Fukushima Meltdown Driving Increased Abnormalities Among US Infants

[kristopher]

209. A fictional web posting about a fictional academic at a fictional academic institution?

There is no Prof. Marcie Rathke and there is no University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople except as a creative tool for a comedic composer, Peter Schickele.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schickele

P. D. Q. Bach
From Wikipedia
P. D. Q. Bach is a fictitious composer invented by musical satirist "Professor" Peter Schickele. In a gag that Schickele has developed over a five-decade-long career, he performs "discovered" works of the "only forgotten son" of the Bach family. Schickele's music combines parodies of musicological scholarship, the conventions of Baroque and classical music, and slapstick comedy.

The name "P. D. Q." is a parody of the three-part names given to some members of the Bach family that are commonly reduced to initials, such as C. P. E., for Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. PDQ is an initialism for "pretty damn quick".

On several recordings Schickele states that he is a professor at the fictitious University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. The town of Hoople, North Dakota, actually exists, but it is in the northeastern part of the state.
For years, Schickele regularly toured, and he has recorded on the Vanguard and Telarc labels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._D._Q._Bach

This is one to bookmark. Did you manufacture the webpage you linked to just for this discussion?

SidDithers
206. Peer review so judicious, the same company accepted a paper generated by a random text generator...

http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102

Yes, the open journal Advances in Pure Mathematics is yet another of the fine journals published by Scientific Research and Publishing. Scientific Research Publishing also puts out the Open Journal of Pediatrics. Surprise, surprise.

Scientific Research Publishing is a Chinese journal factory that will accept any paper with a cheque attached. That's why dumbasses Mangano and Sherman get accepted. A real scientific journal would have rejected their research outright, as long as they could have stopped laughing long enough to write the rejection notice.

Junk science usually doesn't make it past real peer review.

Sid

At least we know without a doubt who is a fraud. ETA: This comment from your link says it perfectly:

Greg A on October 19, 2012 at 11:16 AM said:
I feel like someone just told me, “I trolled wikipedia, and the wikipedians welcomed me to the community even as they reverted my edits for being stupid.”

If you read SciRP’s about us page, it is clear that they are making trade-offs with the goal of maximum accessibility. I think that’s laudable, even though we shouldn’t ignore the costs of this approach.

If you read Newton’s work from a modern perspective, personally I find it impenetrable. My knowledge of calculus and algebra doesn’t help me. He uses arcane-seeming triangle geometry trivia for every single proof. If I have the time, I could read the Descartes and unravel it. But if I didn’t, I would instead write “this doesn’t follow obviously from earlier statements” in red ink all over the paper. Newton’s work is fantastic, but without the time to research his (now arcane) background, it *does* come off as largely unsupported garbage. And he was relatively concrete compared to today’s pure mathematics.

So I find their criticisms are perfectly on point. Since they were providing a free service to you, they did not have the time to research your citations. In service of their goal of accessibility, they didn’t reject your paper merely because of their unfamiliarity with your citations. Instead, all they could tell you is that they would publish your paper if you edited it so that it made sense. You were unable or unwilling to edit it to make sense, so you were not published. Their system worked exactly as intended!

The $500 is a red herring. Most professional organizations that support peer reviewing charge more than $100 per year just to join the club. You wouldn’t have even been permitted a seat at the table, no matter your bona fides.

Unlike SciRP, which ultimately rejected your meaningless story because you were unable to meet their terms, slashdot has actually published your meaningless story. Congrats, you successfully trolled someone, but it’s not who you claim to have intended to.

And this

Wow! I’m impressed that the journal actually took your paper seriously, and that is a clear sign that the journal is not serious itself. Yet, the paper was not accepted. It’s likely that the reviewer and the editor were just being polite (and greedy…). At least once it’s happened to me that an editor gave me a “half-acceptance” like this, if I carried out some “minor” modifications the reviewer was requiring. The paper got finally accepted, but the “minor” modifications took me more than a month of full-time work. It’s not obvious that you would be able to actually get the paper published.