81–90 of 263 posts
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That's a completely separate issue that shouldn't be conflated.
> That's a completely separate issue How so? It seems quite related to me. Anecdotally, one would expect a pretty clear negative correlation between torturedness in the sense of this article and indicators of research quality.
I have encountered something similar to this for a submission that I reviewed for a scientific journal. I will not list any names or give much detail past those generalities, but I pointed out that the authors were misusing a particular technical term. In my review I defined the term and explained it briefly. I asked the authors to revise their submission accordingly. The paper was not bad but the authors did not kno…
I have encountered something similar to this for a submission that I reviewed for a scientific journal. I will not list any names or give much detail past those generalities, but I pointed out that the authors were misusing a particular technical term. In my review I defined the term and explained it briefly. I asked the authors to revise their submission accordingly. The paper was not bad but the authors did not kno…
Is there any way the authors could have kept your definition, and somehow credited you, even anonymously? Because rephrasing definitions is the pinnacle of wasted effort, and leads to confusion - you are asking them to say what you said, but without using your words.
In telecoms they call all the backend infrastructure “back haul” and have never read a satisfactory explanation. I’m convinced that somebody once coined “back hall” with the intention of invoking the image of service passages like what you see in the mall, it was misheard (as is often the case in Telecomms given it’s global nature) and the metaphor of the bulldozer tail stuck for ever after
Maybe that's where the term came from?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you feel about doctorates?
Depends. University of Phoenix awards doctorates that take 3-4 years (HUGE red flag -- the best and brightest phd students might get out in 4 years if everything goes perfectly; an "expected time to graduation" of anything less than 5 years is almost certainly a worthless degree). Those doctorates don't require much more than taking some coursework and paying a boatload in tuition. Basically an expensive and length o…
Due to the current market saturation of math doctorates, any pure mathematics PhD worth the paper its printed on will also probably come with a non-trivial publication record. The exceptions I can think of are high-risk high-reward areas like cutting-edge number theory (I had a friend go eight years without publishing, which, yikes, but his thesis was semi-revolutionary (or so I'm told)) or, I guess, suitably abstract category theory (though the people I follow in this area seem to publish lots of interesting papers, like the Baez school or the homotopy type theory people; your mileage may vary).
It's really too bad. One wonders why we can't simply ax the entire advisor-candidate system (with all its myriad opportunities for physical, emotional, and even sexual abuse) and certify new candidates by saying: "You're a doctor of mathematics when you get five professors to sign off on 3-5 papers you've had published."
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I enjoyed finding "counterfeit consciousness" for artificial intelligence. To me it evokes a kind of science fiction that's shown up occasionally on HN[1]. [1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
Also “haze figuring” for cloud computing. It sounds like something you'd find in 30s, 40s, 50s sci-fi for sure! Like “visiplate” (E.E. “Doc” Smith, Heinlein) for a computer display screen. (Along with ticker tape printouts and tape reels in the far future of course.)
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…
First time I've heard the term "corn row colleges". Google's not bringing up anything that looks relevant.
I suggest picking something else. Given that "cornrows" are a predominantly black hairstyle, the term reads like a racial slur.
I feel like only the highest profile journals can be trusted at this point. How long will it take academia to adapt?
My favorite counter example is "A Draft Sequence Of A Neandertal Genome". The article was accepted by both Nature and Science before it was written. The authors chose to publish in Science, because Science offered more on the side: the title page and an unlimited(!) number of "contributed" (this means unreviewed) companion papers. The article itself was about 20 pages of drivel; all the substantial content was relegated to the 200(!) pages of "Online Supplemental Material". Nobody ever read, let alone reviewed, all of that.
After that, I can't trust either Science or Nature, which offered pretty much the same crooked deal. If those two aren't "highest profile", who is?
I noticed this happening in other areas a few years ago, but with faked blogs. The titles and subjects would sound interesting, but then when you tried to read them, you'd need a specialized decoder to get through the utterly baffling word replacements. But they already got their ad revenue by the time you notice the article is complete gibberish. The first one I found was about dog illnesses. They kept referring to…
In this case, sometimes you get lucky and can actually find meaningful information between the padding. But sometimes you just read an article that takes 5 paragraphs and 500 words to say "we don't know".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you feel about doctorates?
Depends. University of Phoenix awards doctorates that take 3-4 years (HUGE red flag -- the best and brightest phd students might get out in 4 years if everything goes perfectly; an "expected time to graduation" of anything less than 5 years is almost certainly a worthless degree). Those doctorates don't require much more than taking some coursework and paying a boatload in tuition. Basically an expensive and length o…