Sunday, March 2, 2014

Computer Generated Fake Academia Papers

The new normal in academia is fake papers and research. We bring this up on our blog, since Universities across the nation are funded with grants by Pharmaceutical companies to do research and test the drugs before FDA approval.

Three MIT graduate students flushed it out recently as they found more and more academic papers are essentially gobbledegook (filler words) which is actually written by computer programs.
Several news reports indicate that the students wrote a simple computer program that turned out filler words and presented it as an academic paper. They took ownership of the papers as MIT graduate students and sent it to a science conference and this blah blah paper was accepted. Yet the plot thickens as this program was created in 2005 by , Jeremy Stribling, Dan Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn. They made it available to scientists and these scientist have used this bla bla nonsense as part of their paper and research since 2005!!! This has gone on in the US, France and Germany to name a few.

As usual it all comes down to money. Reuters news indicates Academics are under intense pressure to publish, conferences and journals want to turn their papers into profits, and universities want them published. "This ought to be a shock to people," Krohn said. "There's this whole academic underground where everyone seems to benefit, but they are wasting time and money and adding nothing to science. The institutions are being ripped off, because they pay publishers huge subscriptions for this stuff."

Foxnews news article indicated that professors are paid more based on the words, so a fifty page papers pays more than a fifteen, so they fill it up with blah, blah.

Is this just the tip of the exposed iceberg? When Universities get grants in the hundreds of thousands and millions over time, do these Universities also produce the results the grantor wants? Do they skew their results in order to ensure the pharmaceutical company gets the results they are paying for? We will do more research to find out more on this, but are Universities all about money? Looks at how much Universities make on NCAA sports especially College football. In the US it has shown historically it is all about the money.

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