Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 13 Mar 2024Absolutely fantastic tomato and meat sauce served over spaghetti tossed with butter and parmesan
City/Region: Cleveland, Ohio
Time Period: 1930sChef Boyardee was not born in Cleveland (sorry, 30 Rock), but in Borganovo, just outside of Piacenza in Italy. And his name was not Hector Boyardee, but Ettore Boiardi (boy-AR-dee). He opened an Italian restaurant in Cleveland in 1924, where the food was so popular that he frequently sent patrons home with bottles of his spaghetti sauce.
We can’t know exactly what that original sauce was, but this is from a family recipe and is probably pretty close. And it’s phenomenal. It’s fairly simple, but so good. You get a lot of the fresh basil, and the creaminess from mixing the butter and parmesan directly with the pasta is delicious. I don’t often make dishes from the show again, but I can see myself making this any day of the week.
(more…)
June 23, 2024
The Original Chef Boyardee Spaghetti Dinner
June 20, 2024
The “Idiot Nephew Theory” of show business management
Ted Gioia recalls his hopes of getting into the entertainment industry after graduation:
The story of how I became a strategy consultant is shameful.
I was a student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and needed a job after graduation. I wanted to work in the music or entertainment industries — but I soon learned this was an impossible dream.
They didn’t want me. And they didn’t want my classmates either.
Hundreds of companies came to our business school to recruit talent, and they included most of the leading US corporations. So I talked with everybody — Coca Cola, Morgan Stanley, Atari, Procter & Gamble, you name it.
But no record label or movie studio ever showed up. They didn’t even send job listings.
Can you guess why?
I asked around on campus and was told the following (off the record):
Come on, Ted. You will never see the entertainment business recruit here. Those folks are not looking for business talent.
They give the choice jobs to their family members — the idiot nephew gets hired, not an MBA. Even better if it’s an idiot son.
And if there are other openings? Well … You’ve heard about the casting couch, haven’t you? Let me give you a hint — that couch isn’t just for auditioning the cast.
But you wouldn’t want a job there even if they gave you one. When time comes for a promotion, the drooling idiot nephew moves up — not you.
I’ve never shared that story before — because I know how people inside the music business hate hearing it.
And maybe it’s not a fair story.
All I can say is that I found this advice very helpful. I stopped planning on a career in the music business. And I also developed a very useful theory to explain why record labels are so bad at making strategic decisions.
I call it the “Idiot Nephew Theory”:
THE IDIOT NEPHEW THEORY: Whenever a record label makes a strategic decision, it picks the option that the boss’s idiot nephew thinks is best.
And what does the idiot nephew decide? That’s easy — they always do whatever the company lawyer recommends.
Maybe this theory is wrong. All I can say is that it helps me predict events in the entertainment industry with a surprising degree of accuracy.
I always operate on the assumption that there’s no business strategy in the music or movie business — only legal maneuvering.
Years later, when the music business got totally reamed by tech companies — a phase we’re still living through, by the way — I wasn’t surprised in the least. The record labels respond to every new music technology by litigating, but whenever they encounter a company with more legal clout than them (Apple or Google/YouTube, for example), they simply gave up.
In the future, you can test this theory yourself. You will see that it possesses great explanatory power.
“Surely the only way to defeat racism and homophobia is to treat ethnic and sexual minorities as incapable of high achievement and in need of a leg up from their betters?”
Andrew Doyle on a radical new approach to hiring that might just catch on:
With the inexorable spread of DEI – Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – across the western world, it’s refreshing to see at least one major company resist the decrees of this new religion. This is precisely what happened this week when Scale, an Artificial Intelligence company based in San Francisco, launched a new policy to ensure that its employees were hired on the basis of – wait for it – being the most talented and best qualified for the job.
This innovation, which sees race, gender and sexuality as irrelevant when it comes to hiring practices, should hardly be considered revolutionary. And yet in a world in which the content of one’s character is less important than the colour of one’s skin, to treat everyone equally irrespective of these immutable characteristics is suddenly deemed radical.
Scale’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, explained that rather than adopt DEI policies, the company would henceforth favour MEI, which stands for Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence. He explained the thinking behind the new scheme in a post on X.
There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Achieving this requires casting a wide net for talent and then objectively selecting the best, without bias in any direction. We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the “right” or “wrong” race, gender, and so on. It should be needless to say, and yet it needs saying: doing so would be racist and sexist, not to mention illegal. Upholding meritocracy is good for business and is the right thing to do.
One can already hear the likes of Robin DiAngelo and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez screaming in fury at this blatant implementation of good old-fashioned liberal values. Surely the only way to defeat racism and homophobia is to treat ethnic and sexual minorities as incapable of high achievement and in need of a leg up from their betters?
It is instructive to compare reactions from the Twittersphere (now X) and Instagram, as one X user has done. If nothing else, the comparison reveals how the divide in the culture war is playing out on social media since Elon Musk’s takeover. On X, major figures in the corporate world such as Tobias Lütke (CEO of Shopify), Palmer Luckey (founder of Oculus VR) and Musk himself have congratulated Wang on his new initiative.
By contrast, here are some of the responses on Instagram:
You’re ‘disrupting’ current hard-fought standards you don’t like, by reverting to a system rooted in bias and inequality that asks less of you as a hiring manager and as a leader
– Dan Couch (He/Him)Curious to see how hiring processes can effectively (and objectively) measure one’s ‘merit’, ‘excellence’, and ‘intelligence’, all of which are very subjective terms
– Cole Gawin (He/Him)What is merit and how do we measure it?
– Rio Cruz Morales (They/Them)This sounds a lot like excuse making for casting off DEI principles
– R.C. Rondero De Mosier (He/Him)The pronouns, of course, signify membership of the cult, and so we should not be surprised to see the sentiments of its minions mirroring each other so closely. What Wang is proposing of course builds equality into the hiring system and, contrary to these complaints, it is entirely possible to measure merit objectively. This, after all, is the entire point of academic assessment. The arguments against merit can only be sustained if one presupposes that systemic inequalities are ingrained within society, that all of these relate to the concept of group identity, and that adjustments have to be made accordingly to guarantee equality of outcome.
June 17, 2024
Farm Camp for city slickers
In The Free Press, Larissa Phillips explains the kind of things city children (and their parents) learn when they stay at her family’s small farm for a week or a weekend:
Here are some things I have taught the kids who visit my farm: animals don’t care about your feelings, and sometimes we kill them to eat them. It doesn’t matter how desperately you want to find more eggs, the hens don’t lay on demand. Tomatoes aren’t ripe in June. The stalls aren’t going to clean themselves. Cuts, scrapes, and stings aren’t really a big deal. And there will always be poop.
I’m often struck by what city kids don’t know when they turn up at the education program I run for families on our 15-acre hobby farm — Honey Hollow Farm — in the Upper Hudson Valley. As a longtime urbanite, I get it. I lived in Brooklyn for 15 years before my husband and I moved upstate in 2010 with our two young children and one goal: start a farm. We kept horses and ponies for fun and raised poultry and sheep — and sometimes pigs — for food.
It was hard. Slaughtering animals we’d raised since they were babies was wrenching. Breeding and birthing those babies was dicey, too. But these experiences toughened us up. Working with animals and the land and the seasons was grounding — and the best antidote to anxiety I’d ever found. And most of it was fun.
I wanted to share this outlook with other families, even if it was just for a weekend. So at the start of the pandemic, I opened our guest cottage — and set up an informal curriculum to teach escaping urbanites what I’d learned.
I called it farm camp.
We host one family at a time, all through the year, in a renovated barn apartment overlooking the pony pasture. Most come for a week, some for a weekend. Every morning I’ll take a handful of kids, sometimes as young as three, through a two-hour, hands-on class on animal care, life, death, poop. All of them have to do some real farmwork.
There is a lot to learn. I don’t expect a child to know how long it takes for a chick to hatch, or why the roosters are always jumping on top of the hens. But I am often surprised by some of the straightforward things they don’t know how to do. Like how to pull a wagon around a corner, hold a shovel, climb over a gate, make a braid, or tie a knot.
Don’t get me wrong — I love offering explicit instructions on the most mundane tasks, then standing back and cheering when a kid does it independently. But two generations ago, these skills would have been common knowledge. For most of human history, the proportion of the world’s population living in cities was below 5 percent. It’s at 56 percent now. By the time today’s toddlers reach adulthood, it is expected that 80 percent of humans will live in urban areas.
Overprotected as they are, a lot of city kids are missing out on so many important encounters with material reality: with death or danger or manual labor. These encounters can be unpleasant, even painful. It’s understandable that we want to save our children from them. But they lose something essential when we do.
Most urbanites have a very sanitized — in fact, Disneyfied — view of rural life and especially life on a farm. It can be traumatic to discover that all the animals aren’t like you saw in the cutesy cartoons as a preschooler …
June 15, 2024
W.H.O. the hell do they think they are?
Christopher Snowden on what he calls a “new low” for the World Health Organization (WHO) in a report issued earlier this week that sounds like Karl Marx was one of the writers:
The WHO European Region published a new report today, written mostly by British ‘public health’ academics. It is quite revealing. For example …
This requires, at a minimum, that governments recognize that the primary interest of all major corporations is profit and, hence, regardless of the product they sell, their interests do not align with either public health or the broader public interest. Any policy that could impact their sales and profits is therefore a threat, and they should play no role in the development of that policy. Similarly, governments must also recognize the now overwhelming evidence (see also chapters 4, 6 and 7) that HHIs [“health-harming industries”] engage in the same political and scientific practices as tobacco companies and that voluntary or multistakeholder partnership approaches do not work where conflicts of interest exist. Instead, they must regulate other HHIs [“health-harming industries”], their products and practices, as they do tobacco.
That’s just one paragraph, but there’s a lot it in.
Firstly, they are clearly not just opposed to “health-harming industries” but to private industry and the free market in general.
Secondly, they want to exclude all industries from the policy-making process, as already happens with the tobacco industry.
Thirdly, they want to regulate all “health-harming industries” in the same way as they regulate tobacco. These industries include alcohol, food and fossil fuels, but the report also mentions pharmaceuticals, infant formula, gambling, firearms, healthcare (!) and sugary drinks. As the quote above makes clear, they think that all private industry damages health in some way.
This is all there in black and white and there is much more of the same in the report. This is not scaremongering or the slippery slope fallacy. It is in an official WHO document.
When people show you who they are, believe them.
I have written about this for The Critic …
If this sounds to you like Bolshie talk, you might be onto something. It is further confirmation that the modern “public health” movement is an arm of the hard left presented as an arm of medicine. It would be tempting to tell the authors to stay in their lane, but anti-capitalist nanny statism is their lane. For over a decade, such academics, mostly from Britain and Australia, have been pumping out studies about the “commercial determinants of health” and the “corporate political activity” of “unhealthy commodity industries”. The new WHO report is a sort of greatest hits collection. Last year they published a whole series of articles in the Lancet in which they claimed that there is “growing evidence that neoliberalism has been damaging to health” and called for “a normative shift away from harmful consumptogenic systems”.
Half-baked Marxist rhetoric has been rife in the social sciences for decades, but these people have a vaguely coherent point to make and are pursuing a serious, if terrifying, agenda. Since they do not believe in human agency, they assume that people only make “unhealthy choices”, such as eating processed ham, because the system that controls them has been rigged by big corporations. They say in today’s report that “consumers do not have capacity (time or resources) to make the ‘right’ choice”. Fortunately, public health academics know what the right choice is and could impose it on a grateful population if it were not for the pesky free market. Hence their rage against capitalism, which extends to suspicion of intellectual property, international trade, share buybacks, impact assessments (because they allow businesses to engage with policy-makers) and even the EU single market.
Further to what I say in the article, I’d add that it is to the UK’s shame that so many of the authors of this report are British. They include quackademics that I have been making fun of for years, such as Anna Gilmore, Mark Petticrew and May van Schalkwyk. Between them, they constitute a small clique of talentless, fanatics and/or grifting social scientists who have constructed a world of unreality for themselves by publishing endless low quality journal articles which they and their colleagues then reference and self-reference. It is profoundly depressing that they are now dangling the corpse of the WHO — which was once a great institution — on pieces of string.
June 12, 2024
QotD: Wall Street
Wall Street is a street with a river at one end and a graveyard at the other. This is striking, but incomplete. It omits the kindergarten in the middle.
Fred Schwed Jr., Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?, 1940.
June 7, 2024
QotD: Wine labels
Lawrence Osborne, The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World, 2004.
June 4, 2024
How Wall Street billionaires are reacting to the verdict against Trump
Under normal circumstances, you might think that Trump would find doors closed to him among the big-money folks on Wall Street after his trial ended with 34 guilty verdicts … yet the opposite is reported to be happening and his campaign is being inundated with big financial donations:
My quite strong suspicion is that Leticia James and Alvin Bragg have caused alarm by targeting business records and real estate valuations in corporate borrowing, things that everyone shares in finance, insurance, and real estate, for criminalization and destructive litigation. My bet is that capital is turning hard against lawfare, seeking to disincentivize and punish an attack on the basics of corporate business. People in business are horrified by a flamethrower of a prosecution over old business records.
So Bloomberg’s interpretation is that Wall Street is standing with Trump despite the verdict, but my bet is that Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and other business interests are turning against Democrats because of the verdict — because Democratic prosecutors in New York (and especially Manhattan), America’s financial capital, are doing things like turning seven year-old business record misdemeanors into a long list of Frankenstein felonies.
That interpretation makes capital’s support for Trump self-interested rather than morally outraged, though not over Bloomberg’s explanation of lower taxes, as people who keep business records turn against the party that bizarrely overcriminalizes the handling of business records when the target becomes politically unfashionable. If capital turns against the Democratic Party — if the ATM machine stops spitting out campaign funding — the moment becomes pretty significant, and Alvin Bragg becomes the dog who caught the car.
June 2, 2024
THIS is how Plastic Model Kits are MADE! I spent a day at the UK Airfix Factory!
Model Minutes
Published Nov 26, 2022In November 2022 a press day was held at the UK factory which manufactures quickbuild and the NEW Supermarine Spitfire Mk.IXc in 1/24 scale from @OfficialAirfix. During the visit we were given presentations from Luke (researcher) and Chris (designer) on the various elements that go into creating the designs of the tooling.
Join me in this video where I take a look at how plastic model kits are actually manufactured, focusing on the physical creation of the kits through injection moulding and quality control at the Plastech factory in Newhaven.
I’d like to extend my thanks to Airfix and Plastech for putting on this event.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:48 Research & Design
01:36 Plastech Background
02:47 Tooling Prep
03:21 Injection Moulding
06:38 Quality Control
11:31 Boxes & Packaging
13:21 Packing a kit!
16:04 Conclusion
(more…)
May 31, 2024
The best that can be said about VIA Rail is that its financials aren’t as dire as Canada Post
Chris Selley outlines the financial black holes that are the two Crown Corporations — Canada Post and VIA Rail Canada:
VIA Rail 918, a General Electric model P42DC locomotive, at Belleville, Ontario on 23 December 2008.
Photo by Martin Cathrae via Wikimedia Commons.
If you’re unfamiliar with Via’s financials, I’ll advise you to sit down now.
In 2023, the average passenger on The Canadian line [Toronto/Montreal to Vancouver] was subsidized by the taxpayer to the tune of $1,014.77. Revenues on the route were less than half of expenses. And your average Canadian can’t even hope to ride the bastard thing: A bunk bed for the 34 hours and 35 minutes it takes to get from Toronto to Winnipeg still goes for the bargain price of $895.
It’s a cruise ship. Not only are we lavishly subsidizing a cruise ship, but we own the cruise line, and we’re buying it new ships. It’s absolutely bananas. And among those applauding the expenditure is, somehow, the NDP’s transport critic Taylor Bachrach. Where’s simplistic populism when you need it? No money for cruise ships!
Meanwhile, media are being far too indulgent of Via’s alarming and increasing vagueness as to whether it’s committed to “high-frequency rail” on the Toronto-to-Quebec City corridor, or to “high-speed rail”, or to some combination of both. This could not be a bigger or brighter red flag: Beware of Oncoming Boondoggle.
Committing billions of dollars to a new rail corridor between Toronto and Quebec City without a firm idea as to whether it’s “high-frequency” or “high-speed” is a bit like committing billions to a new housing development without knowing whether it’s bungalows or high-rise condos. A train going 300 kilometres per hour, or more (i.e., high-speed rail) needs vastly more protection (fences, eliminating level crossings) than a train going 200 kilometres per hour. It’s not a minor detail or something to be worked out later.
And it’s painfully obvious why Via’s executives are sowing the confusion: Because the high-frequency rail plan that they actually have simply isn’t that compelling. It may offer no time savings at all between Montreal and Toronto — and anyone who tries to tell you a five-hour trip between Montreal and Toronto is a compelling option for business people is either a deluded railfan or works for Via.
“Canada charts path for high-speed trains, but obstacles loom,” a recent Globe and Mail headline declared, completely incorrectly. But casual news consumers can absolutely be forgiven for thinking Via’s working on a Toronto-to-Quebec City version of France’s TGV. Should the high-frequency rail plan ever get built, I can only imagine the kvetching and disappointment that would follow.
May 29, 2024
Ontario’s long and winding (and subsidy-strewn) road to beer in convenience stores
Apparently I’ll have a little bit more to celebrate on my birthday this year as the Ontario government’s glacially slow-to-change alcohol sales rules are being liberalized as of September 5th to allow all the province’s convenience stores to begin selling beer and wine:
“The Beer Store” by Like_the_Grand_Canyon is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Premier Doug Ford promised Ontarians beer in corner stores, supermarkets and big-box stores, and by God he has delivered. As of Sept. 5, all Ontario convenience stores meeting eligibility criteria will be allowed to sell beer, wine, cider and pre-mixed drinks. As of Oct. 31, the privilege will be extended to all grocery and big-box stores. The province says it expects as many as 8,500 new booze-procurement sites to come online under the new regime. By Ontario standards, it’s absolutely revolutionary.
The new regime is also, of course, hilariously complicated. And absurdly, offensively expensive.
It is fair to describe the new regime as somewhat more competitive, and certainly more convenient. In addition to offering potentially thousands of new locations, supermarkets (including the roughly 450 already licensed) will be able to offer volume discounts on beer — i.e., a 24-pack will cost less per bottle than a six-pack. This was a privilege hitherto reserved for The Beer Store, the American-, Belgian- and Japanese-owned conglomerate that dominated beer sales in Ontario from the end of Prohibition until fairly recently.
Private retailers will even be able to set their own prices, which until now has been considered blasphemy.
It is not fair to describe the new regime, as the government does, as an “open” market.
Near as I can tell, Ontario will by 2026 have the following retail environments in place:
- The Beer Store. Smelly, surly, and the best-available value. Only beer — no cider or mixed drinks. It’s in the name.
- LCBO locations. Government-run liquor stores retain their near-absolute monopoly on hard liquor sales, in addition to selling beer (especially craft beer, in which The Beer Store’s owners aren’t so interested), wine and everything else.
- LCBO- and/or The Beer Store-branded “agency stores” in rural areas, which sell everything the LCBO does, but operate inside of convenience stores, small supermarkets and other local businesses, and are staffed by non-government employees.
- The existing supermarkets licensed to sell beer, cider and wine (and in rare cases all three!), plus scores of new outlets — the new 8,500 new locations.
The Beer Store maintains a monopoly (in urban areas) on wholesale for bars and restaurants and on refunding cans and bottles, although its new “master framework agreement” (MFA) doesn’t even oblige it to maintain its current number of locations — which in urban areas have been dwindling rapidly. I’m a 17-minute walk from my nearest Beer Store. The house I grew up in, in the heart of midtown Toronto, is a 45-minute walk. I’m not schlepping a leaky garbage bag full of empty cans either distance.
QotD: Wine
Lawrence Osborne, The Accidental Connoisseur, 2004.
May 28, 2024
Why a Tire Company Gives Out Food’s Most Famous Award
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Feb 20, 2024Eugénie Brazier, the chef behind today’s recipe, was a culinary force to be reckoned with. She was described as “a formidable woman with a voice like a foghorn, rough language, and strong forearms”. Both of her restaurants won Michelin stars in the early 20th century, making her the first person to have six. No one else would earn six Michelin stars for 64 years.
By modern Michelin standards, this dish is pretty plain, but it’s still really good. The chicken is cooked simply in butter, and the cream sauce is absolutely fantastic. I was afraid the alcohol would overpower it, but it doesn’t. The sauce takes on a kind of floral woodiness instead of each individual alcohol’s flavor, and it’s so good.
(more…)
May 27, 2024
“Product recommendations broke Google, and ate the Internet in the process”
Ted Gioia says the algorithms are broken and we need a way to get out of the online hellscape our techbro overlords have created for us:
Have you tried to get information on a product or service from Google recently? Good luck with that.
“Product recommendations broke Google,” declares tech journalist John Herrman, “and ate the Internet in the process.”
That sounds like an extreme claim. But it’s painfully true. If you doubt it, just try finding something — anything! — on the dominant search engine.
No matter what you search for, you end up in a polluted swamp of misleading links. The more you scroll, the more garbage you see:
- Bogus product reviews
- Fake articles that are really advertisements
- Consumer guides that are just infomercials in disguise
- Hucksters pretending to be experts
- And every scam you can imagine (and some that never existed before) empowered by deepfakes or AI or some other innovative new tech
The Google algorithm deliberately makes it difficult to find reliable information. That’s because there’s more money made from promoting garbage, and forcing users to scroll through oceans of crap.
So why should Google offer a quick, easy answer to anything?
Everybody is now playing the same dirty game.
Even (previously) respected media outlets have launched their own recommendation programs as a way to monetize captured clients (= you and me). Everybody from Associated Press to Rolling Stone is doing it, and who can blame them?
Silicon Valley sets the dirty rules and everybody else just plays the game.
Welcome to the exciting world of algorithms. They were supposed to serve us, but now they control us—for the benefit of companies who impose them on every sphere of our lives.
And you can’t opt out.
For example, when I listen to music on a streaming platform, the algorithm takes over as soon as I stop intervening—insisting I listen to what it imposes on me. Where’s the switch to turn it off?
I can’t find it.
That option should be required by law. At a minimum, I should be allowed to opt out of the algorithm. Even better, they shouldn’t force the algorithm on me unless I opt in to begin with.
If this tech really aimed to serve me, opting in and opting out would be an obvious part of the system. The fact that I don’t get to choose tells you the real situation: These algorithms are not for our benefit.
Do you expect the coming wave of AI to be any different?
[…]
The shills who want us to lick the (virtual) boots of the algorithms keep using the word progress. That’s another warning sign.
I don’t think that word progress means what they think it means.
If it makes our lives worse, it isn’t progress. If it forces me into servitude, it isn’t progress. If it gets worse over time — much worse! — it isn’t progress.
All the spin and lobbying dollars in the world can’t change that.
So that’s why I became a conscientious objector in the world of algorithms. They give more unwanted advice than any person in history, even your mom.
At least mom has your best interests at heart. Can we say the same for Silicon Valley?
May 26, 2024
“Naked ‘gobbledygook sandwiches’ got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink”
Jo Nova on the state of play in the (scientifically disastrous) replication crisis and the ethics-free “churnals” that publish junk science:
Proving that unpaid anonymous review is worth every cent, the 217 year old Wiley science publisher “peer reviewed” 11,300 papers that were fake, and didn’t even notice. It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry. Naked “gobbledygook sandwiches” got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink.
Big Government and Big Money has captured science and strangled it. The more money they pour in, the worse it gets. John Wiley and Sons is a US $2 billion dollar machine, but they got used by criminal gangs to launder fake “science” as something real.
Things are so bad, fake scientists pay professional cheating services who use AI to create papers and torture the words so they look “original”. Thus a paper on “breast cancer” becomes a discovery about “bosom peril” and a “naïve Bayes” classifier became a “gullible Bayes”. An ant colony was labeled an “underground creepy crawly state”.
And what do we make of the flag to clamor ratio? Well, old fashioned scientists might call it “signal to noise”. The nonsense never ends.
A “random forest” is not always the same thing as an “irregular backwoods” or an “arbitrary timberland” — especially if you’re writing a paper on machine learning and decision trees.
The most shocking thing is that no human brain even ran a late-night Friday-eye over the words before they passed the hallowed peer review and entered the sacred halls of scientific literature. Even a wine-soaked third year undergrad on work experience would surely have raised an eyebrow when local average energy became “territorial normal vitality”. And when a random value became an “irregular esteem”. Let me just generate some irregular esteem for you in Python?
If there was such a thing as scientific stand-up comedy, we could get plenty of material, not by asking ChatGPT to be funny, but by asking it to cheat. Where else could you talk about a mean square mistake?
Wiley — a mega publisher of science articles has admitted that 19 journals are so worthless, thanks to potential fraud, that they have to close them down. And the industry is now developing AI tools to catch the AI fakes (makes you feel all warm inside?)
Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.
In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.
Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.
