And there upon a rock titanic, I'll cast a giantShadow on the face of the deepAnd never again will they dare to call meA freckled, spotty, specky, four eyedWeedy little creep!

What is it about antivaxxers and the weird Rorschach Vindication fantasies?



This can't be normal.

A king of shreds and patches

This post was earlier cross-posted at Leonid Schneider's site, hence the nonfrivolity and Explaining Voice. The version there is improved by Leonid's editing and explanation of the back-story.

With all the developments and retractions and cruelly-truncated research programs in the field of regenerated airway transplants, it is easy to overlook the parallel events involving 'text transplants'. I refer of course to the experiments of Dr Carmine Finelli and his colleague and mentor Dr Giovanni Tarantino, as reported in posts at RetractionWatch and by Sylvie Cotaud at Ocasapiens.

Finelli rose to prominence 18 months ago in L'affair Dansinger when a paper he had published seemed familiar to one of its readers. The reader had in fact written identical sentences and tabulated identical data, at an earlier date, but his own version had been rejected for publication (by a panel of peer reviewers which included Carmine Finelli). Soon 'Marco' reported that Finelli & Tarantino (2013) was a near-verbatim copy of Wang et al. (2009) (although augmented by the addition of a paragraph of Concluding Remarks, copied from the Abstract of a paper from 2001). The commotion drew the attention of commenters and contributors to PubPeer, who delight in pursuing low-hanging fish and fruit in a barrel, and who doubted that the episode would be an isolate.

The results of their inquiries are documented in 36 threads at PubPeer: 21 co-authored by Finelli and Tarantino, three by Finelli (plus other colleagues and students) and 12 by Tarantino. The dates range from Tarantino (2007) to Finelli (2017), with their productivity peaking in 2013 with nine papers and 2014 with eight. In short, the experiments of the Dottori were all about taking blocks of text (of greater or shorter length) from donor papers, decellularising them stripping out the references, and re-seeding the resulting "scaffold" with stem cells citations of their own previous publications.

You will have to read the PubPeer threads themselves to decide how far the papers depart from conventional standards of originality. In the first two examples above, the re-authored source material was republished in undigested form. At the other extreme are lapidary mosaics of paragraphs woven together from multiple sources (to the extent that a mosaic can be woven): sometimes just Abstracts, with no indication that the main texts of these papers had been consulted. Or nuggets or inclusions of source material, embedded in connective tissue. Finelli et al. 2014a and 2014b are the same collage in two different journals.*

Sometimes journal editors will curate an issue with an Editorial that picks out the significant contributions, bookended by introductory and concluding paragraphs that put them in context and abstract their recurring themes. These prefaces can be stripped of the contribution-specific descriptions and repurposed as perfectly republishable artifacts in their own right.

The works include review articles and Invited Editorials. Also of note, and exemplifying the "lapidary mosaic" style, are two scrapbooked Chapters in the Handbook of Lipids in Human Function (2016) and a third for Nutrition in the Prevention and Treatment of Abdominal Obesity (2014). Ronald Watson, editor of both volumes, presumably commissioned the chapters.* There is a lesson here for young scholars, about the kind of academic conduct by which one builds a magisterial reputation in the field... how one earns invitations to write Editorials, and to be a peer reviewer.



The World Journal of Gastroenterology was a favourite target, with 14 flagged publications (seven of them without Finelli). This hails from Baishideng Publishing Group, a pay-to-play company noted for spamming and negotiable standards of review. Second favourite was Journal of Gastrointestinal and Liver Diseases (the organ of several Romanian medical associations) with five co-authored papers.

In 2013, the editors of J. Gastroint. Liver Dis. were compelled to reprimand Finelli and Tarantino for including an antepenultimate paragraph in their 2012 contribution, without attributing Zelber-Sagi et al. (2011) as the authors. This being "minor plagiarism with inadequate attribution in an already published review", the authors were let off with an apology and a promise to go forth and sin no more, while the editors will engage in no further correspondence, for they feel that they have discharged their obligations. The ironic aspect of this single recycled paragraph is that it is almost the only paragraph in Finelli & Tarantino (2012) that was not taken from Zivkovic et al. (2007).

Compare and contrast

In one form or another, paragraphs from Zivkovic et al. can be found in half-a-dozen of the doctors' works in the medium of collage. They were especially besotted with its introductory phrases ("The rising incidence of obesity in today’s environment is associated with many obesity-related health complications..." and "This constellation is also recognized as the metabolic syndrome and is characterized by underlying..."), e.g. Tarantino, Capone & Finelli (2013); Finelli & Tarantino (2014); and Tarantino & Finelli (2016).

Right: Abstract copied from Aron-Wisnewsky et al. (2013)

Another productive text-mine was Harrison & Day (2007). It provided the bulk of a review article, Finelli & Tarantino (2012), although when the Figures were redrawn for that 2012 appearance they lost much of their aesthetic elegance.

Other paragraphs reappeared in Finelli, Gioia & La Sala (2012), and as a subsection in a 2014 Chapter. It so happened that Harrison and Day had committed a harmless but distinctive malapropism, which was faithfully copied in each emergence, making them easy to find.

I could go on. A summary from Cai et al. (2006) was recreated five times, including in Tarantino & Finelli (2016) again (for that chapter is something of a greatest-hits compilation): not necessarily a record but still an accomplishment to celebrate. It may be that after the first few repetitions, the authors genuinely believed that they were merely copying their own unimprovable bons mots. Other sources ranged from Wikipedia to Dr Mehmet Oz. As well as text, Tables and Figures were fair game.

Meanwhile, science blogger Neuroskeptic had reported the discouraging outcomes of an experiment in editorial receptivity:

Over the space of four months, I reported about 30 cases of plagiarism in review papers to various journals, with the help of Turnitin plagiarism detection software.
Every case I reported was a serious one. The percentage of unoriginal text ranged from 44-90%, with an average of about 65%.

I was inspired by this example to conduct a similar project with the present oeuvre, selecting 18 papers from 13 journals and emailing the editors, drawing their attention to these questions of originality and attribution (this sounds so much better than "anonymous poison-pen denunciations"). I assured the recipients that our correspondence (or their lack of response) would be confidential.

In 11 of 18 cases my email was acknowledged, with some editors asking for further information or promising to conduct an inquiry. Less encouragingly, only two of the 18 have experienced an actual change in status. It may be that a 16-month interval is not long enough for journals to compare two blocks of text, or to obtain the authors' consent to an intervention. However, I have not counted the case of Finelli, Gioia & La Sala (2012) where my message was superfluous, as the editors had already been notified and were already taking steps. Nor did my list include Tarantino, Di Minno & Finelli (2015), which the editors of Oncotarget retracted depublished without prompting, leaving no explanation or trace of its previous existence.

In "Rivers of London", Dr Walid knows the score:

When I asked Dr Walid about it, he merely said that he liked to keep certain of his files secure.
‘From who?’ I asked.
‘Other researchers,’ he said. ‘They’re always looking to pirate my work.’ Apparently the hepatologists were the worst.

* Finelli et al. (2014a / 2014b) reappeared in an extended dance remix as a book chapter in 2017 -- gaining some additional copy-paste though losing the co-authors -- though no-one bothered to annotate the piracy, for the publisher in this case was Bentham, who are unlikely to care.

The shape-shifters grow ever bolder, sire

Back in the Second Age -- those vanished days of heroism and valiant deeds, before last Tuesday -- Don-Errant Jeffrey Beall used to maintain a list of Replicant Journals. Remember those? Persons unknown would select a niche scholarly journal, modest in ambitions but appearing on Whitelists of legitimate academic outlets (so publishing there is accredited to one's tenure or advancement), slap together a website with that name and identifying ISSN, and advertise that its scope had widened from glaciology or Balkan historical-biographical exegesis to "Science, Engineering, Humanities and Interdisciplinary Research". Then wait for the Processing Fees to roll in from academic wannabees with an urgent need to inflate their CVs.

The result is an entire genre of parasitical printeries... a secondary or irreal creation like something out of Gnostic theology, or like the police precinct staffed wholly by replicants that Decker stumbled upon in Electric Sheep. The websites are designed as write-only storage, not places to store one's submissions where people can read them [although they offer access to their doubtless-existent archives for a mere $2000 because there's one born every minute].

Printery run by poorly-maintained replicants

Beall's list is in abeyance now, though still lingering in archived form. It served the useful purpose of informing desperate faculty members of the Derek Zoolander University for Researchers who Can't Write Good and Wanna Learn to do Other Good Stuff Too, of new places where they could dump their execrable screeds. Dr. Mehrdad Jalalian curates a similar list, current up to 2015.

Of course you remember all that, but it is brought freshly to mind by the appearance here at stately Riddled Manor, flung over the transom, of solicitations for submissions in two freshly scope-widened journals. I am not convinced that 'transom' is really a word, or just something that Another Kiwi made up to rhyme with 'handsome' and 'ransom' in a dirty limerick.


The spammograms are strangely similar in style to earlier solicitations from longer-established shape-shifter projects.
 
Similarities include shared HTML design, in which the journal links, and unsubscribe links, and the concealed tracker code are all laundered through Ukraine-registered domains like "vitym.com" or "rovoni.com".

Editorial panel

The same dramatis personae recur across the editorial panels. There can be few cosmopolitan, multi-talented Renaissance men and women who can switch so easily between glaciology and botany and literary discussion, so the smallness of the name-space is understandable.


But distances and national borders mean nothing in the modern globalised economy of publication grifting. When we go all Scooby-Doo with the forensic web-tracing tools, the domains for all these journals can be found on a server in Chicago, all squeezed into promiscuous propinqity, occupying the same IP address :

Bonus editorial panel

The vast and cool and unsympathetic intellects of the readers will notice that some of the other domains occupying that server -- in dangerously unsanitary and over-crowded conditions -- are not on any list of counterfeit journals. Knowledge-Insights, Researchpioneers, Pioneer-Scientists, Scienceborders... these are old friends of Riddled. They present themselves as "on-line libraries" (or portals) rather than journals, though they follow the same basic business grifting model of receiving payments from both the authors of (say) "A Comparative Study Of Phytochemical Screening In Plant Hemidesmus Indicus (L.) Collected From Different Geographical Regions Of Telangana State" or "Dynimic CAPM Theory Segmented Market", and from the prospective audience, avid to download the fifth or sixth re-publication of these opuscules.

'Portals' are less appealing to authors because the CV-inflation factor = 0. Far be it for me to tell gobshites that they are not gobshiting properly, but the gombeen behind these scams* was probably more successful with the "other other operation" (in which authors send him moneys in exchange for a promise not to publish their papers).

Obviously I'm bitter because “Ruslan Boranbaev” has not seen Stercoria / the Journal of Bullshit Studies as worth counterfeiting.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

* Identified by Dr Jalalian as the pseudonym “Ruslan Boranbaev".

Post truth, post hole

It seems that we live in the era of "post truth" politicians. An interesting take on the matter, considering the amount of lying that has gone on in recorded history. Perhaps a more accurate description would be the Couldn't Give a Bugger About the Truth era? It would certainly enliven future textbooks about the early 21st Century.
 "At this point it became obvious just how few buggers were actually given by politicians as it was conclusively proven that Trump was of an alien species but his voters continued to say he connected with real heartland Americans".
 New Zild has had its own share of non-fact-connected politicians but the current Prime Minister must be in the top 5 in the top No Buggers Given list. In the past he has opined about all and sundry with no scraps of credibility or knowledge to impede his decision making. For instance we know he has peed in the shower but not masturbated, he thinks Iraq is a safe place and he would not have shot the Gorilla. Many of his National party colleagues breathed a little easier after that one.
But he doesn't just limit himself to shower antics or zoo animal preservation, he also comments upon things that are central to the modern, go ahead Conservative government he leads.
Conservative governments have a bit of a checklist of things they will do, a comment I have made on this blog before, hopping into the poor people, lowering taxes for rich people and helping businesses to oppress their workers etcetera, etcetera.
This government has ticked all of those boxes and made a special point of Great Specialnesss about how they had "reformed" employment laws with the introduction of the 90 day rule. After they realised that this not a relaxation of the 4 second, dropping food on the floor rule, many New Zilders reacted with "Wahhht... my...did...rugby on". Unbeknownst to them the government had introduced legislation that allowed people to be employed for 90 days at low pay rates and even more excitingly dismissed with no reason and no backsies at any time in the 90 days.
At the time this was greeted by government spinners and lackies as a Great Leap Forward for industrial relations and the benefits would flow to all and young folks would get jobs and possibly everyone would get a panda to keep as a pet.  
Of course, it did no such things.
Five years on from the introduction of the 90 days rules a Treasury report has concluded that the introduction of the 90 day rule has had little to no affect on NZ employment issues. This is the Treasury, mind you, Friedmanites to the core and paid for by the Gubblement to find shit out when the troooooth is needed.
So the PM was in a bind, since his fairytale did not have the right ending and the people collecting the data are his inquisitorial shocktroops. Brilliantly he ignored that dumb ole report. People, he said, talked to him all the time as he went around NZ  and they said it had gone swimmingly and everyone was happy as two clams in whatever place would make clams happy. So there! To make sure that The Base would get what he was on about he noted.

"You can have a piece of academic research but it's quite different from the small cafe owner whose money is on the line, who is taking the risks and who actually rely on this kind of policy.

Academics amirite?

Still, quite brave of him to bring up small cafes after the ponytail pulling incidents of last year. But he is nothing if not something or other.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowd-funding [Serious stuff, not enough jokes]

Back in the days, someone with smarts and experience warned against goofling for "GcMAF + GoFundMe" 'unless you are in the mood for a long parade of sadness and exploitation, in which the phrase "rejected Western chemotherapy" recurs like a Wagnerian Leitmotif farted out on a tuba.'
Now let me extend that warning to searching for "Mexican + clinic + cancer + GoFundMe". For the result is a litany of despair and desperation that will destroy all will to live and turn your previously sunny, optimistic disposition into a fish dinner without illumination, a long dark night of the sole.

Ultimate blame rests with the combination of magical thinking and conspiratorial Truther ideation... is there anything it can't accomplish? Once someone has accepted that there must be a cure for cancer, i.e. for the particular cell-line within them that have adopted a new agenda of short-term growth, then it is evident that because hospitals do not offer this cure then it is being suppressed, for the benefit of the elite. Therefore it will still be available from sketchy individuals in countries where central government is too weak to enforce that suppression, on account of governance being 50% corruption and 50% criminal gangs (also yawning inequities of wealth, the official policies of therapy-suppression are unlikely to stop the billionaire elite from getting what they want).

At which point it suddenly becomes a plausible claim that some bunch of self-certified butchers or hairdressers, having converted a condemned public toilet into a 'clinic' by slapping on a fresh coat of paint, are now in command of cutting-edge therapies that are decades of anything that well-funded first-world researchers can offer at their state-of-the-art facilities. Hence Ukrainian stem-cell clinics, and the Mexican cancer-leech industry, and such as.

Professional-charity crowdsourcing companies have been a godsend to the cancerleech industry. They no longer need to limit their charges to what individual victims can charge; the net is now broadened to whatever their victims can wheedle from their social network and from the generosity of strangers.

'gofundme hope4cancer': About 2,120 results
'gofundme hoxsey clinic': About 65 results
'gofundme "oasis of hope" mexico':

About 11,700 results

So please to welcome Peggy-Sue and Rusty Roberts, of "Cancer Research Awareness", who will say whatever they must to talk cancer patients out of receiving chemotherapy or radiotherapy or surgery or any treatment that works; for they are recruiters and groomers for the Immunity Therapy Center of Tijuana and its panoply of worthless but theatrical ways of waving dead chickens modalities. Here in particular is Rusty, generously creating Annette's GoFundMe money-funnel. Annette cannot raise the $46000 that would undoubtedly save her life, but such is the philanthropic altruism of the Immunity Therapy Center, they are offering her a bounty for every patient she can persuade to come to them instead of to treatment that works.

The Peggy Sue special is will reduce treatment costs by $2000 for anyone who stays at the clinic for 6 weeks and contributes $200 or more to Annette’s campaign.

Oh joy, it is a pyramid scheme of mortality.

In a similar vein, please to welcome Amanda Mary, of Pearl Lodge (Bulgarian Ski-hotel-turned-quackcentre), giving of her time to set up a GoFundMe site for Anne Pharo, to help her pay the £15,000 demanded by Pearl Lodge for treatment. As of August 2015, with £3,486,

We are just £1,800 away from Anne being able to afford her treatment needed, we are so close and I just wanted to ask everyone to kindly share this information, maybe a little fundraiser or work raffle to help with the extra funds, we are so close now, all help will be well received with thanks x

but after that the site fell silent and was shuttered.

Now a challenger appears, in the form of Flor de la Salud!

They may not have GoFundMe charities that specify their name, but they do have Amanda Mary, wearing a white lab coat to reassure us that all is above board. I struggle to read the diplomas on the wall. Perhaps 'Caveat Emptor' is the assumed name of a clinician, a hommage to Dr Lecter.

Steve Kellogg asks your assistance for treatment.* He went to Flor de la Salud initially for stem-cell therapy for his metastatised prostate cancer, because stem cells are what plants bodies crave to destroy metastatic tumours [I don't understand that part either]. But now the clinicians are adamant that his cancer springs from a slipped cervical disc which must undergo surgical reconstruction before anything else will work, and he needs money for at least three more weeks there.

These internal and external protocols are unavailable in the U.S. Originally they planned to be there for 3 weeks, but after the doctors examined him and ran numerous tests this week, they find he needs surgery on a herniated disc in his neck. In addition to surgery, Steve is scheduled to have stem cell therapy.
As you can imagine, these extensive treatments and the extended stay comes at a cost they had not counted on.

Kellogg's charity is mainly of note because he is one of Amanda Jean's most enthusiastic cheerleaders. His Twitter stream is a paean of praise to the panaceal glory of GcMAF and credulous Tea-party politics and God.

Non-white people, always expecting hand-outs

Six months ago he was up at Pearl Lodge receiving the full protocol of GcMAF and bleach enemas, which totally cured his metastatic prostate cancer.**

It is not clear why the bonus surgery came as a surprise to Mr Kellogg, for the Grifter-in-Chief at Flor de la Salud is a slipped-disc carpenter who diagnoses and reconstructs nails slipped discs for everything... THAT IS WHAT HE DOES. All the other Alternative Modalities at the clinic, the ozone and chelation and Bach Flowers and the Magnetic Bed, they are just icing on the cake in case a patient still has money left over afterwards. But still, it's better than mainstream oncology with all that surgery, right?

When I learned that GoFundMe is owned by a private equity firm, and rakes off 5% of every donation, their uninterest in shutting down charities just because they're complicit in dodgy activities suddenly became less of a surprise.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

* Mexico apparently lies beyond the reach of the Interlattice:

Due to the poor internet Steve has asked for me to withdraw funds and send him a check. I really would prefer to not handle it this way, but under these unusual circumstances I need to honor Steve's request.

**

"I have known Amanda Mary for a few years now. I attended her clinic in Bulgaria where I personally witnessed a very compassionate person. She helped people to obtain the recommended natural products for their illness, including mine. The restoration of health for nearly all was amazing. She has been so concerned about my health that she even used her own money to buy products for me, AT GREAT EXPENSE"

Bonus recruiting and grooming:
https://www.facebook.com/MotherNatureAndYou/posts/942581372504288

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AFTERTHOUGHT
Andy Lewis at Quackometer notes that newspapers love these stories -- "plucky patient fights cancer IN OWN WAY, NEEDS OUR HELP".

It makes a good media narrative. It allows the newspapers and TV stations to present themselves as heroes in helping to raise the money.

[...] the media can be heroes both for sending this poor girl to Mexico and then bringing her home against all the odds when it has all gone horribly wrong.

Giving free advertising to the human tapeworms, collaborating with them, as well as professional courtesy, it has mutual benefits.

...my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset

So this took place the other day:

'Worried friends back on the mainland called police about 9pm.
Police were taken out to the island in a boat with the help of the local surf lifesaving club but they could not find the men and the Westpac rescue helicopter was called in.
Taputeranga was a large and rocky island and it was "dark, windy, and horrible" at the time, police said.
Using a spotlight the helicopter found the men and led searchers on land to them.
They were taken back to land by boat about 12.30am on Wednesday.
Police condemned the men's drunken behaviour saying it was lucky they made it to the island.
"They could have easily been blown out to sea by the wind.
"They've put their lives at risk.

"Even if they ended up staying the night on the island they could have succumbed to exposure."
Police would be talking to the men further.
They thanked volunteers from the surf lifesaving club, some of whom got out of bed to help in the rescue.'

I can only say that the expedition had been in no danger at all until that giant nudibranch thing developed amorous intentions towards our novelty elephant-seal inflatable and knocked Another Kiwi into the water.

Oddly enough, the same thing happened this time a year ago:

Police rescue five students from the sea at Island Bay

'Maritime police have rescued five university students, thought to have been drinking, from Wellington's Island Bay after they got in to trouble on toy inflatables and were swept out to sea in gale-force winds.
Just after 2pm Maritime Police Sergeant Andy Cox said four of the group of university students, none of whom were wearing life jackets or had paddles, made it to Island Bay's island.
The fifth tipped out and was stranded struggling in the water before being rescued by Constable Tom McBride, a member of the police national dive squad, who swam him to shore.'

Everyone is hoping that the Stranding of the Students will continue as an annual event, like the Blessing of the Boats, with students riding out to Taputeranga in a Dunkirk-scale flotilla of inflatable sex dolls and Gerry Brownlie pool novelties.

Monoprint yoinked from Margaret Elliot

In his Mountain View Googleplex, dead Cthulhu waits Deepdreaming

Other Re-animated GIFs do not work as well as the Deepdonald, perhaps because the neural network has less difficulty recognising the actual faces.

Still, there is a nice Archimboldi effect going on.

The robot's emotional expressions were sufficiently sophisticated to display "revolted unease" when it looked across the Uncanny Valley and saw a human face

Another human ability has been automated! Another Kiwi was not well-pleased when the news reached us at stately and not-at-all fictive Riddled Manor, about the emesis simulator devised at a rival laboratory. It's all fun-and-games for the researchers, and a chance of an Ignobel Award, but it's not them faced with the prospect of losing their jobs to a robot!

I was all smug, because artificial colons are not yet sufficiently realistic for trainee proctologists to practice their sigmoidoscopy skills, so some of us are still assured of employment. And I was suggesting that the Emesis Machine could be gainfully linked to the Digestion Simulator, in case the latter backs up after four pints of oildrum-aged Goosefeathers Vengeance and an extra-hot Bhuna Gosht. And then we noticed in the small print that the device is only ¼ scale size.

But 'Larry' the previous Emesis Simulator two-½ years ago was full-size. Is this progress? IS IT BOGROLL.

We are not responsible for Discovery's
inappropriate clickbait internal links

They were even larger in 2005:

While forty years ago, the vomit simulator was 100 times larger, could fly, and regurgitated firearms, which are useful social accomplishments.

At the present rate of entropic deterioration, vomiting robots will shrink to bacterial size in another year's time, and triumphant headlines about the nanotech breakthrough will ensue.

Bonus ZARDOZ