Fake things will never cease to amaze me. Starting off here is a story that you may not even be able to follow, because it's so deep, so far-reaching, yet so thorough, and so enduring, that at some point while watching this talk, you will think the presenters are themselves the fake ones, trying to push some really crazy ramble that's just too hard to believe.
If you want to try anyway, below you'll find a link to a presentation at a computer security research conference in 2018, where the presenters followed a funny feeling they had about a possibly fake conference that accepted a talk on one of their research topics. Then they uncovered a vast network of academic publishers and conference organizers serving over 100 countries, on thousands of topics, to tens of thousands of scholars and researchers. It's all tightly controlled by one person, and it's all fake. They went deep, uncovered everything, and presented it to some authorities who did something, but not enough; and you can jump straight to the aftermath if you want, also linked below. Spoiler: six years later they still exist.
Perhaps the most important detail - this is the same publishing group that about ten years ago sold a printed and bound copy of the Wikipedia entry for Stigler's law of eponymy. For the uninitiated, Stigler's law states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer; Stigler attributed the discovery of Stigler's law to sociologist Robert K. Merton, making "Stigler's law" an example of Stigler's law. (gtfo).
They literally printed the Wikipedia article and sold it as a book. So they made a book about eponymy written by an author with no name, and for that they are famous, in Network Address hall of fame, the fake hall of fame. The thumbnail image atop this post is evidence of this fakery, from personal archives as well as this very weblog, dating back to 2013.
If you're an academic, in any sense of the word, or even in spirit, you pretty much need to watch this:
DEF CON 26 - Svea, Suggy, Till - Inside the Fake Science Factory - 2018
And the outcome:
No comments:
Post a Comment