Latest Comments on Science and Academia
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Free reviews for commercial publishers?
So I had a little spat with an Elsevier editor who argued that reviewing for Elsevier journals should be performed for free, because Elsevier is part of the scientific community. Maybe they are part of the scientific community, but primarily they are a commercial enterprise which turns academic labor into profits for their shareholders, like…
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Comments on How to build a vibrant technology industry
Yann LeCun of AI / Meta fame put out a short piece on “how to build a vibrant technology industry” (local copy) focusing on the significance of basic research and the opportunities afforded to other countries than the U.S. right now. It is mostly about academia, how the U.S. system (still) is better than others,…
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Unethical research, beneficence, and smart experimentation
An unnamed research group at University of Zurich is in the news for unethical research: According to this article by Science and the corresponding Reddit report, a research group experimented with the use of LLMs posing as humans on a subreddit (forum). The research question was to see if and how LLMs were more successful…
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The not-so-sweet spot of software engineering research
tl;dr Avoid using qualitative research methods in technology-centered software engineering research as you might not be lucky with your reviewers Anyone following me along knows I love my 2×2 matrices. So here is another one, showing my experiences with research methodologies (qualitative or quantitative) vs. software engineering research (human-centered or technology-centered). With human-centered research I’m…
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Only 15% plagiarism! How is this not funny (academic humor)
Just keep that plagiarism to a reasonable level. (OK, I may not be fair, and it may be an English language issue as reuse of materials is generally possible across multiple publications. Still…)
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GenAI in urgent need of a DEI initiative
Apparently, we are all Linus Torvalds. Or more precisely, if your public profile is associated with open source, ChatGPT might think you should look like them. The following four prompts were entered in sequence (but output was cut short). I only prompted 2-4 after I thought this person from the first output looks vaguely familiar…