Category: 3. Academia
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Cultural slapstick with students
Student, via email: Could you please approve these study-abroad courses for my degree? (We have a process for this that I expect students to use; direct email is not the way to go.) Me: Who sent you my way to approve these? They: I’m so sorry, I didn’t intend to bother you. I will find…
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Glucose on the web service
As a professor, I’m apparently increasingly communicating not with students, but with bots representing students. The following communication ensued after I failed a student for my research class, because they hadn’t submitted any of the required homework. Student: “I have submitted all the method exercises on time, but my final grade is fail.” Me: “There…
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Why would anyone complain about penalizing research papers that have fake citations?
Arxiv, the popular preprint server, recently decided to penalize submitters of articles that contain non-existing references, presumably hallucinated by an AI. All authors will be sent to the doghouse, not just the first author. They’ll be blocked for a year from submitting new articles and will have their whole history reviewed, among other sanctions. While…
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Research vs. engineering
As annoying and repulsive as the world’s richest man’s behavior often is, he is a great source of social media entertainment. He recently complained that making a difference between researchers and engineers is a false dichotomy and hence xAI would do away with such a distinction. Obviously, it is xAI’s decision on how to label…
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Strategic issues when hiring professors
I have always wondered what makes a good hiring strategy for professors at a computer science department. Here are my thoughts on two dimensions: Core strength or best you can get? A common strategy is to double down on your strengths and hire more of the same. For example, at my engineering faculty, there are…
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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…