"Earlier this week (3/01/14), Nature revealed that scientific journal publishers Springer and IEEE are both removing over 120 published papers after discovering that every single one is nothing more than fancy-sounding gibberish. The fairly egregious oversight was discovered by French computer scientist Cyril Labbé, who's spent the past two years cataloguing the collection of computer-generated drivel..."
Interestingly, the entire reason the papers exist in the first place is because of an MIT-made program called SCIgen, a piece of software created in 2005 for the sole purpose of proving that conferences constantly accept nonsensical papers. And, of course, "to maximize amusement." Anyone can download it and use it, so no one is quite sure exactly who is behind the gibberish discovered thus far—and real scientists names are used as the supposed "authors."via Gizmodo
6 comments:
Interesting, towards the end Williams spoke about his friendship with disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, before he was disgraced.
Hindsight.
Did I post this before?
It's possible.
120 papers isn't very many. Pretty weak tea as far as humor.
Not surprising at all. Rigour is extremely rare now days. Nobody really checks on things despite the rampant cheating everywhere. For every thing that can be done proper, there are a dozen whys to cheat at it or do it poorly, and the payoff is usually identical to doing it right. Does anybody do their damned job? Regardless, everyone collects a check anyway. Our whole culture is one big participation trophy for people who don't even show up for the game.
Every single day there is another case of this person or that person ripping us all off, and that's just public employees, and just in California. It must be one every millisecond for the whole country.
And dammit! they forgot my fries too. This is why I love Armageddon movies.
I'm bored with the evolutionary psychology lectures.
The guy keeps talking about criteria to determine whether a behavior is adaptive. Best I can make out, the reasoning goes: Humans do something, they evolved to be able to do something, therefore, they're inclined to do something.
Oh, and by the way, did you know that the capacity for religious experience, rape and warfare are all self-perpetuating and adaptive?
No. He didn't put it that bluntly but it's pretty obvious he's trying to nail that one down in his spare time.
The sad thing is that a hell of a lot of "real" work is irreproducible. But, the author(s) advanced to go.
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