[HN Gopher] Tomatoes roaming the fields and canaries in the coal...
___________________________________________________________________
Tomatoes roaming the fields and canaries in the coalmine
Author : mathgenius
Score : 117 points
Date : 2025-01-19 18:23 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (deevybee.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (deevybee.blogspot.com)
| Animats wrote:
| Each instance of this sort of thing provides more ammunition for
| reducing funding for academia. Expect big cutbacks in US
| government support for research.
| rhcom2 wrote:
| > College of Software Engineering, Northeastern University,
| Shenyang 110169, China
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Yeah, all these academics that are only in it for the big
| paycheck need to be rooted out. The real problem with academia
| is that there's too much money in it. Researchers are simply
| rolling in cash, if they had to worry about where their next
| meal came from they might reconsider. PHD students famously
| have no understanding of adversity, and if we managed to fix
| how secure and lucrative academic careers were, we might make
| some real progress here. We need more adjuncts dying.
| feoren wrote:
| Can anyone offer some insight as to why that junk paper was
| submitted in the first place? Are the authors trying to farm
| reputation somehow? To what end, and does it actually work? Are
| the authors even real people? What's their goal?
| luma wrote:
| Same as every other academic: publish or perish. Collect more
| citations and note them in your next grant proposal.
|
| The modern academy is fucked, the whole system is being gamed
| and very little is being done about the mess created. The
| author here is fighting a tough battle and I wish them
| continued success.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| Well, the authors' byline says they're from Northeastern
| University, Shenyang 110169, China and Faculty of Management
| and Economics, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024,
| China. I've heard that Chinese universities sometimes have
| explicit publication quotas or offer cash bonuses for
| publications. Having never worked at a university in China, I
| cannot personally verify that though.
|
| MDPI also spams anyone it thinks might be willing to submit a
| paper or serve as an editor, and does not seem to care much
| about the quality of the submissions it receives.
| porcoda wrote:
| Publication metrics. This has been a problem for at least the
| last few decades, especially when it comes to papers from some
| parts of the world. Before the current breed of low quality
| journals, we saw this happening with conferences that were
| often branded with professional societies like IEEE, but if you
| looked carefully it would be "IEEE Section of (random place in
| Asia)" and not a conference sanctioned by IEEE itself. Those
| used to be full of garbage plagiarized papers and junk. I think
| the idea is that nobody usually reads the papers when they make
| a decision based on publication metrics, so pumping a CV with
| garbage often goes unnoticed. It's not a wise practice: in many
| places getting caught doing this would be a career ender.
| mondobe wrote:
| I hope the incoming administration takes "tomato government
| assistance" seriously. A lot of my closest tomato friends have
| fallen on hard times.
| justinclift wrote:
| > A lot of my closest tomato friends have fallen on hard times.
|
| Do you have a sauce for that? ;)
| praptak wrote:
| I'm afraid you'll need to ketchup on the news yourself.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Back in the late 2000s I had my second encounter with the FBI (my
| first was talked about in another comment I wrote earlier today)
| I was hanging out with the world's leading web spammers and in
| those circles the 'replace words with synonyms' method was known
| but considered too low quality for web spam. Works for scientific
| literature though, where standards are lower.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Some journals are serious, some journals are pay to win, some
| journals are a clickbait list, sometimes it's difficult to
| classify. Anyone in the area know the journals and know the
| research groups and know whom to thrust. If you are outside the
| area, it's a big problem. I'm completely clueless when someone
| post papers in other areas here. (Not even the name of the
| university is a safe indicator.)
|
| This reminds me that 20 years ago if you wanted to be "famous"
| you could buy 30 weekly minutes in cable tv, probably at Sunday
| 3 am in channel 247. (Or pay more to get a better spot.) So you
| can claim you were a tv star! Nobody took them seriously, and
| there were somewhat confiable metrics to count the number of
| viewers.
|
| The problem is to define what a serious journal is. It's a hard
| problem. Every year we have to evaluate applications of T.A. in
| "fair" way, and how to count the papers always almost start a
| civil war in the department.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My understanding is that this is the case with MDPI. For the
| most part the actual "journals" that publish more than one
| issue are about as good as other journals. The special issues
| are mostly trash.
| belinder wrote:
| Who would have thought that tomatoes are creatures that can be
| herded by a shepherd.
|
| Fraud is on the rise everywhere it seems. Not sure what can be
| done to stop it
| K0balt wrote:
| First, we need to make sure that tomato shepherds are properly
| trained and vetted through some kind of professional board or
| certification process.
| sva_ wrote:
| I was looking for such 'tortured phrases' on Google scholar
| recently and also found an article from MDPI:
|
| https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/4/1792
|
| > There is a requirement to assist various types of solar
| radiation and wind speed measurement and predictions, such as the
| iterative approach, _counterfeit consciousness_ method, and so
| on.
| lysace wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI
|
| > MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) is a
| publisher of open-access scientific journals.
|
| I first thought it was a criticism on the MDPI Android resource
| resolution but oh boy was I wrong.
| verdverm wrote:
| Springer has had issues for a long time. During my PhD, within
| the research field of Genetic Programming, there is an author who
| only published to Springer. This author always had the best
| results in the field. Reliably, when ever some new results would
| come out, this person would publish to Springer with better
| results. Vague methods, no reproducibility. So when I went and
| built a non-GP algorithm and improve the state-of-art by orders
| of magnitude, low and behold this person was able to improve upon
| my results. It seems as though there is no actual editorial
| activity over there at all
|
| When Docker first came out, one of my advisors and I pondered how
| we might use it to aid in the reproducibility crisis in academic
| research. I don't think anything ever came of it, certainly the
| situation seems to have deteriorated since. There are a lot of
| good researchers out there, but I fear many of them do the same
| dealing with the dumb system we find in large bureaucracies in
| the private sector
|
| In some ways it is worse. Reviewers are expected to put in free
| labor for the journals and then we have to either put our own
| work behind a paywall or "pay for the privilege" to have it be
| open access.
|
| Perhaps we should take a stab at building open-review features,
| reviewers, journals, reproducibility, and transparency around
| Arxiv. They have a survey banner on the site right now, lets
| suggest some ideas! (edit: sadly, the survey is quite limited and
| irrelevant to improving the practice of research)
| ashton314 wrote:
| > When Docker first came out, one of my advisors and I pondered
| how we might use it to aid in the reproducibility crisis in
| academic research.
|
| I'm working on my PhD in computer science, programming
| languages specifically. We're lucky that we have the easiest
| time reproducing our benchmarks and experiments. The big venues
| in my field all encourage authors to submit artifacts as docker
| containers to reproduce all the tables and figures from a
| paper. Papers that reproduce get special badges on the first
| page. I've reviewed a few artifacts and it can be really nice
| with docker.
|
| So, hopefully other fields take note of what we're doing to
| combat reproducibility. CS is fortunate that verifying some
| claim might be as simple as running a shell command.
| verdverm wrote:
| I am happy to hear this, is it because PL people are always
| ahead of the rest of the field? ;]
| ashton314 wrote:
| Haha. No, we're just lucky that we get to define our
| systems so well and our experiments are typically small.
| We're often closer to pure math than most of CS.
| sevensor wrote:
| Broadly speaking, the evolutionary computation literature is in
| a dire state. Terrible methods sections, nonsequitur results,
| endlessly tortured biological analogies. The real successes in
| the field are old at this point and a lay person would have a
| hard time finding even a competent review paper to point them
| in the right direction.
| notjoemama wrote:
| The author is from China. There are many MANY great things about
| China and the work they do. But, there is also significant fraud
| and IP theft, not to mention the policy of accelerationism the
| CCP has taken against the US. These things suggest a myriad of
| possible bad faith motivations.
| K0balt wrote:
| If the outdated 3b model running on my phone can identify the
| tomato herding excerpt as nonsense, without fancy prompting,
| maybe they should at least run papers through an automated review
| process? I can loan them my phone, as long as it gets credit for
| the review.
|
| There is no excuse for this kind of abdication of duty on the
| part of publishers. Their entire value proposition is based on
| their lack of credulity. This pretty much means they serve no
| purpose at all. They should all just put their shit in boxes, go
| home, and turn off the lights. Oh wait. Maybe that's what
| happened.
| metalman wrote:
| Academia is in trouble.Many fields(ha!) of study are no longer
| proffesional, ie: self governing and self regulating in an open,
| coherant fashion. Cosmology is dead by the hand of webb. Unearned
| tenure is rampant. And behind the scenes, the corpretisation of
| acedemic publishing is squirming in there seats, whining about
| putting adds into scientific papers.Then there is the
| weaponisation of intelectual property threatening the very idea
| of scientific publishing, sure to be rolled out for federaly
| funded university research, to protect those poor egg heads who
| just dont understand how there nobel work can be stolen and
| turned against them and the rest of our hard working people, and
| of course the new model, will give them a portion of the add
| revenue, giving them greater accedemic freedom, "sciffi" anyone?
| floren wrote:
| At least nobody can accuse you of writing/editing your comments
| with an LLM.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-01-23 23:03 UTC)