Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 579

Publishing Persistence! The Second Rise of SCIRP

Dr. Martin Rundkvist, in The Aarvarkaeology blog muses today about the persistence of a prolific publisher who once caught our eye:

Scam Publisher Fools Swedish Cranks

…Suspicions about SCIRP began to gather in December 2009, when Improbable Research, the body behind the IgNobel Prize, said the publisher might offer "the world's strangest collection of academic journals". Improbable Research pointed out that at the time, SCIRP's journals were repurposing and republishing decade-old papers from bona-fide journals, sometimes repeating the same old paper in several of its journals, and offering scholars in unrelated fields places on editorial boards.

This was taken up by Nature News in January 2010, when they contacted Zhou and received the explanation that the old papers had appeared on the web site by mistake after having been used to mock up journals for design purposes. "They just set up the website to make it look nice", said Zhou. While he had otherwise represented himself as president of SCIRP, Zhou now told Nature News that he helped to run the journals in a volunteer capacity. The piece reports that SCIRP had listed several scholars on editorial boards without asking them first, in some cases recruiting the names of people in completely irrelevant fields. In other cases, scholars had agreed to join because a SCIRP journal's name was similar to that of a respected publication in their field. Recruitment efforts by e-mail had apparently been intensive and scattershot.

Now, what is this really about? Why is SCIRP cranking out all of these fly-by-night fringe journals that anybody can read for free? The feeling across the web is that it's most likely a scam utilising a new source of income: the "author pays" model built into bona fide Open Access publishing. A kinder way to put it would be that SCIRP is a pseudo-academic vanity press….

A treatise on beans in medicine

Coffee beans – image from Wikimedia Commons

Previously on this blog, we have glanced at treatises on , strawberries and spaghetti & meatballs as metaphors in medicine. The bean is no less important medically (besides being associated with flatulence):

Bean-shaped G-spot

Bean-shaped kidney

Coffee bean sign

BONUS: Under the microscope various entities resemble beans, here is an example of a Brenner tumor, a kind of ovarian tumor that has nuclei resembling coffee beans in look. (NB. Coffee beans are strictly speaking not beans)

Anne Elk's theory, and that of The Connectome

This video shows Anne Elk's theory:

Zen Faulkes reminded us of its existence, as he explained the new theory someone has advanced about The Connectome.

BONUS: An neuroscientist's theory of The Connectome:

How to go out on a limb, scientificalistically

A new study demonstrates how a daring scientist (or a team of daring scientists) can go about advancing a possibly controversial idea. The study, which contains the possibly daring idea, is:

"Weapons Make the Man (Larger): Formidability Is Represented as Size and Strength in Humans," Daniel M.T. Fessler [pictured here], Colin Holbrook, Jeffrey K. Snyder, PLoS ONE 7(4): e32751.

The authors are at the Department of Anthropology and Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture, University of California Los Angeles.

They write, daringly (and stylishly):

"we hypothesize that size and strength constitute the conceptual dimensions of a representation used to summarize multiple diverse determinants of a prospective foe's formidability."

(HT Mo Costandi)

What the dog ate. What the scientist reported.

A dog at a scientist's lab work. The scientist then wrote a report about the dog eating the scientist's lab work. The report is:

"Thallium toxicosis in a dog consequent to ingestion of Mycoplasma agar plates," Birgit Puschner [pictured here], Marguerite M. Basso and Thomas W. Graham, Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation, vol. 24 no. 1, January 2012, pp.  227-30. The authors, at UC Davis, report:

"A 1-year-old dog ingested a mixture of blood agar and Mycoplasma agar plates. The Mycoplasma agar plates contained thallium acetate, which resulted in an estimated minimum dose of 5 mg thallium acetate/kg bodyweight. Clinical signs over the course of 2–3 weeks included vomiting, diarrhea, weight loss, alopecia, dysphonia, ataxia, paresthesia, intension tremors, megaesophagus with subsequent aspiration pneumonia, and several seizure episodes. The dog was treated with intravenous fluids and placement of a gastric feeding tube…. This case of thallium poisoning following ingestion of mycoplasma agar plates demonstrates that unusual sources of thallium still exist and suggests that thallium toxicosis should be included in the list of differential diagnoses in dogs presented with megaesophagus, especially if alopecia and other unexplained peripheral neuropathies are present."

[via Frank Swain]

Keeping in touch across SpaceTime

Imagine that you are called Bob (B), and that you have a loved one called Alice (A). You would both like to touch each other across SpaceTime. How might this happen (or have happened) (or will happen) or not? (With or without the use of a relativistic wormhole). Such a theme is presented, in the form of a conundrum, by Cody Gilmore, who is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Davis campus. The professor simplifies the scenario thus :

"I introduce a puzzle about contact and de re temporal predication in relativistic spacetime. In particular, I describe an apparent counterexample to the following principle, roughly stated: if B is never in a position to say 'I was touching A, I am touching A, and I will be touching A', then (time travel aside) A is never in a position to say 'I was touching B, I am touching B, and I will be touching B'. In the case I present, the most that A is ever in a position to say is: 'I am now touching B, but this is the only instant at which this will ever be so'. B, on the other hand, can say: 'I was formerly touching A, I am currently touching A, and I will in the future be touching A'. (And neither object is a time traveler.)"

The professor's new paper 'Keep in Touch' (due for publication in a future edition of the journal  Philosophia Naturalis) examines many of the ramifications of this enigmatic proposition across eighteen pages or so of highly complex logical and philosophical analysis. But, at the end of the day, does such a puzzle end up raising more questions than it answers? Maybe, as the professor explains:

"My goal here has been not been to settle on any particular solution, but only to raise the puzzle and to argue that the most tempting responses to it are more problematic than they initially appear to be."

If you enjoyed reading 'Keep in Touch' you may also like another new paper from the professor: 'Quasi-Supplementation, Plenitudinous Coincidentalism, and Gunk' in Robert Garcia, ed., Substance: New Essays (Philosophia Verlag), forthcoming.

Tom Lehrer sings of sociology and mathematics

Tom Lehrer, master of many trades, sings here about sociology and mathematics, a mixture that is not always a solution:

(HT Vaughn Tan)

"The masculinity of the host was varied between participants"

How does one vary the masculinity of a TV game show host? One finds a copy of the following study, one does, and reads details there about how it can be done:

"Women's behavioural engagement with a masculine male heightens during the fertile window: evidence for the cycle shift hypothesis," Heather D. Flowe [pictured here], Elizabeth Swords, James C. Rockey, Evolution and Human Behavior, epub March 5, 2012. The authors, at the University of Leicester, UK, explain:

"The test was performed using a quiz show paradigm, in which a male host asked female participants general knowledge questions. The masculinity of the host was varied between participants. Women's performance on the quiz, as well as their romantic attraction to the host, was examined in relation to women's estimated cycle phase and host masculinity. Fertile compared to nonfertile women were more romantically attracted to the host and were faster to answer his questions, but only when he was portrayed as masculine."

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

The basic laws of human stupidity are ancient. The definitive essay on the subject is younger. Called The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, it was published in 1976 by an Italian economist.

Professor Carlo M Cipolla [pictured here, below] taught at several universities in Italy, and for many years at the University of California, Berkeley. He also wrote books and studies about clocks, guns, monetary policy, depressions, faith, reason, and of course – he being an economist – money. His essay about stupidity encompasses all those other topics, and perhaps all of human experience.

Cipolla wrote out the laws in plain language. They are akin to laws of nature – a seemingly basic characteristic of the universe….

So begins this week's Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

If you lose teeth, will you topple over?

If you lose a tooth, another tooth, and several more teeth, will your balance suffer? That's the question behind this study:

"The effect of tooth loss on body balance control among community-dwelling elderly persons," M. Yoshida et al., International Journal of Prosthodontics, 2009 Mar-Apr;22(2):136-9. The authors, at Hiroshima City General Rehabilitation Center, Japan. begin by saying:

"Since tooth loss may be considered to affect postural control, the aim of this study was to compare body balance control among samples of edentulous and dentate community-dwelling elderly subjects."

(Thanks to investigator Alexandra Basford for bringing this to our attention.)