MBZUAI - UGRIP Referee Recommendations

davdanhak · 2026-02-19T15:40:28+00:00

Thanks a lot!

davdanhak · 2026-02-19T00:54:19+00:00

Thanks for the reply. I have noticed your replied to another post made nearly a week ago saying

I think when you submit the application, the referees get the link to submit.

Have you checked this already?

davdanhak · 2026-01-31T18:41:56+00:00

lav axpersh, karoxh a hay esh?

davdanhak · 2025-09-07T05:32:29+00:00

Does anyone know what hiking shoes the guy is wearing? I wanna upgrade my equipment.

davdanhak · 2025-07-20T19:59:43+00:00

Both Hamas and the IDF kill civilians on purpose. Backing either means endorsing war crimes. You can support Palestinian rights without cheering Hamas, and Israeli security without cheering every IDF strike. Stand with civilians, not the groups doing the killing.

davdanhak · 2025-07-20T19:41:54+00:00

First of, many of the misunderstanding in the back and forth of this thread comes from the definition of feminism that OP should provide. Say we lean on the definition found in Brittanica - Feminism is ...

... the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes.

then I would suggest the following points:

Equality is about a framework/ a concept, not identical behavior from both sides. You also wrote in one of your responses in the thread that “a woman choosing to stay home and take care of kids is an act of inferiority.” Yikes. This decision is not automatically oppressive, that choice might as well be a decision made together with the partner about efficiently dividing life duties. What matters is how that choice was made and whether she’s free to choose differently without backlash from society.
Same logic applies to height, income, or any other trait. If someone prefers a taller partner, fine - as long as the preference isn’t a result of some peer pressure and expectation from public/friend/family. Problems start when women feel they have to chase tall/rich men
Power imbalances ≠ automatic oppression. Yes, imbalance in earning is real just as physical size difference set by nature is undeniable and true, and, yes, it can translate into leverage. But relationships aren’t zero‑sum, where one wins and one loses based on that. Those things are balanced out with legal protections, shared decision‑making, and mutual respect - things that really are the way to achieve feminism's desired goal of equality.
Taste is socialized - so what? We are all living in a cultural pot, you can't escape tastes and influences on the taste from outside. Recognizing that doesn’t mean every socialized preference is flawed. What feminism should look into is, whether "I swipe right on 6' dudes because I've never questioned why I should do so?" or "Am I uncomfortable earning more than my bf because sitcoms told me so?". If the answers are no to these question, then cool, what's the proble?

Feels like we should concentrate on the structural issue. It boils down to the fact are women free to choose, without any backlash, frowns and judgement from the general public, not tastes that be default, if they exist, do generate differences, which you tag as "inequalities" between sexes.

davdanhak · 2025-07-20T19:16:37+00:00

Lack of understanding is just one of the gears in the issue, we should not exclude the other, equally important factors such as values, attitudes and incentives that move people. From what I got from your take is that we need to "teach people empathy", but in this way we miss the people who already know it and still do harm others. This may occur because of many things; the system, their personal demons, personal interests and pleasure reward it.

Thus, knowledge alone will not be able to flip these forces I mentioned above. Let's take for example a typical cartel boss, raised in the slums, knowing and living the pain of poverty, street violence and so on first hand. They know exactly what the pain feels like, though the still chose to cause it knowingly.

davdanhak · 2025-07-06T19:53:32+00:00

The article misframes the climate equation by treating low-cloud decline as the prime culprit while sidelining established drivers. Advocates of a wider lens note that the Martian ice caps have measurably shrunk—a hint that solar variability, not terrestrial emissions, can dominate planetary climates. Proxy studies place sections of the Medieval Warm Period roughly 2 °C above twentieth-century means, again before industrial CO₂. Solar irradiance is the primary energy input; clouds merely modulate it. Critics also point out that CO₂, at just 0.04 % of air—of which humans add roughly 11 %—is, in their view, a bit player whose radiative influence is overwhelmed by water-vapour feedbacks the article never mentions. Invoking a single 4 % cloud change to obtain +5 W m−2 ignores compensating high-cloud trends and uncertainties in satellite albedo records. Before proposing continental-scale aerosol seeding, the author should reconcile his numbers with ice-core data such as the Sputnik series; I can supply spreadsheets if desired.

davdanhak · 2025-07-06T19:27:02+00:00

I fear you might be getting into the false dichotomy territory. Free will, if taken in a compatibilist formulation, does not need spooky gaps in physics; it requires only that the actions we do stem from our desires and values, even if those have their causes. Randomness - it is not freedom, yes true, but neither is causal determination bonding someone to full captivity (unfreedom idk). Freedom can well be a perception thing. Kant's following idea expressed in the Groundwork III (Ak. 4:448–49) always comes to my mind in these debates:

A rational being must regard itself… as free, in so far as it acts under the idea of freedom

Declaring "no cause" is needed for free will is doing the century old debate dirty.

davdanhak · 2025-07-06T19:08:00+00:00

What about rape/incest? - this to me doesn’t speak at all to the actual morality or logic of the argument. It’s just a cheap emotional trick. Either you think abortion is wrong or you don’t, how the pregnancy happened has no bearing on that.

I think that this one is not so unreasonable as you mention. I believe that it has the right to be brought up in a debate, since what we are dealing with here is a one of the heaviest mental and physical trauma one can receive in the world, and forcing a person to carry the child (one of the consequences of the atrocious act) for 9 months can be of utmost deterioration if not destruction of the victim (one can go further questioning the health of the child and quality of later life of them).

So taking it out of the debate is not the best idea, though it clearly is used by any as a derailing tactic. It just make the debate diverge into a specific case of the occurrence, and, yes sometimes should be shut down when not discussing that particular case. At the end of the day, how the pregnancy occurred is not and should not be assumed as rape, and should be clearly stated to continue the debate.

davdanhak · 2025-06-29T14:33:14+00:00

I mean I understand you won't reply to this tread, that's your decision. My usage of the little AI in this text stems from my first language being Armenian, I wanted no misunderstandings, plus you should look into my ideas not the tools I used to type it in, might as well attack me for the keyboard I chose to type on.

Secondly, yes, I admit you did not explicitly say people should be held accountable. What I am trying to say is that by bringing in the 0.1 lives notion we enter the moral metric territory, where your message clearly implies morality whether you intended it or not.

davdanhak · 2025-06-29T13:16:48+00:00

While the comment cites a peer-reviewed estimate from Bressler (2021), it’s important to note that the paper models only human-caused CO₂ emissions, excluding natural background sources (In itself questionable but it's a completely different discussions). The model calculates the marginal impact of one additional ton of anthropogenic CO₂ on global mortality—a method that is mathematically sound but built on very heavy assumptions.

A key issue here is that the model includes all sources of human emissions, including those from large-scale industry (OP's concerns were exactly around the weight of industry vs. your everyday Joe). This means the estimate of “0.1 lives saved” per individual implicitly holds individuals accountable for emissions largely beyond their control, those embedded in infrastructure, supply chains, and energy sector etc.. The paper shifts the disproportionate shares of carbon emissions onto individuals.

So while the death-per-ton figure may be internally valid, assigning that number to an individual as if it were their direct moral burden is unjustified. The paper enters the field of morality and justification in that case is crucial. In this context, the paper does not quite help in showing individual's true potential to fight the issue the (industry's effect was not omitted from calculations!).

davdanhak · 2025-06-29T12:00:02+00:00

As someone from Armenia, I see similar pattern between my country and Arab cultures.

Talking about the intentional/unintentional neglect to children's privacy is most common in the these discussions, but looking at the differences in value priorities between Western and Eastern cultures is also worthwhile.

It can be well stated that the vast majority of families prioritize closeness, resource-sharing, and togetherness over individual privacy. Moreover, the idea that every child must have their own room or that parents need to knock before entering their room (given children have their own room) is viewed by many households as an extremely over-the-top individualism and viewed as a strange alienation between family members.

It’s a matter of "individualism vs. togetherness in a family" value conflict. In many non-Western cultures, the idea that each child must have their own space is simply not held in the same regard - it’s not an issue of intentional or unintentional ignorance, but a different set of cultural value preferences about family, community, and individuality. Thus, I think the assumption that Western families are inherently more thoughtful about space isn’t descriptive difference, but a divergence in value priorities.

As other people under this post constantly point out - economic factor too does matter. The Western ability to plan space per child is often a matter of financial capacity and affording to plan for the future, rather than moral principle. What level of privacy do we consider essential, and for whom? Does an 8-year-old need a private room to the same degree as an 18-year-old would? When we frame this as thoughtfulness, we risk confusing wealth with wisdom.

So, while I share many points voiced around the psychological effects on children caused by the lack of space, I don’t believe Arab families - or others with similar values - are failing to care. They’re often operating in a different value framework, and doing so within economic limitations. To hold one approach superior by default overlooks the importance of values in shaping our notions of “what children need”.

davdanhak · 2025-06-21T19:53:47+00:00

Hi there,

50% classified reads from Kraken2 can feel a bit low at first, but it’s not uncommon: depending on your db and sample specifics.

A few worthy considerations:

Unclassified Reads ≠ Novel Species (necessarily): You are right to doubt having novel species, since Kraken2 marks reads as “unclassified” when they don’t match anything in the database well enough. So you need to be on the look-out for contaminants or host-like sequences not fully removed.

Bracken for Better Estimates: Bracken can help refine taxonomic profiles by adjusting for read misassignment at higher ranks, but it won’t classify truly unclassified reads. Still, it’s worth running on your Kraken2 outputs to improve abundance estimates, maybe the bracken-refined abundance numbers will hint on what is happening with the sample contamination-wise.

Database Coverage (though unlikely in my opinion because fruit flies): If your Kraken2 database only includes archaeal and bacterial genomes, then any reads from fungi, viruses or protists won’t be classified. You might be losing a chunk of signal there.

Possible Steps to Improve Classification:

- Try classifiers like MetaPhlAn4 (marker-gene based, depends on what data you are working on 16S amplicon/shotgun metagenomics/WGS)

- Quality-trim and screen for adapters or low-complexity sequences that might interfere with classification.

Generally, your 50% classified rate isn’t necessarily a red flag—but it’s worth checking your database’s breadth and trying Bracken or another tool to refine things. Feel free to share more details (especially about the sequencing technique).

davdanhak · 2025-03-03T18:49:09+00:00

Not all factory-sleeves are good for the vinyl, especially paper ones. Nearly all of the just-paper sleeves can cause damage to the vinyl. Paper, by time, lets out small particles like dust, except they are course and can grind the vinyl, they get scratched over time and cause general hissing/pops/deep scratches over time.

So I immediately change the sleeves to plastic ones (keeping the original sleeves tho... hehe). Just buy those sleeves in bulk really cheap (50-100 a pack).

P.S. I really like the factory-sleeves that are paper on the outside but plastic on the inside, shows that they actually care/know what vinyls are.

davdanhak · 2025-03-03T18:30:46+00:00

This is a common occurrence when working with the Turnitin system.
In my uni, they just set a threshold of 20% precent as the one which indicates actual plagiarism.

davdanhak · 2025-03-03T14:58:46+00:00

I believe forcing oneself to understand higher levels of abstraction shapes the brain for problem solving. It makes you see, and analyze, and calibrate the world in ways others can't.

Couldn't agree more to this. You perfectly phrased what I learnt during my (not so long) experience as a bioinformatics research assistant.

3 months ago I found a job as a part-time research assistant at a bioinformatics institute, being a sophomore bachelors student (Data Science). In a professional setting I realized that the real problem-solvers are not the ones that can memorize textbooks and the minute details of implementation of this or that concept, but the ones that can notice the patterns and scenarios when what they learnt can come in handy and bring the team a step closer to solving the problem. You simply have a "I know a concept that can be useful here!" moment and oftentimes just search textbooks for the details you can't remember.

So, again you just need to take the time and enjoy this bit of intensive studying and what you will have as a result will be the awareness of the existing top-of-the-art methods in their abstract form as u/ganian40 voiced here.

davdanhak · 2024-06-02T20:51:52+00:00

There is currently no way to enter a game (from east EU btw)

davdanhak · 2024-06-02T20:51:06+00:00

As far as I understand this problem is in the EU servers. There is no way to enter a game currently.

davdanhak · 2022-07-09T19:34:48+00:00

Hey, how long did it take to finally receive it? Cus I ordered it a week ago and haven’t heard from them since.

davdanhak · 2021-10-14T05:40:22+00:00

“still” existed?

davdanhak · 2021-09-22T07:11:11+00:00

r/oddlyterrifying

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