For example, in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and Thailand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

We did a study on predicting when a tweet would be retweeted (this paper cites us). The dominant factor is not what you write, but how many followers you have.

Basically, a famous person can write anything and it will be retweeted. An unknown person can write the same tweet and it will be ignored.

Link to paper:

Sasa Petrovic, Miles Osborne and Victor Lavrenko. RT to win! Predicting Message Propagation in Twitter. ICWSM, Barcelona, Spain. July 2011. http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/...

People here are forgetting the costs associated with flying senior (ie expensive) people around. There is an argument that if you are billing a client for three figure sums a day, you had better ensure that the person flying arrives in good shape so they can work straight from the flight. Sending people coach can be a false economy.

RT

Well, Twitter could simply stop making public the number of followers an account has. Or not even reveal that number to the user in question.

There are simple ways to stop this. Whether Twitter does this is another matter.

This is a proxy for what marketers call "reach". The more followers you have, the more people will read your posts. Except here the followers are not real and so people buying this SEO snake oil are being ripped-off.

This is the same as any other optimisation task (eg link farms for Page Rank). People will try ti and (eventually) Twitter will work-out how to clamp-down on it.

Rinse and repeat.

Why is this news?

A major problem with open-access journals is that there is no motivation for them to reject submissions, If anything, the more they publish the more money they make. Likewise, peer reviewers (at least in my field --natural language processing and machine learning) are never paid to review them. This is not a good combination. I cannot see any reason for journals nowadays. Either publish in conferences (which in some fields are competitive and very tightly reviewed) or better still publish them on arvXiv and have some kind of citation / comment system as a way to crowd-source quality control.

if you want to go to the other extreme look at SIGIR. They have extremely demanding standards for experimentation, along with an associated conservative nature. It is very hard to get something non-incremental (eg using some new dataset) published there. But I agree, experiments at ACL tend to be quite sloppy.

Being plausible and being reproducible are not sufficient and necessary conditions. Science is a community, with an expectation of what a believable result should look like. This comes from actually understanding the field, including what is written and what is not written down. It is very rare for there to be some genuinely implausible result and Good Science typically seems obvious in hindsight.

There is an academic statistical machine translation system: http://demo.statmt.org/index.php This is open source. Help improve it!

You can use this to produce spam.

that is the question

There is a vogue for such terms: an improper prior is one that does not sum to one; loss is when probability mass cannot be reached.

do I get my bonus now?