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Daily Archives: December 27, 2022

Boost your connection by checking your Wi-Fi strength from any device

PopSci: “From gaming and online shopping to movie streaming and social media. There are a lot of reasons why you need stable Wi-Fi around your home, and getting stuck with a sluggish or unreliable connection, can become a major problem. We’re sadly not equipped to see the radio waves floating around our homes carrying that precious wireless internet access, but you can easily check how strong the signal from your router is at various locations. This can be helpful when making sure you’re getting the wireless speeds you’re paying for, but also to set up your devices in optimum locations and identify problems, like a badly positioned fish tank. You can check your wireless strength from any device, and we’ve picked the simplest options in each case. Note that Wi-Fi strength is not the same as speed, and it refers instead to how strong the radio signal is between your device and your router. A strong Wi-Fi means better download and upload speeds, but also determines factors like the stability of the signal. When reading stats, connection strength corresponds to RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) which is measured in decibel milliwatts or dBm. There will be a minus sign before the dBm figure, but don’t worry: Anything from -50 dBm or higher represents an excellent Wi-Fi signal, but if you’re down below -80 dBm, you should be experiencing problems.”

The best books of 2022 according to BookTok

Mashable: “BookTok is revolutionizing the literature world. For the past two years, books have been climbing the charts not on the backs of movie and TV deals or some miraculous PR stunt, but because users on TikTok deemed it worthy. Kristen McLean, the executive director of business development at NPD Books, told the New York… Continue Reading

CCI Open Data Portal

“Free and open access to all CCI Essential Climate Variable data products – The Open Data Portal hosts the suite of Essential Climate Variable datasets produced under the Climate Change Initiative (CCI) programme as a single point of access. It serves datasets into both the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) and the Global Earth Observation… Continue Reading

The trouble with the supply-side model of science

ProcIndian Natl Sci Acad. 2022; 88(4): 824–828. Published online 2022 Oct 31. doi: 10.1007/s43538-022-00121-1 – The trouble with the supply-side model of science – Naomi Oreskes “Many scientists operate under a mental model that I label the “supply side model of science.” It assumes that the job of scientists is to supply information that governments and… Continue Reading

AI paper mills and image generation require a co-ordinated response from academic publishers

LSE Impact Blog:  “The role of AI in the production of research papers is rapidly moving from being a futuristic vision, towards an everyday reality; a situation with significant consequences for research integrity and the detection of fraudulent research. Rebecca Lawrence and Sabina Alam argue that for publishers, collaboration and open research workflows are key… Continue Reading

Making scientific publishing easier around the world

MIT Technology News: “If you’ve been at MIT long enough, you’ve probably heard grumblings about peer-reviewed journals that are slow or uncooperative. But those problems are trivial compared to the challenges faced by researchers in other parts of the world. Researchers in developing countries have to sift through lists of less familiar international journals that… Continue Reading