This article deals with a modern disease of academic science that consists of an enormous increase in the number of scientific publications without a corresponding advance of knowledge. Findings are sliced as thin as salami and submitted to different journals to produce more papers. If we consider academic papers as a kind of scientific 'currency' that is backed by gold bullion in the central bank of 'true' science, then we are witnessing an article-inflation phenomenon, a scientometric bubble that is most harmful for science and promotes an unethical and antiscientific culture among researchers. The main problem behind the scenes is that the impact factor is used as a proxy for quality. Therefore, not only for convenience, but also based on ethical principles of scientific research, we adhere to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment when it emphasizes "the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics in funding, appointment and promotion considerations; and the need to assess research on its own merits rather on the journal in which the research is published". Our message is mainly addressed to the funding agencies and universities that award tenures or grants and manage research programmes, especially in developing countries. The message is also addressed to well-established scientists who have the power to change things when they participate in committees for grants and jobs.
Object-oriented programming languages do not contain syntax or semantics to express associations directly. Therefore, UML associations have to be implemented by an adequate combination of classes, attributes and methods. This paper presents some principles for the implementation of UML binary associations in Java, paying special attention to multiplicity, navigability and visibility. Our analysis has encountered some paradoxes in the specification of visibility for bidirectional associations. These principles have been used to write a series of code patterns that we use in combination with a tool that generates code for associations, which are read from a model stored in XMI format.
The publication of scientific papers has become increasingly problematic in the last decades. Even if we agree that a renewed model is needed for peer-reviewed scientific publication, we think the problem does not essentially lie in professional publishing-with economic incentives-but in the publish-or-perish culture that dominates the lives of researchers and academics.
The concept of multiplicity in UML derives from that of cardinality in entity-relationship modeling techniques. The UML documentation defines this concept but at the same time acknowledges some lack of obviousness in the specification of multiplicities for n-ary associations. This paper shows an ambiguity in the definition given by UML documentation and proposes a clarification to this definition, as well as the use of outer and inner multiplicities as a simple extension to the current notation to represent other multiplicity constraints, such as participation constraints, that are equally valuable in understanding n-ary associations.
Our purpose in this research is to develop a methodology to automatically and efficiently classify web images as UML static diagrams, and to produce a computer tool that implements this function. The tool receives as input a bitmap file (in different formats) and tells whether the image corresponds to a diagram. The tool does not require that the images are explicitly or implicitly tagged as UML diagrams. The tool extracts graphical characteristics from each image (such as grayscale histogram, color histogram and elementary geometric forms) and uses a combination of rules to classify it. The rules are obtained with machine learning techniques (rule induction) from a sample of 19000 web images manually classified by experts. In this work we do not consider the textual contents of the images.
David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, conceives reason as the slave of the passions, which implies that human reason has predetermined objectives it cannot question. An essential element of an algorithm running on a computational machine (or Logical Computing Machine, as Alan Turing calls it) is its having a predetermined purpose: an algorithm cannot question its purpose, because it would cease to be an algorithm. Therefore, if self-determination is essential to human intelligence, then human beings are neither Humean beings, nor computational machines. We examine also some objections to the Turing Test as a model to understand human intelligence.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.