"The Interlattice," said Another Kiwi over a pint of Mango-nel Weaponised Fruchtbier, "is like fire, or a bicycle, or an alligator pit... perilous in the wrong hands, but a great boon when used wisely."
Weaponised
Fruchtbier
Wise use
Without the Interwebs, for instance, we would never have been apprised of the existence of Dr Ariel Fernandez -- strolling player, hydrogen-bond theorist and freelance drug researcher, himself the subject of recent inquiry
from the commentariat of ResearchWatch.
Here is the
Whackyweedia Chat page in which various pseudonymous entities, wishing to further improve the already-fulsome Ariel Fernandez entry, argue with the WW panjandra who had locked it before the advertorial style grew worse. Far be it for us -- given Dr Fernandez's fondness for
lawyerly posturing and threats of defamation suits whenever he feels that his reputation has been traduced -- to suggest that many of the pseudonyms who present information to his credit are
sockpuppets. Following a venerable literary tradition, we merely
pretend that texts from different people are in fact the work of a single individual.
Dr Fernandez's understanding of defamation law is sufficiently novel to have inspired
a blogpost from a lawyer.
Anyways, the Chat page is worth reading in its entirety, and would require little adaptation to work as a stage production such as the
Riddled Amateur Dramatic Society $mas Pantomime. Ideally all the parts would be narrated by John Gielgud in the manner of
Prospero's Books but you can't have everything.
Alters spawn and support one another in the manner of
split-personality schlock psychology fiction from the 1980s. The dramatic tension ratchets steadily up, with Wiki staffers cast in the roles of Stephano and Caliban. It culminates in
a dramatic crescendo in which newly-created characters 'Liping Laura Meng' and 'Doug Larkin Tobias' -- still dripping fluids from the axolotl tanks -- vouch for the independent existence of 'Heidi B /
Haydee Belinky'; Heidi / Haydee claims in turn:
(a) to be a different person from A. Fernandez,
(b) indeed to hardly know him except by repute, which was inspiration enough to edit his Wiki entry;
(c) to be pseudonymous; and
(d) to be defamed and dishonoured by the Wiki staffers' base suspicions to the contrary. Lawyerly posturing
ensues, with threats of lawsuits to protect Heidi's good pseudonym.
All different people!
The spark for the original furore (and the only reason for caring about any of this) was that
close examination of Dr Fernandez's data sets -- the foundation of his academic reputation -- revealed peculiar and unconvincing qualities to them. Almost as if the data points had been generated from a theoretical linear or parabolic line,
with noise added in a half-assed way.
Further information is is available at Dr Fernandez's
collection of press releases, where he wages a lonely rearguard action against the McCarthyist slander machine of Retraction Watch; and from the like-minded blog of
Weishi Laura Meng who promotes Fernandez's work, interviews him, and is
completely a nother person.
Bear in mind that this is the Intertubes where commentaters
may not even be aware that they are dream-birthed emanations from someone else.
UPDATE: Apparently the Whackyweedia has policy against
meatpuppetry as well as against sockpuppets. This would provide a perfect excuse to link to Survival Research Laboratory performances involving Piggly-Wiggly or the Rabot, but there seem to be no extant videos, only images.
Never mind, here's some Curved Air, because who doesn't love Sonja Kristina?
UPDATE
2: We seem to have buried the lede here. But it was
TOTALLY AN ACCIDENT, and anyway it was the lede's fault for loitering around near the back-hoe while we were engaged in
body-disposal carbon sequestration activities.
Dr Fernandez is not just any Interweb or Twittertroll, deploying a sock-drawer of alters. He had carved out an illustrious high-flying academic career -- in the Icarian sense -- with an Endowed Chair and such as, before the journals went all Expressions-of-Concern and his co-authors sidled away from any confidence in the reality of his data, and he was amending the Acknowledgement sections of his papers to scrub the sources of funding in a way that removed them from the jurisdiction of the Office of research Integrity. Something is seriously wrong with an academic world that can spurn such talent, so now as AFInnovation he
offers his expertise "as expert consultant in pharmaceutical patent litigation".
Reassuringly, Fernandez has not abandoned the scientific endeavour altogether. He continues to serve on the Editorial Boards of
Metabolomics (a mockademic pukefunnels from the Omics vanity press) and the
Journal of Biological Physics and Chemistry (a mockademic journal spawned from the “Collegium Basilea” -- an odd organisation which bestows honorary titles in return for its membership fees). He continues to promote his research through Youtube, where it has impressed non-sockpuppet cheerleaders like
Xi Wang,
Liping Xie and
Howard Wu.
The award for 'Most Embarrassingly Pathetic Plea for a Pity-Fuck from a wannabee predatory publisher' goes to...
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