To some degree. When Wiley (old, big publisher) bought Hindawi (young, fast-growing upstart Open Access publisher), they quickly discovered that the entire publishing house was infiltrated by paper mills. They retracted thousands of papers, and closed many journals. However, some of their own journals are also heavily infiltrated by paper mills, and those had far fewer retractions.

Conversely, another young upstart, MDPI, has very few retractions even though they also have a high number of paper mill productions, including some that they know about very well and have "investigated".

Wiley is obviously a much more serious publisher than MDPI, albeit more hesitant to clean their old house than the newer that they bought.

Computer science, by the way, has a far higher rate of retractions for academic misconduct than other disciplines, and it's not because it's so easily replicated, it's because it's rampant with fraud. I'll give you an example of ridiculous verbiage that somehow stays in the academic literature thanks to the non-efforts of IEEE and an academic community that will publish anything but read nothing. You don't need a replication study to see that this isn't a serious academic work. It's most likely a patchwork of plagiarised text that's been fed through some paraphrasing filters to avoid automatic detection.

But yeah, psychology is surely not serious and computer science is very smart.

I'm not the person you replied to, but the Fairphone 5 meets their specification list.

As a side note, everything the parent asked for is common on older phones. Asking for them all together is not like asking for unrealistic / unicorn options.

A 512 MB module cost $100-$200 in 2006. Sold in an $1000 machine. 10% of the cost.

And now a macbook air costs order of magnitude the same, but the RAM they're putting in it.... $10-20 (1-2% of the cost).

I wonder if that difference in cost is going to some other part of the machine or into margins?

(I know Apple don't pay retail prices for their RAM, which is what I quoted here, the actual percentage of cost will be lower)

You want me to do busywork so Apple doesn't have to pay an extra $10 for memory on a thousand dollar machine?

The title of the story is "GPT-Fabricated Scientific Papers Found on Google Scholar by Misinformation Researchers", you blithering imbecile. It's the starting point of the discussion.

Entirely untrue. The people dealing in fabricated papers are professionals. You can't just submit a generated paper to a journal, not even one published by MDPI, Frontiers or IEEE, and expect to have it published. You need to have friendly peer reviewers, i.e. a network of other crooks, preferably ones with credible credentials. And of course, these people will want something in return, perhaps citations to their own rubbish papers as much as money. And citations get you promoted, or a new job.

There are plenty of scam artists working as full professors, and they can do this because:
1) Publish and perish means no one has time to actually read their work, as they are too busy writing.
2) As productive and highly-cited researchers, they are particularly valuable to their institutions (as long as no one reads their work).
3) Reporting them is entirely ineffective. Publishers will ignore you, also see 2).

Oh, and did I mention that these guys cite each other? That means that a journal with a medium to strong papermill infestation will have a higher impact factor than one with editorial oversight. For instance, the most highly cited paper in IEEE Sensors Journal the last few years is obviously part of such a citation cartel. Removing the papermill presence would ruin their "impact" and hurt their credibility.

There is the Retraction Watch Database, which is directly supported by reference managers Zotero and EndNote. Whenever a reference in your library is retracted and shows up in the database (it's not complete), the reference manager notifies you.

If you're a researcher and aren't using a reference manager, you're probably not very good at your job.

Not really. Not at all, actually. There are still plenty of subscription journals, and many of them have the same problem with paper mills as open access journals have. They are also often as unwilling to fix their problems.

The problem is publish or perish – you need to publish to further your career, no matter how weak your findings are. Your quality as a researcher is usually evaluated on output, both in volume and in the supposed quality of the journals you publish in (ranked by the rate of citations to the papers published in the journals), and in some cases also on how many citations your publications have attained.

Paper mills take care of having your name put on publications. Then they publish other works citing your paper. Now you're a cited author! And also, the journal gets more citations, elevating it in the rankings (yes, this is how fucked things are). Some papers are pure gibberish: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.3390%2Fs22166...

The Hulk film film grossed $264.8 million worldwide, making it the lowest-grossing film of the MCU.

You have an interesting definition of success. I suspect what we're seeing here is confirmation bias.

Uh? No. SHA1 has been vulnerable to faster-than-brute-force attacks since 2005

NIST and most other real security professionals were recommending against using SHA1 since 2010/2011-ish.

Unlike you, I do not claim to be a security professional, but even I know SHA1 has been unsafe for a far longer than a decade.

I feel sorry for your clients.

CO2 (metric tons in 2020) per capita:

Germany's: 7.72
US: 13.68
Australia: 15.22
Singapore: 9.45

But Germany gets the fuck you? I don't think I'd hire you for your critical thinking skills.

Right, so you're int the "being a scumbag & having a knife means you deserve to be shot seven times in the back" camp.

Cites please?

I think the actual quote most people used was "Jacob Blake didn't have a gun".

But I guess him having a knife was justification enough to shoot him seven times in the back? Or was it because he was a scumbag? Was that enough justification to shoot him in the back & leave him a paralyzed burden on his family & wider society for the rest of his life?

Sure, that's why countries with tighter gun controls have far higher gun death rates.

(fucking hell you people are ignoramuses)