Friday, April 10, 2015

It's a pity that there are no Blue Öyster Cult lyrics on the theme of 'Astronomy' that might be used as a title for this post

Which scientific specialty attracts the greatest number of independent researchers whose innovative ideas are best expressed in green ink and miniscule script on the backs of old envelopes? This question appears again and again in the Riddled Advice Column mailbag, as if the readers think we have special expertise to draw upon.

A comment thread over at Scholarly Open Access last year degenerated quickly into a discussion of crank-friendly journals, and one cannot help noticing the preponderance of maths, theoretical physics and cosmology publications. Even in that company the Journal of Cosmology stands out for its editorial emphasis on panspermia and Hydro-Gravitational-Dynamics creationism, and for its authors' use of what appear to be Christian Psychedelia album covers to illustrate their neologasms of deeply-meaningful word coinage.
Conversely, there are surprisingly few free-lance particle physicists and molecular biologists seeking outlets for the discoveries they made from outside the mainstream in their improvised basement laboratories. Vertebrate zoology has the Monkey-Fucked-a-Pig and Initial Bipedalism theories of hominid ancestry... invertebrate zoologists have to make do with Williamson's larval-transfer hypothesis. Psychology is completely devoid of outsider science and wild-eyed loons for they devise new therapies and are welcomed into the fold (or onto Fox News) as valued practitioners.

So it happened that I was browsing through old edit logs at the Whackyweedia the other day, as one so often does when stuck in a barrel and waiting for the Anti-Bat Pills to start working, when the following list of contributions caught my eye. Someone operating from a Minnesota IP address spent a busy three weeks in 2012, improving various Whacky entries by the insertion of references to papers in Astronomical.Review.
Suffice to say that papers on interstellar travel and the Multiverse are likely to be more speculative than empirical.

"What in the name of feck is the Astronomical Review?" you ask. The bad news is that the Weedia's own entry on Astron.Rev. was discontinued just the other day IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY due to a shortage of bytes on the Innertubes. But never mind, the good news is that yer kindly uncle Smut has researched the Google and has all the details, which he will proceed to explain at exhaustive length with the occasional profanity.

We should begin with the journal's own website. It was a Minnesota-based quarterly, edited by Dylan Fazel, with no author fees. Or a nominal $25/page fee, depending on which part of the dogs breakfast website you are looking at. This seems reasonable unless your cosmological insights stretch across 83 pages. In that connection, here is Michael Peck -- a Relativity revisionist with refreshingly novel views about Red Shifts -- complaining that the Astron.Rev. staff accepted his magnum opus on "The Theory of Everything: Foundations, Applications and Corrections to General Relativity" and then wanted to edit it down to 25 pages.

The editorial policy leaned towards open-mindedness and new ideas, in the manner of a Salon des Refusés (which is not to be confused with the Saloon des Refusés -- a rather rough bar in the XVIIIe arrondissement redeemed by its unparalleled range of absinthes). Many of the papers had already been self-published in ArXiv or ViXra before the authors needed the imprimatur of appearance in a recognised print journal. Am I the only one who thinks that Imprimatur sounds like the hereditary title of the arch-villain in a Swords-&-Starships space-opera novel?

Those last paragraphs use the past tense because Astron.Rev. was bought last year by Taylor & Francis, juggernaut colossus of academic publishing. The T&F website for the journal already lists a paper in press (although the Editorial and Reviewers slots remain unfilled) and has hiked the Article Publishing Fee up to a flat charge of $750 / £469 / €625. This will be a bargain for anyone seeking to publish 83 pages of Relativity revision.

But this is where the baby's bath-water is muddied, and the tracks are muddled, by the appearance of a third website, from Knowledge Enterprises Journals. One of the three is an odd one out. It is, either Two Woozles and one, as it might be, Wizzle, or Two, as it might be, Wizzles and one, if it is so, Woozle. Let us continue to follow them.
This whole business of two memories three websites is not a cunning plan to manufacture controversy and convince the Whickyweedia that Astron.Rev. is indeed sufficiently newsworthy to restore the entry. It is closer to the way that there was originally Amon Düül, who split into Amon Düül II (who wanted to be commercial and sell records) and Amon Düül I (who were more into communal living and hippie stuff). It would seem that his time in the editorial chair has inspired Dylan Fazel of Minnesota with the love of academic publishing, and despite handing the journal over to T&F he is loath to leave show business, so he became Knowledge Enterprises Journals and added six new asses to his stable.

The KEJ site notes that
The Astronomical Review is no longer published by Knowledge Enterprises Journals
but Dylan Fazel is using a bog-standard OA platform with a template which fills in a lot of crap by default, so it still solicits on-line submission of contributions. We would wish him good luck if it weren't for the irritating spam sent to plague potential contributors / reviewers.

Posted by Smut Clyde at 5:50 AM 18 comments
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Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Dogma. meet karma... but I see you've already been introduced chased each other

A Juggernaut from the Ratha-Yatra is top-heavy, slow-moving, and hugely impractical, and requires a vast staff of minions. Surprisingly, there are no Top Gear episodes in which the team commandeer a couple and race them through the streets of Puri. MAKE IT SO.

So when one of the many US Izvestia clones tries to pimp out presidential aspirant Rand Paul as "an Internet juggernaut that his competitors will be forced to chase", yes, this seems fair enough.

They further describe Paul as "tech-savvy and youth-focused", this being America, where a 52-year-old tribble-mobility-vehicle can claim to Speak for the Yout and the courtiers will pass on his self-assessment unquestioningly. As for the "tech-savvy" part, the Wonkettariat were deriving no end of delight from Paul's unfamiliarity with this thing called a DMCA, which resulted in his announcement speech disappearing from the Youtuber because he didn't think Warners would notice him borrowing their musical property. He is, however, as aware as any high-school student of the plagiaristic potential of the Whackyweedia.

It belatedly occurs to me that if you put one of the St Petersburg rostral pillars on wheels and pulled it along, it would be a Juggernautical.
Posted by Smut Clyde at 11:47 PM 3 comments
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Tuesday, April 7, 2015

If I may put forward a slice of personal philosophy, I feel that Man has ruled this world as a stumbling, demented child-king long enough! And as his empire crumbles, my precious Black Widow shall rise as his most fitting successor!

"It's Monday night," said Evangeline van Holsterin, head barmaid at the Old Entomologist, "so the Com-post [Wellington's paper of record] will have reprinted a press-release from some university,written with one sentence per paragraph, assuring people that whatever they thought all along is now validated by SCIENCE."

"Monday?" I said, shaking my watch. "I could have sworn it was only half-past Sunday. How time flies -- ow!"

"Don't mention the Time Fly project," Another Kiwi reminded me in a whisper. "People don't need to know. They just ask awkward questions."

"Is this about the bar tab?" I asked.

"Just saying," said E.v.H., "that it will soon be Tuesday, and some of us have homes to go to, and those who don't should probably hie themselves to the Riddled office and write a post assuring people that whatever they thought all along about the laziness of churnalists and the intellectual timidity of their confirmation-bias-addicted readership is now validated by SCIENCE."
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So this is the paper being currently pimped from "Evolutionary Psychology for Dummies", a.k.a. Evolution & Human Behavior:
As the journal's name suggests, it is devoted to the principle that any cultural norm experienced by researchers becomes an immutable, evolutionary-hard-wired fact of human nature if it can also be found in a subject group of college students from the same culture. Another E&HB paper recently made it to the big time Pharyngula for proving that a specific spinal conformation in human female buttocks, if prefered by human male college students, must therefore be optimal for reproduction.

Anyway -- "Spiders at the Cocktail Party" singles out Latrodectus spiders as being sufficiently deadly, or at least (because they are not actually very deadly) as sufficiently annoying to our ancestors to explain arachnophobia as the evo-psych hardwiring du jour. The authors gloss over the absence of Latrodectus species from East Africa (where humans evolved) by referring us to a paleontology paper which does not mention spiders.
Now there is evidence from toothmarks in fossil skulls -- not to mention common sense -- that our prehuman ancestors were more preyed upon by members of the Felidae such as leopards. Causing Evolution to give us dedicated neural mechanisms for detecting, and an instinctual terrified response to...
OOOHH LOOK A KITTY

"Spiders at the cocktail party are not my idea of a horse doover," AK vouchsafed.

"It is bad enough," I agreed, "when they give you bits of cheese and pineapple on a toothpick and they fall off in the akvavit martini."

"Perhaps they are part of the gut macrobiome we keep hearing about."

"It is the thin edge of the slippery slope of the white elephant," I said. "I read a case study about arachnophagy in older females. The introduced species disrupted the patient's intestinal ecology and she was forced to swallow a succession of larger animals in ultimately futile attempts at biological control."
Posted by Smut Clyde at 4:53 AM 16 comments
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Sunday, April 5, 2015

A question for the readers

Is there some scam I don't know about, or a clickbait website that lures a gullible Ukrainian audience by offering them access to the world of wonder and delight that is Riddled? Because this is our readership right now:

Eucrane politics and culture are not exactly high-rotation themes at the Riddled World of Science and Cowshed Maintenance, with a passing allusion to the two "blue" terms in the Eukrainian colour lexicon, and a one-off use of a Kurelek painting.

I am also concerned by their dependence upon IE and Windoze.
Posted by Smut Clyde at 1:29 AM 14 comments
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