61–70 of 263 posts
No mentions of tortured phrases in the humanities and softer social sciences? For all their supposed appreciation of les belles-lettres (viz., "fine writing") those researchers sure seem to like their tortured phrasings.
"flag to clamor" for signal to noise
"individual computerized collaborator" for PDA (personal digital assistant)
"haze figuring" for cloud computing
"information stockroom" for data warehouse
"focal preparing unit" for CPU
"discourse acknowledgement" for voice recognition
"mean square blunder" for MSE (mean square error)
"arbitrary right of passage" for random access
"arbitrary timberland" for random forest
"irregular esteem" for random value
ETA:
"notoriety examination" for sentiment analysis
This is anecdotal evidence at best, but it is worth considering. I know of several individuals who were able to complete their entire Master's thesis utilizing a combination of AI generated content (GPT-3) and a paraphrasing tool. The generated text was well over 50 pages, completely bypassed all known content/plagiarism checks and was even included in the Universities "exemplary examples". To this day, it is still t…
> Master's thesis I don't doubt this at all, and I have no doubt that GPT-3 with a bit of human editing can spit out something better than the lower third of masters students at corn row colleges. Masters degrees are cash cows, which is why no one in unregulated industries cares about them. People in regulated/unionized industries also don't actually care; even educators, who at least nominally see intrinsic value in…
This is anecdotal evidence at best, but it is worth considering. I know of several individuals who were able to complete their entire Master's thesis utilizing a combination of AI generated content (GPT-3) and a paraphrasing tool. The generated text was well over 50 pages, completely bypassed all known content/plagiarism checks and was even included in the Universities "exemplary examples". To this day, it is still t…
I've heard similar stories about generated phd theses and it is even more implausible. The reason is that writing a thesis is much more than just producing a hundred pages or so of prose. Any university student can poop that out in a few weeks. The main job of a thesis is coming up with a research question, conducting an experiment or a study, and describe the results and how it fits in whatever niche of the scientific world you are working in.
I feel like only the highest profile journals can be trusted at this point. How long will it take academia to adapt?
Would that be considered good?
First thought after the opening paragraph, "these have to be mainlanders". Scrolling down, yup.
> Out of 404 papers accepted in less then 30 days after submission, 394 papers (97.5%) have authors with affiliations in (mainland) China. Out of 615 papers of which editorial processing time exceeded 40 days, 58 papers (9.5%) only have authors with affiliations in (main- land) China. This tenfold imbalance suggests a differentiated processing of papers affiliated to China characterised by shorter peer-review duration.
Some of these tortured phrases are great. My favourites: "flag to clamor" for signal to noise "individual computerized collaborator" for PDA (personal digital assistant) "haze figuring" for cloud computing "information stockroom" for data warehouse "focal preparing unit" for CPU "discourse acknowledgement" for voice recognition "mean square blunder" for MSE (mean square error) "arbitrary right of passage" for random…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Master's thesis I don't doubt this at all, and I have no doubt that GPT-3 with a bit of human editing can spit out something better than the lower third of masters students at corn row colleges. Masters degrees are cash cows, which is why no one in unregulated industries cares about them. People in regulated/unionized industries also don't actually care; even educators, who at least nominally see intrinsic value in…
How do you feel about doctorates?
Those doctorates don't require much more than taking some coursework and paying a boatload in tuition. Basically an expensive and length online masters program. Not worth the paper they're printed on, unless you're employed by the government or in a union job that mandates raises for education attainment.
As a general rule of thumb, PhDs from R01 universities that are paid for by the university through research assistantships or teaching assistantships are generally a good signal of at least minimal training in research skills.
Another good general rule of thumb is that paying for a PhD -- beyond perhaps some MD/PhDs or maybe nursing phds, stuff like that -- is always a good sign of someone who has both a meaningless degree and also poor reasoning/research skills.
But anyways, real doctorates outside of a few fields (e.g., pure math) usually come with a non-trivial publication record that speaks for itself. You don't even need to know that the person has a doctorate; you can just read their papers and a rec letter from an advisor describing the student's role in each paper.
(I'm excluding discussion of professional degrees like JDs, PharmDs, etc. which are technically doctorates but sort of their own class.)
> In our strong opinion, the root of the problems discussed in this work is the notorious publish or perish atmosphere (Garfield, 1996) affecting both authors and publishers. This leads to blind counting and fuels production of uninteresting (and even nonsensical) publi- cations.