hear a paper, see a paper, speak no paper

there is a strange thing on the arXiv today

Julianne ponder the metaness of the papers which must not be mentioned

You should read this
and this

It is a most interesting result.

But I may not comment, yet.

You can though.

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Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne is annoyed at Nature's embargo policy. It seems that somebody or another posted a paper to the arxiv while submitting it to Nature, and included a note on the arxiv submission asking people to abide by Nature's embargo. So, instead of blogging about the Incredibly…
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I can laugh though, right?

It all seems a bit silly, to be honest. Despite an obvious rivalry, wouldn't it make more sense for neither of them to submit to arXiv?

*sarcasm* Both of those papers have to be bogus. There's no way they could get that many authors to respond to their email over a five-week period, much less get them to agree on an interpretation of the data and sign off on the content of the paper. */sarcasm* Then again, scientists have been known to sign off on just about anything to get a paper in Science or Nature, so maybe it's not surprising after all.

It's also amusing how these mega author papers only devolve into an alphabetical list a dozen or so authors in. Do folks seriously claim extra credit for being the seventh of the twelve authors who might have read the manuscript unlike the twenty trailers who only found out they were on the paper when they were updating their CVs?

Leslie Sage weighed in in the comments section, I suspect that it is safe to talk about this.

"9. Leslie Sage Says:
June 10th, 2009 at 3:20 am

Anyone who posts to arxiv with a note âunder embargoâ is mis-informed. It is *not* under embargo any longer â it is legally published and in the public domain. Please inform me (astronomy editor, Nature) immediately if an author posts with a note âunder embargoâ and I will tell them that it most definitely is not under embargo.
Authors can post to arxiv at any time, at their convenience. I know our âGuide to Authorsâ is horribly written and confusing â sorry, but Iâve been unable to get it changed. Again, contact me for clarification."

For what it is worth, I would not place a good deal of confidence (or credibility) on the IR spectrum. There are strong Telluric absorption features, and I mean like 10% or less transmission, bluewards of the J band. The authors acknowledge this. The photo-z is pretty solid, and has been for a while, so this only increases the uncertainty on the redshift.

Is this really an interesting result?

Yes, it's very glamourous, and it establishes that z~8 GRBs, stars, and galaxies exist. But will anyone get quantitative science from it? Probably once there are 30 to 50 known, to make a sample with some statistical power.