[ExI] randomly generated math paper accepted for publication

[spike]

>... It does mean the traditional peer-review process, with its ridiculous delays of months and even years, is broken beyond repair.  Giulio


Thanks Giulio, your commentary made my day.  You bring in another element: not just laziness or incompetence, but possible actual corruption in the process.  I can imagine far too easily a referee-bot, set up to make vague and gentle criticisms, randomly chosen from a table in Excel or database, auto-replying to paper authors, while the actual human running the "scientific journal" vacations for a month, collecting the publication fees from the authors for the privilege of appearing in a journal no one actually reads.  

That system is not only broken beyond repair, it isn't clear exactly where all the fractures are located. 

{8-]  

spike








-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Giulio Prisco
Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2012 10:54 AM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] randomly generated math paper accepted for publication

This is super cool! I have seen other examples of randomly generated crap published in "respectable" journals, I think one example had a certain notoriety a few years ago.

Once in an AI lab we played with one of these automatic article generators, able to put together something that looks vaguely plausible at a first glance, using other writings of the same authors and a knowledge base. We thought of sending a particularly good example to a journal, I guess it would have been accepted.

Does that mean that referees don't even read the papers that they should review? No, because there are two cases where they do read them very carefully: 1) when the paper is from a competitor whose prestige they want to destroy, 2) when they want to publish similar results first. We should never forget that scientists are people like everyone else.

It does mean the the traditional peer-review process, with its ridiculous delays of months and even years, is broken beyond repair.

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 7:24 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>
>
> Not only is this hilarious, it makes me feel so much better:
>
>
>
> Mathgen paper accepted!
>
> Posted on September 14, 2012
>
> I’m pleased to announce that Mathgen has had its first 
> randomly-generated paper accepted by a  journal!
>
> ________________________________
>
> On August 3, 2012, a certain Professor Marcie Rathke of the University 
> of Southern North Dakota at Hoople submitted a very interesting 
> article to Advances in Pure Mathematics, one of the many fine journals 
> put out by Scientific Research Publishing. (Your inbox and/or spam 
> trap very likely contains useful information about their publications 
> at this very moment!) This mathematical tour de force was entitled 
> “Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and 
> Problems in Applied Formal PDE”, and I quote here its intriguing 
> abstract:
>
> Let ρ=A. Is it possible to extend isomorphisms? We show that D′ is 
> stochastically orthogonal and trivially affine. In [10], the main 
> result was the construction of p-Cardano, compactly Erdős, Weyl 
> functions. This could shed important light on a conjecture of 
> Conway-d’Alembert.
>
>
>
>
>
> http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102
>
>
>
>
>
> Here’s the paper:
>
>
>
>
> http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/mathgen-13
> 89529747.pdf
>
>
>
>
>
> So why does it make me feel better?  On occasion I have struggled 
> through some of the papers, or unsuccessfully attempted to comprehend, 
> some of the material in the more arcane publications in mathematical 
> theory, but have always come away dismayed and discouraged.  It feels 
> like a hundred lifetimes would be insufficient to understand the 
> material there.  It makes me feel dumber than a box or rocks.
>
>
>
> Now I know that even referees can be snowed by this, I realize that 
> this practice could go undetected: a real human writes a reasonable 
> abstract and the first page or two (which is usually about my 
> endurance level in trying to comprehend the papers) then let MathSpew 
> fill out the paper, which is then published in an attempt to not 
> perish.
>
>
>
> In reality, the joke is on anyone who attempts to publish in this 
> journal, paying the 500 dollar fee.  If you look at the referee’s 
> comments, it is not at all clear to me those were generated by an 
> actual human either.
>
>
>
> spike
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>

_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat