The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense. Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.
Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are “reviewed for merits and contents”.) The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. (Nature News has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper).
If you are wondering how this happens, it is because academic jargon echolalic, and phrases become stock phrases, hat computer programs can replicate things that sound enough like the real near nonsense articles that take hours to decipher. Because understanding all the jargon and insider phrasing is supposed to be a sign of aptitude and experience in the field, no one on these journals dares voice the idea that these technobabble articles are actually nonsense for fear of being seen as just not knowledgeable enough to “get” all the complicated insular language. As a result every just kind of glances at these things, sees the words that look right, and nods it along.
Non-peer reviewed journals are of course more susceptible, but because of the culture of jargon and drivel and fear of sounding not in the know enough, even supposedly peer reviewed journals fall pray to these revealing hoaxes.
At least they were removed before some professor assigned them to their students to analyze for class.
“I adore the way fan fiction writers engage with and critique source texts, but manipulating them and breaking their rules. Some of it is straight-up homage, but a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you’ll read these stories and it’ll be like ‘What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?’ And of course the point is that they don’t, and they wouldn’t, because they don’t have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There’s a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there—which I find fascinating and interesting and cool.”—Lev Grossman (via mycrofts)
protip if a nerd dude tries to give you a pop quiz about the fandom on your shirt/bag/cosplay by asking you to answer a banal and obscure trivia question to prove you’re a Real Gamer, turn the question back on him. ask him about the thematic implications that bit of trivia has on the actual story. ask him about the character development and motivations of the minor characters he’s making you list. ask him if he thinks the major in-universe event he’s testing you on was successful in carrying forward the underlying tone and intent of the work itself. ask him about fucking literary devices. you know that one super tough and intimidating lit teacher everyone encounters at least once in their lifetime? become that teacher. make him sweat.
Cicero: would put multi-paragraph rants without page breaks and piss everyone off
Catullus: would run one of those arty blogs that periodically startles you with hardcore gay porn on your dash
Vergil: would have a successful ongoing webcomic or blog and would constantly reblog and be reblogged by Horace
Horace: would post a ton of Instagram photos of wine and houses in the countryside and would constantly reblog and be reblogged by Vergil
Pliny the Elder: would post a bunch of photos of flowers, nature, and astronomical facts, and would die while attempting to liveblog the Vesuvius eruption
Lucretius: would be a nightblogger who would always post stuff like “what if when we die we become atoms and float away in the wind? Like you could be inhaling and exhaling your dead ancestors right now!”
Ovid: Would post a mixture of porn and reblogs of nature and portrait photos and would ultimately engage in massive flame wars and get banned for violating the Terms of Service
If Ancient Greeks had Tumblrs
Plato would have an RPG blog, blogging as Socrates, and it would be one of those ones that’s practically all responses to asks, but the asks would be written by other RPG blogs that he was also running.
(Socrates would not be on Tumblr, he would be on Twitter, and would be more interested in stirring up drama over controversial issues than defending any one position himself.)
Thales would have a photo blog full of pictures of water: waterfalls, rivers, the sea. Heraclitus would sometimes reblog the river ones.
Heraclitus - total night-blogger. Reblogged by just about everyone, but for some reason no one ever remembers to reblog as text, so as you scroll down your feed all you ever see are fragments from linked posts.
Pythagoras - Posts a lot of gifs of cool natural phenomena followed by the comment: ‘MATHS!’. LOTS of followers, but tells a lot of in jokes you don’t really get if you haven’t been with him from the beginning.
Homer - just gets reblogged EVERYWHERE, frequently without a link to the source. Frequently accused of reposting stuff that’s actually his own work someone else has stolen.
Sophocles - very popular, writes a lot of fanfic. Into incest kinks. Big in Game of Thrones fandom.
Aristotle - follows Plato. Massive following extending onto other social networking platforms. Always a bit Serious. You will not find kittens being adorably incompetent here. Lot of meta about what blogging SHOULD be for.
Herodotus - lots of really interesting posts on history, the kind of stuff that really makes you go ‘huh, that’s cool’… not always particularly well researched.
If Renaissance Dramatists had Tumblr…
Jonson: endless Instagram photos of whatever he’s currently reading. Lots of followers who are mostly too intimidated to speak to him.
Shakespeare: writes tons of fanfiction, most of it AU. Gets a lot of anons complaining about his spelling, grammar, and (lack of) adherence to canon. All of them are Jonson.
Marlowe: veers wildly between giant flame wars over religion and/or gay rights and suddenly going on hiatus for weeks, only to return with a variety of bizarre and improbable stories. Runs a ‘secret’ side blog full of love poetry.
Beaumont and Fletcher: mostly just reblog Shakespeare- and their own weird injokes, even though they live in the same flat.
Dekker: posts a lot from the queue, but is hardly ever actually there because he never pays his internet bill and keeps getting cut off
Greene: hates everyone and everything and eventually ragequits after nobody agrees with his now-infamous rant about Shakespeare and Marlowe.
Nashe: trolls Marlowe’s inbox. Runs a ‘dick jokes’ blog with Shakespeare. Neither of them is ashamed of or sorry about it. They probably should be.
Middleton: instagrams random stuff in London and reblogs Financial Times articles with snarky commentary. Once in a while he reblogs something Shakespeare posted and it gets like a billion notes. Also Dekker posts on his account a lot when his internet is cut off.
Milton: posts incredibly wordy rants that confuse everyone because they’re both politically and religiously radical. Everyone reblogs them but nobody quite understands what they mean.
Spenser: mostly posts Mary Sue fanfic, but it’s beautifully written.
If you ever feel bad about your own writing, just remember that one of the world’s most well-known works of classic literature is self-insert fanfiction where the author hangs out with his favorite poet and is guided on his journey of discovery by a Manic Pixie Dream Girl version of a woman he met twice.
sometimes i think post-modernism looks remarkably like pre-modernism
During the act of reading engaging fiction, we can lose all sense of time. By the final chapter of the right book, we feel changed in our own lives, even if what we’ve read is entirely made up.
Research says that’s because while you’re engaged in fiction—unlike nonfiction—you’re given a safe arena to experience emotions without the need for self-protection. Since the events you’re reading about do not follow you into your own life, you can feel strong emotions freely.
[…]
The key metric the researchers used is “emotionally transported,” or how deeply connected we are to the story. Previous research has shown that when we read stories about people experiencing specific emotions or events it triggers activity in our brains as if we were right there in the thick of the action.
”—
New study by Dutch researchers confirms previoustheories that reading fiction makes you a better person by expanding your capacity for empathy.
I would be interested in seeing a similar study done with other narrative media. Graphic novels, manga, and comic books, seem to follow the description of an empathic work that does not follow your life and allows you to experience the emotions of others.“ And it is still a reading experience. But I feel like taking it further into television and movies might be bordering on poor scholarship. By the same token, what of short stories? Short short stories? Flash fiction? Fan fiction drabbles? (For the purposes of fiction prose, a fan fiction that is 200k words would, I assume, be no different than original fiction of the same sort…)
I would be really interested to see this kind of work replicated with video games - particularly video games of different levels of linearity and plot. Does having your choices impacting the story change the level of empathy or immersion? In which direction? Certainly even a running around and chasing butterflies in skyrim or building houses in the Sims can make us "lose all sense of time,” but what of the claim of empathy?
I feel like the study almost demands to be done with different types of games, what with the claims out there in the news that video games cause the opposite of empathetic growth.
I just worry about researchers outside of the gaming community lumping something relatively freeform, or prized for its freeform play with a more story and character driven game.
I suppose I am similarly curious if the study found the increase in empathy for fiction to be true regardless of the material. Does Lolita and American Psycho produce the same increased empathic skills as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or even something more mainstream like Harry Potter?
If we are going to apply something designed for precision like the scientific method to something as vague and hand-wavy as “fiction” and “empathy” then we might as well go all the way, no?
So I was driving home and something occurred to me that I want to write about real fast, because i am apparently incapable of experiencing moments of learning and NOT sharing it here.
I have been, over time, fond of making jokes about Kieron Gillen killing off Kate Bishop. To me, it’s a joke about cavalierly spoiling another writer’s work and filling that writer’s inbox up with concerned emails and asks. I do this because I love Kieron. He’s one of my dearest friends in comics and out and I am on any given day at any given time in awe of something he’s said or written somewhere. And because Actually Feeling Stuff is hard this is how I show affection. Or at least it was.
For whatever reason I was chewing it over in my head and I started to feel like Lucy with the football. I dunno about you or who you are or what you like but I don’t like feeling like Lucy with the football.
It doesn’t matter what I thought the joke was, it occurs to me that because Kate is Kate and not, say, Karl, it occurs to me that there’s another angle from which to view that joke from that makes it seem… well, mean-spirited. Because this is a thing that comics does to Kates. Frequently.
Which, uh, which is bullshit. And I’m sorry for not sensing that sooner.
So I’m not going to make that joke any more. And I promise nobody’s gonna off Kate so Clint can feel bad about it and do what needs to be done.
Not right now, I mean. Not while she’s carrying that baby.
KIDDING! KIDDING!
Okay, that was the last joke like that. I promise.
For those who don’t know, Kate Bishop aka Hawkeye (not to be confused with Clint Barton aka Hawkeye aka Hawkguy) has been featured pretty prominently in two popular marvel titles. One of them is Hawkeye which Matt Fraction (the OP) writes, which is about Kate and Clint being Hawkeye and what that title and role means (and also about pizza dogs and adorable things) and the other is Young Avengers, written by Kieron Gillen, which is about a group of young super heroes (and gay love).
What Mr. Fraction is saying here that is so awesome and so wonderfully insightful into the medium he is writing in, is that the jokes he makes about Kate being killed off in the other series she is in are far too reminiscent of a real problem in comics - the killing off of women for the pain and motivation of men - as he puts it, “so Clint can feel bad about it and do what needs to be done.”
The next line is a lovely jab at both plot twists and conservative politics, because Mr. Fraction is a wonderful man.
Even if death in Marvel comics doesn’t mean much, the idea that female characters, and the violence enacted on them are tools to further the plot of male characters is a problem, and it is one that Mr. Fraction clearly understands.
It just makes me really happy when people show awareness of the problematic tropes of their medium, and vow to work against them. Also of course that Kate will be around for a while longer.
“Episode 4 saw the words Bad Wolf appear for the first time. I just made it up on a whim, cos I liked the idea of the TARDIS being graffiti’d. But then I spent the rest of the episode idly wondering who that kid was, why he wrote those odd words. And, having dismissed notions of Evil Super Villain Kid, a plan began to form, in mid-production. Knowing that Rose would become the Time Goddess at the end of the series, I wondered if a Time Goddess would imprint herself on the universe, creating things in her image, like the face of Jesus in a bagel. Better still, these signs would actually summon her into existence. That’s the sort of thing you think about in this job, late at night. And then I worked backwards, inserting Bad Wolf references into almost every script. Funnily enough, I never told anyone what I was doing, in case it didn’t work, but the design department picked up on it—they didn’t even ask what it meant, they just offered to stencil it on Captain Jack’s bomb, in German. The idea spread without anyone knowing what it meant. Which is very Bad Wolf in itself.”—Russell T Davies, Doctor Who: The Shooting Scripts (via timelordsandladies)
“never use this word because it’s common, instead use all of these things that i’ll call synonyms even though they carry different connotations and will change the meaning of your dialogue if you use them” — very bad and unfortunately very common writing advice
fortunately, only on tumblr. Intro fiction/poetry day one basically says the opposite. Then they make you read enough Hemingway to long for ANYTHING ELSE.
Teen Wolf is often under fire around Tumblr for being as casually misogynistic as they come. The central women are all love interests or mothers. The female villains die horribly, where the male villains get backstories and development. Sometimes women seem to be gratuitously murdered just because. These accusations all may be true, but I think to call the show as a whole misogynistic is to miss one of the central themes of the show: matriarchy.
Teen Wolf, as far as I can tell, is about matriarchies. Specifically, it’s about matriarchy as an ideal and about the problems that arise when men grab for power that belongs by right to women. Which is to say, all the problems in the show.
“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”—Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (via dracarysh)
This actually explains a lot. Everyone who’s raved about Frozen should read this.
Oh my god, this article. The writer of this article seems legit disappointed that the two mains of Frozen are not the Kate Beatonian “Strong Female Character.” While it doesn’t send me into belching globs of rage like I thought it might, I am tempted to waste the afternoon writing a strongly-worded rebuttal.
…but I won’t. Because today is sportsball.
Female characters that make mistakes = anti-feminist, ladies!
A good portion of what she writes is true about Frozen, but her strikes against it doesn’t have much to do with why I like that film. I like the film because, to me, it’s about escaping from your dumb well-intentioned-but-actually-friggin’-abusive biological parents and putting yourself in a place that you can heal. I don’t especially care if any other Disney movie managed to do that first. I like the way this movie did it, and it speaks to me and makes me feel stronger and less alone as a person.
Sometimes you just have to run away from everything, hide yourself in an ice castle, and learn that what you are isn’t terrible. Seeing this reinforced has made me a better, happier adult. The rest of the movie is just details.
Complaining that Elsa is a bad character because she doesn’t “take responsibility” both dramatically misses the point of her character arc completely and suggests to me a certain disturbing lack of empathy for people who actually deal with severe anxiety…
And saying that for Anna fixing her relationship with Elsa is a secondary goal because her second song is about love is… I mean… wow. Just. Wow.
Okay, kudos to everyone who got to the end of this piece of crap article. Wow.
This author, on top of whatever everyone else here said, clearly has no idea what theme and contrast are. What is Anna clumsy? because Elsa is too contained. They are contrasts. Duh? Like. What movie was this person watching?
Elsa doesn’t take responsibility? What - did she have to say those words on camera? Or does this author not know how to read emotion, motivation, or anything that isn’t stated.
External image
And um. Love being Anna’s primary objective? Maybe this author was busy checking her watch when the conflict was resolved, what with the “true love” in the film being that between sisters.
But yeah, nothing outgrosses the fact that this author needs women to be perfect idealized “strong” characters with no flaws or actual traits.
Look at me, I am not a good female character (gender shit aside).
Oh, and the fact that they don’t think that showing that a male love interest can be predatory is important and a feminist message? Psh. John Smith was shown as nonpredatory. And Naveen, who came looking for money, ended up being a god guy after all.
“More than half the questions I am asked are about the politics of the way I look. What it feels like to be not skinny/dark-skinned/a minority/not conventionally pretty/female/etc. It’s not very interesting to me, but I know it’s interesting to people reading an interview. Sometimes I get jealous of white male showrunners when 90 percent of their questions are about characters, story structure, creative inspiration, or, hell, even the business of getting a show on the air. Because as a result the interview of me reads like I’m interested only in talking about my outward appearance and the politics of being a minority and how I fit into Hollywood, blah blah blah. I want to shout, “Those were the only questions they asked!?”—Mindy Kaling (interviewed by Lena Dunham) on the politics of the way she looks (via heidisaman)
revisionist lay criticism for shakespeare is so popular both as like, word-of-mouth truisms — “romeo and juliet isn’t REALLY about love, everyone gets it ALL WRONG, what it’s REALLY about is—” (which is like the literary equivalent of urban legends about hidden legendary pokemon in pokemon red) — and well-meaning but ill-advised attempts to make the supposed canon ‘edgy’ and ‘relatable,’ no shakespeare’s not dry and irrelevant he’s REALLY relevant he’s SUPER relevant! and entertaining too! it comes off as kind of a fearful tryhard bleat, ineffectual flailing in the face of losing kids to paranormal ya and video games. which. the works of william shakespeare are many things but strictly textually relevant to the life of the average american teenager is not one of them. so good luck with that
actually what gets on me more is the common (in fandom and some starry-eyed lit departments) and hopeful claim that shakespeare is or was ~SUBVERSIVE~: usually pointing to the obvious and common elements of tongue-in-cheek homoeroticism and genderbending/crossdressing in his plays. which. uh, again, values dissonance. it’s not that he was flouting taboo, it’s that sociohistorical ‘progression’ even within the same or related cultures is, well, fictitious, but moreover is not actually a linear march from some nebulous state of conservatism to some nebulous state of progressivism with a few setbacks and regressions; the sexual morals of london of shakespeare’s time weren’t the sexual morals of today’s london, and they certainly weren’t the sexual morals of today’s united states. there’s a big difference between asserting that the staging of shakespeare’s work can be harnessed to some progressive purpose in the present day US against our particular shades of puritanical morals and asserting that they were radical purely on grounds that they might make rick santorum uncomfortable.
one can’t just decide that the things one likes and finds personally empowering are intrinsically radical and subversive on a macro, historical level because one wants them to be
… well, one certainly can, as evidenced by the vast majority of tumblr. but. but it’d make me PEEVISH ok
There are definitely valid concerns in this post. For one, assuming that society is inevitably marching from some more primitive state to some more advanced and enlightened state, and that all things can me placed somewhere on this path is not only simplistic and wrong, but rooted in racism and imperialism and very problematic.
The idea that the mores of one era and place can be at all mapped on to those of another is also a really problematic thing, and is an issue in both lay and academic criticisms - don’t think folks in ivory towers are immune from the inability to see the times so differently.
This comment interests me on a meta critical level, though, because that at least since the Romantics, every single movement I can think of has found a way to claim Shakespeare as if not the first of their canon, as a fore runner, or predictor of it - I have read naturalist claiming Shakespeare was a revolutionary in naturalism. Modernists and existentialists were fond of calling him the first modernist or the first true tragedian since the Greeks and thus the founder of their movement. Looking for a foundation in Shakespeare is practically a requirement at this point for a new field of theory and criticism or a new school of play writing. Everyone tries to stage Shakespeare as per the dictates of their favorite school of drama.
So this is very far from either new or lay.
Before I continue, I should note I am by no means very well studied in Elizabethan England nor do I claim to have read, let alone studied, all of Shakespeare’s writing.
But to claim that Shakespeare wasn’t at all subversive is something I question. Yes, it is very true that gender bending would have not been seen as something at all subversive - rather as a kind of sly bit of comedy for a theatre where all parts are played by men anyway. Plays were subject to censor, and Shakespeare’s own family were subject to arrest for religious and/or political reasons. So he was very much aware of the politics of the age. Plays were also “vulgar” entertainment - they were specifically made to appeal to the non-elite as well as the educated. In that sense alone, the Marxist readings of Shakespeare have grounding. In a sense, his play’s contemporary success means he had a good finger on the pulse of his contemporary politics of the “masses” and the elite.
His plays are also noted for breaking with the “standards of drama” of the day. Someone more versed in Elizabethan drama can tell you more, but some contemporary critics noted that he seemed to want for knowledge of convention and knowledge of the canon. That alone can be taken as subversive. People often called him a “natural, unlearned genius” though that comment probably gained popularity due to the Romantics love of that kind of thing.
But it is also important to remember that when a piece of literary criticism mentions “Shakespeare” they might be referring to the canon of Shakespeare’s writing, rather than the man himself. And any arguments they make about the text thus no longer depend one bit on the man himself, and become very easy to divorce from time and place. The gender bending in Shakespeare might not have been subversive for the Globe stage in the 1500’s, but if an all women’s Shakespeare troop preforms the Twelfth Night for an AIDS benefit, suddenly the genderbending becomes very subversive. It’s part of what happens when you allow for Death of the Author - it also kind of kills the original context. (OP did touch on this)
Which takes me to the part I take issue with the most in the original post.
Of COURSE Shakespeare’s canon is relevant to today’s youth. How could it be relevant and critical to every art movement up through the 20th century and suddenly stop?
How are two teenagers, restricted by their parents generations war, stuck in a city plagued by gang violence, caught up in a youthful passion turned tragic NOT relevant to inner city kids? Did you miss West Side Story?
How is Othello and Merchant of Venice not important to students facing discrimination today? Are there no more young women whose lives are controlled and constrained by men?
I mean, here, have a screenshot from a mid 1990’s cartoon from a franchise still making millions in the box office.
He does the whole quotation, but I am not going to subject anyone to more of that animation style. I mean, you’ll be pretty hard pressed to find a Jewish High School in this country that doesn’t make it’s students read that play and discuss it on length. Or HERE is a link to a Key and Peele sketch from this year on Othello, for that perspective.
By the way, OP, I mean you no ill will, if you even read this - this post was stuck in my drafts for who knows how long basically until I had the brain power to get around to typing until I had an excuse to make everyone look at 1990’s animated Hank McCoy.
As one of those weirdo’s not in the Harry Potter maelstrom, I am confused.
Has someone explained Death of the Author to this supposedly great writer of our (postmodern) time?
Because I am getting a serious Night of the Living Dead vibe from this. As in maybe (figurative) shotguns should be more involved.
wish fulfillment is publicly recanting your published novel plot years later
And yes I know Dickens tried to do it in Great Expectations, but does anyone remember how that worked out? Badly. It worked out badly and was not taken well.
If you’re at all familiar with me and my personal thoughts on comicverse Tony Stark, you probably already know that I believe Tony is at least semi-canonically bisexual. There are a lot of reasons for this, most of which I plan to address at some point in the future, but this post is only tangentially related to that viewpoint. This post is mainly about how Tony Stark is sexualized/has his virility or manhood mocked or questioned by villains and antagonists in the comics. At the end, I vaguely describe why I feel this adds fuel to the fire of my theory about his sexual orientation, but in this context that’s more for my personal justification than anything else. In the 1998 Iron Man and Captain America Annual, upon first meeting Tony psychically, Metallo immediately calls into question Tony’s playboy status.
This innuendo, while obviously intended to be a throwaway insult to Tony, is interesting because it presents Tony’s sexual promiscuity as something which weakens Tony, thus questioning his power and subverting the typical societal view of a promiscuous male (one that equates male power with sexuality). According to Metallo, because he is suddenly able to resist Metallo psychologically (he intends to mentally stop him from using mind control), his sexual strength must be diminished through his own will, making power and sexuality mutually exclusive. This then calls into question to power of Iron Man, whose identity is still a secret to everyone at this point. Iron Man’s power is clearly non-sexual in nature, but Tony’s reputation has allowed for questioning of his agency and virility on the part of Metallo, subverting traditional views of male sexual prowess.
“Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.”—Vladimir Nabokov on Sigmund Freud