Archive for July, 2011

O poceni kreditih kot razlogu za ostajanje v Sloveniji

[...]bi po eni od javnomnenjskih raziskav kar tretjina Slovencev odšla v kakšno drugo državo.

Pavle Gantar: Če bi bile razmere res tako slabe, bi verjetno odšli. To anketno vprašanje ima po mojem nekaj metodoloških problemov. Vprašati bi jih morali tudi, kaj je tisto, zaradi česar bi šli, in kaj je razlog, da ne gredo. Ali je to hiša, ki so jo postavili s poceni posojilom, ali kaj drugega. Takole bom rekel: ko so razmere res slabe, ljudje gredo, tudi če nimajo možnosti. To smo videli pri migracijah.

Pavle Gantar v Dnevnikovem objektivu

 

Metodoloških problemov? Ja, bi rekel, predvsem ker raziskava ne zajema tistih, ki s(m)o tako ali tako že šli (pa bi se mogoče kdaj vrnili). Seveda je vzorec izkrivljen, ostali so samo tisti, ki (iz bolj ali manj tehtnih) različnih razlogov (še) niso šli. Taka raziskava ti ne pove nič o begu možganov. V najboljšem primeru mimogrede zajame še koga, ki se počasi odpravlja, pa še ni čisto odšel.

Ta vase-zagledanost, pišuka. “Ne greš, a?, a?, a smo ti šenkal bajto, sirotek, zdej pa hvaležno trp v tišini…” Prvič, kje se dobijo poceni posojila? In kaj sploh so poceni posojila? A so bolj poceni, kot drugje po svetu? V primerjavi s cenami nepremičnin in trendi zaposlitvene politike? In kako lahko posojilu, ki je vezano na inflacijsko stopnjo in na fluktuacije valutnega tečaja, v obdobju gospodarske krize rečeš poceni?

Kar se tice predzadnjega stavka v navedbi, pride čez kot izziv. Če ti ni všeč, pa spoki. Od kje ta ideja, da se to že ne dogaja? Tkole malo vulgarno lahko rečem samo: “V redu, pa ostan sam na kupu gnoja s povprečno sposobnim kadrom in tko po Nietzschejansko reci: Ja, saj je res, da so sosedje bolj sposobni, bolj premožni, bolj srečni in manj izkoriščani, ampak mi smo pa bolj moralni; Medtem, ko tvojim poslancem iz žepov lezejo pogodbe za privatne letalske muzeje in floskule o tem kako bi bilo vse drugače, če bi le lahko dobil čisto vse kar hočeš.”

Kar se mene tiče se v tem stavu še enkrat (kot že kdaj prej) kaže popolno nerazumevanje lastne vloge v političnem sestavu države. Drugi najmočnejsi človek v Sloveniji (kot se P.G. samo-deklarira) ne more reči, ej politika mora narediti X, Y in Z zato, da bomo bolje živeli. Tak človek mora to storiti. Polno potovalko imam ljudi, ki potem jamrajo kako težko jim je opravljati svoj posel. Pišuka, kako dolgo misliš, da bi preživel v poslovnem svetu z odnosom: Sej bi izvajal svoje naloge, sam kaj ko mi ostali skoz nagajajo?

Ja, kdo pa te je silil, da kandidiraš? Si kdaj, ko si dobil plačilni listek rekel, ej tega jaz ne vzamem, ker menim, da ne opravljam dobro svojega posla? V točki, ko posameznik reče, ja saj ne bi prejemal nezasluženega plačila, samo kaj ko ga bodo drugi še naprej, se izkaže s kom se primerja in kam segajo njegova pričakovanja do samega sebe. Torej, njegov moralni standard je identičen preprodajalcem orožja, političnim trgovcem in ljudem, ki pišejo sms sporočila kot npr. Prinesi denar, ki si nam ga pokradel. Še je čas, po tem datumu bo zate slabo, poslovi se od familije, kmalu greš na dolg dopust. Danes si zapravil še zadnjo možnost. Dobro se skrij, tvoja družina bo plačala za vse, kar si nam naredil in ti boš gledal to trpljenje, pička, ne moreš se skriti na zemlji. In še: Se vidimo svinja, ko boš najmanj pričakoval, ti kar uživaj, ne boš dolgo, res ne, videl te bom jokati, prasec pokvarjen, in naučil te bom, kaj je PRIJATELJ .

Kolk me to pogreje. V moji državi pravnomočno obsojeni kriminalci kandidirajo za predsednika države (in dobijo 10% glasov!). Skoraj tretjina poslancev je končala izobraževalno pot na srednji šoli.  Državo vodijo ‘krizni managerji’, ki nimajo pojma o ekonomiji. Fiskalna politika se bolj kot ne sestoji iz tega, da uvedemo kak nov davek, porežemo finance kaki nepotrebni panogi, kot npr kulturi ali šolstvu, ali pa si sposodimo denar iz tujine. V taki vizuri nepotrebnosti je naša daleč najbolj nepotrebna panoga slovenska politika. Da ne bo pomote, moje mnenje o ljudeh, ki imajo program, ki se bolj kot ne sestoji iz “Ne vem, točno, ampak v vsakem primeru se potegujem za ravno obratne stvari od tebe” in ljudeh, ki pokoljejo vse kure v kurniku, potem pa očitajo gospodarju, da je pustil vrata odprta, se prav nič ne razlikuje od mojega mnenja o ljudeh, ki ta hip ‘krmarijo Titanik’.

Pismo, res, parlament, kjer ministri vlečejo nadomestilo plači dokler lahko (tudi če so sami odstopili); kjer velja prepričanje, da je nekaj normalnega če trguješ z glasovi; kjer ni nobene vsebine, razen kontriranja; kjer je silikonska bjonda višek referendumske kampanje; kjer neovirano blatijo predsednika države s ponarejeno dokumentacijo; kjer nič ni treba dokazat, za nič ni treba imeti preverjenih virov; kjer je važno samo da poziraš pred kamerami, za oddaje, ki jih nihče več ne gleda; kjer ljudi bolj zanima kdo se daje dol z živalmi, kot kako izboljšati življenjski standard populacije in kjer se hvalijo s tem da zakone pišejo mimo stroke….

Pri takem parlamentu, mi njegov drugi mož mirno reče, da je moje nezadovoljstvo povezno s tem, da je moja rit preveč polna. Nehi blefirat, večina tistih, ki smo kaj vredni nas je že zdavnaj odšlo. Pa ne zato, ker ne bi marali Slovenije, ampak zato, ker ona nas ne mara.

About amateur psychotherapy and support groups

 

 

I am participating in a longish discussion in a forum, where one of the things said made me write about something I’ve been upset about for a while now [things in brackets changed by me].

 

 

… I am not talking about this [support group], cause it is different, but most seem to be stuck in their own feeling of being right and know how support has to be given. Isn’t it true that amateur psychologists cause more harm then good?

As far as amateur psychologists/therapists go, that is my pet peeve anyway and in general.

I have no issue with either support or self-help groups, but when the line between support and therapy blurs, then I do have an issue, yes. I have an even bigger issue with friendly advice, mainly because I did work both in a psychiatric institution and in a private setting, and my experience is that the client/patient usually gets screwed by inexpert help.

Once the situation is really dire, they come to people like me, who face a lot more work in helping to fix the things that were relatively easily fixable before the person followed well-meaning, but nevertheless wrong, advice.

Sometimes, things are not satisfactorily fixable after the fact at all (for example somebody who is slowly drifting into psychosis and is told that they should really stand up for themselves and understand that as a permission to beat her children to the point where it leaves lasting marks, because they didn’t want to go to sleep at bedtime. If you don’t understand how the mind works, don’t mess with it, is what I am saying. Funnily enough, at that point, people who were full of advice before suddenly go quiet and stop answering calls. And then to my everlasting joy, I get to speak to the mother in a psychiatric clinic and explain to them why they’ll be staying with us, and why that nice person from social services is taking the kids away for good).

Now, don’t start with victim blaming (i.e. the mother is crazy, she should be locked up. Poor kids.).  This is all solvable in a way where the kids don’t get hurt and don’t lose their mother in the process (which in turn doesn’t leave them an impression that it’s their fault that they can’t stay with their mother anymore).

You see, there are two points where friendly advice can fail – 1) when the person giving the advice has no experience whatsoever with what they are dealing with, and just play it by heart, which may work for them personally, but certainly doesn’t work for everybody. They might also mistake their personal experience with a certain issue to be grounds for a good general advice (e.g. if you are quite timid and have once in your life stood up for yourself to a great outcome, you still shouldn’t encourage a serial rapist to not listen to anyone else and just follow their heart).

And 2) (connected to the first one), when the advice giver fails to see the warning signs or misinterprets them because they judge everybody to be just like them.

Both of those sometimes work OK and leave no outward damage which in turn empowers the person to fancy themselves the go-to mental guru, so to speak (i.e. if you have a problem, just talk to me, everybody else does it). This might work for a while, but there will certainly come a point when people are out of their depth (which also happens to ‘real’ therapists, don’t get me wrong, but at least we have any numbers of external mechanisms to help us cope. And, quite importantly, we are equipped to recognize this, when it happens).

Once out of their depth, people either shy away from the problem, leaving the client/patient to pick up the pieces (bad), or steam-roller on, into the unknown, after all how bad could it be, right? (worse).

Well, it can be as bad as you can imagine and then some more. Mainly because if a lay person can actually imagine it and still goes ahead with it, they are probably a psychopath (i.e. don’t care if somebody else suffers. Might also enjoy it. Same applies for being overconfident – it is easy to be overconfident about somebody else’s future. If it works, then fine, if it doesn’t, well, they’ll face the consequences, is also an anti-social trait).

Let me point out that, like I said before, I think that there is a real need for support and self-help groups out there, but there is also a responsibility attached to offering that kind of service, one that shouldn’t be brushed away.

I would say that the main function of such groups is to listen. Offering an opinion is also fine, sharing of experiences too. Lay therapy, absolutely not. I am saying that it is OK to say: “That sucks. I experienced a similar thing – here is what happened to me.” In my opinion is also still OK to say: “Now here is how I dealt with it, but please bear in mind that this might not work for you and that I am not saying you should do any of this. I am merely telling you what worked for me. If you want to follow any of this, please talk it over with somebody who is a) uninvolved, and b) knows how to deal with those kinds of issues. It certainly helped me to do it. A phone number of somebody, whom I had previous good experiences with, is in your mailbox”.

It is definitely NOT OK to say: “Wow, that sucks, and here is what you should do…” or “Mhm, sure, sure, let me tell you what your problem is…” or “Stop talking, nobody cares. Let me tell you a real story of hardship now” or “You fool, it is all your fault, stop whining and get a life” or”You handled it all wrong, here is what you should have done…”

A peer-review phishing scam

I thought you would be interested to know about a very interesting scam that has been going around lately (well, interesting from my perspective, I research scams for a living :) ).

It is in a form of a very well executed spearphishing attack. It targets academics, and would be particularly effective against postgraduate students (I know it took me a while to realize it is a scam and at least one of my colleagues didn’t, but got stopped by me in time).

The way this works

You get an email, from a journal editor (in my case from Science Journal of Economics. The web-page URL is sciencejournals.cc) asking for a peer review of an article. Now, for those of you who are not familiar with academic publishing – all articles are reviewed, for free, by researchers in the chosen field. They then post a review to the editor and the editor makes a decision about publishing said article. A legit peer review request would look almost identical to the one received.

I went and checked – the Journal web page seems OK. On the face of it, the fledgling journal is sparsely populated with articles, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere, right? For me an additional issue was, that about a fortnight ago, I actually did speak in person to an editor of a small family run journal, whose name I have instantly forgotten. He asked me to write for him. So I was not completely sure whether this was the same guy, who first wanted to test my reviewing skills, before asking for an article.

I asked a senior academic about this journal (My full email to them consisted of: ‘Is this for real?’), and he replied saying that it is a very new journal, but could be above board, so if I had the time, I should review the article. Now, this is the first brilliant move by the scammer: if they get a hold of a PhD student, they can count on them being relatively inexperienced in the process of peer reviewing, while at the same time they know that peer reviewing is a required part of the academic life; plus it might stroke their ego that a journal wants their opinion about a piece of research.

I replied, saying that they should sent the article over, with reviewers guidelines. This is what I got from them, things in [italic square brackets are changed by me]:

From: Editor [editor@sciencejournals.cc]
Sent: 28 June 2011 12:10
To: [Me]
Subject: Re: Manuscript For Review [article title]

Dear [Me],

Thank you for accepting our invitation to review with the Science Journal of Economics. Please find attached files, the full Manuscript , Instruction for Authors as well as the Reviewer’s Guide. You may present your evaluations the way you deem fit. If you wish to correct parts of the manuscript itself, please indicate your corrections with a different color (for example, red for addition and blue for deletion).

I am looking forward to your response.

Best regards,
Dr. John Morrison
Editorial Assistant

Enclosure: Manuscript,Reviewer’s Guide and Instruction for Authors

I downloaded the files and looked at them. The reviewers guide is competently written, very boiler-plate, but that is the way all of them are.

The reviewers form is quite elaborate, but not out of the ordinary.

I decided to just briefly look at the article, before actually reviewing it the next day. The article was horrible. Really, you can’t get much worse than that in a piece of academic writing. I wrote at least ten remarks for first paragraph alone, before I decided that this was not publishable and that it is just a waste of time.

So, I sent an email to my academic colleague:

From: [Me]
Sent: 27 June 2011 00:07
To: [Colleague]
Subject: FWD: Manuscript For Review [article title]

Hi [Colleague],

OK, I’ve gotten the manuscript from the Journal we wrote about the other day and it is horrible. It is. I stopped correcting after the first paragraph of the introduction. There is, literally, several things wrong with each sentence in the first two paragraphs.I have appended my version with comments, so you can judge for yourself.

What I am wondering right now is - at what point is it ok to write back and say, this should not be accepted on the grounds of:

  • It is written in something only approximating English language and grammar.
  • Claims are unsupported
  • Logic is shaky or non-existent
  • In order for this to pass, I would have to rewrite sentence by sentence and I have neither an interest or the inclination to do that.

This essay actually about on a level of a 3rd for a first year [our University] undergrad.

I am now scrolling through it. It cites the source of their figures as “their own drawing”. The figures are not formatted in any consistent manner. They include helpful diagrams!! Words in the diagrams are clipped.

The References section is not consistently formatted. I am not prepared to read this crap. I looks like a high school essay.

Science Journal of Economics…. wait a second, I can’t find this journal wheen I google it. Hang on… sciencejournals.cc lists their head office as:

Science Journal Publication Head Office:
Federal Capital Territory (Abuja), Nigeria.
Branch Office: Accra, Ghana.

It looks to me as if a high school student wants to get a good grade by having somebody review their essay for them.

This actually looks like a scam to me.

[Me]

At the same time, I sent an email to John Morrison the associate editor of the journal

From: [Me]
Sent: 27 June 2011 00:06
To: Editor [editor@sciencejournals.cc]
Subject: Re: Manuscript For Review [article title]

Hi John, Please let me know which referencing style you expect the Authors to follow, so I can judge whether they are following it. I am also quite unclear about which category the submission you sent over, falls under (according to your Instruction for Authors guidelines). It is clearly not an article (method, results and discussion are missing). It is too long to be a review (17 pages of 1.15 spacing at best, but probably single spacing. Your guidelines specify 4-6 pages), and includes far too few references. It is also far too long to be a short communication.

So, which is it? Please let me know as soon as possible.
Sincerely,
[Me], Msc(dist), AHEA
[My University]

Next day, I had a meeting at the University and asked several colleagues if they ever received a request to peer review an article (I wanted to know how to go about rejecting this job, as it made no sense to continue).

It turns out, all of them got the same request! To review the same article! Now, peer review usually does not include six or more of our friends. Strange … Most of them agreed that it was a scam, but had no inkling what the end-game was (i.e. how the scammer could get the money out of us).

I then went home and, working under the assumption that these were high school kids, looking to get peer reviewed and get good grades at school for their essays, I started thinking of how to write a letter to ‘the editor’ that would prime the kids to wish they never sent a request for peer review.

It wouldn’t work if I just said I am onto you, as that would not leave enough of a sting. What I needed to do is to write how crappy the paper was in no uncertain terms, while giving away as little as possible on how to correct it. Hopefully, they would be conditioned to not send their requests ever again.

So, I wrote this:

From: [Me]
Sent: 27 June 2011 21:25
To: Editor [editor@sciencejournals.cc]
Subject: Re: Manuscript For Review [article title]

Hi John,

I have stopped reviewing the article you sent over. It is not publishable, at least not in the present form. It would literally require rewriting almost every sentence in it. I assume it was translated (badly) into English, and it shows. It is hard to follow the logic of the argument, which admittedly might have something to do with very bad grammar, which makes the logic itself seem flawed.

The referencing is insufficient, and at times, claims are completely unsupported. Furthermore, the referencing is also inconsistent, and regardless of the referencing style required, sometimes just plain wrong (the Author does not avoid figures that are superfluous in any case, they give an impression of patronising the reader, which makes me want to say: I can read, I don’t need a picture drawn for me. Furthermore, if you draw a picture, support it with extensive referencing, not by saying it is good, because I thought of it). This is not befitting a scientific text, it explains nothing and is far too garish to even consider in an academic context.

The formatting is wrong (paragraph spacing, placement of figures and tables, etc). It does not follow your guidelines in any way, shape or form.

I leave it up to you as an associate editor to judge how much of this communication to share with the Author(s), but it is clear they need to invest substantially into writting articles if they want to be published in a respectable journal. Frankly, between you and me, if one of the first year undergraduate students from my University wrote this essay, I would have to search thoroughly for reasons not to fail them.

[... continued after the break]

I am covering my bases here – In case this is legit in the end, I don’t want to incur the wrath of the real Author. Also if the editor is not actually the editor, then they still get my opinion, but the Authors are not exposed to my dressing down. In other words, no legitimate journal would forward my writing to the Author.

Wasting your time and mine on this is a huge disservice to your journal – it raises doubts about your publication. I believe you should reject it immediately as considering it at all would give the wrong impression about your publication to the academic community. I realize you are not well established yet, but giving a longer consideration to this submission will sink you very quickly.

The biggest issue, though, is, that it has already been published, here: [the URL] I don’t know what your policy is, concerning republication of already published material, but this has a strange feel to it.

If the submission you’ve got is not under the names of [Author names], then it has also been plagiarised, down to the last word. If that is the case, I think you should act quickly and notify the submitting authors’ Institution. [... continued after the break]

Ok, at this stage I realized that this is a real article, just one that should not have been published. I found it on the net, on a semi-academic site. So, if these were kids, then not only were they looking for peer review, but they were blatantly plagiarizing too. So, I said I see what you did there, without directly claiming scientific misconduct.

The real authors were probably not to blame here (except the article really is quite bad and there is simply no way in hell that they would be published in a respectable journal). Still, that is why I am excluding them from the post by saying [Author Names], [Article Title], etc.

Once I found the article, I did a WhoIS on the site and concluded that this is certainly a scam. See my next email, to my colleague. This one still goes on, for one more sentence:

On a personal note, do you like spearfishing, John? I am a huge fan, perhaps we could compare notes at some later time? Sometime before April 2012 would be perfect for me.

[Me], MSc (dist), AHEA
[My University]

I then wrote my last email to my Colleague:

From: [Me]
Sent: 27 June 2011 22:06
To: [Colleagues]
Subject: Re: Manuscript For Review [article title]

Hi [Colleague],

(I am copying others into this, as we talked about it in the morning and we couldn’t figure out what the endgame was. And now, I think I know).

Oh, this is sooo a scam. The domain sciencejournals.cc is registered in Africa. It has been registered on the 1st of April of 2011 for only a year (see http://www.whois.net/whois/sciencejournals.cc).

The site is almost empty of content (there are only a few articles scattered here and there on the site).

The article they sent for review is taken from another site: [URL to the original Article] (this domain is marginally better – it includes a real contact address in Bucharest).

John Morrison (“the Associate Editor”) does not exist on the Internet (unless he is either an Orthopedic Surgeon from Great Neck, NY or a senior lecturer at Aberdeen University whose research interests are concerned with Scottish Paintings from 17th century).

I didn’t know what exactly is their endgame – at first I assumed high school kids are looking for someone to peer review their essays to get better grades, but when it turned out that this article actually exists and that the authors are actually from two Universities in [a third world Country], that theory got tossed in a bin.

I am not holding my breath about these people contacting me again, as I not too subtly hinted that they were spearphishing and that I am onto them. Perhaps they are only looking to fill out their sucker lists. I would love to know what they hope to accomplish. It would almost be worth reviewing the article to find out, but it is such crap, that I don’t want to suffer through it and also I don’t want to do a good job, and make it publishable under somebody else’s name, but doing a bad job potentially opens me to extortion (i.e.You call yourself an academic? What will happen once the scientific community finds out how clueless you are? Now, if you transferred a measly $1000 to this bank account, we could forget about telling everyone how badly you did at this review…).

We’ll see. It is a very good premise, though, and PhD students are a perfect population to fall for this (relatively inexperienced, perhaps reviewing strokes their ego a bit…). The only thing the scammers don’t realize is, that PhD students are actually paid a little less than a person on unemployment benefits, so them trying to get money out of us tickles my funny bone.

Hmm, another endgame might be them requiring us to submit the review on their site and for that we would have to register there. They have a registration system there… This is generally perfectly reasonable. We require it for [Our Conference] site. Reviewers might also get a “free journal subscription” out of it. But, here it is – we know that a vast majority of people uses the same password for all logins, which is terribly bad practice, but they don’t want to forget it. That means that a couple of people in Nigeria now have a username and password to, for example, somebody’s eBay, PayPal, Gmail, HotMail and amazon.com account and that unlucky person suddenly finds themselves ordering 20 copies of Black Nigerian Booty Hoes DVD from Amazon and sending it to Abuja, Nigeria. He received the notification, but the mails got deleted somehow, before he saw them.

Ah, cunning. Perhaps I am giving them too much credit, but this is how I would do it, if I was them. I like this scam now. They almost fooled me.

[Me]
[My University]

So, there you go, a very interesting phishing scheme. I think the public should be aware of it, especially the academic one.

I have not received any response from the ‘editor’ in three days. I think, they have dropped me now.

I am still running an experiment about falling for scams, so if you ever responded to an illegitimate offer, or lost any kind of money, sleep, etc. to scams, please answer my questionnairehttp://survey.scamresearch.info//43356/lang-en