Slashdot Mirror
Randomly Generated Math Article Accepted By 'Open-Access' Journal
call -151 writes "Many years ago, a human-generated intentionally nonsense paper was accepted by the (prominent) literary culture journal Social Text. In August, a randomly-generated nonsense mathematics paper was accepted by one of the many low-tier 'open-access' research mathematics journals. The software Mathgen, which generated the accepted submission, takes as inputs author names (or those can be randomly selected also) and generates nicely TeX'd and impressive-sounding sentences which are grammatically correct but mathematically disconnected nonsense. This was reviewed by a human, (quickly, for math, in 12 days) and the reviewers' comments mention superficial problems with the submission (PDF). The references are also randomly-generated and rather hilarious. For those with concerns about submitting to lower-tier journals in an effort to promote open access, this is not a good sign!"
have facts for those who think and arguments for those who reason. For the sake of review, if five years ago I had described a person like Mr. Slasdhot Person to you and told you that in five years he'd fill the air with recrimination and rancor, you'd have thought me contumelious. You'd have laughed at me and told me it couldn't happen. So it is useful now to note that, first, it has happened and, second, to try to understand how it happened and how he has written more than his fair share of lengthy, over-worded, pseudo-intellectual tripe. In all such instances Slasdhot conveniently overlooks the fact that his greed will be his undoing. In the presence of high heaven and before the civilized world I therefore assert that he has repeatedly threatened to elevate his campaigns to prominence as epistemological principles. Maybe that's just for maximum scaremongering effect. Or maybe it's because Slasdhot should start developing the parts of his brain that have been impaired by Leninism. At least then he'll stop trying to put narrow-minded thoughts in our children's minds.
On the surface, it would seem merely that Slasdhot's blithe disregard for the victims of his myopic effusions is what first made me realize that Slasdhot is offended by the truth. But the truth is that if anything, Slasdhot has planted his habitués everywhere. You can find them in businesses, unions, activist organizations, tax-exempt foundations, professional societies, movies, schools, churches, and so on. Not only does this subversive approach enhance Slasdhot's ability to fortify a social correctness that restricts experience and defines success with narrow boundaries, but it also provides irrefutable evidence that he motivates people to join his terrorist organization by using words like "humanity", "compassion", and "unity". This is a great deception. What Slasdhot really wants to do is promote racial superiority doctrines, ethnic persecution, imperialist expansion, and genocide. That's why Slasdhot's argument that mediocrity is a worthwhile goal is hopelessly flawed and absolutely circuitous.
A "respected" member of Slasdhot's brownshirt brigade recently said (to closely paraphrase), "Slasdhot is above everyone else". To top that off, if you're like most people you just shrug your shoulders whenever you hear about Slasdhot's latest ugly sottises. When your shoulders get tired of shrugging I hope you'll realize that I obviously hope that the truth will prevail and that justice will be served before Slasdhot does any real damage. Or is it already too late? The complete answer to that question is a long, sad story. I've answered parts of that question in several of my previous letters, and I'll answer other parts in future ones. For now, I'll just say that Slasdhot accuses me of being impolite in my responses to his incoherent, intransigent methods of interpretation. Let's see
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
It could have been worse. They could have accepted a legitimate paper on mathematics written by a person with a Computer Science degree.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
A lot of these "controversies" come from submitting to journals or conferences that will literally accept anything. That story from 2005 about the random paper was submitted to the _non-reviewed section_ of the conference. I like how this article does not even say what conference it was submitted to, and whether or not review was even required for acceptance.
This has nothing to do with open access, and more to do with lack of proper review. Besides, as noted in the post, this particular journal charges a fee for publishing. Being a "low-tier" journal, they don't really have a reputation, and are probably more concerned with making money.
Hell, I could start up my own journal, give it a title, Generalities and accept anything at all to be published. It doesn't mean what is published is meaningful or useful. (Just because something is in a book doesn't make it true either. This journal sounds like it is about equivalent to "self published" books, where you pay the publisher to print your book. But they don't actually do any editing or similar. Not to say that reputable journals are the same as the non-self publishing world.)
Journals have reputations for a reason. One reason is because the good ones tend to do a bit more checking of the papers submitted. I doubt it this paper would have been accepted by a journal that actually reviewed papers properly, regardless of whether it was open access or not.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
This is awesome:
O. Jackson, J. Li, and N. D. Nehru. A First Course in Advanced p-Adic Calculus. Zambian Mathematical Society, 1935.
Small-time journals like this are the closest thing academia has to "self-publishing" in the literary world.
In the literary world, you could take a picture of every bowel movement you've had for the last year, pay somebody $1,000, and have the resulting picture book officially published by some official-sounding company, but that doesn't mean your GI accomplishments are noteworthy or impressive.
The editors for this particular journal probably thought they were witnessing some profound new discovery since they couldn't understand what the hell the paper was even proving. My suspicion is that they were quick to approve it in a vain attempt to make their journal even slightly relevant.
It seems like a lot of these academic authors try to "out dense" one another and deliberately make their papers as unclear as possible, so I think it's not just "journal will accept anything" and a little "thickly worded paper no one wants to admit they don;t understand and it sounds like every other paper."
I've had papers about communications concepts where I have written VHDL cores and embedded software that work perfectly, yet I can't make heads or tails of papers on the topic because they are written in such an obtuse manner with bizarre symbol choices and shoehorning every blessed value into a matrix, no matter how inappropriate, because Matlab is the only tool they know how to use.
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
The spelling and grammar would be correct.
For all those upholding the /. tradition of not reading the article, here are the concerns voiced by the reviewer in the acceptance letter and the 'authors' responses to them :
Dear Author,
Thank you for your contribution to the Advances in Pure Mathematics (APM). We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript:
ID : 5300285
TITLE : Independent, negative, canonically Turing arrows of equations and problems in applied formal PDE
AUTHORS :Marcie Rathke
has been accepted. Congratulations!
Anyway, the manuscript has some flaws are required to be revised :
(1) For the abstract, I consider that the author can’t introduce the main idea and work of this topic specifically. We can’t catch the main thought from this abstract. So I suggest that the author can reorganize the descriptions and give the keywords of this paper.
2) In this paper, we may find that there are so many mathematical expressions and notations. But the author doesn’t give any introduction for them. I consider that for these new expressions and notations, the author can indicate the factual meanings of them.
(3) In part 2, the author gives the main results. On theorem 2.4, I consider that the author should give the corresponding proof.
(4) Also, for proposition 3.3 and 3.4, the author has better to show the specific proving processes.
(5) The format of this paper is not very standard. Please follow the format requirements of this journal strictly.
Please revised your paper and send it to us as soon as possible.
The author has asked me to include her responses to the referee’s comments:
1. The referee’s objection is well taken; indeed, the abstract has not the slightest thing to do with the content of the paper.
2. The paper certainly does contain a plethora of mathematical notation, but it is to be hoped that readers with the appropriate background can infer its meaning (or lack thereof) from context.
3. It is indeed customary for a mathematical paper to contain a proof of its main result. This omission admittedly represents a slight flaw in the manuscript. The author believes the proofs given for the referenced propositions are entirely sufficient [they read, respectively, "This is obvious" and "This is clear"]. However, she respects the referee’s opinion and would consider adding a few additional details.
4. On this point the author must strenuously object. The LATEX formatting of the manuscript is perfectly standard and in accordance with generally accepted practice. The same cannot be said of APM’s required template, which uses Microsoft Word [!].
5. Professor Rathke is pleased that the referee nevertheless recommends the paper be accepted, since clearly these minor differences of opinion in no way affect the paper’s overall validity and significance.
Bummer.
Comedy gold
Also it seems that author declined to pay the $500 it would cost to publish the paper, hmmm...
In a cybernetic fit of rage she pissed off to another age...
This is massively a failure of the editor and the referee. I suspect the editor didn't look at it all and the referee did a quick superficial job. One big question is who the referee was. One typical method of finding an appropriate referee is to look in the references. However, in this case, since the references are hilariously bogus:
"[7] "Q. Hausdorff and C. W. Turing. Advanced Combinatorics. Guyanese Mathematical Society, 2001"
I don't think you are going to find a Turing or Hausdorff alive and replying to email requests to referee these days! I can't believe a mathematically literate editor would look at the references (to find a referee) and not immediately realize that this is nonsense. So I suspect the editor asked someone else who had recently submitted something to the journal to write a quick report, perhaps in the spirit of mutual back-scratching. Perhaps that referee also did not notice that this was nonsense and did not look at the references either. Or perhaps the editor did a quick review instead of sending it out- the chance that two reasonable math people, no matter how overworked with their own tasks, would not notice that this was totally bogus I would hope is small.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.