Tag Archives: Academia

Blogging on Nature: why not?

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Some months ago I was asked to open a blog on Nature. I’m in a period of small mood for blogging, so I postponed the idea of opening the blog on Nature until now.
Partially I was also wondering about some questions such as “Wow! A blog on Nature! How does it count? I’ll probably never have a paper in Nature but a blog yes. So what? How many blogs there are at the moment on Nature? A quick check says around 80. Uhm. This is not so exclusive. Will I insert it in my curriculum? Probably not. Does a blog counts as a paper? Surely not. Maybe things will be different in future? For sure, but not too different”.
Anyway, if 10 years ago somebody would have told me “one day, you will blog on Nature!”, I would have replied “No bet!” … well, actually 10 years ago the word “blog” was still to be proposed (the term “blog” was coined by Peter Merholz in April or May of 1999 according to the Blog page on Wikipedia as it is today) so maybe the reply would have been more a “I will do what?!?”.
Nevertheless, blogging on Nature is surely about new ways of doing research and of publishing your ideas so I’m in the game.
My blog on Nature is at http://network.nature.com/blogs/user/paolo-massa, the plan for now is to repost and possibly extend some posts related to trust and society I post at gnuband.org, for the future I guess we’ll see.

Another randomly generated paper accepted in a Journal

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Scigen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations.
According to Scigen blog, the randomly generated article “Cooperative, Compact Algorithms for Randomized Algorithms” by Rohollah Mosallahnezhad of the Iran Institute of Technology was accepted for publication in the Applied Mathematics and Computation journal. You can check by yourself on the publisher site which admits it was accepted and now removed. What is even more sad is that the reviewer provided many corrections to be resolved without realizing that the paper was just 8 pages of randomly generated text, figures, graphs and citations. How depressing is that, eh?
You can generate a paper and check previous random papers accepted in conferences. But for even more fun, be sure not to miss the randomly generated presentation these crazy folks gave during one of these bogus conferences. They presented slides which they were never seen before, which incidentally I think it is a great exercise for a presenter, if you can make it over presenting slides that have no meaning and you have never seen before, nothing can stop you. And I really love the guy dressed up as Einstein with fake mustaches.