To some degree. When Wiley (old, big publisher) bought Hindawi (young, fast-growing upstart Open Access publisher), they quickly discovered that the entire publishing house was infiltrated by paper mills. They retracted thousands of papers, and closed many journals. However, some of their own journals are also heavily infiltrated by paper mills, and those had far fewer retractions.

Conversely, another young upstart, MDPI, has very few retractions even though they also have a high number of paper mill productions, including some that they know about very well and have "investigated".

Wiley is obviously a much more serious publisher than MDPI, albeit more hesitant to clean their old house than the newer that they bought.

Computer science, by the way, has a far higher rate of retractions for academic misconduct than other disciplines, and it's not because it's so easily replicated, it's because it's rampant with fraud. I'll give you an example of ridiculous verbiage that somehow stays in the academic literature thanks to the non-efforts of IEEE and an academic community that will publish anything but read nothing. You don't need a replication study to see that this isn't a serious academic work. It's most likely a patchwork of plagiarised text that's been fed through some paraphrasing filters to avoid automatic detection.

But yeah, psychology is surely not serious and computer science is very smart.

The title of the story is "GPT-Fabricated Scientific Papers Found on Google Scholar by Misinformation Researchers", you blithering imbecile. It's the starting point of the discussion.

Entirely untrue. The people dealing in fabricated papers are professionals. You can't just submit a generated paper to a journal, not even one published by MDPI, Frontiers or IEEE, and expect to have it published. You need to have friendly peer reviewers, i.e. a network of other crooks, preferably ones with credible credentials. And of course, these people will want something in return, perhaps citations to their own rubbish papers as much as money. And citations get you promoted, or a new job.

There are plenty of scam artists working as full professors, and they can do this because:
1) Publish and perish means no one has time to actually read their work, as they are too busy writing.
2) As productive and highly-cited researchers, they are particularly valuable to their institutions (as long as no one reads their work).
3) Reporting them is entirely ineffective. Publishers will ignore you, also see 2).

Oh, and did I mention that these guys cite each other? That means that a journal with a medium to strong papermill infestation will have a higher impact factor than one with editorial oversight. For instance, the most highly cited paper in IEEE Sensors Journal the last few years is obviously part of such a citation cartel. Removing the papermill presence would ruin their "impact" and hurt their credibility.

There is the Retraction Watch Database, which is directly supported by reference managers Zotero and EndNote. Whenever a reference in your library is retracted and shows up in the database (it's not complete), the reference manager notifies you.

If you're a researcher and aren't using a reference manager, you're probably not very good at your job.

Not really. Not at all, actually. There are still plenty of subscription journals, and many of them have the same problem with paper mills as open access journals have. They are also often as unwilling to fix their problems.

The problem is publish or perish – you need to publish to further your career, no matter how weak your findings are. Your quality as a researcher is usually evaluated on output, both in volume and in the supposed quality of the journals you publish in (ranked by the rate of citations to the papers published in the journals), and in some cases also on how many citations your publications have attained.

Paper mills take care of having your name put on publications. Then they publish other works citing your paper. Now you're a cited author! And also, the journal gets more citations, elevating it in the rankings (yes, this is how fucked things are). Some papers are pure gibberish: https://doi.org/10.3390/s22166...

Well you're not, at 12 cores loaded you're thermally limited and tests show no difference to speak of at all. You get a slight boost to single threaded performance but overall this is the dullest upgrade in ages and creating a whole new XT line for it is silly. Should have just called it 3910X, 3810X and 3610X, at least then they'd get points for honesty.

Jurisdiction is not the only kind of power. China has repeatedly shown that they don't care if you're an American speaking out in America, if you're badmouthing China they will do what they can to make your life miserable. Of course they'll wrap their demands in weasel words and so will the corporate chain and your business partners but the real message is "STFU or we'll lose our business with China". Like any negotiations will be mysteriously stuck in a quagmire that'll equally mysteriously resolve itself once you're relieved of your position or the partnership is terminated.

To be honest Taiwan's problem is that the had delusions of grandeur, in 1971 when they lost their seat on the UN Security Council they themselves strongly refused any division of China and the creation of an independent Taiwan. Instead they forced it into a vote of who was the "legitimate" owner of China's seat and long story short they lost. If they wanted independence back then, they probably would have gotten it. Their problem now is that China has flipped the script on them, because they were pouting over the loss of the mainland China they never cut their losses and got their independence so now China wants them to answer to Beijing.

They don't realistically have much political or public support in Taiwan though. China is pressuring every other nation to recognize China's claim to Taiwan if they want to have relations with China, but that only makes it a hostile territory they could occupy at great cost - and probably not without an actual shooting war with an army supplied by the US military. My guess is they're eyeing the situation in Hong Kong waiting for the right moment to say status quo is no longer an option, it's either independence or submission and we choose independence. They must see that there's no future in trying to appease China.

Write no, compile yes. He's pulling code from all the subsystem maintainers (lieutenants) to create the master branch. And they again are mostly pulling other people's patches. They're supposed to make sure it's clean and tested before it reaches Linus but that's not always what happens. If it breaks or he finds bad code it goes back down the chain of command again so they can fix their code again and resubmit.

In rocket science I'd say 10+ launches is well into established already. The Falcon Heavy got their military certification after just three launches. The SLS is still planning to launch crew on their second flight. I suspect your sig is very relevant here:

My guess is one faulty part or installation brought the mission down. This was not a violent failure, the rocket just lost engine power and stopped. Which means it's probably the QA department and not the design department that needs to get to work.

Funny, I wish I had more of the first bit. Not my fuck-ups but the best times are those where I've been living in the moment and let go of all the rational, dull downers like that this junk food isn't good for me or that partying this hard will give me a hangover tomorrow or that this vacation is burning a hole in my wallet. Like I know that I'm overall fairly rational and got my shit in order, can't I get a break when I have a few excesses without that nagging party pooper in the back of my head. It's okay to have a plan for where you want to be five years from now but it's also important to accumulate happy memories on the way.

Bad employees also tend to think they're irreplaceable and they're as common as bad managers. The difference is that bad employees are the manager's problem, a bad manager is your problem. Unless you become the manager, then you see the other side of that equation. I don't mind taking on a tech lead position but if I went into middle management I'd probably end up strangling someone. I have the feeling I'd be one of those technically bright but horribly micromanaging bosses who'd rather be doing my underlings job than doing mine. Which would be mostly herding cats, running interference and communicating upwards, downwards and sideways in the hierarchy.

Intel drank that kool-aid and decided to make a CPU architecture where practically everything was exposed to the compiler, it's called IA-64 aka Itanium. They soon found out that a design grounded in reality beats ivory tower theory. ARM is also CISC with micro-ops these days, some instruction complexity is best left hidden. Forcing the compiler to deliver micro-instructions only hurts performance.

The reason I use whitelist and blacklist is that they're not the same as what's allowed/denied. If you implement say a spam filter and somebody wonders why something does or doesn't get through then "it's whitelisted" or "it's blacklisted" are complete explanations that someone has overridden the regular spam filter that'll also allow and deny emails. If the rules are exhaustive there's no reason not to be more direct. I have no strong opinion about master and slave, I tend to use manager/worker anyway since that's been the most relevant structure for me. But as long as people don't go crazy on the euphemisms we'll be fine. Rudolph/reindeer anyone?

Ads are quite effective for the things you know relatively little about and in general we don't have the time or interest to research most things in our life. For these types of things I often don't even consider alternatives, it's like I have a problem and product X will solve that problem so I buy X and the problem is solved. Now maybe product Y or Z was better or cheaper, but I just reached for the first possible solution. That way I can get on with the rest of my life so I consider this rational even if it's sub-optimal.

What's the first thing that pops into your mind? It's a brand that you've seen a lot, with a memorable catchphrase or jingle. We like to tell ourselves that we don't care about the ads, but the practical reality is that we'd never bother seeking out their store on our own. If they didn't advertise they wouldn't be on the radar. At the grocery store a big poster with an introductory offer can be the difference between "meh, I'll buy the usual" and "okay, I'll give it go... doesn't cost me much to try". Notice the lack of enthusiasm, if I had that I'd buy it anyway. Ads is limping it in.