Something is rotten in the state of science: How did computer generated gibberish get published?

American Thinker ^ | 02/25/2014 | Thomas Lifson

[SeekAndFind]

Evidence is accumulating that quality control is a serious issue in academic publishing, which is the key to career advancement for scientists and other scholars. In an age when appeals to "peer reviewed" "settled science" have become standard operating procedure in efforts to impose radical increases in government control over our lives, corruption in the mechanisms for reviewing  scientific publications has very real consequences for all of us.

Nature magazine tells us: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. Richard Van Noorden writes:

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.

So, how does computer-generated gibberish get published?

[E. Pluribus Unum]

An oldie but goodie from New Scientist.

Most scientific papers are probably wrong

[onedoug]

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. --Richard Feynman

[pepsionice]

Basically....just because you get published...means absolutely nothing. This is one of the fifty issues with people saying ‘no more peer review’.

There’s another issue as well. A hundred years ago....a guy who was living on some farm in Iowa could be conducting experiments, and come to note some of an amazing nature with his own personal experiments, and get noted nationally, and internationally. Today? No professor from any of the publications out there....would allow this self-taught farmer to present a paper. They simply close off the entry portal and make it impossible except for noted scientists.

[DJ MacWoW]

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[a fool in paradise]

SICENCE PING!!!

[a fool in paradise]

Looks like the Nigerian Peer Review Scienced paper scam is up!

[bigbob]

When elected representatives who take an oath don’t read the bills before them, who expects “peers” to actually read and review scientific articles?

[a fool in paradise]

There’s another issue as well. A hundred years ago....a guy who was living on some farm in Iowa could be conducting experiments, and come to note some of an amazing nature with his own personal experiments, and get noted nationally, and internationally. Today? No professor from any of the publications out there....would allow this self-taught farmer to present a paper. They simply close off the entry portal and make it impossible except for noted scientists.

Well that's ONE way to stifle dissent on the globalist warning meme!!!

[a fool in paradise]

No NEED to review the papers. It's settled science, dude!

#IDIOCRACY

[CodeToad]

Proof people do not read much of anything and if they do they know little of the subject. Ignorance is rewarded.

[JoeProBono]

[Zathras]

Richard Feynman, not a perfect person but a true Scientist.

[Jack Hammer]

“Evidence is accumulating that quality control is a serious issue in academic publishing, which is the key to career advancement for scientists and other scholars.”

Gee, you could knock me over with a feather.

[Slyfox]

When faith is divorced from reason, reason is clueless when it confronts something mysterious.

So, the human imagination goes hog wild and makes up stuff.

Reason divorced from faith grabs anything it can and then pretends it is still relevant.

[Solson]

This is hilarious! Science, which has become a very political "profession" is suddenly shocked because they haven't been policing themselves for YEARS????

Science has become just another name for "government grant" and it shows. Computer generated gibberish? How about the REST of the jibberish which is published and then "peer reviewed" and approved yet all of it, if put into an "excel spreadsheet" would result in a circular reference error.

[dfwgator]

"We must internalize the flatulation of the matter, by transmitting the effervescent of the Indonesian proximity in order to further segregate the crux of my venereal infection."

[Disambiguator]

This paper was written almost 20 years ago by a physics professor to prove that academia was full of itself. It was a hoax, but the post-modern types didn't know it until the author told them, "just kidding."

So, this is nothing new.

[SunkenCiv]

By gibberish, they must mean any “study” which promotes the AGW hoax — but those aren’t computer generated, those are produced by hoaxers who are living on the public dime. Thanks SeekAndFind.

[GOPJ]

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