My dog is not the smartest of dogs. She knows barely any tricks and often does stupid things but sometimes she surprises me. Like the time we wrote a couple of scientific papers together. She’s called Peanut and she looks like this:
This is Peanut at her most majestic.
This isn’t just an excuse to post pictures of my dog, though here is another:
We actually wrote a couple of scientific papers together. Instead of focusing on palaeontology or science communication, the two things I should supposedly be able to write about, or rolling in fox poo and eating plants, which are Peanut’s areas of expertise, we decided to write a couple of papers on computer science. This is the first:
Looks good, right?
Have a good read of that and see how far you get. It is tempting to go off on a tangent and discuss how people have the propensity to perceive text to have deeper meaning if they have to invest a lot of time to understand it, leading to intelligent sounding statements which are really lacking in profundity, but that is a story for another time (that’s not a planned blog post, I don’t even write the planned ones). There is no meaning to this paper, it is all nonsense. I produced it using the automatic paper generator SCIgen, which creates fully formed papers including typical formatting, graphs, diagrams and citations, all of which is complete nonsense yet appears to be grammatically sound. It can even be downloaded as a pdf, our second paper looks like this:
Available on request from either myself or Peanut.
It is all a bit of fun but it does have a legitimate function. Journals suspected of having low publishing standards can be exposed by submitting a paper from SCIgen, as can predatory conferences which prey on inexperienced researchers in an attempt to exploit them for money. In case you are worried that computer science is flooded with SCIgen papers, there is even a free program designed to spot them. They do look good though:
Look, sciencey stuff.
Jump to the references in the paper and you should find that the authors – in this case, Peanut and me – have been involved with other papers. I was shocked to find that Peanut had been publishing papers as far back as 1999. Not only did I feel deceived but I am baffled too; she was born in 2007.
She’s been busy.
In case you wanted to see us hard at work, this is us (she is the hairier one):
This post has partly been an excuse to share pictures of my dog, follow her on Instagram at adogcalledpeanut if you want to see more pictures like this:
Just be aware that the Sun actually shines out of my dog’s arse:
And she is going to ditch her career in computer science to fly off on the Millennium Falcon:
The Palaeobabbler 