Some people doomscroll on BlueSky or other social media, others doomscroll on bad journals... 🐕

I'm no longer surprised by problems in @acm.org papers, but these two PubPeer comments deserve a special mention: pubpeer.com/publications... pubpeer.com/publications... The author in common in both self-plagiarism cases is... the ACM CEO. Oops.

Contrast with my previous repost.

The death toll in the russian terrorist strike against Ternopil has risen to 35. The 12yo girl succumbed to her wounds after doctors had hard fought to save her life for 9d. Her mother was killed too and her sister is still in the hospital. 35 innocent souls stolen at once. 35.

What does it take to publish in Scientific Reports? Access to an LLM, a few weeks, and 2690$ for the APC. What does it take to obtain a retraction? A lot of sleuthing time & work, pubpeer, repeated emails, time, evaluation committees, appeals, and more. Let's make errors like this costly!

No matter how stupid you expect this answer to be, there is no way you are prepared for how stupid it actually is.

Will say again. If this was London or Paris, it would not be tolerated. But we expect Ukrainians to put up with this horror every night. Indeed, we in the west are getting inured to it. It should enrage us.

I'm tracking retractions here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets... Let's see how long it takes for @acm.org to accept that if the program chair of a conference and other organizers "violated the ACM Policy on Plagiarism, Misrepresentation, and Falsification" they should retract the whole thing...

When even PubPeer moderators, who are usually restrained, have to chime in on a publisher's non-answer: pubpeer.com/publications...

Ireland's defense policy was created in a lab to make Switzerland look reasonable.

I'd just like to point out that we spent an entire shipment of air defense interceptors' worth of money on new signs for a name change that isn't even legally the name of the DoD. Ukraine is currently experiencing rolling blackouts from Russian strikes, btw.

Leftists::data center water use = MAGA::birds killed by windmills

Zürich Opera’s new “La forza del destino” is being advertised with the question: “What if war comes to Switzerland?” It’s a haunting image—until you see Anna Netrebko in the lead, once posing with a Z-ribbon and “To Berlin.” Europe’s opera houses call this bridge-building. But to where? To Kremlin.

>looking for a new leftist movement >ask the leftist co-leader if their movement is based or tankie >she doesn't understand >pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is based and what is tankie >she laughs and says "It's Your Party, sir" >join >it's tankie

Another example of institutional investigations conducted in secret, without a public report, for 'privacy reasons'. Investigation found UBC researcher fabricated data, gave spinal patients 'false hope.' The public was not told. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

36 cites to the same author? Retracted. 59 of them? Not retracted! 4 self-cites? Retracted. 21 self-cites? Not retracted! 70 unused cites to the same author? Retracted. 77 of them? Not retracted! Plagiarism? Cites authors didn't add? 113 cites to the TPC chair in a 0.5-page paper? Not retracted!

Good news: ACM retracted some problematic papers. Bad news: Only some, without apparent logic, as you can tell by following the links of my old blog post. Doesn't look like they understand the concept of trust in an organizing/reviewing committee. solalpirelli.github.io/2023/01/25/t...

The kind of hard-hitting science you can find in @acm.org's International Conference Proceedings Series, a.k.a. the stuff that no established group is sponsoring. doi.org/10.1145/3456...

Today in "how not to do comms": send an email to all authors whose title begins with "Immediate Action Needed" just to advertise they have 7 days to submit their abstract. Not nice, @wcrifoundation.bsky.social .

It’s happened again

I invite @acm.org to review their articles with Tortured Phrases dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p... (not the first time I'm doing so, here and on LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/posts/guilla...)

In fact, ACM is hiding behind *its own policies* that *it decided by and for itself*. Nobody is forcing ACM to refuse to comply with COPE recommendations, and publishers who do comply see better results in practice. Nothing prevents ACM from updating its policies to match other publishers'.

Just noticed that @acm.org's list of "charged terminology" now includes "binary classification" because it may be charged for "persons who identify either as binary or as non-binary", a class of people that presumably includes everyone. 🤔

this jailbreak shit too easy even on gpt-5 (i didn't even bother correcting any typos)

A CRO has been scamming academic and industry labs in the US with fraudulent data that has been published in Nature and other high impact journals. Leonid has written a great piece on my findings: forbetterscience.com/2025/09/22/i...

Swiss far-right propaganda vs Switzerland in the real world

Whichever YouTube employee decided to enable AI translations and dubs by default for videos not in the user's language apparently doesn't know people can speak more than 1 language. US folks not beating the stereotypes.

ACM is not short of a bob or two, but seem oblivious to the reputational damage that this kind of response creates

PubPeer: pretty clear duplicate publication going on here. Probably should do something. *lots of time passes* ACM: oh hi! you didn't submit the right form. Best recent example of the complete lack of proactivity you can see in research integrity. Just *chef's kiss*.

In which @acm.org acknowledges blatant plagiarism and... Decides not to do anything unless someone copies that information into the right form. pubpeer.com/publications...

TIL computer scientists aren't the only ones giving cute names to discoveries. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikachu...

Fun fact of the day: there's a small town in Switzerland called "Fully", population <10k. According to LinkedIn, there are hundreds of job openings there. Presumably because people wrote "fully remote" in the wrong field.

This is rich: following the publication of our study, ARDA has changed its website to include a pop-up disclaimer that they do not guarantee journal publications.

Even by paper mill standards this abstract is quite something.

🤯 Tortured phrases in ‘ACM Computing Surveys’ a top journal in my field (JIF 28 and SJR Q1, FWIW). @acm.org tell us it's a bug in the editorial system. Did any of the reviewers recommended acceptance? Please make their reports public with the upcoming retraction notice. pubpeer.com/publications...

More IEEE-published oddities for your enjoyment or consternation. Zoo-inspired algorithms, a Chinese paper about integrating "ideological and political education" in a software testing course with AI, and a take on feminism in Africa from a conference on "AI in cybersecurity".

Fun titles from the @ieeexplore.bsky.social catalog. And by "fun" I mean "depressing given the implications for the peer review thoroughness at IEEE-published conferences". But I prefer laughing to crying, so laugh with me.

Weather report: baaaaaa. 🐑

Academics (including the journal’s founder) told Wiley to pound sand, started an open access journal, and Wiley just surrendered. I think more academics should tell academic publishers to pound sand. They are vampires.

How not to send recruiting emails, courtesy of Outlier AI: - use "Action Required" in the title for a cold email - send to many folks in To: instead of Bcc:, disclosing addresses - invite someone who deleted their account there when their terms of use ban signing up after a deletion

In which a Springer executive bravely speaks up on behalf of the underdog & defends the papermills who want to go on papermilling.

It goes without saying that these people are incredibly useful for the right wing in Israel because they give a pretty compelling case that it doesn't actually matter what Israel does, so they might as well go in hard.

Why kerning matters

I tried Outlier.AI and failed their "assessment" for... my native language/dialect. 😂

One reason I'm not optimistic on anti-Trump "resistance" is how little they know about the rest of the world. You'd think after so many years they'd have bothered to check.

I knew it was only a matter of time before we found out Pete Hegseth stopped weapons shipment to Ukraine on his own - for the third time this year. www.nbcnews.com/news/militar...

Remember that this terror is motivated by a plainly and simply childish incentive. They have already been halted in their summer offensive. They cannot beat the army, so they attack the disabled, the children, the old and those who work to keep everyone fed.

We investigated, reported and it we're very happy it had an effect! Collaboration with @elisabethbik.bsky.social @mortenoxe.bsky.social @smutclyde.bsky.social and @thatsregrettab1.bsky.social !

The journal Bioengineered is going to pause all submissions and are currently investigating over 1000 papers they've published in the past. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... We could only dream of this outcome after our investigation: arxiv.org/abs/2503.21267 1/2

US universities aren't governed seriously, episode # 42938475: Columbia's president wanted to replace a Jewish board member with a token Arab or Middle Eastern one. While forgetting said board member is Iranian. 🤦🤦🤦 www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/n...