Vivian Darkbloom is not a exactly a coauthor, but what an exquisitely chosen name for a character.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita
More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors
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Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Usually comes in the form of some faculty's HS-age kid helping out in the lab and getting tacked-on as an author of a paper. Cleaning glassware -> authorship. This sometimes happens to faculty w/o their knowledge, with a grad student or postdoc trying to butter-up their superior.
Reminds me of http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=562
Phdcomics are painful to read for someone who did a PhD and went through all the strips during all these years :)
Fortunately the comics did not exist at that time otherwise we would have been continuously depressed.
I will have to get the movies someday, for masochist reasons.
Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, rig…
> 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.
So basically it's not smart because it's work, and anyone that can find a lazy shortcut is a genius?
Ultimately what matters is whether or not it worked. The bankers got rich and faced no jail time, despite being under scrutiny by investors, regulators, and occasionally the public. The academics committed fraud and hopefully have their careers and reputations permanently blemished as a result, not to mention undoing all of the publications they need redacted directly as a result of the act you are calling "genius."
I really think what you call genius I call laziness, and your celebration of it represents a lot of what I think is wrong with the world today.
Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, rig…
> 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. So basically it's not smart because it's work, and anyone that can find a lazy shortcut is a genius? Ultimately what matters is whether or not it worked. The bankers got rich and faced no jail time, despite being under scrutiny by investors, regulators, and occasion…
And I think I'm amused by the trick. I admire its simplicity and far-sightedness, that's all. I mean, people have been adding their cats as co-authors just because a paper couldn't have a single author.
Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coffee, M. has published 7 different papers. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/search/q=author%3A%22Coffee%2C...
Most of the M. Coffee papers are actually by two real medical researchers with that surname, one called Megan and the other called Michelle.
I was wondering what happens when someone has the same surname and same first initial. I was hoping it has some way of telling them apart, but it seems I was hoping for too much.
Re: More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not trying to belittle the contributions of individual contributors (indeed, I'm an IC-level engineer who has worked out the details on many products that have been patented). The detail work is totally necessary to get a working product into the market.
But that doesn't mean that the detail work is always what is claimed in the patent. Sure, sometimes it's a smaller detail-level aspect of a product that is patented; but other times it's the higher-level system architecture that is new--so that's what gets patented. It all comes down to what is novel about the new product, and what is valuable enough that a company wants to pay for IP protections.
In my experience, engineering managers are almost always engineers themselves, and tend to still enjoy contributing to some engineering work when given the chance. Also, sometimes someone is given a "manager" or "director" title as a promotion simply because they don't have a well-developed technical track for advancement. "Principal" or "fellow" engineer may be a more fitting title for their role, but it's not what you'll see on their LinkedIn page. The point is, just because someone has a title that suggests they're only spending their day managing people, some can definitely contribute to patentable ideas enough that they should be listed as an inventor. As mentioned in another comment, the patent could potentially be invalidated if their contributions rose to the level of an inventor but they weren't listed on the patent.