Microsoft on Michael’s Domain

GPT-3 is hallucinating again

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

On the weekend, I needed to finalize my report for UP (University Pedagogy) 3.1 course. Since we had talked much about the usefulness of formal supervision agreements, I wanted to see whether some empirical research supported our ideas. Since our University had discontinued its subscription to Iris AI (an AI-driven literature research tool), I decided to ask GPT-3. I headed over to the GPT-3 playground and asked:"Can you find me five literature references that show the usefulness of a supervision agreement in an academic environment?"It quickly returned five references (see picture). I then asked for the DOIs (I am using Zotero for reference management, and Zotero can easily pull down full-text references if you give it a DOI provided the paper is not behind a paywall).When I tried to download the references, Zotero complained “Zotero could not find a record for the specified identifier. Please verify the identifier and try again.“So I VPNed into the university network to access the article directly from the paywalled publisher’s (Taylor & Francis) website. However, when I browsed the correct issue of “Studies in Higher Education” (2005, volume 30, issue 5), there was no such article. No such author. Nothing remotely looked like the reference it had promised.GPT-3 made up these superficially sound-looking references out of thin air. However, on close inspection, the articles are weird: each has only one author (rare, but not impossible), all authors are doctors (IRL most authors are Ph.D. candidates), and all authors list exactly one middle name (possible, but unlikely). When confronted with the fact that the DOIs are bogus and that they do not resolve to any published article, GPT-3 first claimed that I was not able to access the articles because they were behind a paywall. When I repeated this experiment for the sake of taking screenshots, GPT-3 apologized and promised to fix the mistake. When pointing out that the mistake cannot be fixed since the articles were fictitious, GPT-3 crashed.This behavior makes sense: Similar to how it finds information on any topic and nicely merges it into an answer, it found many references and merged them into a “new” answer. But since the algorithm doesn’t “understand” anything, it doesn’t realize that literature references must not be modified in any way. I am expecting this to be fixed soon as it is an easy thing to fix. GPT-3 is just a clever amalgamator and regurgitator, and this seems to be just a special case of hallucination.Take-home message for students: Do never trust GPT-3 to give you accurate information. Others have also reported that GPT-3 hallucinates often and quite badly .

University helpdesk recommends Zotero, but does not provide meaningful support

Sun, 20 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

With the end of last year (31.12.2021), the University of Helsinki discontinued licensing its default bibliographic software tool RefWorks . Strangely, you cannot license RefWorks as an individual. That means when your academic affiliation ends, there is no way for you to continue using the software. Perhaps, the current owner of RefWorks (Clarivate) will kill it completely because RefWorks is a direct competitor of Endnote , which is the reference management solution that Clarivate is focussing on, given Endnote’s integration with Publons and the Web of Science (WoS), which is best known for its Impact Factor . Not coincidentally, Clavivate is owned by Thomson Reuters, which is the company that litigated against Zotero for offering its users the possibility to convert proprietary EndNote citation style sheets into the interoperable and standard CSL format . The recommended replacement for RefWorks is Zotero . I have no problem with this since I like Zotero and have been using it as my default bibliography management tool for now more than 10 years. On top of the fact that it is free, it combines two important features, which make it unique and superior to commercial solutions:

Why I am running Windows 11 now

Sun, 03 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

My work computer broke in early summer: the graphics card failed. I used it without a graphics card since, but a few weeks ago the hard drive started to make problems. I ordered a new machine, but since the new Lenovo models will be coming soon, IT asked whether I want to wait for a few weeks in order to get the newer model (the P350 instead of the P340). So I have to bridge this time with something. I tried the old desktop that controlled the Äkta Avant, but it was pretty unusable (boot time ~ 3 minutes), but the solution appeared to be our old HP Elitebook G3. Most people who know me know that I am a big fan of open source software. Many of the best open source programs can run on Windows OS: Firefox, VLC, Inkscape, Blender, Scribus, Zotero. However, some open source software has never been ported to Windows. And often, the Linux version of the software runs better than the Windows version. One example is Gnumeric, Gnome’s spreadsheet calculator, which has an excellent chart export function to SVG. I have often recommended to my Windows-using students to install the Linux Subsystem for Windows (WSL) in order to run Linux programs, but only now have I done so myself. In order to do this, I needed to upgrade Windows 10 to Windows 11. I followed these instructions: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-appsStrangely when I tried to upgrade, Windows complained that my hardware is not “compatible” with Windows 11, but nevertheless started and succeeded with the upgrade.Here you can see a Win 11 running on a decomissioned HP Elitebook G3, which my university had refused to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 in 2019 (even though it was technically one day within the limits). I did a fresh install of Win 10 with the official installation media which I downloaded from Microsoft. For some strange reason, it never asked me for a license (even though the I had exchanged the SATA-SSD for an NVMe SSD). In fact the computer is actually very fast and usable, and I will definitely keep it around for a few years as my only Windows machine, because there are still rare occasions when I need a physcial Windows installation.On the downsider, the Win 10 install was a PITA because my university IT locks the BIOS, and once the machine is decomissioned, they don’t feel the responsibility to give these machines a second life. IMHO, this is totally against the sustainability goals of our university. Fortunately, one can mostly work around a locked BIOS. In the worst case, one needs to exchange it against a spare BIOS from China.

1000 times too slow

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Helsinki University has outsourced parts of its IT infrastructure to Microsoft. Even if outsourcing is cheaper in the short term than generating equivalent services locally, the net effect is likely negative due to the lost jobs, know how and independence. It doesn’t need a conspiracy to explain this self-destructive behavior, just bad decision criteria, which do not include long term and externalized costs.In its push to upgrade to newer Windows versions, Microsoft ended extended support for Windows XP on April 8, 2014 and the university obeyed by denying network access to XP machines. The argument was that XP was becoming a security risk. At the same time, Windows XP accounted still for about 20% of all Windows installations on this planet ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ ). Even in October 2015, well above 100 Million computers did still run Windows XP ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems and https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ ) without any catastrophic consequences.The ban of Windows XP was a problem, since four of our devices, that we need for research, are still running Windows XP. And there is no way to upgrade the OS without upgrading the equipment (which would cost thousands or tens of thousands of Euros and therefore is mostly impossible in the present tight financial situation of the university). And of course, the software that is needed to operate the devices is not compatible with Windows 7. As a consequence, we can neither remotely operate this machinery nor do automated backups. Even taking the data for analysis to another computer requires the Adidas network .I had contacted IT support well before the extended support of Windows XP ended and asked them to find a solution. Apparently there were different possible solutions and IT support did start to implement them, but because of personnel fluctuations, the project had to be “restarted” several times and different support professionals had different opinions on how to solve this problem. With the big “fire and hire” action at the university, the whole project disintegrated again. This autumn I again discussed our needs with the IT staff, but did not receive any concrete help so far.This Tuesday, I finally wanted to know how difficult it really is to connect a Windows XP machine to the network in a way that would not compromise security, but enable file distribution, backup and remote control. I went to the Institute’s garbage place where broken electronic equipment is gathered and took three old 10/100 NICs and a few ethernet cables. One card and one cable were still functioning and I dropped the NIC into a Ubuntu 16.04 computer and connected it via ethernet cable to one of the XP machines.After manually assigning an IP to the NIC and installing samba onto the Ubuntu machine, I was able to mount the samba share as a drive on the Windows XP machine. Then I just made the samba share available via a web page. All this took about one hour. Not being an IT professional, I spend maybe an additional three hours researching how to do it (samba setup, apache setup, configuration of a secondary NIC, which is not automatic on Ubuntu). This setup fulfills all of our requirements, didn’t cost anything and was implemented within one day.A write-up of the technical details will follow once I get around documenting what I did. Agility is perhaps what is mostly missing when I look at many of our university’s IT projects. Notably I think of switching to Drupal as content management system for the university’s web pages. Sadly, our faculty is still using Dreamweaver to create its web presence and as a consequence many web pages are never updated.

½ year and 1000+€ for Win7 & Office 2010

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In the beginning of 2011 I bought a netbook ( Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t ). I bought it with my own money. It was preloaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition. Because I prefer to use Ubuntu , I shrank the Windows 7 partition and installed Ubuntu as my primary OS. I installed the University-licensed Microsoft Office XP, for which there were still installation media around in our research program. There are only two occasions when I boot into Windows: when I needed to work on collaborative publications or grant applications at home with my co-authors using Microsoft Word or when there is a program that has no equivalent on Linux (which has rarely happened during the last years).However, last October, more and more compatibility problems appeared between the aging Office XP and the newer versions of Office, that use the new XML format (.docx). On one occasion, after my boss had opened a Word file (created by Office XP), modified it and send it back to me (using compatibility mode), it became uneditable in Office XP. Word would crash whenever I tried to edit two of the three embedded images. In fact, I spent hours of recreating an editable version of that document from scratch.That was when I decided to upgrade my privately owned computer’s Windows and Office versions. Helsinki University’s license agreement with Microsoft allows staff and students to run Windows and Office on their home PC. To university researchers, it happens all the time that they need to work from home. In fact, I wrote almost a complete research paper ( Jeltsch et al, JBC 2006 ) from home. Thus it should not be difficult and not expensive to upgrade from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Ultimate and from Office XP to Office 2010, right? Helsinki University wants to get higher and higher in the [Alma intranet pages]( http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/2011?page=1>international rankings. Therefore, one might think the University would have made sure their researchers have easy access for the right tools to do their job. WRONG!Helsinki University has provided instructions on their Ohjelmistojakelu page of the university. Under the <a href=) (Home Use Program) link hides the “Microsoft Home Use Program and software delivery to members of the staff”. I downloaded the file (“koodi.txt”) which is a text file cotaining a code (something like “XXX0000”). With this code I went to the Microsoft Home use Program site. I had to type in my work e-mail address and the code and I received the following error message: “We are sorry, but we are unable to complete your request. the following problem(s) exist: - Please contact your benefit administrator to learn if you are eligible and to retrieve your program code.“I phoned the helpdesk of the University to ask what is wrong. The answer: “The University and Micorsoft are negotiating a new licensing deal and the old code doesn’t work anymore and the new code is not yet there.” How long will it approximately take for the new working codes codes to appear? “A few weeks.” I waited a few weeks. To be precise: I waited six weeks. I went through the same procedure as before. But the code still did not work. Retrospectively, I suppose that the helpdesk’s first answer was wrong: The codes were probably still fine, but the instructions on the university’s pages were wrong (they sent me to the wrong page to type in the code and at the time of this writing - 5 months later - the university’s pages are still wrong).In the beginning of the new year I submitted a formal support request to the helpdesk. I received the following answer:Hi MichaelUniversity of Helsinki has made a new agreement with Microsoft (moved from MSCA to EES) starting this month and now that our agreement is changing codes won't work. I assume we get new codes to our new agreement from Microsoft after all paper work is done, and this will take approx. couple of weeks or so.All we can do now is wait, you can check in february if Home Use Program -option is working. Sorry for the inconvenience.Best regards,Tommi also send me the Alma link with the instructions . I tried several of the links in the document (which were links to sites where one could order Windows and Office installation media/downloads), but already the first link was broken: Microsoft Windows operating systems: e-Academy (no CD/DVD option, only downloadable versions). It is still broken at the time of this writing.The other option (“Microsoft Home Use Program HUP (Digital River, also installation medias)”) linked only to the instructions that I already knew (and which do not work). Because apparently nobody had ever tried before to leaglly aquire Windows and Office for home use via this program, I went in March together with my computer to our physical help desk at Meilahti campus. Iivari was very friendly, but the only thing he managed to do was to replicate the problem and to convice somebody that there is a problem that should be looked at. A few days later he sent me the link to a page from where I could order Windows and Office for 20€/DVD: https://hup.atea.fi/ .This link I have never found anywhere in the university’s online instructions (as I learned later, it is somewhere there, but almost impossible to find). I am not surprised that otherwise law-abiding citizens of this country use illegal versions of Windows/Office at home if it is so difficult to be legal.I received the DVDs via Post a week later (I had to go to the post office and to pay there the 20€/DVD).Before I installed anything, I made a disk dumpdd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdbof my entire hard drive (250 GB hard disk, it took 20 hours via USB). Because I had Windows 7 Starter installed on my computer, I first tried to use the anytime upgrade . For this I actually only would have needed the license key, but not the physical installation disks. When I typed in the key, it started the upgrade, but failed without any details. So I decided to run the upgrade advisor (a program from Microsoft that determines whether your computer is “good” enough for the upgrade). The only thing it found was that I was short on disk space. So I freed another 5 GB by uninstalling software (mostly the bloatware that was put there by Lenovo). The second attempt also failed without any specific error message. I had no way of knowing what was the reason.So I tried a clean custom install. First I needed to transfer the Windows 7 install DVD to a USB stick (my computer has no CD/DVD drive and I or my lab doesn’t own an external CD/DVD drive). Fortunately this is easier with Windows 7 than with Windows XP. However, not all USB sticks seem to be equal and the first USB stick I tired (Verbatim) was rejected by the tool I used. I followed these instructions . Then I booted from the 4GB stick and started the upgrade. Everything went fine until the very end, when I needed to reboot and I was greeted with “Your Windows 7 install is broken. Do you want Windows to fix it?” Then I made a bad decision: I said yes. After fixing, nothing worked anymore. Upon rebooting, there was only a blinking black cursor.OK, if I cannot upgrade, I can do a fresh install. I wiped my hard drive clean and started the install. Everything went fine until I had to type in the product key. It complained that it is not a valid product key. Of course I had not thouroughly read and understood the pages at www.atea.fi . Probably because they are only in Finnish. Apparently, the University’s deal with Microsoft does not provide the staff with full installers, but only with upgrade installers. Consequently I need to keep my old Windows version around for the install. Luckily I had my diskdump. I wrote it back to the hard drive. This took only about 6 hours.This Monday I went (together with my laptop) to the local computing support. Perttu enlightened me about the possible upgrade paths to Windows 7 and tried to do the custom install using an external DVD drive. And it worked! Hallelujah! It took several reboots, but finally I had a running Windows 7 Ultimate. Installing the drivers took also about three hours. It took an eternity to download the drivers from Lenovo’s site, despite them being akamaized. Maybe they didn’t pay their bills. Now I just needed to create an iso image from the Office 2010 DVD, move it over to the computer and start the install, which went flawlessly this time.I presume that the first time I tried the custom install, the system was somehow compromised by the failed anytime-upgrade. Who knows. 500 Million lines of code, that nobody really understands anymore. It’s close to a miracle, that Microsoft is managing to keep Windows afloat.Of course the Windows installer had screwed up my grub boot loader and I had to start the machine from a System rescue CD on a USB stick and write back the MBR from my disk dump:dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1I still don’t exaclty know now, whether the Windows 7 Starter Edition does or doesn’t qualify for an upgrade using the University licensed upgrade plan. I stupidly assumed that if a 10 year old Windows XP Home qualifies, a Windows 7 Starter edition would too.The whole procedure lastet about half a year and taken together, I spent maybe seven to ten days of work for it (about half of this time during working hours, the other half during my weekends). Let’s estimate the real costs including the hours I had to put into this Windows 7 & Office 2010 installation: conservatively at least 1000€. The system is broken and the worst thing is, that there is nobody to blame and nobody who can fix it. Maybe Helsinki University should invest some energy and time into the development and adoption of open source Operating Systems. After all, the most popular one (Linux) was started by somebody from Helsinki University .