Very OT: Math paper retracted for no scientific content
Nearly 3 years after publication, Elsevier has retracted a paper for containing no scientific content.
Link to the paper itself.
Entirely ludicrous, yet something I thought this fine community of intelligentsia would appreciate. Perhaps Brian, in his altered state of consciousness, can make sense of it for us.
EDIT: Be sure to read the comments for links to more articles from the same "author"
April 19th, 2012 at 12:39 AM ^
Not the first time for-profit scientific publishers have had problems based on online prepublications of stuff nobody actually read.
April 19th, 2012 at 12:52 AM ^
I am a big fan of the sources that he cites.
www.cut-the-knot.org/ is clearly a top rate academic resource, and //www.softsurfer.com/history.html is less of an actual website, being just a crappy advertisement.
I legitimately think the author was just trolling the publication when he submitted this. That, or he went to OSU.
I also appreciated one of the author's listed email addresses: "[email protected] (S. Kalimuthu)"
is what makes me love MGoBlog. Where else are you going to find sports, Arrested Development, and people who find this story funny all in one place?
At first I was reading the introduction and was thinking wow I hope all mathematics papers don't look like this or they really need to require some writing classes from math majors. Then I went on to the second page, and it was over. I realized then that no, this is just nonsense, and I laughed. Then I called a nerd alert on myself.
I had a similar, initial reaction: These authors are struggling mightily with the English language. But it has to be a joke ... right?
Either way, I have a new appreciation for the significance of "peer review."
A problematic problem indeed. Really funny that the authors managed to get that into an actual publication. Wonder if they meant it as satire, or just as a prank.
who approved it has been fired from around 5 different publications and the journals that he worked for have had to retract numerous paper.
This paper reminds me of the randomized CS research paper generator:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
Similarly to this story, the paper generator's authors were able to get one of their nonsensical papers into a for-profit journal.
Okay fine, I'll own up to it. It was I who penned this paper.
4 years ago, I was on a 7-day acid bender while alone hiking through the baren foothills of Saskatchewan. Somewhere within the mental fog of my drug-addled quest I had an epiphany. Math immediately made sense, not just mentally but visually as well. I saw the number 12. I hugged a polynomial. I danced with derivatives. I had a beer with an exponential function. For a moment there was complete mathematical clarity. (Upon further thought, this may have been caused by the drugs). Anyways, during my frolicking with quantitative thought I penned this brilliant paper. Or at least what I thought was brilliant at the time. I explained it to a man whose house I passed along the way, who happened to vet papers for Computers and Mathematical Applications--however, now I suspect he just wanted me to leave him alone, as I had stood outside his window reading my paper over and over again for a 4.5 hour period.
This thread is a perfect example of why I love Michigan and MGoBlog!
Alan Sokal's paper arguing that quantum physics is a social construct is my favorite academic hoax. I
April 19th, 2012 at 12:24 PM ^
Awesomenss of the Sokal affair aside, I'm pretty sure this isn't a hoax, unfortunately.
Everyone knows it's about magnetism, not magnification.
The craziest thing is what they're claiming. They're not claiming that they derived some menial formula or prove an insignificant result. They're claiming to have proved the parallel postulate, one of the biggest and most important postulates in Euclidean geometry. Nice. I'm going to go off and prove that P = NP now.
i once ran an undergrad journal that got a submission from turkey about descartes' successful proof of the existence of god. the guy didn't appear to know that this was an unusual position, or, you know, ever to have googled "cartesian circle"
which is the worst offender among for-profit academic publishers. (Here's Nature's take on the boycott).
Now I know how to get some publications on my resume. Didn't realize it was so easy.
I'm going to solve the quiet supersonic transport problem. After that I plan on solving for a low mass method for radiation reduction for long-duration manned space missions. And I'll solve them all through a single computer code that solves problematic problems.
Just last Monday, the New York Times had an article on the rise in scientific journal retractions. Apparently the pressure on professors in universities to produce publications, discoveries, and new information in order to survive is so competitive and intense that it has given rise to fabrication of data, or at least stretching the truth, in order to get promoted and tenured and to compete for diminishing funding from the federal government. And the fewer numbers of jobs for the PhD's that are being produced make them cut corners to get publications in meaningful journals in order to compete for jobs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/science/rise-in-scientific-journal-re…
...studies have their limitations, especially in the evidence based world.
This great article was published in the British Medical Journal several years ago.
BMJ 2003;327:1459-1461 (20 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7429.1459
Hazardous journey
Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials
Gordon C S Smith, professor1, Jill P Pell, consultant2
1 Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 2QQ, 2 Department of Public Health, Greater Glasgow NHS Board, Glasgow G3 8YU
Correspondence to: G C S Smith [email protected]
Abstract
Objectives To determine whether parachutes are effective inpreventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge.
Design Systematic review of randomised controlled trials.
Data sources: Medline, Web of Science, Embase, and the CochraneLibrary databases; appropriate internet sites and citation lists.
Study selection: Studies showing the effects of using a parachuteduring free fall.
Main outcome measure Death or major trauma, defined as an injuryseverity score > 15.
Results We were unable to identify any randomised controlledtrials of parachute intervention.
Conclusions As with many interventions intended to prevent illhealth, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjectedto rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials.Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoptionof interventions evaluated by using only observational data.We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonistsof evidence based medicine organised and participated in a doubleblind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of theparachute.
that is fucking awesome
April 19th, 2012 at 11:06 AM ^
Not only do I really like this, but it would really suck to get a placebo parachute.
I say we use monkeys as our test subjects. Or Chiuauas.
April 19th, 2012 at 10:26 AM ^
"Further studies will give birth to a new branch of mathematical science."
April 19th, 2012 at 10:48 AM ^
That is a pretty awesome paper. I actually worked at a legal journal for a couple of years and we had general rules such as "must be longer than a page" and "@budweiser.com email addresses are not the most trustworthy" serve as red flags prior to publishing. Surprised at least one of those wasn't tripped here.
April 19th, 2012 at 11:38 AM ^
Link to the citing paper. Words cannot describe.
http://www.sciencepub.net/researcher/0105/research0105.pdf#page=62
It was originally published at Applied Mathematics Letters (another Elsevier publication) but (surprise!) it's been retracted:
http://m.friendfeed-media.com/ab0afbf8c8e3bc7e39694f640ef880a7919ed3e7
which contains links to all their myriad results. I can see how the Budweiser might be useful in their research.
Ed.: never mind--I should have read the retractionwatch article before I posted. This is the article "written by one of the co-authors of this latest retracted paper" mentioned there.
April 19th, 2012 at 11:37 AM ^
April 19th, 2012 at 11:45 AM ^
I looked up the Dr. Mahalingam College of Engineering and Technology and they don't even seem to have a math department, but they do have a Department of Information Technology whose "Department faculty members have published about 25 International Journal Papers in Reputed Journals."
The general tenor and quality of the website fits the paper and I can easily imagine the faculty cranking out papers to submit to friendly editors at pseudojournals to try to give the institution some credibility with potential paying customers.
April 19th, 2012 at 12:00 PM ^
April 19th, 2012 at 12:20 PM ^
2. Experiment
Choose an 1HP (one horse power) electric motor whose RPM is 1440. Take two single cell torch lights made by one and the same company. Take two single tiny 1.5volt battery cells made by one and the same company. Fix one of the torches to a wheel of the motor. Let the second torch light be at rest. Now switch on the torch lights simultaneously and switch on the electric motor at the same time. In our experiment the torch light at rest gave light only for 90 minutes where as the torch light in motion emitted light for 111 minutes. That is, the torch light at motion gave light more than 11 minutes than the torch light at rest. From this, we get the moving mass (the torch light in motion) is greater than the rest mass.(the torch light at rest) And hence the proof for Einstein’s mass-velocity equation.
http://www.sciencepub.net/researcher/0105/07_0870_Kalimuthu_pub_researc…
Oh my god!! I nearly fell out of my chair readig this gem -
http://www.sciencepub.net/nature/ns0712/05_2012_easy_ns0712_31_32.pdf
<blockquote>Experiment
