Inventxyo - Match

11 year old me walked so i could run (to my computer to draw these)

Iconic Things My Coding Professors Have Said (and it’s only day one)

“that sounds very hacky, but smart”

“i’m not sure where i’m going with this… its quite similiar to my life”

*Entire class and prof spends fifteen minutes trying to solve a problem before eventually giving up* “great work guys, that was some good debugging”

“is this a super big issue?” *longggg dramatic sigh* “… yes”.

Professor 1: “it’s still not working? um… okay, maybe you should… turn off your wifi and turn it back on again?"   Professor 2: "40 years of experience in networking and computing at its finest”

“whenever i’m doing my taxes, i never use the calculator app on my phone, i always just open up a notebook and use python and i think thats very brave of me”

“your life quality with improve when you use python 3 instead of python 2. your skin will improve and you’ll even sleep better”

“so this compiler doesn’t recognise cases, so if you’re really perverse, you could do Apple, aPple, apPle, appLe, applE, but if you do that then i’m going to kick you out”

“so, let’s give an example: "True = False”. Asides from causing the end of the world, much like dividing by 0, this will also cause an error"

“if you want to see my cat, i’ll show her. if you DON’T want to see my cat, too bad, cause I’m going to show you her anyway”

“today we will use three keywords: `if`, `else`, and their weird cousin `elif`.”

“if you want to type something else, like… uh, goodbye world? maybe? is that too dark? i think its too dark, so lets save that for later on in the year… by the way, have you been told about your exams yet?”

Professor : “is everything clear so far? shall i go faster?”   Literally EVERYONE: “no! slower!"   Professor: "Slower?! you can go slow when you’re dead, you won’t need python then!”

“you can’t use functions as your variable names. for example, you can’t call this number "if”. i mean i don’t know why you’d use that as your variable name to begin with, but i’m not here to question your life, i’m here to teach you python"

“it’s probably not the most efficient but its just what came out of me so we’re running with it”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 

Part 9  | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14

some people are taking "doomed" to mean "dead". this is actually a misconception! you can be doomed even if you don't die! it's sometimes worse if you don't die!

Since we're all talking about plagiarism now, I'd like to share this video which came out last year about a paper accepted at the CVPR 2022:

For the people not in the know, the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference is the biggest conference in computer science. Last year, in 2022, the paper featured in the video got accepted. A few days later, this video was posted. The first author, a PhD student, apologized and the paper was retracted and removed from the proceedings. Hilariously, the first reaction of the co-authors, including a professor at the Seoul National University, was to say that they had nothing to do with it.

My point here is that scientific papers are not rigorously checked for plagiarism, and a background in academia tells you absolutely nothing about whether or not someone will be diligent in avoiding plagiarism. The biggest difference is that there are consequences if you're caught.

I also don't want people to be too harsh on the first author of this paper, or to think the situation is equivalent to the whole Somerton debacle. For starters, you don't get paid for publishing papers, you (or more commonly your university) pay the publishers. But the phrase publish or perish exists for a reason, and everyone in the field wants to get published in the CVPR, because it's supposed to show that you're great at research. Additionally, the number of papers and the prestige of the venues they're published in criteria on which you will be evaluated as a researcher and a university employee.

The way I see it, there are basically two kinds of plagiarism that are shown in the video. The first one concerns sentences that are lifted completely unchanged from other papers. This is bad, and it is plagiarism, but I can see how this would happen. Most instances of this appear in the introduction and on background information, so if you're insecure about your mastery of English and it's not about your contribution anyway, I can understand how you would take the shortcut of copy-pasting and tell yourself that it's just so that the rest of the paper makes sense, and why waste time on phrasing things differently if others have done it already, and it's not like there are a million way to write these equations anyways.

Let me be clear. I don't approve, or condone. It's still erasing the work of the people who took the time and pain to phrase these things. It's still plagiarism. But I understand how you could get to that point.

The second kind of plagiarism is a way bigger deal in my opinion. At 0:37 , we can see that one of the contributions of the paper is also lifted from another paper. Egregiously, the passage includes "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first [...]" , which is a hell of a thing to copy-paste. So this is not only lazily passing other people's words as your own, it's also pretending that you're making a contribution you damn well know other people have already done. I also wasn't able to find a version of the plagiarized article that had been published in a peer-reviewed venue, which might mean that the authors submitted it, got rejected, and published it on arXiv (an website on which authors can put their papers so that they're accessible to the public, but doesn't "count" as a publication because it's not peer-reviewed. You can also put papers that are under review or have been published on there as long as you're careful with the copyrights and double-blind process). And then parts of it were published in the CVPR under someone else's name.

I think there's also a third kind of plagiarism going on here, one that is incredibly common in academia, but that is not shown in the video. That's the FIVE other authors, including a professor, who were apparently happy to add their name to the paper but obviously didn't do anything meaningful since they didn't notice how much plagiarism was going on.

Palestinians are starving!!!!