The Becker Blog

Apparently it is in China – if you get caught.

Chinese academia ghost-writing ‘widespread’

This BBC article claims that “More than $100m (£63m) changes hands in China every year for ghost-written academic papers, according to research by a Chinese university.”

As I see it, the only thing that really distinguishes this crime from the all too common practice of claiming authorship for everything one’s own grad students do is that the grad students weren’t yours.

There are plenty of academics who routinely add their names to everything their grad students publish. I personally know a science department where a good number of the faculty get most of their publications without ever having to write a word. Yet THAT practice rarely gets questioned. WHY? They didn’t do the work. They merely paid to support the grad student. If I follow that same logic, does that mean any publication I get while being paid by the university must bear the name of the person who approves my paycheque?

I realize there is huge pressure to publish, but the truth is, if people stopped bowing to that pressure and actually claimed credit ONLY for the work they actually did, then the problem would sort itself out as most of the so-called “high fliers” do very little of their own work or writing.

Academia needs to get back to real, honest work. Honestly is supposed to be our most cherished value. Most academics these days are as corrupt as the students they claim to despise – you know those who cheat their way through school.

If Academics actually practiced what they preached, we’d be far better off.

• for a computer scientist, everything is an algorithm.
• to a musician, everything is a song.
• to a writer, everything is a story.
• to thespians, everything is a play.
• to a film-maker, everything is a movie.
• to an educator, everything is a lesson.
• to a set designer, everything is a set.

[My name is Katrin. And I am a scientist. ]

Note:  no disrespect is meant to any of the real 12-step programs.

1.        We admitted we were powerless over science—that our lives had become uncorrelated.

2.        Came to believe that an authority better published than ourselves could restore us to our senses.

3.        Made a decision to turn our data and our labs over to the care of professors emeriti /as we understood them/.

4.        Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our notes.

5.        Admitted to social constructivists, to ourselves, and to principal investigators of related projects the exact nature of our data.

6.        Were entirely ready to have journal referees remove all these defects of our submitted papers.

7.        Humbly asked those better funded than us to remove our shortcomings.

8.        Made a list of all persons we had corrected, and became willing to cite them in all our papers.

9.        Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure their annual reports.

10.    Continued to take personal inventory and when we were found out promptly corrected it.

11.    Sought through analysis and verification to improve our conscious contact with /real data/, asking only for validity in our sample and the power to publish it.

12.  Having had a rude awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to department heads and granting agencies, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

I have recently been working on a new methodology for the analysis of commercial video games in order to uncover mechanisms used to support learning. I am calling this new approach Instructional Ethology. It combines
structural analysis based on black box reverse engineering (adapted from ontological excavation) with behavioural analysis based on an adaptation of the basic approach to studying animal behaviour. (For more as it develops see: http://www.minkhollow.ca/KB/PhD/Thesis07/doku.php?id=thesis:06.methodology)

It occurs to me that this methodology could also have much broader applications in software generally – as a way to analyse usability. It obviously needs development and lots of testing, but as far as I know *no-one* has thought off applying ethological techniques to program behaviour. As for “Why ANIMAL behaviour and not human behaviour studies?” Animals can’t talk to us so all we have is observations of behaviour. This is the same position that most users of software are in – they have no clue what is happening underneath (nor should they have to, mostly) so code analysis is unlikely to provide insights to making software more usable/intuitive/comprehensible to users. So perhaps, software ethology has some potential.

There is a wonderful article about Usable GUI design at http://benroe.com/files/gui.html; one of the best things to remember is:

The most basic point in all computer UI design is that the user does not want to use your application. They want to get their work done as quickly and easily as possible, and the application is simply a tool aiding that. The more you can keep your application out of the way of the user, the better. Effort spent on using your application is effort not spent on the work the user is trying to do.

This connects very nicely with studying UI design by studying the behaviour of the program.

Stay tuned.