Got this email earlier and I’m still upset about it. Some unnamed “team from #Northwestern, #Stanford & #Cornell” fed our preprint through their “#AI" to generate "suggestions" on how we could improve it.
This feels like some really shit #HCI study that seems to think asking for consent is optional. And like one that wants to spin out into an even shittier start-up in the future (hence not giving any names of team members)?
@gedankenstuecke@academicchatter@hci Researchers from Northwestern University also found an increasing number of abstracts in scientific papers which are generated by AI or with its support: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.07016
Funny coincidence.
@AlexSanterne@academicchatter I don’t think scientists have changed because people haven’t changed, and man is the history of science littered with petty shit
Can #UK#academics explain these spammy emails from publication agencies who want to feature my academic articles? I've been told this this a scam, but I'm not sure how -- do they charge money to do this? Is this related to the dreaded #REF?
As far as I'm concerned, if some publication wants to write a feature based on one of my publications... go for it. You don't need to contact me about it.
I'm invited to be jury of a #PhD thesis in #Porto 🇵🇹 which defence could be attended either in person or remotely. I find a decent route by #train from #Marseille 🇫🇷 , via #Madrid 🇪🇸 for a total of 4 trains to reach the destination and about 2 days in the train / stations, both ways for 2 days in Porto.
Regardless of the cost,, and considering the potentiel benefit in terms of exemplarity, would you attend in person ?
@AlexSanterne
I think you know the answer already. 😃
And I'm pretty sure it will be also a better experience for the candidate, in particular if you have the chance to talk to him/her in person before the defence. @jknodlseder@academicchatter
He complained about the high price of parking. He disputed the President's numbers in a "cordial" but "tense" public meeting on the topic. He turned over the research documenting his numbers. Two and a half weeks later, the provost fired him, explaining that Tarleton State University would not "tolerate intolerable behavior."
@rspfau@vfrmedia@gemlog@petersuber@academicchatter
Thanks for this link. People who sign up for leadership positions in higher ed and have not the smallest tolerance for dissent or discomfort are truly baffling to me. I hope this (by all accounts) fine teacher lands well somewhere else.
Nothing says "We care about accessibility and equity for disabled people in STEM like 'Go to Google and let their AI handle it"" #Ableism#DisabledAndSTEM
@ml and the point is not that it is a "zero effort" solution or "not done by human professionals", the point is that AI-generated captions are not good enough in quality to provide sufficient accessibility, and therefore using AI as only accessibility measure is a fucking poor excuse.
@RonaldVisser@academicchatter totally agree that it is a problem that being unlucky to end up in a toxic department does not make the existence of the toxic department OK.
by the way, now that I work in Germany I learned that in Germany this department was widely known as being toxic at that time already, so there were also mentoring issues in the sense that she was not warned what she was getting into. Very sad.
@freyablekman@academicchatter
So sad! I know all too well that some people can create toxic environments and that you are not always warned beforehand... I think that she correctly identifies some causes on her video. I hope the future of academia will be more open and more supportive and less a competitive rat race...
Yesterday I finished writing a research paper that I've been working on (as time permitted) for about the last 9 months or so.
The only thing left to do is find a journal or conference to send it to.
Is it better to submit it to a journal, or should I wait until next year for a conference? There's follow-up work that I plan to do, but the paper is already pretty condensed, so I'm not sure if expanding it before submitting somewhere makes sense.
@floe@academicchatter Yeah, it's CS - geometry specifically. I should probably have included that... :)
I just missed the deadline for the CGVC conference (https://cgvc.org.uk), and was considering IEEE Access as the journal. If the dates worked for me then I'd look at GRAPP (https://grapp.scitevents.org/).
Unfortunately I've not published many papers, so I don't have a good feel for selecting the right "level" of conference/journal.
"ChatGPT Edu, powered by GPT-4o, is designed for universities to responsibly integrate AI into academic and campus operations. This advanced AI tool supports text and vision reasoning, data analysis, and offers enterprise-level security."
Based on everything we know about AI, I am sure nothing could possibly go wrong with this new tool to integrate it into our #teaching and campus operations more broadly.
/Obvious sarcasm
Let me count some ways that Academia Edu has declined in its zeal to monetize. The latest is that no URLs in articles that I've seen are active links anymore!
Before, non-members could scroll down to read articles, but now they have to provide personal info.
As a free member I'm usually hit with a pop-up on arrival. They flatter users by citing a large but false number of mentions to get them to become paying members. One Indian professor was boasting on FB thousands of citations, but I found only 27 for him on Google Scholar. When I pointed that out, he blocked me.
There were Academia Letters and then journals, first free and then pay to publish (like $2,000).
Academia Edu can amplify our works if they want, with nearly 300 million users signed up. That's the attraction to us, but their temptation to exploit. Comments?
After many criticisms of Academia Edu, I didn't have space to discuss alternative research repositories like ResearchGate, or open access repositories like Knowledge Commons (which also maintains a sizeable Mastodon instance) -- details under: https://hcommons.social/@SteveMcCarty/112635424860940626
ResearchGate purports to be more exclusive but still allows non-members to scroll down to read in-text articles. However, they might also be tempted toward #enshittification (in Cory Doctorow's colorful parlance). To an extent we have to hold our nose ;-) to gain the network effects of Academia Edu and ResearchGate, but if they become too unethical or difficult to reach readers, we can move our works and links to an open access repository like Knowledge Commons. Most members use it additionally for blogging, but I recommend it as a free Website host as well, such as my central Website on Japan, online education, bilingualism, and the academic life: https://japanned.hcommons.org
Donella Meadows book Thinking in Systems is a good (but dated) introduction to feedback modeling and systems design in ecology. I've always held-out hope that Agent-Based stimulative modeling would advance sufficiently to simulate the behavior of actors governed by these broad systems patterns. And in a way that could include spatial processes in the modeling. Our computers are big enough now.🙂
Me: I have no idea how to fit this much stuff in the short amount of time I have before summer holidays. So many loose ends to tie up in the next 3 weeks.
Also me: Accepts invitation to write a book chapter to be submitted this time next year because then I'll surely have time.
@renordquist@academicchatter yes, that's the way it is in academia. I still have some deadlines before the holidays, and every year I say to myself: next year, you will do it differently...
@petersuber@academicchatter It's a bit strange that most of the Nature commentary goes out of its way to quote other Chinese scientists who claim things are not that bad, actually.