Dean of Engineering at University of Nevada wrote a paper that’s bad | Hacker News Reader

Dean of Engineering at University of Nevada wrote a paper that’s bad

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

123 pointsTomte79 comments

* The entire paper is 278 words, excluding references

* There are 9 references, but no footnotes to show where a referenced work is actually being used.

* The paper provides no data.

* The paper mentions correlation between data that was taken, without providing statistics or graphs to prove said correlation.

* The paper's single photo, of a Drosophila Melanogastert fly, was copied from Pixabay, without proper attribution (Per reverse image search)

* The authors neglected to use a properly licensed image of a Drosophila Melanogastert fly which exists in Wikicommons.

* The paper's last sentence is neither a valid English sentence, nor an accurate summary of the paper. The sentence is "of these age factors when considering these options supply chain procedure for maintaining will be beneficial." That is not a typo. It literally starts with a lowercase letter.

Link to paper: https://isctj.com/index.php/isctj/article/view/250/250

Image on Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/photos/fruit-fly-fly-insect-animal-68310...

Whoa, GPT3.5 is already better than that.

Oh wow, I thought we were just seeing the poorly written introduction. Nope... It's the whole paper!

Good grief

“…there was no correlation between chronological age and time to death.” Umm…

I worked for the previous Dean and the guy mentioned in the article. After a conversation with him, it was clear that the college's mission was inverted. Rather than serving the students, the college was there to serve him. Basically, everyone in the Dean's office quit after he started. It is sad because the previous Dean was a civil engineer and spent 30 years at the institution building it up.

Devil’s advocate but most research universities seem to serve the prestige and egos rather than students, especially grad students.

Even if that were true, it should not be the purpose of a university

The process was so flawed with this search. Initially, they didn't even provide a curriculum vitae to the college faculty. We were literally told to 'Google him'. The whole process was rushed and condensed into a single week with minimal interaction with faculty. Typically, these university leadership searches are very public because if they go wrong, they result in reputational harm, which is a huge disservice to the students.

The title does sound very much like clickbait, but the "paper" is certainly bad enough that I wouldn't even consider it a scientific paper at all. It's about twice the size of the abstract of a typical paper, and has essentially no content at all.

Wow, at first I thought that was just the first page, but it really is the entire paper.

It was an exciting read. I was not expecting the conclusion to suddenly talk about trains!

Wow.

Here's the meat of it:

> Our recent study has the premise that both humans and flies sleep during the night and are awake during the day, and both species require a significant amount of sleep each day when their neural systems are developing in specific activities. This trait is shared by both species. An investigation was segmented into three subfields, which were titled "Life span," "Time-to-death," and "Chronological age." In D. melanogaster, there was a positive correlation between life span, the intensity of young male medflies, and the persistence of movement. Time-to-death analysis revealed that the male flies passed away two weeks after exhibiting the supine behavior. Chronological age, activity in D. melanogaster was adversely correlated with age; however, there was no correlation between chronological age and time-to-death.

And by "meat of it" I mean literally everything that's not background.

In conclusion:

> of these age factors when considering these options supply chain procedure for maintaining will be beneficial.

That's not a fragment, that's the entire last sentence copied exactly, including the lack of capitalization.

https://isctj.com/index.php/isctj/article/view/250/250

Maybe the author just needs some sleep. To “exhibit the supine behavior,” as we say in the business.

It reads like someone took a longer paper, cut out individual sentences or fragments, and then put a fraction of them back together without bothering to see if it made sense.

It lists 9 references but never cites them directly. So there's no way to tell what came from where.

It's also just not copy-edited at all. There's _three _ spaces before the third sentence, which begins with a fragment of a different sentence

> The thing I still can’t figure out is, why did Jones publish this paper at all? He’d already landed the juicy Dean of Engineering job, months before submitting it to his own journal.

This was my first reaction as well. We always hear about publish or perish, but eventually you get pretty perish-proof.

Maybe he just wants to brag with his h-index. Or he uses the citation metrics to appear more prestigious when applying to grants or presenting himself in general. Or he has some bonus tied to publication numbers. Or he siphons off the publication fees as he owns the journal.

>Maybe he just wants to brag with his h-index.

Who is going to cite this paper?

He is ;-)

I only checked two papers by that author, but they both contained references to other papers by him in that journal.

Everyone he forces to. Its very common for seniors to pressure younger researchers to cite their papers.

Also funny is how many Wikipedia accounts exist only to edit his personal article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Student3... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Ecjones2 , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Bkp8677 , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Raidrfid , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Beronlee , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/UNREngin...

I doubt that this paper gets a passing grade as a middle school science research project

I used to work at the University of Nevada, Reno - the institution cited here. The current president of the institution is a former Republican governor without a Ph.D (something nearly all university presidents have). The current VP of Finance is a former Reno city manager who left his job due to a series of sexual harrassment and hostile workplace scandals. After leaving his Reno city job he went to work for the Republican govenor who is now the UNR president.

I think you get the idea of what kind of institution UNR is morphing into.

"former Republican governor without a Ph.D" - Are these traits disqualifiers for some reason? In particular, maybe NOT having a Ph.D. could be considered a good thing in this case. Is there anything else to say about this person's qualifications or lack thereof?

Is a general without combat experience fit to lead?

Of course.

I think that’s plausible.

A better analogy would be a general who had never been a junior officer.

It's possible in theory. Someone with unique skills can be directly commissioned at the O-4, O-5, or even O-6 ranks without ever being a junior officer. After commissioning they can eventually be promoted to O-7 (brigadier general or equivalent) just like any other officer.

https://talent.army.mil/direct-commissioning/

William Knudsen was even commissioned directly at O-9 (Lieutenant General) during WWII.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Knudsen

You might want to change that to "lead in a war?" There's a bunch of high level people at the Pentagon that are glorified procurement officers.

That's kind of a loaded question from an ethical standpoint, because the obvious answer ("No") tends to justify getting into an unnecessary war every so often to keep your armed forces from getting too rusty. But it's an interesting one.

My father was a medical doctor in the army. He rose to the rank of Colonel and they wanted him to become a general, but he didn't want to put in the number of years that would required to get his pension at the general level, so he declined. So... yes, you can become a general with zero combat experience.

For sake of analogy, I simplified. There are many pathways up the ranks, and the general of today may not ever engage in a theatre of war depending on country.

Experience however, does contribute to one's station -- whether basic training, joint exercises or in inopportune times, the battlefield.

And the famous early computer scientist Grace Hopper retired as a rear admiral in the US Navy despite not having combat experience either. But that's because she was career Navy, and basically the only way the military can give you a promotion is by increasing your rank.

My university had a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff[1] as the president when the pandemic hit. IMO we were lucky to have him as president.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Myers

Logistics experience seems more relevant to that job

You left off the part that answers your question:

> (something nearly all university presidents have)

So yea, it looks like it would normally be a disqualifier. I'd imagine it's for the same reason that not being a part of a union means you can't be leader of the union.

Or why Boeing should probably have had a signification number of engineers at the top levels over the last decades.

EDIT: There's a peculiar meme that I first noticed in the early 2010s that it's actually good to not know anything about what you're doing because you can "innovate" and "disrupt" better. I remember first hearing it explicitly stated by the founder of B.S. startup uBeam. Wonder how that's turning out...

Not so much disqualifiers as redundant. If either of these traits appeal to you, I imagine that both would.

> "former Republican governor without a Ph.D" - Are these traits disqualifiers for some reason?

A Ph.D. is a pretty reasonable qualification to expect of a university director.

Unless you come from the law faculty.

Isn’t that rather splitting hairs as they’d have equivalent degrees?

And, in fact, Brian Sandoval does indeed have a law degree.

Well yes and no. A large fraction of law professors don't have academic degrees past JD which despite having 'Doctor' in its name, is not the equivalent of a Phd. On the other hand they likely would have a large number of publications or a significant body of work as a clerk for an important court.

The current president spent a lot of money acquiring and maintaining a school in Incline Village. The idea behind this was to attract more students. However, they failed to enroll a single student in Fall 2023. He believes college is a lifestyle. He started a program to give all freshmen an iPad and wants them to 'spend a semester at Tahoe.'

I don't think being a governor is a bad experience, but not having a doctoral degree is a very unfavorable situation because essentially all academic research stems from holders of doctoral degrees. A doctoral degree is the foundational course on how to conduct research. In this scenario, how can someone without a doctoral degree lead an academic institution in its activities?

But we’re talking about the office of the president. Isn’t this role more analogous to the CEO?

The president isn’t researching as an individual practitioner, but rather as an executive administrator.

CEOs for many companies should have some amount of 'lower level' experience in the business of the company. I would argue the 'CEO' for institutions focused primarily on research should have a relatively good amount of experience with performing the research. A doctoral degree is a pretty good indicator that the person has done some serious research, so it does not seem unreasonable to me to want the person leading a research institution to have one.

But isn’t University of Nevada a simply a state school?

I understand they have some research programs, but this primarily is a higher ed institution.

If there primary focus was research I’d agree with you.

It's a state school, but Nevada isn't exactly overflowing with them, so in the context of the higher-ed system in Nevada, they not 'simply' a state school.

unfortunately, usually professors in university should have Ph.D. let people who focus on research cutting-edge technology/knowledge to teach students in a higher education is important (at least in a perfect world).

Outside of the northeast, most large research universities in the US are state schools.

I mean, it's... suspect, anyway. "University president" is not a good retirement option for worn-out politicians, in that it involves doing an actual responsible job. Whatever happened to them just corruptly joining corporate boards and things?

Like, maybe it's innocent, and they really were the best person for the job, appointed via a competitive recruitment process, but... I mean, come on, now, if you'll believe that you'll believe anything.

So is this position some sort of sinecure? Like what’s happening in Florida?

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/16/how-desantis-and-fl...

My first reaction was “yup that’s Reno”, but the same problem exists in colleges across the board, red states and blue states, socially conservative states and anything-goes states.

>The current president of the institution is a former Republican governor without a Ph.D (something nearly all university presidents have).

Brian Sandoval has a law degree, for which there is good precedent for university presidents to have in lieu of a PhD.

Two other governors who became university presidents immediately come to mind: David Boren (Oklahoma), Mitch Daniels (Purdue). Both with law degrees.

There are people at places like this who want to do a good job. They want to do rigorous academic work and hold their students to high standards but the incentives are arrayed against them. Among other problems, there are tides of clownish administrators whose only goal is to gather more money so they can hire more administrators and give themselves higher salaries. Having academic standards of any kind doesn't help with this. Federal loan dollars are tied to enrolled warm bodies, not enrolled warm bodies that are also doing useful work or learning anything.

The Dean responded in the comments of this post.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/02/06/its-bezzle...

Working with research support and documentation, I can certainly belive it. Folks would be surprised what clever people with long resumes sometimes tries to pass as 'research'.

Florida and Texas state universities, behold your future!

This is so bad that I cannot even comprehend it.

No one in my department could or want to ever get away with something like this; absolutely appalling.

Scary, I considered applying to a faculty opening there at UNR.

When you think about "research" like this in the context of LLMs, I worry that the source (a journal) will start codifying some of this nonsense as known fact that the ChatGPTs of the world start regurgitatiing...

thats kind of incredible - on the linked comments they are discussing other submissions to that jounal of supply chain management and they're all like that. A page with two paragraphs or so, a picture, and three citations. how bizzare!

It's paywalled, but Noahpinion had a good summary of the situation: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/how-much-of-modern-academia-is.... The key points are that breaking disciplines into tiny subfields essentially makes it easier to build citation rings (even if you don't intend to, the same reviewers see most papers and let through ones that cite themselves).

With citation counts rather than quality working as karma in a competitive field (getting tenure) we shouldn't be surprised that some people supply a low quality but technically "peer-reviewed" journal.

This title is so bad I can't believe it.

No paywall, but it’s not loading for me.

https://archive.ph/EZr39

Outrage over a single low-quality paper, of which there are thousands across academia, misses the larger point. The real issue is the systemic problem within academia, where creative thinkers are often stifled early in their careers. Researchers find themselves forced to align their work with the direction of funding sources or their superiors' interests, resulting in a significant misallocation of resources. Annually, billions of dollars are buried in research that lacks true innovation or independence. This is a far more critical issue than the work of this literal nobody dean. What's even more funny is that the same individuals quick to criticize such low-hanging fruit often do everything in their power to avoid scrutiny themselves, especially regarding the inefficient use of tax dollars and the insignificance of their research areas.

This isn't just a low quality paper. It is two paragraphs long. Its very last sentence is a sentence fragment. It just says "Rest may be important for train operators. Rest is also important for this particular kind of fly species."

I've seen low quality papers get published before, but they are enormously better than this. Even the very worst papers I've ever seen in peer review and given strong rejects to are enormously better than this. This wouldn't even cut it for a poster proposal at a conference.

I would expect a 6th grader writing a science report that they were given two weeks to complete to produce better writing than this.

This looks like a journal article not a paper. It's not a good one but framing it as a paper seems disingenuous.

Those terms are synonyms (at least in US academic parlance)

This is the whole western civilization now. Moving away from merrit to something else. And of course it was never a perfectly merit based system but it was to some better extent than it is now.

What's this for?

OK there are probably plenty of not-really academic institutions who hire not-really academics, not to mention administrators, but this just seems like some very specific personal grudge.

It does seem strangely personal, though I'll admit it is confusing to publish as a n engineering Dean.

My theory is this author, Andrew Gelman, is an MIT and Harvard trained academic that is incensed by the fact that a state-school educated, industry-focused individual would be a lead administrator at a University. I don't think he has a particularly high opinion of people that weren't precocious youth.

The paper is extremely embarrassingly bad. It would be lame as a middle school science fair project.

The students I worked with at UNR were not from privileged backgrounds and picked the school because it is affordable. I loved working with these students. They were smart and hardworking, and you could see the positive impact of higher education on their lives. It is a betrayal of these students to hire someone like this that will harm the reputation of their degrees.

I'm very skeptical that the reputation of a state school is really influenced by a single Dean of engineering no matter how silly their recent publication record is.

I'm also noticing a red flag in this comment by stating that they picked the school because it was affordable - while that is true, shouldn't the same grace be applied to students that went to this school because it was the best school they got into and didn't get into any better ones? I've noticed a lot of people justify their attendance at lower-ranked schools by saying the institutions are affordable, but in reality you shouldn't need to justify not getting into elite schools to begin with.

Because it’s morally wrong?

We just had a whole conversation on what happens when a non-engineering mentality dominates organizations (Boeing). Now we have a case of a leader sacrificing academic reputation for political purposes.

The University of Nevada is not a "not-really academic institution." It is a flagship state university.

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