Terminally Incoherent

I saw this little factoid on one of those “things they don’t want you to know” that are doing rounds online. It was something among the lines of:

Recent studies show that most scientists do not read all the papers they cite.

My initial reaction was “LOL, this sounds about right!” But then I decided to dig around and see if there is any merit to this bold statement. Apparently there is. In 2002 two dudes named Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury from University of Califonia actually decided to grab bunch of academic papers, and track how small typos in the bibliography propagated from paper to paper. New Scientist actually covered their research few years back:

Simkin and Roychowdhury looked at citation data for a famous 1973 paper on the structure of two-dimensional crystals. They found it had been cited in other papers 4300 times, with 196 citations containing misprints in the volume, page or year. But despite the fact that a billion different versions of erroneous reference are possible, they counted only 45. The most popular mistake appeared 78 times.

The pattern suggests that 45 scientists, who might well have read the paper, made an error when they cited it. Then 151 others copied their misprints without reading the original. So for at least 77 per cent of the 196 misprinted citations, no one read the paper.

People who never actually wrote research papers, or toiled in academia are probably shocked by this factoid. I’m not. As bad as it may sound, I can tell you that this shit happens all the time. And in most cases, this is not nearly as alarming as these people are making it. Let me explain.

Do you really think it is that important to read a 16 year old paper, if you just read 27 papers that essentially re-iterate that original research and then suggest various improvements? Especially if some of those recent papers are written with much more accessible language, and explain the problem clearer? Or if another paper frames the original in a way that pertains to your own research. Or if the original is a barely legible pseudo-english with odd grammar and sentence construction and overabundance of intricate jargon? This often happens when the original researcher is not a native english speaker.

You already know what were the findings in the original, because all those other researchers just gave you the cliff-notes version. Furthermore, your mentor or sponsor wants to sea a draft yesterday, you still have pile of other stuff to go through, and you haven’t slept in two weeks. What do you do? There is little value in tracking down the original in a situation like that. Even if you find it, you know you will not read it from cover to cover. You will just briefly skim it, and maybe check the formulas.

So you do what everyone else does in this situation. You grab another coffee, copy the citation from one of your sources, then your have a 2 second lapse of microsleep due to sleep deprivation, and you move on to bigger and better things.

To tell you the truth, I saw this pattern when I was working on my thesis. At one time I actually lined up 4 papers at the table and started highlighting. I found the same exact sentence in each of them, attributed to the same source. Naturally were minor stylistic and grammatical differences between them (because they had to work it into the flow of the paper) but the wording of the argument was nearly identical. All these people essentially copied and pasted from each other. And these were all articles from peer reviewed journals. :p

Gotta love academia.

I was under impression that almost everyone in the world knew the international radiation symbol:

After all its been only featured in hundreds of movies, books, children’s cartoons, video games and taught to millions of children in schools during the cold war era. To miss this symbol and it’s significance, you either have to be really, really dumb or be completely disconnected from the cultural aftermath of the cold war era.

But apparently countless numbers of people ignore the dreaded trefoil symbol, and remove themselves from the human gene pool. I call this natural selection - these people are obviously unfit to breed if they fail to recognize this symbol. Especially since it is rarely posted without a big “DANGER! RADIATION!” note attached next to it.

However it seems that IAEA and ISO figured that this was a problem, and so they designed a new symbol, which is so literal that even an inbred, retard with a full frontal lobotomy could figure it out:

Even if you are one of those religious nuts and you don’t believe in radiation and other science stuff, it still kinda works. With the trefoil looking like an eye in the sky, shooting down arrows, and the Jolly Eoger symbol it can be interpreted as: “God will smite you” or “you will be chased by sky pirates”. Either way, it clearly motivates you to stay away.

It is perhaps the dumbest thing I saw in years, but I guess this is what it takes to keep people from drinking heavy water these days. If this is not an indication that we are getting dumber as a species, I don’t know what is. Idiocracy, here we come.

I saw this flier pined on a bulletin board outside of the Computer Science Department at MSU the other day:

At first I thought this might be a Computer Science class on translation algorithms. That would actually be kinda cool and interesting. I never had any experience with building this kind of tools, and I would love to learn more about it. If I had to build one, I would probably look into neural networks, or use TF-IDF like approaches to do statistical analysis on tons of sample data - or at least that would be the starting point for further research. I’m pretty sure there is some impressive shit being done in that field these days.

But then I noticed how the course was labeled Linguistics 450. Translation - it’s not a and not Computer Science course. It is a non-technical course about shit that Linguistics people probably have no idea about. I really can’t figure out what is the educational value of this course. Without actually looking at the algorithms and methodologies involved in translation this course has as much value as a Discovery Chanel documentary on the same topic.

I just don’t like when non-technical people try to teach others about technology - because, oh boy, do they get it wrong. When we do research that overlaps with another field (for example bio-infomatics) we are expected to have strong background and extensive research done in that area. But when other people do research that involves technology, they just tend to make all kinds of crazy assumptions without a shade of understanding of the real issues at hand, and then just wing it.

If anyone is taking this class, let me know if it’s crap or not. I’m suspecting it will be, but I would love to be pleasantly surprised by it.

Nature is freaky! Watch this video in which ant gets infected by a fungi which takes over their brain, and grows spores out if its head:

YouTube Link

This fungus specializes in insects, but imagine if there was one that infects mammals, or even humans. Would it make us climb trees and telephone poles? How big would be the spore baring stem that would sprout from human head? Judging from the movie, it was almost the same length as the ant’s body. So would an infected human turn into a 10-11′ tall spore baring tree?

Who wants to make a movie about this? I think someone should!

A group of students from Cambridge University recently launched a small weather balloon equipped with a digital cam that reached the height of 32km and took over 800 pictures. They have published all the images in a Picassa gallery on their website. Check out some of these images - they are quite amazing:

Not bad for a student project, eh? Most of us will never experience being so high up in the air. But then again something as simple as a student made balloon rig can lift a digital camera almost to the edge of space, and bring back such breath taking pictures. Makes you think…