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posted by janrinok on Monday March 03 2014, @09:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the twas-brillig-and-the-slithy-toves dept.

AnonTechie writes:

"The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbe of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbe, say that they are now removing the papers.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by theluggage on Monday March 03 2014, @09:50PM

    by theluggage (1797) on Monday March 03 2014, @09:50PM (#10258)

    Wow, exciting moment. This page is required to post a comment. Unfortunately, that's fine, but not to me the gate of the designers need more. No, it's elit free, a quiver organization.

    It's a great advantage of the course , or chocolate consumption and enhanced. This page is required to post a comment. Lake visitors live performances or organizational official website of the author of the pain in my throat. It's a great advantage of the course , or chocolate consumption and enhanced. I really had a job . Apple patients than playing the game of football betting. Welcome to Oklahoma but no drink driving . Chinese cultural beliefs.

    It's a soft , there is no advantage of the grief, but it was the ferry around the world, a lot of the development on the fringe of hatred nor the meals. How to Choose protein, development and of course advantages, to create a macro to improve the budget , in order to warm-up the mass of the option might be a bit tight . Unfortunately, that's fine, but not to me the gate of the designers need more . I really had a job . Apple patients than playing the game of football betting . How to Choose protein, development and of course advantages , to create a macro to improve the budget , in order to warm-up the mass of the option might be a bit tight.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Troll=1, Insightful=1, Funny=3, Total=5
    Extra 'Funny' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 3) by gishzida on Monday March 03 2014, @10:05PM

    by gishzida (2870) on Monday March 03 2014, @10:05PM (#10275) Journal

    I had nothing to do with the parent post but everything to do with this: http://markovswisdom.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

    That said, for all the talk of "the [coming real soon now, the new improved] A.I. singularity" computers are still stupid. How will we know they are smart? When they learn where to buy their term papers.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by dotdotdot on Monday March 03 2014, @10:13PM

      by dotdotdot (858) on Monday March 03 2014, @10:13PM (#10282)

      You can't fool me. There is no way a computer could come up with this ...

      "Always set aside a cat."

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by gishzida on Monday March 03 2014, @10:59PM

        by gishzida (2870) on Monday March 03 2014, @10:59PM (#10308) Journal
        The quote is the result of a Travesty generator powered by a Markov Chain [First the travesty Markov and then mixed into a multi channel travesty stream from other source texts.

        The input text steams that were used for that particular output run were:

        "the book of reminders" [an as yet unpublished book of quotations gleaned from my years of endeavors at the advanced school of hard knocks] and a stream of Lewis Carroll's writings...

        But among the quotes in the book of reminders is:

        "Magic is the ability to suspend our disbelief: Play with a cat. Watch a child. Look in the Mirror. Magic is REAL."

        And a quote about spices: "Always set aside a portion of you income for spices. Spices can make even the dullest life liveable."

        Hench the Markov Wisdom of "Always set aside a cat" is likely to be true.

        Thanks for reading.
    • (Score: 1) by theluggage on Tuesday March 04 2014, @12:10AM

      by theluggage (1797) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @12:10AM (#10361)

      I had nothing to do with the parent post but everything to do with this: http://markovswisdom.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

      Wow - that's sophisticated.

      I just plugged the output of a "lorem ipsum" utility [littleipsum.com] into Google Translate. And I got modded +5! so just think what could be achieved with a really sophisticated posting generator.

      Come to think of it... hello...? is there actually anybody out there?

      • (Score: 1) by gishzida on Tuesday March 04 2014, @12:54AM

        by gishzida (2870) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @12:54AM (#10376) Journal

        Who do you think is doing the moderation? It's what you get for taking one of those funny colored capsules they talk about in the movies. You never know where you'll wake up.

        • (Score: 1) by Taibhsear on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:22PM

          by Taibhsear (1464) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:22PM (#10834)

          Who do you think is doing the moderation? It's what you get for taking one of those funny colored capsules they talk about in the movies. You never know where you'll wake up.

          Usually, the local drunk tank.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday March 03 2014, @10:15PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Monday March 03 2014, @10:15PM (#10283) Homepage

    Hahah, nice.

    Your post reads a lot like Atlanta Nights, [wikipedia.org] a collaborative effort written by a bunch of pissed-off Sci-Fi writers trolling a publishing house because it hosted articles basically saying that Sci-fi is crap and Sci-fi writers are a bunch of illiterate neckbeards. From the article:

    " The distinctive flaws of Atlanta Nights include nonidentical chapters written by two different authors from the same segment of outline (13 and 15), a missing chapter (21), two chapters that are word-for-word identical to each other (4 and 17), two different chapters with the same chapter number (12 and 12), and a chapter "written" by a computer program that generated random text based on patterns found in the previous chapters (34).

    After PublishAmerica accepted the manuscript for publication, the hoax was revealed by the authors. I have this book, and man, is it hilariously terrible -- it's just like a Slashdot discussion turned into a novel, with misused apostrophes and missing closing-quotes, loaded with the kind of dumb sayings you'd expect to hear from Philip J. Fry. From the first page in the opening chapter:

    Pain. Whispering voices. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain.
    Need pee--new pain--what are they sticking in me? . . .
    Sleep.
    Pain.
    Whispering voices.
    "As you know, Nurse Eastman, the government spooks controlling this hospital
    will not permit me to give this patient the care I think he needs."
    "Yes, doctor." The voice was breathy, sweet, so sweet and sexy..."

    Etc.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by etherscythe on Tuesday March 04 2014, @12:52AM

      by etherscythe (937) on Tuesday March 04 2014, @12:52AM (#10374) Journal

      Slightly more to the point (I sat in on a presentation by several Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America [sfwa.org] members on this topic), the PublishAmerica company was basically recruiting authors with promises of advertising, editing, and other support which they completely failed to provide after they received their money. When authors would complain, they would respond in derogatory fashion, at which point that book concept was born. It showed up the highly-touted "publication standards" of the company in pretty epic fashion.

      --
      "Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @03:09AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @03:09AM (#10417)

        A solution would be for each peer reviewer to sign their name to the publication that they peer reviewed it. If we see that a peer reviewer signs off on way more articles than they can possibly read and reasonably understand, analyze, scrutinize, criticize, and investigate then we know something is suspicious. Peer reviewers should only be permitted to sign off on a limited, reasonable, number of publications a year in opposed to simply rubber stamping 20 a week (made up number) that they couldn't have possibly even gone through (yet alone thoroughly) if you consider all their other routine daily activities that they must also spend time doing (eating, sleeping, do they have another job and how much time is spent there, how much time do they allot to peer reviewing and is it on site monitored peer reviewing, where their time can be audited, or is it at home reviewing, etc..).

        • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @03:18AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @03:18AM (#10421)

          (same author, sorry for so many submissions). Another possible solution could be to somehow require the person peer reviewing the document to answer basic questions and to write those questions down.

          Summarize the article. State its conclusions. Does the article prescribe anything? If so, what? How was this conclusion arrived at? What was the experiment done and what is the procedure? What is the uncertainty? What measurements were made and how were they made?

          I'm sure others can think of more difficult questions.

          If they can't even be bothered to answer some basic questions then they don't deserve to be selected to peer review anything.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @03:21AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @03:21AM (#10422)

            (errrr ... write those answers down. They don't get to choose the questions).

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @02:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @02:59AM (#10414)

    I nominate you for a noble prize!!!

    (hey, Obama got one ...)