Then, Discord

A poem:

Then o'er the world

Shall discord stretch her wings,

Kings change their laws,

And kingdoms change their kings

-Samuel Johnson 1739

Image credit: AI Art - Discord w Cinematic Noise - Jan 2025

Samuel Johnson, Biography

These are notes taken from  Samuel Johnson's biography, but the one by John Wain 1974, so this is not the official Boswell biography.

Image credits: Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds, the first picture in 1775 and the second in 1772. The third picture had to wait until about 2010, but comfortably inhabits the internet hall of fame as a meme, seen here in the original macro image series formula, and usually placed after a screenshot of some crazy comment or question already posted online (filed as "dafuq" as in "wtf did I just read").

• On the Episode of Dr. Swinfin and the Latin Document (AKA 1700's HIPAA) - Johnson calls on a Dr. Swinfin to help with his depression, but because of his enviable command of language, he wrote out his symptoms in Latin, to which Swinfin was so impressed, he showed all his friends. p59
• On Living Cheaply - he only made social calls on 'clean shirt days' p80
• On Psalmanazar the Faker - this was a friend of his, and this guy is so crazy, I need to write it out: He (Psalm.) got taken into another man's plot, to be 'converted' to Christianity by baptism, but pretending ot be Formosan it made the other guy look good as a clergyman. It worked, and the clergyman got his chaplaincy, and Psalmanazar stayed in London, as a Formosan, while he completely fabricated a book about his birthplace (published 1704). But wait - in the process he created a fake Formosan language, and made up all the letters, and was send to Oxford to teach it to young men who would go as missionaries. He would burn a candle all night in his window so people thought he was studying non-stop. p121 (no update given on what happened to those poor missionaries)
• Samuel Johnson started his Dictionary at a time when England was not yet as powerful as an empire. They didn't have all the academies and learned men and public money and private patronage. They had an agreement between seven different booksellers and the genius of S.J. The biography's author calls this an example of the 'enlightened behavior' the free market is sometimes capable of. p130
• The most polite letter ever - actually he was a very polite person in general, but this I'd like to copy, for the edification of any reader; this was written to a gentleman who asked how he could get a copy of the Dictionary when it came out, and despite his being a total stranger, Johnson wrote this response: Sire, If you imagine that by delaying my answer I intended to show any neglect of the notice with which you have favored me, you will neither think justly of yourself nor of me. Your civilities were offered with too much elegance not to engage attention, and I have too much pleasure in pleasing men like you, not to feel very sensibly the distinction which you have bestowed upon me. ... p200-201
• On what I will call the Evolution of Authority; he's working with a professor at Oxford to help him write lectures, this one is about kingship, called "The King and his Coronation Oath" - In that age of prejudice and ignorance, when the civil institutions were yet few, and the securities of legal obligation very weak, both because offenses against the law were often unpunished, and because the law itself could be but little known, it was necessary to invest the king with some thing of a sacred character that might secure obedience by reverence, and more effectually preserve his person from danger and violation. For this reason it was necessary to interpose the clerical authority that the crown being imposed by a holy hand might communicate some sanctity to him that wore it. And, accordingly, the inauguration of a king is by our ancient historians termed consecration; and the writings, both fabulous and historical, of the Middle Ages connect with royalty some supernatural powers. p272
• And then, he's writing about the American colonists (and he's kind of against them I think), but I might just call it 'Being Human' - No man has a right to any good without partaking of the evil by which that good is necessarily produced; no man has a right to security by another's danger, nor to plenty by another's labor, but as he gives something of his own which he who meets the danger, or undergoes the labour, but as he gives something of his own which he who meets the danger, or undergoes the labour considers as equivalent; no man has a right to the security of government without bearing his share of inconveniences. ... If by forsaking our native country we could carry away all its happiness and leave its evils behind, what human being would not wish for exile? p272
• "A decent provision of the poor is a true test of a civilization." p280
• Forsooth!
• They used to wear an ink horn dangling from the lapel, for writing on the go. p357

Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography

Written 1706-1790; this is considered the first autobiography (a la Albrecht Dürer's self-portrait?)

• Says the Pope, judiciously: "Men should be taught as if you taught them not. And things unknown propos'd as things forgot."
• Ben Franklin became a vegetarian because of that guy's book Way to Health(?), until he realized that animals eat other animals - he saw a fish get cut open once, and other fish were in its stomach.
• (Talking shit) It was a habit he had acquired. He wanted to please everybody, and having little to give, he gave expectations. 
• "Taking a Saint Monday" is when you're hung over from Sunday night, and call out of work.
• He mentions how when they wanted to increase circulation of paper money, rich people didn't like the idea, but they had nobody to write about it. Ben Franklin could write, and had his own press, so he wrote in favor, and it happened. Imagine a day when simply knowing how to write made you that valuable. But also imagine a time when it was so rare that even "the rich" couldn't find one. 
• I think "shut up" originally meant shut up in the house, not to shut your mouth.
• He seems to think that reading, in itself, makes you a better person. Granted, it was very new at the time, and so yes it may have given you a huge advantage, like having a PhD today.
• Imagine the nerve - "In the conduct of my newspaper I carefully excluded libeling and personal abuse, which is of late years become so disgraceful to our country. Whenever I was solicited to insert anything of that kind, and the writers pleaded as they generally did, the liberty of the press, and that a newspaper was like a stagecoach in which any one who would pay had a right to a place, my answer was, that I would print the piece separately if desired, and the author might have as many copies as he pleased to distribute to himself, but that I would not take upon me to spread his detraction, and that having contracted with my subscribers to furnish them with what might be either useful or entertaining, I could not fill their papers with private altercation in which they had no concern without doing them manifest injustice. ... These things I mention as a caution to young printers, and that they may be encouraged not to pollute their presses and disgrace their profession by such infamous practices, but refuse steadily .... In the Pennsylvania Gazette for June 10, 1731, Franklin wrote of having displeased many men "for refusing absolutely to print any of their party or personal reflections". On December 24, 1782, he wrote Francis Hopkinson: "If people will print heir abuses of one another, let them do it in little pamphlets, and distribute them where they think proper.
• He tells a story of a guy he doesn't like, but who he has no choice but to cooperate with, and who is above him in station, and who would likely be for a long time: "I did not however aim at gaining his favor by paying any servile respect to him, but after some time took this other method. Having heard that he had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him expressing my desire of perusing that book, and requesting he would do me the favor of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately; and I returned it in about a week, with another note expressing strongly my sense of the favor. When we next met in the House he spoke to me, (which he had never done before) and with great civility. And he ever afterwards manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends and our friendship continued to his death. Tis is another instance of the truth of an old maxim I had learned, which says, He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged. And it shows how much more profitable it is prudently to remove, than to resent, return and continue inimical proceedings. [inimical: adverse, hurtful, enemy]
• Ben Franklin on vaccines (in the *** 1700's) - In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of 4 years old, by the smallpox taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly and still regret that I had no given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents, who omit that operation on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that therefore the safer should be chosen. 
• Note, also from the 1700's, most of the profits of his paper came from advertisements.

Image credit: Benjamin Franklin - Joseph-Siffred Duplessis - 1785

An Essay on Projects, by Daniel DeFoe

Here's a lesser-known one by DeFoe, who wrote Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Journal of the Plague Years (1665). This one, An Essay on Projects, is from 1697:

• On authorship and authenticity - "One happiness I lie under in the following book, viz.: That having kept the greatest part of it by me for near five years, several of the thoughts seem to be hit by other hands, and some by the public, which turns the tables upon me, as if I had borrowed from them." p5-6
• On large numbers - Talking about a bank, basically the idea of a bank, and how much money it would have, he says "...ten million sterling - a sum that everybody who can talk of does not understand." p19
• On seamen - "They are fellows that bid defiance to terror, and maintain a constant war with the elements; who, by the magic of their art, trade in the very confines of death, and are always posted within shot, as I may say, of the grave. It is true, their familiarity with danger makes them despise it (for which, I hope, nobody will say they are the wiser); and custom has so hardened them that we find them the worst of men, though always in view of their last moment." p38 And then he goes on to say how there should be like a pension for them.
• "The great family of mankind", just a phrase he uses. p52
• He wants to tax books for a fund for "fool-houses" (like a mental institution), and says: "Some tribute is due to God's goodness for bestowing extraordinary gifts [in this case the gift of being smart enough to be literate]; and who can it be better paid to then such as suffer for want of the same bounty?" p53
• On Academics (but really about language) - He wants more and better academies in England. He says France has the best, and that "The peculiar study of the academy of Paris has been to refine and correct their own language, which they have done to that happy degree that we see it now spoken in all the courts of Christendom, as the language allowed to be most universal. ... The English tongue is a subject not at all less worthy the labor of such a society than the French, and capable of a much greater perfection. ... That a society be enacted ... The work of this society should be to encourage polite learning, to polish and refine the English tongue, and to advance the so much neglected faculty of correct language, to establish purity and propriety of style, and to purge it from all the irregular additions that ignorance and affectation I have introduced; and all those innovation in speech, if I may call them such, which some dogmatic writers have the confidence to foster upon their native language, as if their authority were sufficient to make their own fancy legitimate. ... Into this society should be admitted none but persons eminent for learning, and yet none, or but very few, whose business or trade was learning. For I may be allowed, I supposed, to say we have seen many great scholars mere learned men, and graduates in the last degree of study, whose English has been far from polite, full of stiffness and affectation, hard words, and long unusual couplings of syllables and sentences, which sound harsh and untunable to the ear, and shock the reader both in expression and understanding ... The exercise of this society would be lectures on the English tongue. p64-67
• Listen to him talk shit about "that excrement of the mouth", "a frenzy of the tongue" - "Jack, God damn me Jack, how dost do? How has thou done this long time, by God?" And then they kiss; and the other, as lewd as himself, goes on: - "Dear Tom, I am glad to see thee with all my heart, let me die. Come, let us go take a bottle, we must not part so; pr'ythee let's go and get drunk, by God." p67
• On why people don't become seamen when they're required by the government: "A secret aversion to the service from a natural principal, common to the English nation, to hate compulsion". p84

Image credit: Daniel Defoe - credit unknown - National Maritime Museum London - circa 

1700s

Culture as Metaphysical Superorganism

This is about human things, but mediated by culture, which is more powerful than engines, or fuel, or multiplexed photonic quantum computers:

Aboriginal ritual passed down over 12,000 years, cave find shows

July 2024 phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-aboriginal-ritual-years-cave.html

My god, a 12,000 years old tradition:

They discovered some 12,000 year old sticks in a cave. The discovery was made inside Cloggs Cave in the foothills of the Victorian Alps in Australia's southeast, in a region long inhabited by the Gunaikurnai people. An anthropologist from the 1880s recorded the rituals of Gunaikurnai medicine men and women. One ritual involved tying something that belonged to a sick person to the end of a throwing stick smeared in human or kangaroo fat. The stick was thrust into the ground before a small fire was lit underneath. The medicine men would then chant the name of the sick person, and once the stick fell, the charm was complete. The sticks used in the ritual were made of casuarina wood. And the sticks found appear to be the same sticks, so they're evidence that this tradition has been happening since then, and was passed down by oral tradition, but since the advent of the written word, we've lost a connection to this. 

via Monash University and Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation: Bruno David et al, Archaeological evidence of an ethnographically documented Australian Aboriginal ritual dated to the last ice age, Nature Human Behaviour (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01912-w

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01912-w

Image credit: AI Art - Rave Party - 2023

Culture, and fashion in particular, reduces social conflict, enabling a more complex society:

Colorful traits in primates ease tensions between groups, data suggest

Aug 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-traits-primates-ease-tensions-groups.html

"Species that shared more space with their neighbors had significantly greater differences in ornamentation between the sexes. In species where groups frequently interact, males are more likely to sport flashy traits that set them apart from females."

Vivid physical traits might help to reduce conflict between groups, possibly by allowing them to quickly assess potential rivals from a distance.

via Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at University of Zurich and University of Western Australia: Cyril C Grueter et al, The role of between-group signaling in the evolution of primate ornamentation, Evolution Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1093/evlett/qrae045

https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/evlett/qrae045

We should be reminded, via Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants (2011) that technological evolution follows relatively strict trajectory, independent on the civilization, so that bone needles always come before bellows (how else do you sew the skins to make the bellows), and ceramics before metal (metal kilns are much hotter than ceramic kilns, and require the advent of bellows). 

The beginnings of fashion: Paleolithic eyed needles and the evolution of dress

Jun 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-fashion-paleolithic-eyed-needles-evolution.html

"Eyed needle tools are an important development in prehistory because they document a transition in the function of clothing from utilitarian to social purposes,"

"What intrigues me is the transition of clothing from being a physical necessity in certain environments, to a social necessity in all environments."

The earliest known eyed needles appeared approximately 40,000 years ago in Siberia. Eyed needles are more difficult to make when compared to bone awls, which sufficed for creating fitted clothing. Bone awls are tools made of animal bones that are sharpened to a point. Eyed needles are modified bone awls, with a perforated hole (eye) to facilitate the sewing of sinew or thread.

The innovation of eyed needles may reflect the production of more complex, layered clothing, as well as the adornment of clothes by attaching beads and other small decorative items onto garments, and which may have allowed larger and more complex societies to form, as people could relocate to colder climates while also cooperating with their tribe or community based on shared clothing styles and symbols.

Dr. Gilligan and his co-authors argue that clothing became an item of decoration because traditional body decoration methods, like body painting with ocher or deliberate scarification, weren't possible during the latter part of the last ice age in colder parts of Eurasia, as people were needing to wear clothes all the time to survive.

via University of Sydney: Ian Gilligan, Palaeolithic eyed needles and the evolution of dress, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adp2887

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adp2887

Post Script: Read Bernard Rudofsky's Are Clothes Modern? (1944)

Bodying in the 21st Century

Disney investigating massive leak of internal messages

Jul 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cprq1d280ggo

Disney has confirmed it is investigating an apparent leak of internal messages by a hacking group, which claims it is "protecting artists' rights".

The group, Nullbulge, said it had gained access to thousands of communications from Disney employees and had downloaded "every file possible".

Nullbulge's website says the group targets anyone it believes is harming the creative industry by using content generated by artificial intelligence (AI), which it describes as "theft".

Nullbulge describes itself as "a hacktivist group protecting artists' rights and ensuring fair compensation for their work".

Partially related image credit: This is an image taken from an nj.com article on porch pirates in 2024, and is just a great example of terrible staged photos, which is what happens when we don't give the arts the respect it deserves.

Phantom data could show copyright holders if their work is in AI training data

Jul 2024, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-07-phantom-copyright-holders-ai.html

"Taking inspiration from the map makers of the early 20th century, who put phantom towns on their maps to detect illicit copies, we study how injection of 'copyright traps'—unique fictitious sentences—into the original text enables content detectability in a trained LLM."

via Imperial College London: Matthieu Meeus et al, Copyright Traps for Large Language Models, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2402.09363

https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2402.09363

Public Service Announcement: "AI companies are increasingly reluctant to share any information about their training data. While the training data composition for GPT-3 and LLaMA (older models released by OpenAI and Meta AI respectively) is publicly known, it is no longer the case for the more recent models GPT-4 and LLaMA-2."

Video game strike - Online games could be first to be hit

Aug 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgddkq2zx9o

Members of union SAG-Aftra, which represents approximately 160,000 performers, recently staged a picket outside the offices of Warner Bros, one of 10 game companies negotiating with the union.

They say their offer gives workers "meaningful protections" but SAG-Aftra disagrees.

"AI technology lets these companies put your face, your voice, your body into something that you may not even have agreed to," says Duncan.

FBI busts musician’s elaborate AI-powered $10M streaming-royalty heist

Sep 2024, Benji Edwards for Ars Technica but originally reported from New York Times

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/fbi-busts-musicians-elaborate-ai-powered-10m-streaming-royalty-heist/

Smith's scheme, which prosecutors say ran for seven years, involved creating thousands of fake streaming accounts using purchased email addresses. He developed software to play his AI-generated music on repeat from various computers, mimicking individual listeners from different locations. In an industry where success is measured by digital listens, Smith's fabricated catalog reportedly managed to rack up billions of streams.

To avoid detection, Smith spread his streaming activity across numerous fake songs, never playing a single track too many times. He also generated unique names for the AI-created artists and songs, trying to blend in with the quirky names of legitimate musical acts. Smith used artist names like "Callous Post" and "Calorie Screams," while their songs included titles such as "Zygotic Washstands" and "Zymotechnical."

...2018 when he partnered with an as-yet-unnamed AI music company CEO and a music promoter to create a large library of computer-generated songs.

New tool makes songs unlearnable to generative AI

Oct 2024, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-10-tool-songs-unlearnable-generative-ai.html

Reminder: 

"Most of the high-quality artworks online are copyrighted, but these companies can get the copyrighted versions very easily. Maybe they pay $5 for a song, like a normal user, and they have the full version. But that purchase only gives them a personal license; they are not authorized to use the song for commercialization."

Companies will often ignore that restriction and train their AI models on the copyrighted work. 

...

HarmonyCloak - makes musical files unlearnable to generative AI models without changing how they sound to humans. [link] 

"Our idea is to minimize the knowledge gap [between new information and their existing knowledge] ourselves so that the model mistakenly recognizes a new song as something it has already learned. That way, even if an AI company can still feed your music into their model, the AI 'thinks' there is nothing to learn from it."

via Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Tennessee at Knoxville and Lehigh University: They will present their research at the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) in May 2025.

mosis.eecs.utk.edu/harmonycloak.html

Science Doesn't Work For Free

This post is about how science works, and how it doesn't. 

Science is hard work, and requires lots of money, most of which comes from public funds and school tuitions. But some of it comes from people-like entities called corporations. Sometimes it's hard to tell what money goes where and from who, and we want to know because those who fund science are ultimately creating our reality.

Infiltrating academia is the most surreptitious, subversive, insidious (and let's face it - effective) way to control the minds of a population, every big industry (Big Agra, Big Rubber, Big Cheese, Big PFAS?) will spend more money manipulating reality by way of academic scientific pursuits than making their own products and services. 

This first article is from the Barabasi labs and uses network science, so the way they do their study is interesting:

Study reveals complex dynamics of philanthropic funding for US science

Jun 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-reveals-complex-dynamics-philanthropic-funding.html

The IRS in recent years has made the tax form that nonprofits must file disclosing their revenue, expenditures, and other organizational information machine readable. Researchers then analyzed more than 3.6 million tax records filed by approximately 685,000 universities and research institutions between 2010 and 2019. 

"Some philanthropists make it very explicit that they give to their local communities. The Gates Foundation's biggest donation was to the University of Washington; they favor things in Seattle much more than they declared."

The authors also found that the amount of philanthropic dollars institutions receive is highly correlated to the degree of support provided by the National Science Foundation.

Additionally, private donors and nonprofits tend to support the same organizations over time, the analysis showed. with an 80% chance that a donor who gave to an organization two years in a row would support it the following year; for funding relationships that had lasted seven years, the probability is 90%.

Such a tool could enhance the public's understanding of the impact of philanthropy on science and help researchers gain access and awareness of the philanthropic options that could advance their work.

via Virginia University and Albert-László Barabási at Northeastern University: Louis M. Shekhtman et al, Mapping philanthropic support of science, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-58367-2

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-58367-2

Above image credit: AI Art - Room With a Big Mess - Dec 2024 1

Next - Science depends on a written record of experiments and results. Maintaining the record of science, i.e., scientific journals, is done almost exclusively by the private industry. Sometimes, both the scientsits and the publishers have an incentive to NOT realize they're doing something wrong (Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it").

Here's a story about how bad science happens, and what it can do to the rest of us. This is about retractions:

University of Minnesota retracts pioneering studies in stem cells, Alzheimer's disease

Jun 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-06-university-minnesota-retracts-stem-cells.html

Dr. Karen Ashe and colleagues gained global attention in 2006 when they found amyloid beta star 56 as a molecular target in the onset of Alzheimer's disease.

Colleagues at other institutions struggled to replicate their findings, which prompted others to look closer at the images of cellular or molecular activity in mice on which their findings were based.

Verfaillie and colleagues corrected the Nature paper in 2007, which contained an image of cellular activity in mice that appeared identical to an image in a different paper that supposedly came from different mice. The U then launched an investigation over complaints of image duplications or manipulations in more of Verfaillie's papers.

It eventually cleared her of misconduct, but blamed her for inadequate training and oversight and claimed that a junior researcher had falsified data in a similar study published in the journal Blood.

The journal Nature stated that the paper contained "excessive manipulation, including splicing, duplication and the use of an eraser tool" to edit the images.

(This is almost 20 years later, and after lots of people invested lots of money in chasing this result.)

via The Star Tribune:

Sylvain Lesné et al, RETRACTED ARTICLE: A specific amyloid-β protein assembly in the brain impairs memory, Nature (2006). DOI: 10.1038/nature04533

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature04533

Yuehua Jiang et al, RETRACTED ARTICLE: Pluripotency of mesenchymal stem cells derived from adult marrow, Nature (2002). DOI: 10.1038/nature00870

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature00870

AI Art - Room With a Big Mess - Dec 2024 2

Less sensational, or perhaps more sensational, is this absolute bomb - dropped on all of us who've been obediently following the one-drink-a-day advice for about one generation since it first came out.

The worldwide public health community has been scratching its head over this since it emerged from the data, many years ago. People who drink once a day seem to live longer than people who drink none. Therefore, one drink a day must be good for you! Hmmm. Turns out the only people in a large population who we can get to serve as a "normal healthy person who doesn't ever drink" is a person who's suffering from former substance abuse, and abstaining from alcohol not for any other reason than the fact that it's going to ruin their life. And those people have a built-in health burden that makes them a bad reference point for a "normal healthy person", and then makes all the rest of us look less healthy when compared to them.  It's called the Former Drinker Paradox, or a number of other names, and it's likely going to be the canonical case study in public health research courses for decades to come. 

This is a story about the scientific method, study design, and the need to understand how large numbers work when mashed together:

Study debunks link between moderate drinking and longer life

Jul 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-07-debunks-link-moderate-longer-life.html

Reminder - "lower quality" studies, with older participants, no distinction between former drinkers and lifelong abstainers, linked moderate drinking to greater longevity. So moderate drinkers were compared with "abstainer" and "occasional drinker" groups that included some older adults who had quit or cut down on drinking because they'd developed any number of health conditions. "That makes people who continue to drink look much healthier by comparison."

"If you look at the weakest studies," Stockwell said, "that's where you see health benefits."

Yes, the weak studies. 

Further reading: Stockwell, T., et al. Why do only some cohort studies find health benefits from low volume alcohol use? A systematic review and meta-analysis of study characteristics that may bias mortality risk estimates. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs (2024). DOI: 10.15288/jsad.23-00283. 

https://dx.doi.org/10.15288/jsad.23-00283

AI Art - Room With a Big Mess - Dec 2024 3

Next - The scientists who make the content in the journals and the people who run the publishing industry are not the same people, yet they both seem to be having a hard time resisting the temptation to use robots:

Flood of 'junk': How AI is changing scientific publishing

Aug 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-junk-ai-scientific-publishing.html

A bioinformatics professor at Brigham Young University in the United States told AFP that he had been asked to peer review the study in March.

After realizing it was "100 percent plagiarism" of his own study - but with the text seemingly rephrased by an AI program - he rejected the paper.

He said he was "shocked" to find the plagiarized work had simply been published elsewhere, in a new Wiley journal called Proteomics.

More than 13,000 papers were retracted last year, by far the most in history, according to the US-based group Retraction Watch. The paper in question in this writeup, however, has not yet been retracted.

Note: usually I try to add the academic paper here at the bottom, and which is usually taken from the bottom of the writeup, but in this case I think there is no paper, and the bottom of the writeup points to ... the journal that reprinted the obviously fake paper. Proteomics. Remember the name. But also remember that the science aggregator website (phys.org) probably uses some level of automation (remember when we used to call AI simply "automation"?) to place the article information at the bottom of the writeup, explaining how this happened here. This is the future. 

AI Art - Room With a Big Mess - Dec 2024 4

Paper mills: The 'cartel-like' companies behind fraudulent scientific journals

Oct 2024, phys.org via Rizqy Amelia Zein for The Conversation

https://phys.org/news/2024-10-paper-mills-cartel-companies-fraudulent.html

In just five years, the numbers of retractions jumped from 10 in 2019 to 2,099 in 2023. [link]

Paper Mills - By paying around €180 to €5,000 (approximately US$197–$5,472), a person can have their name listed as the author of research paper, without having to painstakingly do research and write the results.

And this is how:

• plagiarize other published articles
• contain false and stolen data
• include engineered and duplicated images
• rewrite scientific articles using generative artificial intelligence 
• translate published articles from other languages into English
• sell authorship slots before an article is accepted, guaranteed to publish
• offer fake peer review services to convince potential buyers
• bribing rogue journal editors with as  much as $20,000 [link]
• unusual collaboration patterns: An article on the activity of ground beetles attacking crops in Kazakhstan, for example, is written by authors who are neither affiliated with institutions in Kazakhstan nor experts in insects or agriculture. The authors' backgrounds are suspiciously heterogeneous, ranging from anesthesia, dentistry, to biomedical engineering. 

Journals rarely state outright that a retraction is due to paper mill fraud, so Retraction Watch data as of May 2024 only recorded 7,275 retractions of articles related to the paper mill out of a total of 44,000 retractions recorded. In fact, it is estimated that up to 400,000 paper mill articles have infiltrated scientific literature over the past two decades.

via The Conversation under Creative Commons license

https://phys.org/partners/the-conversation/

Even the survey participants themselves can't resist!

Survey participants are turning to AI, putting academic research results into question

Nov 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-11-survey-ai-academic-results.html

"AI use has probably caused scholars and researchers and editors to pay increased scrutiny to the quality of their data."

The authors surveyed about 800 participants on Prolific (like Mechanical Turk) to learn how they engage with LLMs. All had taken surveys on Prolific at least once; 40% had taken seven surveys or more in the last 24 hours. 

The authors also noted that these responses included more "dehumanizing" language when describing Black Americans, Democrats, and Republicans. In contrast, LLMs consistently used more neutral, abstract language, suggesting that they may approach race, politics, and other sensitive topics with more detachment.

Participants who were newer to Prolific or identified as male, Black, Republican, or college-educated, were more likely to say they'd used AI writing assistance.

Societal inflection point: To see how human-crafted answers differ from AI-generated ones, the authors looked at data from three studies fielded on gold-standard samples before the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022. 

via Stanford Graduate School of Business, New York University and Cornell: Simone Zhang et al, Generative AI Meets Open-Ended Survey Responses: Participant Use of AI and Homogenization, SocArXiv (2024). DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/4esdp

https://dx.doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/4esdp

Bonus Reminder:

Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research

This memorandum provides policy guidance to federal agencies with research and development

expenditures on updating their public access policies. In accordance with this memorandum,

OSTP recommends that federal agencies, to the extent consistent with applicable law:

1. Update their public access policies as soon as possible, and no later than December 31st, 2025, to make publications and their supporting data resulting from federally funded research publicly accessible without an embargo on their free and public release;
2. Establish transparent procedures that ensure scientific and research integrity is maintained in public access policies; and,
3. Coordinate with OSTP to ensure equitable delivery of federally funded research results and data. Aug 25 2022.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-access-Memo.pdf