More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors • Hacker News Board

Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors

#91

Post by tasogare » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 6:04 AM UTC

EthanHeilman wrote: post #80

wallace_f wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked on farms, with mechanics, and with grad students, I tend to believe grad students exaggerate their misery. While not always true, most grad students I know tend to have relatively good careers, which they are comparing grad school to. They also tend to be, relatively speaking, born into good fortune with finances and healthy families. This is not universally true, of course, but more often the case than…

This is true. I think a lot of complaining about grad school comes from four areas: 1. As you point out people who become grad students are often fortunate people. They already have a college degree. They are able to do well enough at school to be accepted into a graduate program. This usually means that they could be getting paid 2-15X more while doing far less work at an industry job. So in comparison grad school i…

Also 2': you come in grad school to work on thing A, sub-thing B with method/tool C and your advisor makes you work on thing X, sub-thing Y with tool Z. Working on something you don't really care is way harder and a bit soul crushing.

3': you can be in a situation were you are micro-managed and required to do tasks for your advisors slightly or not even related to your subject. In my lab we have two weekly meetings, and during the Friday on everyone need to report. I feel spending more time doing powerpoint than research.

Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors

#92

Post by kong75 » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 6:16 AM UTC

This phenomenon cannot be avoided as long as papers can help kids go to universities.

Maybe we can prevent parents from buying papers for their kids (this can be charged based on evidence more easily). But when the parents themselves are professors, it is just difficult to determine whether the credits are assigned appropriately.

Skills that can be accessed and learnt by the majority should be the criteria for university admission.

Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors

#93

Post by cortesoft » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 6:25 AM UTC

qrian wrote: post #32

cortesoft wrote: post #22

Who thought it was a good idea to use academic paper authorship as a selection criteria for university!? There can't be enough high school kids writing academic papers for it to be that helpful, and certainly encourages this kind of cheating.

They don't have it as a selection criteria. Some context: South Korean educational system recently had a crackdown on private academy(hakwon), and in their infinite wisdom, decided to ban every non-public educational experiences (including things like international olympiad awards) when applying for the university. Which means that the only thing you can submit in the application is SAT scores, some public education…

I mean, at that point you are straight up lying... why not just write an essay and claim all of that without actually getting your name put on a real paper.

Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors

#94

Post by tasogare » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 6:27 AM UTC

intrnttrll wrote: post #74

I guess this is just another flavor of claiming one's kid was a top rower for their high school crew team. But I guess many parents will use whatever means then can ( legal or illegal ) to give their children a leg up. Also, I find it interesting that many schools ( in the US ) will do away with SAT scores because it is unfair to disadvantaged students. But they will not get rid of their legacy admissions program whi…

The lottery system is super injust for those that put the work but aren't admitted. A lot of countries in the developed world don't have the admission problem because they fund education properly.

Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors

#95

Post by CrazyCatDog » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 6:27 AM UTC

telotortium wrote: post #69

antognini wrote: post #18

When I was in grad school our department had a meeting every morning where we could get together to discuss the latest papers which we called "Morning Coffee" (or also Astro Coffee). These discussions were pretty fruitful and regularly would inspire new papers. After writing a new paper based on one of these discussions one of the professors decided to commemorate the contribution of Morning Coffee to the paper and a…

F.D.C. Willard was a much more subtle version of this joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._D._C._Willard

This is awesome! Thank tut so much for sharing, I’ll be looking for that cat in East Lansing tomorrow

Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors

#96

Post by yabadabadoes » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 7:29 AM UTC

topspin wrote: post #67

yabadabadoes wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really looking to justify it. I think fish rots from the head and it's time to either buckle down to real rules for credit or stop doing multi-author papers in this fashion. Hollywood has a credit format.. programmers have a change by change attribution system. A serious limit to academic reform is that an institution that fixes its own rules will have trouble competing for people in many positions by having…

IOW, if they fail to tolerate fraud they'll have a smaller pool of candidates because unethical people won't be interested. This is the sort of thing that's only a problem when your own prerogatives are misguided. Must academe be merely another institution that must pursue growth at all costs? If so then is the pedestal it presumes to occupy legitimate?

I think they have very few candidates because of the ethical issues, for example nearly no one in the US wants to complete an upper degree because they don't want to be exploited.

To put it differently, poor ethics is possibly a necessity to outcompete other institutions in what should be a net zero game. Instead the game is negative, we view academia overall as worse than n years ago because of the progressively lower ethics, higher administration costs and staff to compete for the same grants, etc.

Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors

#97

Post by b0rsuk » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 7:48 AM UTC

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #28

b0rsuk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure it's a fraud, but like something from a comedy movie. Most of the time frauds are incredibly boring and time-consuming to explain. Especially financial frauds are often hidden behind layers upon layers of obfuscation. Now THAT'S what I call planning ahead! EDIT: ...and I'll gladly pay the karma cost for that reply!

Your idea of genius seems to be simplicity. I consider genius the ability to understand things others cannot. I think the question is, how long did the researchers get away with this fraudulent act compared to bankers who created the last recession? The ability to hide something for longer from more eyes is a greater sign of genius than coming up with a trick nobody bothered to verify. And of course, the really fucke…

I don't remember the exact quote, but simple people can understand when taught, smarter can learn on their own, smarter still can teach, and a genius can simplify. Simple things are often hard to make and come from deep understanding of the system. See also: "If you can't explain something to a 6-year old, you don't really understand it."

You have a point with more eyes, but we still paint a camouflage on a tank, right?

I think what bankers do is equivalent to piling layers of duct tape/javascript. It takes a lot of time to go through it and see what it actually means.

Here, Internal Revenue Service openly admits auditing rich taxpayers is too hard. https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-ea... To audit them, you have to spend more time and use more senior people, which means more money. The US institution can't muster the same amount of money and specialists as rich people can. And corporations have a monetary incentive to hire people to do 'tax optimization'.

Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors

#98

Post by krageon » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 8:19 AM UTC

tasogare wrote: post #94

intrnttrll wrote: post #74

I guess this is just another flavor of claiming one's kid was a top rower for their high school crew team. But I guess many parents will use whatever means then can ( legal or illegal ) to give their children a leg up. Also, I find it interesting that many schools ( in the US ) will do away with SAT scores because it is unfair to disadvantaged students. But they will not get rid of their legacy admissions program whi…

The lottery system is super injust for those that put the work but aren't admitted. A lot of countries in the developed world don't have the admission problem because they fund education properly.

Generally this problem is solved by having lottery buckets, with higher average grades giving access to a separate bucket (with more spots relative to the applicants). This gives people who "put the work" a higher chance to be admitted.

Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors

#99

Post by krageon » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 8:23 AM UTC

my_username_is_ wrote: post #73

suyash wrote: post #62

Similar things occurs for Patent Applications all the time in large corporations, names of managers is usually present along with the names of actual inventors.

Just because someone is a manager doesn't mean that they can't make a meaningful contribution to an invention. In my experience, the patentable ideas can come from anywhere in an organization (and I've seen it from individual contributor level up to VPs)... but the individual contributor is always left figuring out the lower-level details of how to get this idea into production.

Ideas are easy, the execution is what's hard. If someone casually thought of a cold fusion reactor while taking a leak in the morning we would not put them on a patent for cold fusion reactors either. Where the ideas come from is immaterial, who fleshes them out is not.

Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors

#100

Post by icelancer » Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 8:42 AM UTC

pen2l wrote: post #88

koolba wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s sounds like it’d be an exceptional selection criteria. It shows hard work, dedication, follow through, and especially gumption. How many weeks total were you there?

It also sounds pretty unbelievable. You can't really just walk into some research hospitals and somehow find yourself talking to the right person who will get you in as a research intern. In my experiences, sadly, virtually all research interns are basically just the PI/member-of-lab's daughter/son or a collaborator's children/relatives. One reason I can think of as to why this is is that you do really need a filter,…

It's happened at my research institution. Then again, I run a pretty unconventional one. I took a high school student in who just had the initiative to email us and make an unscheduled visit.

Science should be for us all. Not the crony system we have right now.