Curate, connect, and discover
It's so funny to me that people think of Math/Mathematicians as being hyper-logical and rational. Like, have you seen some of the wild things hiding in the Math?
Did you know there are non-computable numbers?? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant)
Did you know that there are things that are true, but we can't prove them??? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems)
Did you know that we can prove that something exists, and yet never actually figure out what that thing is?? (https://mathworld.wolfram.com/NonconstructiveProof.html)
Math is crazy. Math is wild. Math hardly makes sense, and when you think you understand the weirdest parts of it, everyone who hears you explain it to thinks you're a gibbering lunatic.
"In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them." - von Neumann
(please share more unhinged math with me, i want to see more scary math)
"So you know how C is procedural, Haskell is functional, and Java is object-oriented? You may ask: 'what about Python?'
Well, Python is bullshit-oriented."
My friend, teaching me Python.
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 The first author, a PhD student, apologized and the paper was retracted and removed from the proceedings.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.
as a young afab queer person going into computer/data science, it makes me so sad that the face of the tech industry is a largely misogynistic homophobic transphobic trump-suck-up unethical billionaire bro club like musk, bezos, and zuckerberg. like, computers and the internet have limitless potential, but we’re using it for this????
i cannot wait until all these dipshits get what’s coming to them so a new generation of leaders can rise up and make tech kind.
Fuck comp sci. Shoulda never majored in it. The classes fucking blow. Every fucking class makes me realize how stupid I am, since I don't fucking understand a thing. Doesn't help that the professors just read off of slides rather than making sure the material is understandable. College can choke to death on a big ol' cock.
Hey! Saw your post about community college. Just wondering, what are you studying? Thanks!
I was actually there to get my GED since I had to drop out of high school for a plethora of reasons. (Covid era, Mental health stuff, etc.) I did very well lol and got credit for Math. I was one point off from a Science credit too.
Though I do plan on going to a community college soon for computer science. There’s one near me that has a game dev course type thing i’m looking into right now, but even if I just end up in programming I think I’d be good.