The silver lining is that the media hype probably got a lot of people interested in physics and materials science. Some of them will undoubtedly go on to make great discoveries and contributions to the field in the future.
Maybe there should be a group of researchers that submit papers that seem believable with known issues to avoid scientific journals stagnating. Maybe the names and institutions of the group submitting papers should be hidden so that more reputable/famous people and institutions get the same level of scrutiny as everyone else.
That's a great idea, but who is going to pay for it?
Every scientist knows that it's more than possible to publish deliberately fraudulent work. Every non-scientist thinks that detecting this fraud is easy.
Eh, this working engineer doesn't think so. Freeform fraud detection is a hard problem in general, and when you're talking about (apparent) cutting-edge research, the pool of people who might spot specific details is tiny.
A low probability of detection does suggest that the penalty should be relatively high to have a deterrent effect.
In fact I know for a fact this has been done at least once before (at least with the big words): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen
But it should be done in every field, regularly
The "alternative solution" to having a thing that wacks people on the head every Tuesday is...not having it.
This assumes code review's key purpose is to find bugs.
I always wonder about this when I review something, but at the end of the day there are many other things I'm looking more at than "is this a bug"
-Is this duplicating something
else?
-Should this be part of this
object?
-if I come back in a year, will
it take me 10 minutes or an
hour to understand it?
-is this necessary?
-should I approve this but add a
task to the tracking board to
figure out if this should be
done in the service instead of
the client?
-etcThe editor always has the final word on whether a manuscript gets accepted.
In terms of function though, the "hairy arm" is the complete opposite though: it's not to make sure reviewers are paying attention, it's to distract meddling reviewers from the changes you don't want them to veto.
> A feature added for no other reason than to draw management attention and be removed, thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the product.
Sounds like it was for the same reason
You'd be better off pair programming everything and forgoing code reviews.
Sometimes I think the people that come up with this shit are sociopaths.
There was. People were not very pleased.
good idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
bad idea: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/22/22398156/university-minne...
It’s called a scholarly hoax, and it’s been done more than once: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing...
The idea being that if the submission got published, the review process was obviously a total joke. I think they even had some examples that had actually been published.
Edit, Link: https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/
(it would keep the students alert)
or maybe Van Halen's "CRC check", where their venue contract would ask for a bunch of things set up in advance, including a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed.
(it was a test of diligence, that they read the contract and knew the requirements)
Listening to someone who plainly had no idea what they were talking about is what got me interested in the field of education.