zlatiah

This got me into a way bigger rabbit hole than I remembered... The person is not officially "fired" since you cannot fire a tenured, distinguished professor and a former department head, but I suspect she was persuaded to leave. The incident is quite wild, I was just a random undergrad hired to do lab tests so I only knew some details.

This is about Dr. Connie Weaver, professor emeritus and former department head at Purdue's Department of Nutrition Sciences (her ORCiD). She was known for nutrition research where the institution recruits adolescents summer-camp style (similar to a clinical trial), and in 2017 she started to lead a multi-year (lasted one month before it was shut down) study on low-sodium diets in adolescents, Camp DASH. Supposed to be a gold-standard diet study... close to 10 million dollars of NIH money on the line too.

And then things went off the rail. The operation tried to cut a lot of corners: pretty much all of the employees were undergraduates who couldn't find other things to do for the summer, training was minimal or nonexistent, and the employees-to-camper ratio was very, very low... oddly similar to the recent MrBeast incident where participation oversight seems to be very bad.

This then led to sexual harassment, abuse, etc... one poor girl's nude was shared online, probably more cases of sexual assault, several adolescents got into serious fights with each other, and from what I've heard some of the undergrads who were on supervisory roles were also injured. Several lawsuits were filed, the university stepped in and stopped the study (I just remembered them stop scheduling me to work in July and was wondering what went wrong lol), the issue got elevated to the university president, and more lawsuits...

Obviously tenure means someone should be protected from being terminated at-will like most employment contracts. So the reason I have my suspicion is... Dr. Weaver became a professor emeritus not long after the incident, but is now somehow still publishing work while working from... San Diego State University? Doesn't seem like someone who retired on their own will to me.

If you are interested in the full detail... here are some news articles on this incident. Exponent is Purdue's student-run newspaper

• Undark's report on Camp DASH
• Exponent, 2017-07-24, Camp DASH was shut down
• Exponent, 2017-11-28, president's statement
• Exponent, 2019-09-20, drama between Dr. Weaver and the school on data retention
• Exponent, 2024-02-11, outcome of a lawsuit

I have a suspicion it's not just an Alzheimer's issue but rather quite systemic to lots of competitive fields in academia... There definitely needs to be guard rails. I think the sad thing with funding is... these days you have to be exceptionally good at grant writing to even have a chance of getting into the lottery, and it mostly feels like a lottery with success rates in the teens... and apparently no grant=no lab, no career for most ppl (seriously why are most PI roles soft money-funded anyway). Hard to not try and cut the corners if there's so much pressure on the line

Not to mention, apparently even if you are a super ethical PI who wants to do nothing wrong, if the lab gets big enough, there might eventually be some unethical postdoc trying to make it big and falsify data (that you don't have time to check) under your name so... how the hell do people guard against that.

I'm honestly impressed how science is still making progress with all of these random nonsense in the field

It's definitely way more prevalent. There actually is this post from Retractionwatch just a few days ago too. This is kind-of a systematic issue induced by how scientific funding & the system works...

My current PI is actually co-mentoring a student who was studying scientific fraud, but the problem is... being a fraud researcher is apparently a really good way to alienate a lot of people, which ensures you never make it in academia (which is heavily dependent on networking/knowing people)... so I don't know how many ppl would seriously study this.

Oh boy. I used to live in Houston, TX, a city notorious for being car-dependent...

I will present three sets of numbers. First is where I first moved to in Houston, in a supposedly highly coveted, super walkable area home to mostly medical students... Second is the place I lived before I moved out (and I used to boast to people how accessible the place was, by US standards). Third is in Chicago, close to city center ("The Loop").

And FYI I only lived in places that would be considered to be within the city, so these might be as small as they can get...

• To the nearest convenience store: 900m | 750m | 170m
• To the nearest chain supermarket: 700m(used to be 4.2km) | 450m | 220m
• To the bus stop: 160m(never seen anyone there though) | 350m | 71m
• To the nearest park: 950m | 1.5km | 1.6km
• To the nearest big supermarket: 700m(used to be 4.2km) | 450m | 450m
• To the nearest library: 1.2km | 450m | 1.0km
• To the nearest train station: 7.0km | 3.8km | 2.5km

Fun story about the first location! Everything seems so walkable on paper (close to park, close to highway), until you realize that there was no fucking supermarket anywhere within walking distance... H-E-B only opened a store closeby after I moved there. However, even the super-close grocery store is across the highway and I almost never see any sane people walk there so... For parks I am only counting ones that are good enough to be tourist-worthy, otherwise the latter two locations have pretty easy access to lots of green space

And if you are asking about public transit that are not bus/train: respective distances are 1.4km | 1.0km | 280m. The last number in this series is basically how I chose where to live...

The grocery store around the block sells dirt-cheap 2-pc fried chicken + potato meals that I like a lot. I think I used to get the 8-pc fried chicken from Walmart often too...

I sure hope their recent heavy prosecution of the Invidious project isn't related

I've actually been waiting for anyone to mention any rhythm games at all. I think rhythm games in general tend to have low skill floor, but insanely high skill ceilings (Freedom Dive, some Hatsune Miku songs, ...), which make them an interesting case on the difficulty scale... Some rhythm games have unintuitive control too (OSU being a prime example with the mouse control, also Taiko series) which makes them even more difficult

Side note: I find it hilarious that the original game which OSU was based on was actually just a "tap a tablet" game though (Ouendan series, use stylus to click bottom screen of NDS)... also some JP arcades stock Reflec Beat and crossbeats Rev, Round1 has an exclusive game Tetote Connect, which are all "tap a button on the screen" games but you touch the screen with your hands instead

I agree, even the hardest non-rhythm games I seem to be able to get accustomed to in 50~100 hours, but not some of these monstrosities

One of:

1. none,
2. lofi, or
3. wild speedcore music beyond most people's imagination

Although I think options 2 and 3 are more helpful for helping me getting back from being distracted rather than concentration itself...

I'm glad you mentioned this! I completely agree... Which is kinda why I was asking about this in the first place. I was curious what others consider as objectively "difficult" for them, and I got my answer: my sense of "difficult" is very different from that of most Lemmy users...

fake difficulty

IMO I felt a lot of the answers pointed to games that are extremely high on the "cheap" scale... I mean yes cheap games are difficult, but yeah it does feel a bit artificial on the difficulty scale.

Which is also precisely why I didn't think of most platformers as among the hardest games. Like for example the original IWBTG; is it difficult? Sure it is, but a large part of it comes from the game being cheap AF... Someone with good platforming skills can clear every section with a few tries. And the higher difficulties just reduce the number of checkpoints, not actually making the game fundamentally more difficult... I mean there are genuinely difficult platformers but there are objectively more difficult games out there

so many kinds of difficulty

I'm actually surprised almost no one mentioned any type of PvP games or games that are primarily reliant on competing against other humans... they go insanely hard, but like how much of Street Fighter's difficulty is you being better than the other person vs just "know how the game works"?

If you want a game that not many people could beat

My favourite genre of games almost universally feature levels that probably fewer than 100 people across the world could beat (not counting customs), so... yeah.

I guess I forgot to take that into consideration... I'm not worried about Google banning my IP since I essentially don't use any Google services at all and my home IP is hidden behind a wireguard tunnel, but yes that is a valid concern

But I mean someone can just spin it up on their home network so... No way 192.168.0.1:3000 can get someone into trouble right

I've really only played Touhou in middle/high school... Imperishable Night was actually a really formative game for me, loved the OST and played quite a bit out of it. Fairly sure I've cleared this particular one on Easy, might have made to Stage 5/6 on Normal... Definitely didn't clear Scarlet Devil on Normal because my motor skills were terrible back then

I should be able to clear Normal/Hard now that I'm older and more skilled. If I have the patience/time that is...

Edit: apparently I forgot how to do math and got the game release numbers wrong