Gigglebit is Siliconrepublic’s daily dose of the funny and fantastic in science and tech, to help start your day on a lighter note. Today we look two surprising authors of scientific papers.
One widely known as a silent child, the other as an unenthused elementary school teacher, it turns out there’s more to Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel than meets the eye. For they, along with Kim Jong Fun, have recently had their debut scientific paper accepted by not one, but two, journals.
“Fuzzy”, Homogeneous Configurations, has been accepted into both the Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and the Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology, exposing both journals for their sheer disregard for reality. The paper is still published on the latter’s site.
The paper, actually written by engineer Alex Smolyanitsky, offers nonsensical script, merely created to highlight both journals’ ‘predatory’ nature.
“These outlets both belong to a world of predatory journals that spam thousands of scientists, offering to publish their work — whatever it is — for a fee, without actually conducting peer review,” according to the Vox, which reports that the entire paper was written by SCIgen, a random text generator.
Image of acceptance letter, via www.vox.com
Indeed this article states some fantastic rubbish, including the removal of USBs from computers, removing “RISC processors from the NSA’s desktop machines” and taking out 8MB of RAM from Intel’s network. These activities were done to show an experiment, of which there is none, works “in the wild”, proving “fuzzy symmetries’s influence on the work of Japanese mad scientist Karthik Lakshminarayanan.”
Image of acceptance letter, via www.vox.com
Maggie Simpson image via Shutterstock
