October 20, 2012
Academic scam (on bogus/fake research publications)
This all started when one day in the morning, I found this link :
http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102
Apparently, it is a math paper generator website. Visitors just need to press few clicks and a randomly generated math paper is available. As mentioned in the website, somebody used the engine to generate a random nonsense paper and then submitted it to a journal, and it was accepted ! Apparently, since few years ago there is also an engine that can generate a random Computer Science paper !
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/blog/
From those two blogs we can read some interesting ‘success’ stories on how the generated papers could fool the reviewers…or is that the case ? Or maybe the papers were not reviewed at all ?
In either cases, this is a very serious issue and can degrade the academic value. If the paper is indeed reviewed, that means the conference/journal is of low quality as the reviewers are unable to tell if the paper makes sense or not. If the paper is definitely not reviewed, then it is even worse. It is said that one of the main reasons of this dishonesty is : money. In this way, the ‘fake’ publishers make money either by charging the conference registration fee or charging the subscribers. Or … by charging the authors (in short : pay us some money if you want your paper want to be published) ! These pages from few years ago report this issue :
http://chronicle.com/article/Open-Access-Publisher-Appears/47717
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/06/10/nonsense-for-dollars/
Note that some real and valid conferences or journals also use this practice (even though some people disagree with this practice, but this is a story for another day) but at least the papers are really reviewed, whereas the bogus conferences or journals do not consider the academic value of research at all.
This matter also spreads to my field, Computer Graphics. Somebody tested an alleged bogus conference by submitting a nonsense work, that is rendering of a close room with not artificial light (that means, it should be perfect dark, nothing is rendered at all). And as predicted, this abstract was accepted !
http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/~wp/beware_of_VIDEA_mail.txt
So, what will happen, if we accidentally submit our research result to these kinds of conferences/journals ? Here are some possible repercussions I can think of :
- Just say our papers are accepted to these conferences/journals, and it’s later found out or reported that these are bogus conferences/journals, we will face serious problems as people may just associate with with cheating or academic dishonesty regardless of we really do the research or not. Worse, if we are already high-ranking professors, we may plummet hard and we will make scandal headlines in newspapers.
- Since the papers do not go through peer-review, there’s a risk that our paper has a great flaw in the techniques and/or methodologies. When having an academic discussion this can be quite embarassing when the colleagues point out the flaws (or maybe they will consider us to be incompetent). For PhD student case, then prepare to face serious problem in the Oral Defence.
- Also related to point no.2. If we are working in a research that can affect many people, just say medicine or chemistry, then when somebody apply the work it can be very disastrous (for example, may cause mass poisoning).
- Degrade the academic value. Nobody will trust academic research anymore. Civilization and technology will be halted.
Here are some tips on how to avoid the scams :
- Search around the internet for the information about the conferences or journals. Here are two example blogs that provide lists of bogus conferences/journals:
– http://fakejournalss.wordpress.com/
– http://netdriver.blogspot.sg/<
– http://scholarlyoa.com/individual-journals/ - Consult your supervisor(s) and your colleague(s) about the conferences or journals.
- See if there are notable researchers (in your field) in the conference committee list or journal editor list. If the names exist but you still doubt this, then send an e-mail to the researchers, by using the e-mail address listed on his/her official lab or university website.
- Do some random checks on some of the papers of the conference or jounal:
– Check if the papers in the bibliographies exist or not.
– Obviously, check if the paper makes sense or not. - Submit the randomly generated paper and see the review results.
Encore : There’s also an interesting web-based Computer Graphics paper generator. No, it does not generate the whole paper for you, instead it only generates a paper title.
http://www.ywing.net/graphicspaper.php
Just keep pressing the refresh buttons, and enjoy the randomly generated title. Some of them can be quite nonsense, but if you are lucky, some of the generated titles can inspire you for a new research project!
Credits to my labmates, Koa Ming Di for some of the links and the tips, and Nicholas Mario Wardhana for the link to the third bogus journal list.
March 14, 2012
Is quality of life better with New Media? What will be next?
“Is quality of life better with New Media? What will be next?” That’s the title of a panel talk of a workshop I attended today at IMI. Basically, the panel talk is about the discussion if the development of new media in the future can worsen or make our life better. At first, the host Prof. Thalmann showed us an interesting video about our possible future lives related to the media :
There were some important and interesting points both from the panels (comprised several top academics or researchers) and also audience (these are the ones that I remember) regarding this matter :
- Can affect our privacy in the future.
- May have good or bad impact on our lives, depending on how we utilize the technology.
- Can spoil humans by providing many interesting entertainment and stuff like that.
- Can lessen the real interactivity between people.
- And many others which I cannot remember.
From a specific time period point of view, this can be somehow a biased discussion. For example, things that are considered good today most likely will be dismissed by our previous generation. What our future generations will have, will be considered by us as unnecessary stuffs. (Talking about good ol’ days..)
In my mind, I prefer to answer this in a broader or larger scope and more generalized compared to most of their opinions. For me, I don’t really care if the new media in the future can worsen or improve our own life, as every created things can have positive and negative impacts. One easy example, is the e-mail whose positive impact is increasing the communication speed and the negative impact is the junk or scam e-mails.
What matters to me, is whether humanity can ‘evolve’ thus survive in the future with the introduction of the new technologies. If we see from the past, how our ancestors could evolve from simple organisms into homo sapiens (if you agree the evolution theory, if you don’t, feel free to ignore this) in a harsh environment, how our ancestors could survive with the invention of languages, how our ancestors could survive with the invention of social structure, how our ancestors could survive with the invention of weapons (leading to unfortunate wars), how our ancestors could survive with the invention of gunpowder, how our ancestors could survive with the invention of transistors, how our ancestors could survive with the invention of nuclear powers, and so on.
As we see in the history, with the introduction of each of those new grounbreaking stuffs, human lives changed significantly and humanity ‘evolved’ (here ‘evolve’ is not strictly in biological sense anymore, but can be in the form of changes in society, morality, paradigm, etc.) accordingly in order to survive. One easy example, is the invention of nuclear power resulting in the disastrous destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But afterward, realizing the destructive power of the nuclear power, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed between countries in order to prevent possible doomsday in the future (of course, some of the conspiracy theory buffs will rebuke this and say this is an attempt by a specific country to control the nuclear weapon development of other countries). This is a simple ‘evolution’ example (indeed, this ‘evolution’ is not a fool-proof as countries might get crazy, break the treaty and start hurling nuclear missiles to each other) that humanity tries to evolve and adapt well with the introduction of nuclear power in order to survive.
New media, new technologies, they’re part of human history, and it’s undeniable new ones will be invented from time to time. It does not matter if they can affect the quality of life in positive or negative ways (as mentioned before, each new technologies can give positive or negative impacts), and they will indeed, it is the matter of whether humanity can ‘evolve’ and survive in the future with the introduction of these new ‘external’ factors.
So, what can we do for the future ?
- If humanity is overly pessimistic about the upcoming technologies, then we just dissolve academic research, and the function of universities is limited to only teaching existing knowledge. New kind of disease, just let it be. Boring life as everything is the same from generations to generations ? let it be.
- If humanity still wants to proceed with the invention of new technologies, then plan well for the future. Know what are the ramifications for the future lives, what are the possible positive and negative impacts, what are the necessary steps to safeguard the future (or ‘evolve’) of humanity, due to the introduction of a new particular technology. And don’t forget, teach our descendants well.
I wish humanity could ‘evolve’ well in the future, will not become a spoiled species (e.g. Wall-E)
or being enslaved by the machines (e.g. The Matrix)
or being ‘terminated’ by the machines (you guess it)
or devolve (e.g. The Time Machine)
but rather this
and beyond…
December 23, 2011
Taking Photo of the Moon Using a Point-and-Shoot Camera (and some othe dirty tricks)
One night during the full moon, you stroll around the park and you notice a big bright beauty moon (with a Stanford Bunny look-a-likte on its surface) in the sky. Luckily, at that time you are taking your trusted Point-and-Shoot (PnS) digital camera with you. You turn on the camera, aim to the moon, and take the photo. You then check the taken photo. Disappointingly, the moon appears very bright unlike what you see with your own eyes :
A moon...or a sun ?
Yes, the moon is very bright ! You quickly rush home, and googling around. Some sites suggest you to set the camera to the manual mode, and then adjust the exposure amount to the lowest. You follow the advice, try again, but to no avail, the moon still appears too bright (but, in some cases might work, it depends on the type of your PnS camera). Sadly, you give up and decided try to move on.
But wait, don’t give up yet, because :
- You haven’t taken an arrow in the knee.
- There is one possible way without resorting to purchasing a DSLR camera
And, how is it ? It’s simple. Just enable the flash when you take the photo ! And, at last, you manage to take the photo of a moon (complete with the Stanford Bunny look-a-like) :
Now it works !
So, what happen ? It is simple, first, the reflection on the moon is still too bright for your camera even though you set the exposure to the lowest. Second, by enabling the flash, the PnS camera basically automatically adjusts its setting to the lowest senstitivity (such as reducing the shutter speed). After all, when the flash is enabled, in the usual condition such as taking photo in a room, the flash light will be very bright and the PnS camera has to compensate this by automatically reducing its sensitivity (e.g. reduce the shutter speed).
BTW, when you take the photo of the moon, don’t forget to set the focus to infinite and do optical zooming until the end.
Oh, what was the camera I used to take these photos ? It was Canon Powershot A2100 IS. Here are more photos I took using this little guy :
This Lunar Eclipse photo was taken on 10 December 2011. Since the moon was not as bright as usual, I took this photo by using long exposure (around 8 seconds). A tripod would be useful in this case.
Double Lightning. Lightning appears very brief, so it is hard to take the right moment to take its photo. Two possible ways to take this photo : (a) by using long exposure (b) by enabling continuous shots (i.e., by keep holding down the shutter button, the camera will keep taking photos). For this photo, I used the latter method.
So, what's so special about this photo. In this case, the light is very bright from the sky behind. So, when we took the photo in the usual way, my friend appeared very dark (After all, this camera cannot take HDR or RAW photo). So, to get around this, I just enabled the flash so that it can illuminate my friend. So, now you have learned two unorthodox ways of using flash : to take photo of the moon and to take photo in the daytime.
My eye, in close up. Love the iris ? Here's how to take the photo by my own. (1) set it to Macro mode (2) put it very near to my eye. (3) used another hand to hold the flashlight to illuminate from the side (4) put a mirror behind the camera, and used another eye to see the preview from the camera display through the mirror reflection.
Note that there exists a firmware hack for Canon PnS cameras called CHDK which enables us to have greater control on our Canon PnS cameras. Unfortunately, it is still not available yet for Canon Powershot A2100 IS. That’s why I relied on these tricks to take some of these photos.
So, that’s all folks for today. If you have any suggestions, comments, or interesting tricks for PnS digital camera, feel free to share in the comment.
BTW, if you want to use these photos somewhere else, please notify me first. Thanks !
August 19, 2011
Music Video for the Ghost Month
So, now is the Ghost Month in Chinese calendar. How about if we enjoy some horror songs, taken from some game OSTs ? Best enjoyed alone at midnight, loudspeaker in the maximum volume, with all lights turned-off, and air cond in the coolest/coldest setting.
Sleeping Priestess from Fatal Frame
Hasizoroe from Kuon
April 21, 2011
Theme Song
Buy the soundtrack of games or movies and we often see some of the track titles like “AAA’s theme”. These tracks are associated with certain characters and hence they’re mostly played during the scenes involving the particular characters. Sometimes, the tracks manage to somehow describe the personality of the associated characters and sometimes may fail to do it.
Now, back to real life. Sometimes we heard people say like : “Life itself is a drama stage/movie and we’re the main character” (citation needed, if you know, please provide me with the source). Truly, during the course of our life we make interactions with various other ‘characters’, and some of them may leave impression in our life. Imprinted into our brain is the memory, experience, and feeling involving said ‘characters’, thus if we somehow stumble upon something related to particular ‘character’, we may remember both the memory and feeling about the person. Depending on each person’s personal experience, one of these nostalgic elements may be : “Music”. Occasionaly, some music may be involved during our interaction with the other ‘characters’. For example, with ‘character A’ discussing about music B, or listening to ‘character A’ singing music B, or ‘character A’ introduced music B, and so on. As a result, we may associate a song with a ‘character’ we know, and thus somehow becoming the ‘A’s Theme Song” for us, personally.
Here I list down theme songs of several ‘characters’ I know in my life, who leave impression to me. Sorry, due to personal reason, I won’t tell you who the songs are associated with. If you’re one of the ‘characters’ associated with one of these song, you may or may not know it that it’s actually your theme song for me.
I Know him so Well
Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For you
七里香 (Common Jasmin Orange)
Kiss the Rain
我只在乎你 (I only care about you)
Tifa’s Theme
菊花台 (Chrysanthemum Terrace)
And now, what song do you personally consider as my theme song ?
Update : A soundtrack from .Hack//Sign is perfect as my theme song, as it’s the theme song of a character called B.T. (initials of my name), never mind about the character is actually a girl.
Budianto "EonStrife" Tandianus 
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