3 ms·

Tempest in a teapot. The SEM photos are likely taken by a specialist technician who is not an author but who is known to the authors of the paper. A grad stude

by yodon 2y ago

Tempest in a teapot. The SEM photos are likely taken by a specialist technician who is not an author but who is known to the authors of the paper. A grad student who is n-th author on the paper copied and pasted the instrument name from a previous paper, because (a) that paper used photos from the same SEM, (b) the grad student has never seen the SEM, (c) the name and model number of the SEM doesn't actually matter (gasp!) it's more included for tradition than anything else because the contents of the image are what matters - no one who tries to replicate the experiment in a lab will care what SEM model was used, they'll use the SEM they have at their own lab, period. Of course copy-and-paste damage happens in an area that no one but this "researcher" cares about or bothers to read. This is about turning data mining into drama factories, nothing more.

Angostura 2y ago
That feels like a pretty hand-wavy dismissal of a potentially serious problem. Your hypothesis may be correct. But maybe not.
yodon 2y ago
In an earlier life, I did a deep dive into academic publications on simulating camera lens blur computationally. Nearly every paper that mentioned the topic cited the same original work for the same numerical result. The result in question was clearly a reasonable result (you could derive it yourself with a quick hand-waving calculation). The problem was it wasn't actually mentioned in that original paper. And yes, many of these papers with the incorrect citations were written by the greats of the computer graphics field. At the time, I talked about this with friends who were academics from a wide range of different disciplines. No one was surprised. This isn't at all unusual. The reality is copy-and-paste damage happens all the time in the published academic literature. It's not a sign that every author is an evil malicious fake news generating bad actor. It's a sign that writing papers is a huge amount of work, frequently with tight deadlines, and every human faced with that context (a) is imperfect and (b) focuses their attention on what matters. If you want to build a data mining machine to find witches or communists or whatever word you want to apply to supposedly "bad" people, your data mining machine will find people to blame, not because all people are bad but because the real world is full of real errors.
- withinboredom 2y ago
  Related: I also went deep diving into witness encryption only to find some glaring issues with the most cited paper. You wouldn't notice it at first glance, as it appears sound. It isn't until you actually get into implementation that you find that it doesn't actually do anything at all. Other papers on this topic also, apparently, haven't actually implemented it either. The actual real implementations barely resemble the papers.
neilv 2y ago
> A grad student who is n-th author on the paper copied and pasted the instrument name from a previous paper, because (a) that paper used photos from the same SEM, (b) the grad student has never seen the SEM, (c) the name and model number of the SEM doesn't actually matter (gasp!) it's more included for tradition than anything else because the contents of the image are what matters - no one who tries to replicate the experiment in a lab will care what SEM model was used, they'll use the SEM they have at their own lab, period. If this is true, then is the tradition counterproductive, in that it's encouraging false assertions to be put into scientific papers, for no good reason? If so, why hasn't the tradition been reconsidered, and changed?
- yodon 2y ago
  Perhaps because researchers in other disciplines secretly wish they were Physicists, since Physicists live in a world where this kind of equipment detail actually does matter?

by yodon 2y ago

Angostura 2y ago

That feels like a pretty hand-wavy dismissal of a potentially serious problem. Your hypothesis may be correct. But maybe not.

yodon 2y ago

In an earlier life, I did a deep dive into academic publications on simulating camera lens blur computationally. Nearly every paper that mentioned the topic cited the same original work for the same numerical result. The result in question was clearly a reasonable result (you could derive it yourself with a quick hand-waving calculation). The problem was it wasn't actually mentioned in that original paper. And yes, many of these papers with the incorrect citations were written by the greats of the computer graphics field. At the time, I talked about this with friends who were academics from a wide range of different disciplines. No one was surprised. This isn't at all unusual. The reality is copy-and-paste damage happens all the time in the published academic literature. It's not a sign that every author is an evil malicious fake news generating bad actor. It's a sign that writing papers is a huge amount of work, frequently with tight deadlines, and every human faced with that context (a) is imperfect and (b) focuses their attention on what matters. If you want to build a data mining machine to find witches or communists or whatever word you want to apply to supposedly "bad" people, your data mining machine will find people to blame, not because all people are bad but because the real world is full of real errors.

withinboredom 2y ago
Related: I also went deep diving into witness encryption only to find some glaring issues with the most cited paper. You wouldn't notice it at first glance, as it appears sound. It isn't until you actually get into implementation that you find that it doesn't actually do anything at all. Other papers on this topic also, apparently, haven't actually implemented it either. The actual real implementations barely resemble the papers.

neilv 2y ago

> A grad student who is n-th author on the paper copied and pasted the instrument name from a previous paper, because (a) that paper used photos from the same SEM, (b) the grad student has never seen the SEM, (c) the name and model number of the SEM doesn't actually matter (gasp!) it's more included for tradition than anything else because the contents of the image are what matters - no one who tries to replicate the experiment in a lab will care what SEM model was used, they'll use the SEM they have at their own lab, period. If this is true, then is the tradition counterproductive, in that it's encouraging false assertions to be put into scientific papers, for no good reason? If so, why hasn't the tradition been reconsidered, and changed?

yodon 2y ago
Perhaps because researchers in other disciplines secretly wish they were Physicists, since Physicists live in a world where this kind of equipment detail actually does matter?