Feedback is Ā鶹“«Ć½ās popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com
Speaking our truth
The experienced science journalist soon learns to skim over certain sections of scientific papers: specifically, the sentences stating that the research represents āa significant advanceā and āexpands our understandingā. Not because theyāre incorrect, but because literally any study that achieves anything at all can make these claims, and academics are incentivised (as we all are) to amplify the impact of their work.
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Except for the times when they donāt bother. Via a long sequence of events that started with reporter Matthew Sparkes and went via the social network Bluesky, Feedback discovered a paper on the arXiv preprint server from 2018 that should win a prize for its to make any big claims.
In it, researchers Joseph Redmon and Ali Farhadi described their latest iteration of YOLO: one of those AI systems that can be trained to recognise objects in images. YOLO can beat those CAPTCHA tests that ask you to click all the squares that contain bicycles, and it has been used to spot smuggling ships. All of which is quite impressive/alarming (delete as appropriate), but by 2018 the pair were evidently coasting.
It starts with the paperās title: āYOLOv3: An incremental improvementā. The short summary continues the trend by claiming: āWe made a bunch of little design changes to make it better.ā The main text begins: āSometimes you just kinda phone it in for a year, you know? I didnāt do a whole lot of research this year. Spent a lot of time on Twitter.ā That last line certainly dates the paper.
The authors go on to explain that they āmostly took good ideas from other peopleā to improve YOLO. They describe this in some detail, after first admitting that the tweaks are āhonestly, nothing like super interesting, just a bunch of small changes that make it betterā.
Then we get to section 4, which is titled āThings we tried that didnāt workā. Feedback thinks this should be included in all scientific papers as a matter of course. It would save other researchers so much time.
The authors confess that they have only described āthe stuff we can rememberā, but they do recall that they tried adding something called āfocal lossā, and that it made the model less accurate. āYOLOv3 may already be robust to the problem focal loss is trying to solve,ā they say, ābecause it has separate objectness predictions and conditional class predictions. Thus for most examples there is no loss from the class predictions? Or something? We arenāt totally sure.ā
Feedback canāt quite believe we missed this in 2018, or when it was picked up on the in 2024. But we are grateful to sociologist Per Engzell, who said on Bluesky that ā are where academics practice radical honesty for exactly one paragraphā, and to data scientist Johan Ugander, who replied that the YOLOv3 paper should get an award for āā.
Surely, someone must know of an academic being even more disarmingly honest about how little they have accomplished. Emails to the usual address.
A long-lived bit
āI know you are avoiding nominative determinism,ā writes Clare Boyes, incorrectly, ābut couldnāt resist sending you this one which came in an email today from the British Wildlife Newsletter.ā It was a book called by Paul Wood.
Likewise, Robert Masta points out that our recent special issue on āhow to live to 100ā (TL;DR donāt die) featured a longevity researcher named Paul Lazarus.
Sleep on this
Back in the mists of time (July), Feedback wrote about receiving a press release that staunchly defended the environmental sustainability of avocados, only to discover that it came from the World Avocado Organisation. We concluded that these people might be right or might be wrong, but, either way, they may have been operating in an incentive structure.
We havenāt heard anything further from the avocadomongers, but we did get a series of press releases about the importance of sleep. āCanāt find a solution? Science confirms that sleeping on it really does solve problemsā announced the first. It went on to share āa fascinating new researchā explaining that āthe old advice to āsleep on itā might actually be one of the smartest problem-solving tools we haveā.
This is because the brain continues processing memories and forming new connections while we sleep, it explains, sometimes generating new insights by fusing new and old ideas. Thereās talk of āmemory consolidationā, āthe prefrontal cortex (the brainās inner critic)ā and āassociative thinkingā.
A follow-up email went further, with a dramatic and grammatical title: āNew study shows rising youth deaths and could worsen if sleep deprivation persists, experts warnā. The press release linked poor sleep to chronic health conditions. It also featured a quote from a āCertified Sleep Coachā, which may well be a real thing, but in our addled mind it generated an image of a sweaty man in a tracksuit, blowing a whistle and yelling at us to āgive me seven [hours]!ā Still, the message was clear: sleep good.
Possibly the foreshadowing at the start gave it away, but in case you hadnāt guessed, both emails were sent on behalf of Amerisleep, which is, of course, a supplier of mattresses.
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