Latest Comments on Science and Academia
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Using Google’s NotebookLM for summarization
Stefan Probst of Innovationsbeirat sent me a NotebookLM summary of my research methods course “Nailing Your Thesis” (NYT). The summary comes in the form of a 30 minute podcast with two hosts talking to each other, asking and answering questions, and making the content more palatable. To create the podcast, NotebookLM simple loaded my slides…
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An unpopular open source grant proposal (in German)
This is the leading motivation for a grant proposal I just filed. Venture-capital funded open source is good for society? Oh no, how dare I. The proposal will probably be rejected for heresy. Kommerzielle Open-Source-Unternehmen sind Unternehmen, welche Produkte und Dienstleistungen auf Basis einer Software bereitstellen, die zu Teilen oder auch vollständig der Welt kostenfrei…
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A plea for not writing peer reviews using generative AI
I’m looking at the first reviews we received tagged with “use of generative AI in the review.” If and how much AI was used is actually not clear, but if so, they are stirring my worst fears. There are (at least) two things wrong with the reviews we received. Hallucination One reviewer is completely wrong.…
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Template response to Elsevier review requests
Dear colleague: Thank you for considering me for providing review services to your esteemed journal. Please note, however, that I am unable to provide these services for free, because your journal is an Elsevier journal. From 2019 to 2023, German researchers were excluded from reading their own and colleagues’ research, if this research was stored…
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Creative practice for dealing with obnoxious reviewers
Also, I guess for sticking it to somebody else.
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Some associated editors should grow a spine
There, it happened again. An associate editor of a prestigious software engineering journal rejected our paper, because they wouldn’t overrule a single bogus review. In the current case, all reviewers were on plain accept, with one holdout, reviewer 2, who recommended a plain reject. (The paper was the first revised version of the original submission.)…