Incredibly Accurate

me normally: i'm not personally a huge fan of modern art

me around right wingers: I love modern art sooooo much and I think there should be litter boxes in schools also

A recent cartoon for New Scientist

Since we're all talking about plagiarism now, I'd like to share this video which came out last year about a paper accepted at the CVPR 2022:

For the people not in the know, the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference is the biggest conference in computer science. Last year, in 2022, the paper featured in the video got accepted. A few days later, this video was posted. The first author, a PhD student, apologized and the paper was retracted and removed from the proceedings. Hilariously, the first reaction of the co-authors, including a professor at the Seoul National University, was to say that they had nothing to do with it.

My point here is that scientific papers are not rigorously checked for plagiarism, and a background in academia tells you absolutely nothing about whether or not someone will be diligent in avoiding plagiarism. The biggest difference is that there are consequences if you're caught.

I also don't want people to be too harsh on the first author of this paper, or to think the situation is equivalent to the whole Somerton debacle. For starters, you don't get paid for publishing papers, you (or more commonly your university) pay the publishers. But the phrase publish or perish exists for a reason, and everyone in the field wants to get published in the CVPR, because it's supposed to show that you're great at research. Additionally, the number of papers and the prestige of the venues they're published in criteria on which you will be evaluated as a researcher and a university employee.

The way I see it, there are basically two kinds of plagiarism that are shown in the video. The first one concerns sentences that are lifted completely unchanged from other papers. This is bad, and it is plagiarism, but I can see how this would happen. Most instances of this appear in the introduction and on background information, so if you're insecure about your mastery of English and it's not about your contribution anyway, I can understand how you would take the shortcut of copy-pasting and tell yourself that it's just so that the rest of the paper makes sense, and why waste time on phrasing things differently if others have done it already, and it's not like there are a million way to write these equations anyways.

Let me be clear. I don't approve, or condone. It's still erasing the work of the people who took the time and pain to phrase these things. It's still plagiarism. But I understand how you could get to that point.

The second kind of plagiarism is a way bigger deal in my opinion. At 0:37 , we can see that one of the contributions of the paper is also lifted from another paper. Egregiously, the passage includes "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first [...]" , which is a hell of a thing to copy-paste. So this is not only lazily passing other people's words as your own, it's also pretending that you're making a contribution you damn well know other people have already done. I also wasn't able to find a version of the plagiarized article that had been published in a peer-reviewed venue, which might mean that the authors submitted it, got rejected, and published it on arXiv (an website on which authors can put their papers so that they're accessible to the public, but doesn't "count" as a publication because it's not peer-reviewed. You can also put papers that are under review or have been published on there as long as you're careful with the copyrights and double-blind process). And then parts of it were published in the CVPR under someone else's name.

I think there's also a third kind of plagiarism going on here, one that is incredibly common in academia, but that is not shown in the video. That's the FIVE other authors, including a professor, who were apparently happy to add their name to the paper but obviously didn't do anything meaningful since they didn't notice how much plagiarism was going on.

So while we wait to see how low we've slid on this slippery slope, I thought I'd give a primer on how legislative elections work in France.

The first thing to know is that it's more like 577 local elections. In order to be elected, a candidate has to win in the circonscription in which they were campaigning.

The second thing to know is that in order to win on the first round of the election, a candidate must have at least 50% of the votes AND 25% of those registered. This means that if, as has happened in La Martinique, a candidate has 63% of the votes but the turn-out was low (estimated around 25%, which is low but higher than it was in the last election), they still get a second round.

Now, for the second round. Are qualified 1. The candidate who had the most votes and 2. Any candidate that had 12,5% of those registered to vote. Once again, this means that the turn-out is a factor in who gets to participate in the second round. It also means that it is possible for a second round to have a "triangulaire", that is to say 3 candidates in the second round (technically, it means that it's possible to have four candidates).

At time of writing, it is estimated that between 65 and 85 representatives have been elected on the first round, and that there will be between 285 and 315 triangulaires (based on the data given by Le Monde, which is based on Ipsos data). Out of 577 seats. This means that in a lot of circonscriptions, there will most probably be one RN candidate, one NFP candidate and one candidate from the presidential party.

On the left, several political leaders have already announced that if their candidates arrived third and a RN candidate was qualified for the second round, they would give up the election and encourage people to vote for whoever else was qualified.

And now the big question: will the presidential party do the same? Gabriel Attal, the Prime Minister, is expected to talk to the press tonight. I, personally, will be drinking and obsessively refreshing the news page.

I would like to present the tmagp fandom with "Mercy Down" by Shayfer James, because it was one of my favorite daydream about horrible TMA things songs originally and now with literal canary situations i think it's relevant again.

I have very conflicted feelings about Jean Vicquemare but I think this sums it up pretty well

My latest cartoon for New Scientist.

This is harder than choosing a major

I figured the vendiagram between OFMD fans and Good Omens fans was just a circle so all my OFMD followers could still enjoy this poll.