Science and Academia Under Attack, Imposters Inheriting or Aggressively Seizing the Top Roles
AS we recently showed, people who fake their credentials or capacities are slandering those who have both credentials and capacities. A week ago my wife and I both sued one of the imposters [1, 2], having already dealt with imposters in our defunct workplace. Prior to that I began seeing the same in academia; some of today's lecturers are more like actors, not practitioners, and they serve the likes of Microsoft (often the sponsor of departments).
The same is applicable to Linux; the Zemlin scammers (corrupt family; there's a class action lawsuit for securities fraud) ended up 'taking over' Linux via the Linux Foundation, where no company buys (yes, buys) more seats than Microsoft.
There will soon be a very long article about this, courtesy of Andy. We're reviewing the text at the moment. "Apropos the closing section of Andy's post where he mentions creating our computing environments," an associate said today, "my thoughts turn yet again back to the sales pitch from Steve Jobs where he (and others) envisioned computers as tools to amplify our abilities and capabilities. Instead, they've been used as handicappers a la Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut but not to make every one equal, instead to ensure that the mediocre MBAs are above everyone else. I still naively hang on to the view that not only are computers tools to amplify our abilities, they are tools that must remain under our will specifically and not under the control of others or, equally bad, running amok."
Academia has turned into a bad place. I left in 2012 after they had lost my data and work (my offsite code backups were days out of date) because they didn't secure the servers and these inevitably got cracked. They wiped the servers before even informing the people who put work on that server (that the server had been cracked). Their "sorry" meant nothing to me; you neglected a server, you got cracked, you deleted my work, and only then you told me about it. That's the "quality" of sys-admins the university could afford. Lessons learned! They could only attract flunkies who could find no place in industry and it really showed. It's hard to have respect for remaining Computer Science lecturers because not many of them teach Computer Science; it is more like they provide industry training.
Computer Science in the 1990s: HOW computers WORK.
Computer Science today: how to use a computer to make an APP for a SMARTPHONE.
There is also the cartel associated with academic publishing, which ranks people and forms the basis for their promotions (going up the academic ladder).
"Glyn Moody has not mentioned this," an associate has said, but "Journal Publishers Sued on Antitrust Grounds":
See "Academic Journal Publishers Antitrust Litigation" and this file ("some a-hole used MS-Word to make a fake PDF," our associate noted).
There is something very anti-scientific about how these companies work; they've turned it into a greedy and corrupt industry, preying on science like it is mere "content" and using authors/editors like free labour/volunteers in exchange for alleged "recognition". They never paid me to peer-review submissions, they just offered to send me a book in exchange for hours of free work (proper peer-review and feedback take a long time). That book costs them very little to print and ship. █