that is more in line with super list gets a higher weight in summing scores. So after recalculating super list with new weights, we get a new list and we can start iterating until we get to some sort of convergence in list order.

[LaggerYT]

You get a penalty for disagreeing? So bascially to game the system the goal is to anticipate the average opinion on a paper instead of giving your honest assessment. Not sure if that's the intention... especially in the scientific community where opinions may disagree so widely sometimes. :)

[expirydate]

I like Prof. Merrifield. Not only is he intelligent, but he's a bit crafty too :-)

[angie]

What I have to know is who wrote a proposal to observe Endor? I about scream-laughed when I spotted it!

[IWubYooz]

Not sure how much I like the disagreement penalty thing.  If enough people grade it, 1 bad rating will be cancelled out by the others' high ratings.  This sounds more like: Do our work for us and here's how you do it.  If you break the rules we give you, you lose.