Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

huixiangvoice.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 196 posts

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#51

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

izacus wrote: post #22
Animats wrote: post #5

The paper is "3D-based video recognition acceleration by leveraging temporal locality". Haven't found a copy online. I'd expect a paper like that to come with examples and a link to Github. Why fake something like that? Either the paper is ignored, or someone implements it and finds it doesn't work.

I spent a lot of time in my career implementing and comparing different algorithms based on published papers. This might surprise you but: - Most of them don't publish any kind of code or only snippets. - Most of the algorithms are incomplete (think "we add constant M here into equation tuned by an expert"). The chosen constants aren't documented and they're tweaked before publication to maximize results for the give…

It's tragic that academics have no metric for quality in published work.

The only metrics are journal status and citation count, which is partly why we're in this mess.

There should be some form of public post-review attached to all public work, with explicit requirements for rigour and reproducibility.

Some domains - like math - do at least attempt this, more or less. But CS doesn't seem to.

Aside from motivations - now skewed towards business outcomes - the underlying problem is that paper publishing as the gold standard for disseminating new research is a 17th century process and badly needs an update.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#52

Post by tlringer »

hackerofhacker wrote: post #8

Sad story. An interesting question is if you were him, what to do? My intuitive thought is simply to quit, and start another academic pursuit (assuming you are really interesting in science and research); it could be rather hard, but that is life. LIFE never goes easy.

Things to consider:

1. When under an abuser, frequently you internalize their narrative.

2. Allegedly the professor threatened to kill him if he "ruined his reputation."

3. If he was an international student (I do not know if he was), he could quite literally lose his visa for losing his spot in the program.

4. If your advisor hates you and you haven't managed to safely switch advisors, good luck getting a letter for any future academic pursuits. (Unless you're willing to speak out about what happened, or you have someone willing to write an explanatory letter on your behalf.)

5. When you're being abused and threatened with retaliation for speaking out and so on, you aren't thinking rationally. It's really traumatic and scary, and sometimes it's hard to imagine a path out that is tolerable, and death sounds safer and easier.

We in academia need to respond by setting up better systems to recognize and safely escape abusive situations without permanent harm to one's career and mental or physical wellbeing. And also by making those systems known to students and very easy to access and use.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#53

Post by zaik »

tticvs wrote: post #44
lixtra wrote: post #39

From the suicide note: > Considering that this will have an impact on my career in the future and my reputation in the area of Computer Architecture, my future life will be worse than death and I will be totally in a dilemma. Maybe we also need to change academic culture to allow people to confess academic fraud, receive punishment and than be forgiven and continue academic careers. Currently once you started, there…

This is similar to the advantage to amnesty for corrupt dictators proposed by Mesquita & White in The Dictators Handbook. Basically giving authoritarian regimes an alternative to fighting to the death might increase overall utility.

I think the authors are Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and Alastair Smith.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#54

Post by tlringer »

tlringer wrote: post #48

Someone really, really, really needs to get this professor's current students to safety immediately. Don't forget that shortly before the student's suicide, according to a screenshot of a conversation with the student who took his own life (same Medium account, earlier article), the professor threatened to kill the student if he "ruined his reputation." His students are not safe and the focus should be on making sure…

If any one of his current students are reading this, feel free to reach out to me (use ringertalia@gmail.com), and I will help you find resources that may help you while prioritizing your safety. I recommend doing this from a non-university email because university emails are not truly private.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#55

Post by airhead969 »

ccs42762 wrote: post #3

This is really shocking and heart breaking. Really angry that University of Florida did nothing and the professor is still in the position and giving speech.

University of Florida is a sheepskin factory. It's all about the Benjamins and politics. That they don't care shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#56

Post by [deleted] »

dbos_friends wrote: post #30
ylyn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the sheer number of wrongly-used words just makes it really hard to read.

We are really sorry for these mistakes in langauge. Can you please send an email to huixiangvoice@gmail.com with details of these language mistakes so that we can try to fix it. Thanks

[deleted]

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#57

Post by throw_m239339 »

dbos_friends wrote: post #31
aerovistae wrote: post #13

The sheer amount of typos here is....challenging. And I'm not one to pick on someone who's doing their best to communicate in a second language or anything but shoot this really could've used a copy editor.

We are really sorry for these mistakes in langauge. Can you please send an email to huixiangvoice@gmail.com with details of these language mistakes so that we can try to fix it. Thanks

Non English native here, a few obvious:

Engineering hold an off-site event => held an off-site event

a classmate got suicide => a classmate committed suicide

academic integrating => academic integrity.

with a responsible manner => in a responsible manner.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#58

Post by airhead969 »

DSingularity wrote: post #40
csfighers_0 wrote: post #25

Why did the University of Florida tolerant this and kind of keep protecting that professor?

Same reason the conference allowed the professor to present the paper even though the first author committed suicide over it and left a suicide letter which blamed the misconduct and the professor —- nobody in academia gives a shit. Don’t mistake the penalty for integrity. These are the same guys that abuse vulnerable students to fuel their ego-trip (which they call careers).

PhDComics needs a special dystopian subsidiary just for these sort of departments. Like a Charlie Hebdo.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#59

Post by WWWWH »

dbos_friends wrote: post #30
ylyn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the sheer number of wrongly-used words just makes it really hard to read.

We are really sorry for these mistakes in langauge. Can you please send an email to huixiangvoice@gmail.com with details of these language mistakes so that we can try to fix it. Thanks

Sincerely, I wouldn't worry about it. This is a powerfully written, emotive, bombshell. Anyone who is genuinely worrying about apposite word choice and non-native syntax is missing the wood for the trees.

Re: A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

#60

Post by atoav »

tobmlt wrote: post #19

I want to express sympathies in a particular way: When I had a job I didn’t want, in a city i didn’t want, no kids, no wife, and prospects abounding, it was easy to speak truth to power. I did it, and I was right technically, businesswise, and morally. What a win...(?) Now, I have my dream job, my dream location, my own damn house, and my family. -Whole thing feels like a dream I might wake up from if I am not carefu…

Totally understandably so. However I think that it is also a matter of perception: If we view it as a matter of living the dream while some intrusion might endanger that dream, surely minimizing the damage done to the dream is a logical consequence. But what if the intrusion stops making your job a dream job?

I was in a similar situation where a superior demanded that I breach the trust our users had in the privacy of our service. This would not only have been illegal, but there was no way to make use of that data without revealing that we broke that trust. Additionally it made no sense, because the info my superior hoped to gain through this wouldn't have been readable from the data anyways.

My superior was a typical authotarian male: Saying no to him is something he took very personal. This was my dream job, but breaking privacy rules goes against anything I stand for (which no longer would make it my dream job), so I did what needed to be done and stood up. I explained carefully what he needs to know before making that decision and why I wouldn't do it that way, all the time making sure there is a way out for him where he can keep his face.

Guess what, I didn't need to breach that trust and the superior ultimately was thankful that I stopped him from running into this. But it left a very bitter taste in my mouth that the guy even considered this as a possibility.

Post reply on HN