The most extreme cases of self-citation are definitely bad news.
There seem to be some authors and author groups who rely almost entirely on self-citation for impact factor, allowing them to get by with irrelevant or unchecked work. It might be possible to detect that with a metric like self-citation or high author-placement self-citation as a fraction of overall citations.
But overall, it seems like this metric should be limited to exploratory use. There are wholly legitimate cases of frequent self-citation, like mathemeticians pioneering a new technique, or astronomy research groups which cite a large support team and product many sequential findings. Discerning an apparent citation-mill like Vel Tech R&D from a legitimate research group like the LSST requires thought, not just statistics.
Meanwhile, the most egregious self-citers are usually doing something else wrong too. Robert Sternberg wasn't just self-citing, he was reusing large amounts of text without acknowledgement, and abusing his journal editorship to publish his own works without peer review. The Vel Tech author in the article seems to be citing his own past works which are irrelevant beyond vaguely falling in the same field, and the enormous range in his work (from food chain models to neurobiology to machine learning to fusion reactors) makes me suspect it's either inaccurate or insignificant.
Ioannidis is damn good at what he does, and was far too sensible to broadly condemn high self-citation researchers. But it would be a real shame to see self-citation rate blindly added to university standards the way citations and impact factor were. The lesson here is that reducing academic impact to statistical measures of papers doesn't work, not that we need some more statistical measures.
The builder concept is actually really appealing. Academia can tend towards the same problem as consulting, where tasks get sharply split between "credit-producing" and "not worth doing".
Answering questions about your past papers; looking over someone else's proposed methodology; or cleaning up an internal tool into one you can share are all great tasks for advancing the field, but none of them bolster a CV, earn grants, or help you get tenure. If you want credit for them, you usually have to commit lots more time to the task, like running a formal discussion, becoming an author, or polishing the tool into an OSS contribution. All too often, the result is siloed projects and work abandoned as soon as it's published. (How many papers offering some novel twist on priming or ego depletion could have been turned into replication-and-extension if past authors had been involved?)
Especially in astronomy, with large projects and lots of non-PhD team members, this makes so much sense. (I believe something similar may happen at LIGO - if not formally then at least in practice?) If work is going to be judged by authorship, it's only fair to recognize that at a certain point the groundwork and floating aid people give is comparably valuable to the act of writing up some chunk of the text.
> TLDR: avoid the suburbs if you want your kids to run free.
A lot of the decline in free-range childhood clicked into place once I realized just how terrible suburbs are for little kids.
The roads are the worst part - wide, empty streets that invite speeding, connectivity that make them short-cuts for outside drivers, lots of bends and bushes that obscure the view. But they're not the only major issue.
Suburbs are usually built for cars, meaning no sidewalks or bike lanes, just a choice between walking in the road and upsetting the neighbors with their manicured lawns. They're usually fully developed, meaning no woods or fields to play in. And they're privatized, meaning no sports fields, no open grass for games unless the neighbors approve, not even any parking lots for safer street ball. They're featureless, so littler kids can't find their street or house in a maze of HOA-mandated similarity. And while our fears of crime are exaggerated, they're perversely insecure, combining a rural lack of bystanders with urban anonymity.
My run-down, dead-end street growing up seems weirdly idyllic in hindsight. Speeding was impossible, no one but the residents had a reason to drive through, every house looked different, there were trees to climb and a bit of undeveloped land at the end of the road. Even the neighbors who hated kids and each other had to use spite fences and complaining, not impersonal HOA crackdowns. But of course, there have been plans to suburb-ify it for decades now...
We could talk about era (this is largely 90s and more recent), location (small towns are often better, suburbs are overzealous but not viciously policed, cities are less likely to intrude but often more heavy-handed when they do), income, and race (the predictable biases). There are definitely places where children have been systematically taken away (mostly poor, minority communities).
But for most people, this comes down to "99.5% of the time, no, but there's no way to be sure you're safe." It just takes a run of bad luck: an invasive bystander, followed by an overzealous cop or social worker, perhaps followed by a judge without much common sense. Which means that it has an extremely widespread chilling effect. I've heard several people say that they know the crime stats and aren't scared of their kid being attacked if they go out alone - but still won't allow it because they're scared of the police and child protective services.
The accessible woods are often private property, though, at least on the east coast. BLM and other state/federal lands are fantastic, and they're certainly plentiful out west. But lots of that land demands serious hiking or backpacking, and even the land that's easy to walk into isn't generally accessible without driving. It's not an option for inviting a friend over after school to explore the woods.
The land that is accessible by foot or bike is much more likely to be privately owned. And when it is public space, it's often a town or state park - which is quite likely to come with enough curfews, enforced bans on unaccompanied minors, and other child-unfriendliness that it's functionally private.
I keep seeing stories about how kids are talking to their friends more online and less in person, almost always spun as "tech is supplanting face-to-face interactions!"
The reverse explanation seems screamingly obvious. Minecraft, Fortnite, Facebook, AIM, pick your program, are all things kids and teens do to talk and interact when they can't be together in person. They'll play videogames at a sleepover, sure, but it's a very different thing than getting on a game every night to chat. If your friends live driving distance away, you don't have anywhere fun to hang out, and you probably can't go out on schoolnights anyway, it's no surprise that socialization moves online.
Even beyond exploration, Minecraft is a perfect vector for this. It's collaborative and persistent, the same as building a treehouse would be. It can be closed-access, so your parents don't have to worry about strangers. It's drop-in with no fixed player count, so your friends can all cycle in and out for dinner, bedtime, and so on. And it's varying intensity, so you can do anything from fighting monsters to chatting about the schoolday as you decorate a house.
The decline of physical "third places", and the outright death of third places for children, is really depressing to behold. But I think Minecraft is at least a bright spot helping to offset that; it offers practically everything you could want except physicality.
It's probably worth distinguishing 'bloatware' from 'crapware', even if Wikipedia does consider them synonyms.
Roughly, I'd say that bloatware is anything preinstalled that's not filling a core use-case for the device, plus literally anything unremovable that isn't part of core functionality. So Messages isn't bloatware, but Messages+ and Samsung Health are. The first standard is sort of a fuzzy with general-purpose devices like computers and tablets, the second is pretty clearcut.
Crapware, to my mind, is "bloatware + shovelware". It's preinstalled stuff that's broken, malicious, redundant, or outside of standard use. Samsung Gallery is crappy, Superfish was malicious, VZ Navigator is basically a scam (paid, bad Google Maps), and the NFL app is worthless to a huge fraction of users.
The Office suite is very popular and highly functional, so I'd give it a pass if it could be uninstalled. Since it can't, it's bloatware. OneDrive is on the line; it's a popular complement to Office, but it's vendor-specific in a way that opening documents isn't. (Low-impact is not at all a defense; the 'disabled' state is nice for quick reinstalls, but there's no user-friendly argument for not allowing deletion.)
LinkedIn is absolutely crapware of the worst kind. It can't be uninstalled. It's irrelevant to a huge fraction of users (anyone who doesn't work). Its provided for the benefit of one company in a crowded space, whereas Office is a clear market leader. It's redundant functionality with a simple website, where Office is only partially duplicated by OpenOffice and Google Drive.
And worst of all? It actively hurts users. When LinkedIn lost its user data in 2012, the breach was made substantially worse because their iOs app scraped and uploader user data (including calendar info!) without permission. Permanently preinstalling an app that's largely useless and has already contributed to a major data breach is far outside what I consider acceptable behavior.
> at least a year before they understand the problem space well enough
I'm curious what domain you're in? I get the sense that different real-world topics account for much of the difference between developer 'worlds'.
I remember talking to a few rocketry companies in college (not SpaceX), and they were overt about wanting someone who would start out doing rote work and already had substantial expertise in their C package of choice. I certainly cant blame them; their risk profile is fundamentally different than almost any other software domain. (The exceptions, like military and aviation use, also tend to be pretty hard-nosed.)
"Not doing assigned work" is obviously a terrible trait basically anywhere, but the other divide here is really interesting to me. There are a lot of very successful companies which hire 2-year-turnover staff and assume they'll get the same, and then there are companies like yours with 'dark matter developers' who would never cross paths with that.
This is the second version of this reaction I got, so I think I made my point wrong.
I don't mean at all to say "it's not education". I did get educated in a northeastern public schools, I had a lot of excellent teachers who worked incredibly hard and committed their free time and money to education.
My point is that K-8 public schools are both source of education and - intentionally, explicitly - daycare alternatives. Not "school is useless, it's a holding pen", but "schools intentionally provide non-educational support for parents including childcare".
My public school had full-day kindergarten that was about 70% recess. When budget cuts hit, there was a public discussion of whether to go to half-day kindergarten, and the two sides were "it'll save money" and "parents will have to pay for childcare". My district had after-school activities with no real educational value to help keep kids occupied until ~4PM, and then another hour of unstructured study hall after that. The formal purpose of the thing was to provide a place for kids who didn't go to daycare or go home alone.
I don't even think this is a bad thing! The parent comments suggested "free college is a vacation" and "well by that light, so is K-12 education". My point was that children don't take vacations, and the daycare role of primary schooling is a benefit, not a hazard.
Not a problem - as I reread my own post I realized that it only made sense in a very narrow context.
To the extent that I'm upset by education-as-daycare, it's only because I think they ought to be separate public services so each one can be done more efficiently. But that's a serious pipe dream, so for now I'd rather just double the budget of what exists and trust that the people involved are well-meaning enough to use it sensibly.
I think I was unclear, or you're rounding my view off to a very different one that I admit is common.
I'm a child of teachers, and I know quite a lot of people who teach in inner cities or narrowly made it out of impoverished towns because of good education. There's a reason I said "as well as an educational system", and I definitely don't believe the daycare role of schools is a reason to cut budgets or cut schooling.
Educating kids is hard. Many people lack the time, knowledge, and resources to substantially educate their children themselves. Many students benefit from years of often-repetitive teaching to ensure information is available when they're developmentally and environmentally ready for it. I don't doubt any of this, and I absolutely think public schooling is a sensible solution to it.
My point was only that "you could say K-12 education acts as a state sponsored vacation" misunderstands the role of schools as daycares. Non-educational time at school isn't a vacation, it's a public service for two-income households that struggle to afford daycare. I'm not talking about teaching kids math. I'm talking about the existence of three-recesses-per-day kindergarten, or middle schoolers sitting in voluntary, teacher-run study hall after school.
The district I grew up in had a public debate about whether to move to half-day kindergarten, where the two sides were "it'll cut school costs" and "it'll cost parents more in daycare". No one even claimed it was an educational debate, because less than half the day was spent on education. None of this has anything to do with whether teaching literacy in the Bronx is important.
I'm simply asserting that "provides childcare for free" is an intentional benefit, not an accidental drawback, of public schooling.
> Yeah, but isn't that also the "problem" with subsidizing K-12 public school?
Eh, 9-12 public school maybe. The dirty not-a-secret of K-8 is that it's effectively state-sponsored daycare as well as an educational system, so its role as a holding pen is a feature rather than a bug.
I keep expecting companies to suffer from this "hit your numbers" approach, and it seems like they're starting to.
Every A/B test makes your site less predictable and straightforward for your users. Every push notification dilutes the value of every other notification sent. Every 'fake' event undermines the thrill of real engagement with other users.
At a certain point you're burning real value to create better metrics, and that's not sustainable for a company that actually wants to endure.
Those prompts almost certainly aren't Facebook-run. Too much effort and risk, no real need.
Rather, Facebook has a huge number of scammers. A few might be scamming you, but mostly they're from clickfarms that are trying to increase 'organic' behaviors so their accounts won't be banned.
I think a lot of new companies are going to be burned by this eventually.
Every time Facebook turns up the notification rate, they see more engagement. Every time they encourage Boosting a post, they make more money. And then later, when they can't link cause and effect, people like you and me and OP give up on the site completely.
Similarly, sites that A/B test and adjust features and "improve" their design constantly pay a real price - their users feel like guinea pigs and can't ever learn to use the product fluidly. But a .1% conversion boost is measurable now, while a slow bleed of users who want reliability can't be proven.
At a certain point trading goodwill for bigger numbers actually does become a problem, and I think we're getting there.
There seem to be some authors and author groups who rely almost entirely on self-citation for impact factor, allowing them to get by with irrelevant or unchecked work. It might be possible to detect that with a metric like self-citation or high author-placement self-citation as a fraction of overall citations.
But overall, it seems like this metric should be limited to exploratory use. There are wholly legitimate cases of frequent self-citation, like mathemeticians pioneering a new technique, or astronomy research groups which cite a large support team and product many sequential findings. Discerning an apparent citation-mill like Vel Tech R&D from a legitimate research group like the LSST requires thought, not just statistics.
Meanwhile, the most egregious self-citers are usually doing something else wrong too. Robert Sternberg wasn't just self-citing, he was reusing large amounts of text without acknowledgement, and abusing his journal editorship to publish his own works without peer review. The Vel Tech author in the article seems to be citing his own past works which are irrelevant beyond vaguely falling in the same field, and the enormous range in his work (from food chain models to neurobiology to machine learning to fusion reactors) makes me suspect it's either inaccurate or insignificant.
Ioannidis is damn good at what he does, and was far too sensible to broadly condemn high self-citation researchers. But it would be a real shame to see self-citation rate blindly added to university standards the way citations and impact factor were. The lesson here is that reducing academic impact to statistical measures of papers doesn't work, not that we need some more statistical measures.