I don’t really have any big issue with the students self-regulating exam rule violations, but if it is to have any hope of working, the students would then also need to have supervisors at the exam, if only because it’s ludicrous to think that honest people that are focused on their own exam will be aware enough of their surroundings to catch others cheating, let alone call them out when they’re likely in their close social circle.

As the name implies, this was originally an “honour system”, based around individual students self-regulating based on an idea of honour. That probably worked well enough in the 1800’s and early 1900’s, but it sure as hell won’t work in a modern society that values “getting ahead at all costs” above near anything else (as the numbers show).

Wait? These people were having unsupervised exams with access to their phone and now they see that they need to do something? I mean, the numbers speak for themselves when 45% of students say they were aware of an “honor code violation” during their time as students. I was at uni for five years, and I literally don’t know about a single case of cheating on exams among my peers.

Seems to me that cheating was already rampant, they just found a new excuse to do something about it.

To be clear by the way: Our exam “supervision” literally consisted of some pensioned seniors that got paid to come in for a day to hand out exam papers, receive and archive your response, and otherwise just hang around in the exam hall so people wouldn’t feel safe just blatantly bringing notes or their phone.

Are people backwards here or something? You’re explicitly stating that you’re not defending them, and you’re completely right in what you’re saying. A company can have record revenues and record losses (negative profit) in the same period. That doesn’t mean meta and zucky are anything short of horrible, it means the headline is crap. An informative headline would be “<Company> reports <value> profits and announces <number of> layoffs”. Saying they have record revenues tells us exactly nothing about whether layoffs are justified or not.

Case in point: My buddy’s startup had record revenues this year, more than doubled since last year, if they keep going at this pace they’ll be bankrupt by this time next year, since their income is smaller than their wage expenses.

Thanks, I hadn’t caught that!

Beall also claimed that MDPI used email spam to solicit manuscripts

I can confirm - this is what I’ve been experiencing after publishing with them once.

In August 2018, 10 senior editors (including the editor-in-chief) of the journal Nutrients resigned, alleging that MDPI forced the replacement of the editor-in-chief because of his high editorial standards and for resisting pressure to “accept manuscripts of mediocre quality and importance.”

Yep, this is really bad, and something I definitely should have known.

(Edit: In my defence, I was relatively inexperienced at the time, and was recommended to publish in a special issue there by a (very) senior researcher that I know well and have every reason to trust. They definitely should have known better, and I’ve since learned to not trust the judgement of your seniors, even when it seems reasonable at first sight to do so.)

MDPI even asked Jeffrey Beall, the author of Beall’s list of predatory publishers, to edit a Special Issue in a field that is not his own.

Yea, I’m never publishing with these guys again. I probably wouldn’t have anyway, because the email-spam has been so annoying, but now I definitely won’t.

For anyone interested in predatory publishing practices, the link is a pretty good and in-depth read.

There’s nothing to discuss.

I have plenty of grievances with publishing practices that it could be nice to both discuss with peers, and discuss online on a forum where people outside the science community can both learn about what’s going on in the community and come with input from outside.

You are clearly biased due to the motivation to defend the publishing body for your research.

I’ve literally published one article in an MDPI-journal, and have exactly zero motivation to defend that journal. My work stands on its own feet, regardless where it’s been published. I haven’t even defended the publisher or the journal in my comments, so I don’t see how you can conclude that I’m motivated to do so.

Expert scientific bodies all over the globe, including China , Europe , had or have strong criticisms of the MDPI and for very good reasons.

This is what I asked you to elaborate on. Not because I think you’re wrong or have any need to prove you wrong, but because I wanted to open for a discussion around publishing practice and bad journals/publishers.

You seem to have concluded a priori that I disagree with you, and then you’re attacking me based on that. I really can’t fathom why you would do that. This could have been a pleasant conversation that both myself and others reading these comments could learn and benefit from, but you decided to make it about attacking my integrity and qualifications as a researcher.

Being a researcher, I know that the most efficient way to get more knowledge about a claim can be to ask the person making the claim. Being a lemmy-user, I recognise the value of asking the question openly so that others can read the response. I really don’t understand why you would try to make that point (in a derogatory way nonetheless …) of course I could check this myself, that’s easy. I decided to ask because

a) You might have specific reasons for claiming what you did that could be different from, or more specific than, the myriad of reasons that could show up in a search.

b) I wanted to contribute here by opening for a pleasant conversation about publishing practice.

With that said: I’m kind of surprised these points would be applied to the publisher as a whole. The fact that the publisher is multi-disciplinary doesn’t in my eyes imply that the individual journals are “inexpert” (they can still be confined to a niche). The review process is also typically run by the individual journal, so I’m a bit surprised that a blanket description of “crappy review” is applied to a publisher as a whole.

Honest question: What’s wrong with MDPI? I’ve published in one of them, and noted that they (MDPI) have been spamming for more ever since, but other than that I haven’t heard of any issue with them.

No? Even if the new battery is 3x more expensive to build, and has 50 % of the capacity of a Li-ion battery, it can still have an advantage in large scale storage if it lasts for 10x as many cycles without degrading. At the end of the day, it’s a combination of parameters that determine which is the best for a given application, and high resistance to degradation can outweigh other parameters in many scenarios.

What did they get banned for??

Come on… I agree that it’s possible, maybe even plausible, that this was staged, but you can’t honestly claim to be sceptical if you think the most likely situation here was that this was staged when you have no hard evidence at all. I’m not saying it wasn’t staged, I’m saying that the sceptical approach is to recognise that anything coming out of the White House is a half-truth at best, that there is exists a motive for staging this, and that it could be staged. At this point we have nowhere near enough evidence to conclude either way.

Besides, there are plenty of people that want trump dead. I don’t see it as unlikely that one of them decided to give it a shot here.

https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Palantíri

How Are so many people so ignorant and confident at the same time? You’re all acting like you know what you’re talking about…

I’m upvoting just to counterbalance the people downvoting because they dislike someone else’s subjective opinion.

While that’s true, it’s worth remembering that congresspeople and senators see these results, and take them into account when deciding whether to support or oppose trump. If his approval rating gets low enough, other politicians will start seeing it as detrimental to their careers to support him. If just a few republican senators or congressmen start actively opposing him, his power will be significantly reduced. If it goes low enough they might even decide that it’s in their own best interest to either impeach or 25th him. The last two are a loong shot, but the point stands that terrible approval ratings can actually have tangible impact on things.

Saying you’re surprised something hasn’t happened is a long shot from encouraging that it’s done.

With the amount of unstable and desperate people out there I’m surprised nobody’s kidnapped Elon musks kids for ransom. I don’t wish his kids any harm, and don’t hope it happens, but I’m still a bit surprised that it hasn’t happened when you consider the amount of people out there with nothing to lose, questionable morals, and a big desire to make a lot of money.

The damaging kind necessarily carries enough energy to cause damage, what’s preventing it from being harvested?

Isn’t a major challenge of trying to surpass Voyager 1 that it had extremely good conditions for slingshotting off a lot of planets?

“Their only motivation to stop fighting is if you take their land” is quite possibly the stupidest thing anyone’s ever said. I have a hard time believing someone actually thinks a person becomes motivated to give up when you take their home from them and make sure they have nothing left to lose. Like… I really can’t fathom what is going through this persons mind if they actually believe this.

Isn’t the Chinese army in fact subordinate to (or a branch of) the CCP though? I mean, it’s a one-part system, so it doesn’t make much of a difference, but I seem to remember that the army is in fact formally controlled by the party, not the government.

PS. Note: I’m not at all sure, just drawing off an old, possibly incorrect, memory.

• Attack and bomb a country during ongoing negotiations.
• Wipe out a truckload of their air defences
• Use air superiority to bomb thousands of civilians
• Propose ceasefire without having achieved any political goals at all
• The country immediately starts rebuilding their decimated air defences to prevent you from bombing them during the ongoing negotiations
• shockedpicatchu.jpg
• this_is_a_provocation.wav

The fact that the account is 9 years old (from long before he was famous) points to a potential for this being his real account.