More South Korean academics caught naming kids as co-authors

Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro, you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”

They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it’s certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you’re an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to ~~programming~~ grad school.

from the classic "Programming Sucks" article.

This is true.

I think a lot of complaining about grad school comes from four areas:

1. As you point out people who become grad students are often fortunate people. They already have a college degree. They are able to do well enough at school to be accepted into a graduate program. This usually means that they could be getting paid 2-15X more while doing far less work at an industry job. So in comparison grad school is miserable.

2. Unlike a top high-skill job grad school is a uncertain career track. You can find out that you spent between 3-12 years of our life with very little to show for it researching something it turns out no one, including you, cares about. The uncertainty gets to some people.

3. PhD programs can place an enormous amount of pressure on the student to be independent, have new ideas and execute those ideas well. This can be a frightening experience.

4. In some fields very strange workloads placed on the student. For instance in some labs students run experiments that require performing a task every 40 minutes for 36-72 hours straight. If the task is not performed perfectly weeks of work is lost. The experiment might involve dangerous chemicals. This is like being a long haul trucker or sound engineer.

Which probably means that they're not exaggerating their misery.

The human experience is relative. If you're stronger than you were before you feel strong. If you're poorer than you were before you feel poor.

Manual labour jobs have about as much bearing on how a graduate student feels about their day to day as does a gazelle being eaten by a lion.

I was wondering what happens when someone has the same surname and same first initial. I was hoping it has some way of telling them apart, but it seems I was hoping for too much.

I am also a Korean and wrote this on top of my head, though I do have to admit that it has been some time since I've been a student involved in it.

I'm mostly talking about 학종 where you submit 자소서 and 생기부(학생부?), and that there's been a ban on writing non-public education related experience on the latter. As for the claim that it being part of the government crackdown an hakwon, [here](https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20100407138500004) is a source I found where they directly mention it. Ctrl+f for 사교육.

It is run by a non-profit as opposed to a government. Granted the SAT would also qualify as non-public so that just confuses things further.

It also sounds pretty unbelievable.

You can't really just walk into some research hospitals and somehow find yourself talking to the right person who will get you in as a research intern. In my experiences, sadly, virtually all research interns are basically just the PI/member-of-lab's daughter/son or a collaborator's children/relatives.

One reason I can think of as to why this is is that you do really need a filter, because not having a filter will cost you immense time. It just turns out that references -- which are bound to be from your close friends and relatives -- are a signal one tends to trust.

I remember this from 19th century novel "The Captain's Daughter" by Alexander Pushkin[0]. While the book is fiction, the practice isn't presented as something extraordinary for the mid-18th century and may very well be true. I haven't looked for non-fictional sources.

The second paragraph of the novel reads as follows:

Матушка была еще мною брюхата, как уже я был записан в Семеновский полк сержантом, по милости майора гвардии князя Б., близкого нашего родственника. Если бы паче всякого чаяния матушка родила дочь, то батюшка объявил бы куда следовало о смерти неявившегося сержанта, и дело тем бы и кончилось.

Oddly, in both English translations linked to by the Wikipedia article the mention of pregnancy and handling of the girl situation is just dropped.

In my very imperfect translation:

"My mother was only pregnant with me when through the help of a near relative of ours, Prince B., himself a Major of the Guards, I was already enlisted in Semyonovsky regiment as a Sergeant of the Guards. Were my mother, contrary to the wishes, to give birth to a girl, my father would've notified the regiment of the death of an absent sergeant and that would've been it."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Captain%27s_Daughter

Added a rough translation which doesn't really add anything to what the parent comment said.

He said education, not certification. Education happens in your head, not in a database where you have x qualification or not.

And many libraries (especially my local city library) have a notable lack of technical books, so you need quite a bit more than dedication and critical thinking if you're going to go that route.

I'm not trying to belittle the contributions of individual contributors (indeed, I'm an IC-level engineer who has worked out the details on many products that have been patented). The detail work is totally necessary to get a working product into the market.

But that doesn't mean that the detail work is always what is claimed in the patent. Sure, sometimes it's a smaller detail-level aspect of a product that is patented; but other times it's the higher-level system architecture that is new--so that's what gets patented. It all comes down to what is novel about the new product, and what is valuable enough that a company wants to pay for IP protections.

In my experience, engineering managers are almost always engineers themselves, and tend to still enjoy contributing to some engineering work when given the chance. Also, sometimes someone is given a "manager" or "director" title as a promotion simply because they don't have a well-developed technical track for advancement. "Principal" or "fellow" engineer may be a more fitting title for their role, but it's not what you'll see on their LinkedIn page. The point is, just because someone has a title that suggests they're only spending their day managing people, some can definitely contribute to patentable ideas enough that they should be listed as an inventor. As mentioned in another comment, the patent could potentially be invalidated if their contributions rose to the level of an inventor but they weren't listed on the patent.

That would be more or less the expected outcome if there was no cheating of any kind going on. If you grow up in a household where the dinner table conversation is about carpentry you’ll pick up a lot of background knowledge by osmosis and if you show the slightest actual interest most parents are very happy to share what they’re interested in with their child. Very few people become researchers without being comparatively obsessed with their field. Having family in a lab also means your path to working there is a lot easier because if you screw something up it’ll reflect badly on whoever brought you in.

I’m sure there are tons of fraudulent papers “written” by teenagers but they’re certainly not all fraudulent.

Phdcomics are painful to read for someone who did a PhD and went through all the strips during all these years :)

Fortunately the comics did not exist at that time otherwise we would have been continuously depressed.

I will have to get the movies someday, for masochist reasons.

Your idea of genius seems to be simplicity. I consider genius the ability to understand things others cannot. I think the question is, how long did the researchers get away with this fraudulent act compared to bankers who created the last recession? The ability to hide something for longer from more eyes is a greater sign of genius than coming up with a trick nobody bothered to verify.

And of course, the really fucked up part is what the bankers did was legal.

I feel like you're ascribing genius to the equivalent of a parlor trick.

> Yes, but

One fraud doesn't justify the other.

The difference being that it's often expected to put your advisor as a co-author even if their contribution was anecdotal while it's never expected to put your kids/pets as co-authors unless maybe there was a very significant contribution from their part.