It ain't what it used to be. Even the laziest and shallowest reviewer should have known there was something wrong with a paper entitled "TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce," whose abstract states that the authors "concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact."
Or some have succeeded in birthing AI, and the IEEE and Springer, embarrassed at having been...outsmarted...by an AI, are doubling down.
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
The report said that quite a few of them came from conferences in China. I'd bet that if a reviewer actually looked at it, he decided that he wasn't going to bother with grammar and skimmed for impressions rather than meaning. Of course it turns out to be a little hard to get the meaning if you don't work through the grammar...
ReplyDelete"Empathic"?
ReplyDelete"Empathic"?
ReplyDeleteYeah--AIs can have ESP. What are you, kind of machine intelligence bigot? [g]
Eric Hines
If my spreadsheets ever become a form of artificial intelligence, I'm going John Connor.
ReplyDeleteI studied under a Korean professor, and was his assistant for a graduate class on Structured Query Language--part of what I got to do was to read papers he was writing with colleagues of his from Korea.
ReplyDeleteSince he was ESL, I got to correct his English. Actually not really fun, given that he was doing research into set theory that I couldn't explain to you now if you put a gun to my head.
I'm not very surprised that the stuff snuck by the editors.
Actually, this stuff shouldn't have snuck through. I have rejected papers before solely because the English was so bad I couldn't understand what they were saying.
ReplyDeleteYou must be an unusual reviewer, if your default position is that the paper isn't publishable unless you can understand it well enough to have a right to an opinion on its worth. Too many people either don't care, as long as it has a fashionable sound to it, or don't want to admit they can't understand it. Wouldn't it be nice if more reviewers said, "You can fire me for being obtuse, if you like, but I can't make head nor tail out of that article."
ReplyDeleteWe might wish for a similar standard for legislation, corporate policy, and university curricula.