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A challenger appears

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Here at the Riddled Experimental Ethics Laboratory (purveyors of the finest, freshest informed consent), naturally we follow the exploits of Dr Alexander Seifalian. As Chair of the Board of Trustees at OA Publishing London,
Alexander Marcus Seifalian is a Professor of Nanotechnology and Regenerative Medicine, and Director of UCL Centre for Nanotechnology & Regenerative Medicine at University College London (UCL-CNRM).
NO WAIT the OAPL website has been stuck in a time-warp since late 2014 (it is an entertaining and edifying institution in its own right, as described by Neuroskeptic). It has not been updated to reflect the changes in Seifalian's employment status since the Macchiarini scandal, with all the dead patients... this cast unwelcome light upon the whole artificial-organ nanotech-scaffolding area, and his financial irregularities made it convenient for UCL to use him as an ablative heat-shield for the protection of other faculty members.

So here he is again, at the centre of the Scientific Committee of a Global Summit & Expo, vertically compressed (as is the custom), as if the entire committee had been recruited from the inhabitants of a heavy-gravity planet.


Time spent at the website finds the designer observing all the stylistic conventions that we have learned to expect from the hypertextual genre, such as sex-chatline pop-ups that obscure half the text, a pastel-hued shite logo seemingly intended for a Generic Baseball Cap, a contact address that's a virtual office in San Francisco, and the random rolling graphics that are state-of-the-art in Hyderabad web-design.

The scamference perpetrator has chosen a company name "Linkin Science" that suggests an affiliation with LinkedIn without actually claiming one.* So far there are only six Global Summits in the franchise, at two locations, so attendees at the Nanotech Expo will find themselves sharing facilities at the Grand Excelsior Hotel with the Global Cancer Meet and the World Vaccine Summit. Not to forget any antivax loons who are motivated enough to take their flying picket-line to Dubai.

All that makes Linkin Science worth mentioning is the fact that they are not yet another polyp extruded from the OMICS scampire, but rather some goombah wannabee in Hyderabad operating out of his spare room in Flat #203. Abhiram Sathyadurga is abreast with trends in contemporary grifting, and he has purchased a twitbot to circulate bot-chat about the promising appearance and sterling reputation of each upcoming scamboree.
This may be an innovation in the scamference industry. As is bot-chat about eating cheeses and cooked meat, while repeating our opinion because it wants us to like it.

Academic citation style requires link to Oglaf

* Alternative explanation: the company name is a homage to an alt-metal-lite band.

Three men in black said, "Don't report this"

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Christopher Exley is totally not a crazy person.


In addition to aluminating water, why, there are studies underway to aluminate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk...
Naturally the authorities are trying to hide the truth! It's what they do.
Ice-cream, Mandrake, Children's ice-cream!
Fortunately the editors of the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry operate somewhere outside the power of the authorities, and they provide Exley with a forum. Every November they invite him to guest-edit a Special Issue containing the proceedings of the year's Keele Meeting on Aluminium Toxicity. Yet the world ignores his warnings, and his accumulation of handcrafted artisanal evidence, no wonder he is distraught.

Chris Shaw and Lucija Tomljenovic are collaborators and regular November contributors. Shaw's papers really need to be reported in the style of Mallory Ortberg's "Two Medieval Monks Inventing Stuff".

Two Medieval Monks invent a highly delayed systemic translocation:
MONK#1: the predicted AlOH translocation didn't show up in either breed of mice

MONK#2: yeah, that shows the response was delayed in C57BL/B7 mice until outside the time-window of our experiment, it's a new phenomenon, we can write a paper

MONK#1: what about the CD1 breed of mice, they didn't show even a trace of translocation

MONK#2: it must have happened too quickly to show up in the time-window, we know the response must have happened so we'll run more experiments and stop when we see something
-------------------------------------------------------
Two Medieval Monks invent a homeopathic inverted dose response:

MONK#1: no significant response

MONK#2: yeah there was something at the 200 Al/kg level

MONK#1: that was the lowest dose
MONK#1: practically the control condition
MONK#1: remind me how to correct for multiple comparisons

MONK#2: we don't do that, we call it a non-linear response and pretend it was what we expected
-------------------------------------------------------
Going back to Exley's 2014 paper in Frontiers in Neurology[of course it was a Frontiers journal] with the overwrought title, inquiring minds are wondering who edited and peer-reviewed it. Surely someone should have told him that underwroughting the title would increase its credibility...

Edited by:
Christopher Ariel Shaw, University of British Columbia, Canada

Reviewed by:
Nelson Silva Filho, Universidade Estadual Paulista, Brazil
Lucija Tomljenovic, University of British Columbia, Canada

OK. There are two lessons here — first, that Frontiers is devoted to the objective of independent and disinterested peer review; and second, that the level of intellectual inbreeding within the Aluminati is so great that their brains have six fingers and play banjo.

Your master he's a monster He will come on a bridge of paper Inscribed with a hundred names of God

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The process of killing mice grows ever more complex, with the People's Laboratory of Drug Targeting & Drug Delivery Systems hard at work on the proverbial better mousetrap. In this murine mortuary of iridescent corpses from May 2014, the victims had been injected with C26 colon carcinoma cells, and later with tumour-seeking IR-fluorescing liposomes, then killed sacrificed at 1 to 72 hours after that.

The helpful brownies at Pubpeer noted that three of the little panels (in the 12- and 24-hour columns) had been cut from a single multi-mouse crime scene, in another paper, in the manner of Manet's Execution of Emperor Maximilian.

The second paper with the original image came later (Wu et al.), and shared no authors with the first (Tang et al.); all three mice were the lucky recipients of A2780 ovarian-carcinoma xenografts, and had all died 24 hours after injection with different liposomes. Also there are two instantiations of the paper, in Int.J.Clin.Exp.Med. from Dec. 2014 and in Int.J.Clin.Exp.Pathol. in Jan. 2015, but that's because the publisher "e-Century" is several bottoms-of-barrels down the scale of competence.*

This is all by way of introduction to the Late Capitalism phenomenon of a Paper-Mill.

Does this fit the terms of the Riddled Mission Statement?

The terms of the Riddled Mission statement were scrawled in unfamiliar characters, in lipstick, on the flipside of a beer-mat from the Old Entomologist -- the topside bearing a cartoon of a happy Strepsipteran -- which was subsequently soaked in Old Sheepshagger Mangelwurzel Mild. Therefore its interpretation requires hermeneutic exegesis and a broad degree of latitude. In fact it may originally have been a shopping list.

What's a 'shopping list', Uncle Smut?

It's how we pre-Millennials used to organise forays to the supermarket before we had Interduct-enabled fridges that we could program to download porn order replacement provisions by themselves. Now stop distracting me with questions, or I will lose track of my consumption of wormwood stout and then it will be "Hello Mr Carpet" time again.

As I was saying... a vibrant ecology of previously undreamt-of vocational titles has grown up around the academic precariat, feeding their need to stuff their CVs with spurious publications. There are the scamferences, and the parasitic journals, and the bogus Citations Indices that provide those parasitic journals with marks of quality (and are often issued by the same grifters). Comparable in many ways to the niches like Sewer-siever and Pure-finder that emerged in the ecosystem of Victorian London. Someone needs to document the world of mockademic publishing in the same rich detail as Mayhew documented "London Labour and the London Poor", for the benefit of historical novelists of the future.**

The Paper-mills are part of the ecosystem. They are a solution, provided by the Market!, for academics who need publications for promotion or job retention, but are unable to conduct the research themselves (due to incompetence, or absence of facilities, or the time pressure of taxi-driving as a third job). The best agencies will not only assemble the paper, they negotiate with the editors and set up fictitious identities to be the peer-reviewers who provide good reviews for the manuscript -- a seamless wrap service.***
Original papermill: Swift [1726]
The upshot and outcome of all this is a huge Oncology Drug-Delivery literature pouring out of China. Each paper follows a template, working through the permutations, with the format "modified liposome / micelle / nanoparticle X" + "Chemo drug Y" + "murine cancer Z" -- each promising a marginal improvement in mouse survival time -- for the conventions of the genre are as stylised as those of dirty limericks. One laboratory accounts for much of this productivity... sometimes signing their papers, sometimes supplying their laboratory-deprived provincial competitors. They must have a substantial visual library of fluorescing spheroids and such, from which bespoke publications can be assembled for clients, interspersed with standardisedbuilding-block paragraphs of text.

Some of these papers may even report not-made-up results, but there is no way of knowing which. It is not as if any of the literature will find its way into clinical practice. Mainly it provides a money pipeline from the Chinese gubblement to a few academic publishing conglomerates, turning the wheels of the papermills and paying the salaries of the academic precariat along the way.

Other visual overlaps emerged from scrutiny... Evidently three differently-coated liposomes loaded with docetaxel (from Shi et al.), paclitaxel (Qin et al.) and paclitaxel (Li et al.) shrink cancer-cell spheroids in the same manner. Bold authorship indicates a 'recognised' paper, signed by Qin He's lab.


Here are Shi and Li again:


Another family of spheroids from Cao, Guo and Wu (no official publication sighted yet).


Shi and Li have slightly different scale bars on their transmission electron microscopy of nanoparticles (negatively stained with uranyl acetate):


Mei, Chen and Wang obtain their explanatory diagrams from the same graphic designer.


Chen, Wang and Cao variously plot the growth of HepG2, A549 and PC-3 cancer xenografts.


Here are some spheroids themselves (at various focal planes) from Mei, Li and Qin.


Meanwhile Liu shared spheroids with Wu and (flipped) for Cao.



Guo, Zheng and Wang:


Mei and Li:


Confocal cells from Mei and Wu:


The pursuit began with someone at Pubpeer recognising mouse corpses shared between Wang and Guo. Mei have further casualties from the same crime scene.

[h/t Raymond M. Schiffelers]


All this has barely scratched the surface of the iceberg [h/t BBB Scientist], we have merely picked the low-hanging fish in the barrel. Also, bored now. But every image of confocal microscopy, committed to memory for recognition across papers, means less memory for other stuff, valuable stuff, and I have personally lost my internalised copies of several of Menzel's Realist masterpieces from the Altes Nationalgalerie. Any further detection of image reuse will require someone to devote a Profiler String Wall to the task: pinning up all the figures according to category, connected with criss-crossing red threads.
To finish where we started, on 29 September Wu et al. retracted both copies of their paper (with the iridescent dead mice) and would like the entire unfortunate episode to be expunged from the Interlattice, so as to attract no further attention.
we found there are many errors in my paper, so after careful thinking, we are going to rearrange this manuscript. Thus we decided to withdraw this manuscript with great pity. Please delete the paper from your website and PubMed.
------------------------------------------------------
* The "e-Century Publishing Corporation" is a single grifter who puts his 17 American- and International-Journal-shaped dumpsters on-line from his home in the suburbs of Madison WI. Consequently his customers can honestly inform their institutions that they have Published in an International Journal, and receive enough of a bonus to cover his price of $1580. He serves a very selective niche in the mockaemic eco-system: the Tables of Contents are dominated by Chinese authorship lists, interrupted only by a couple of Turkish research groups who submitted there by mistake.

** If it's good enough for Terry Pratchett...

*** The Meta-analysis genre was popular for a while, until sharp-eyed readers noticed the same phrases and mistakes recurring in the output from the production-line, and Yea there was a mighty retraction.

Not sure which is worst

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1. That someone wrote or otherwise acquired a manuscript about the supposed health benefits of Potato Purple Drank, and went through an article-broker or papermill who set up spoof reviewers to get it published;



2. That the cockwombles at Bentham Open accepted it, so that they could later make a holy show ofunpublishing it again and proclaiming their adherence to the high ideals of research probity (they were shocked, shocked! to find that gambling is going on here);

3. That Potato Purple Drank is a thing.




Just saying, when the Bentham Open editators decided to accept an Article Processing Charge from the nominal authors of "The Research on the Impact of Green Beans Sports Drinks on Relieving Fatigue in Sports Training", and "The Research on the Impact of Maca Polypeptide on Sport Fatigue", they knew all along that both papers came off a production line.

I turn on my side which side the left it’s preferable throw the right hand forward bend the right knee these joints are working the fingers sink the toes sink in the slime these are my holds too strong slime is too strong holds is too strong I say it as I hear it push pull the leg straightens the arm bends all these joints are working the head arrives alongside the hand flat on the face and rest the other side left leg left arm push pull the head and upper trunk rise clear reducing friction correspondingly fall back I crawl in an amble ten yards fifteen yards halt

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All my Hallowe'en party problems are solved with this Sexy Sam-Beckett-Novel costume from Costco!


I need only provide my own coal-sack, cord, can-opener, and unbounded quaquagmire of mud and slime to crawl through, dragging the sack of cans behind.

You maniacs! You blew it all up divided by zero!

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Pubpeer
The collective lidless eye of Pubpeer was recently directed at a vaccines-make-mice-autistic paper at the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry... a paper now on the express train to Retractionville. For details, see "Mirror neurons and little men in boats" (a narrativised, hand-curated artisanal compilation of Pubpeer comments); or Orac's exhaustively-detailed account; or even the summary at RetractionWatch if you swing that way, we do not judge.

Much of that vast and unsympathetic attention was directed at Figures 2 and 4, where individual lanes from PT-PCR gels turn up repeatedly like a stamp collection with déjà vu, variously manipulated and freed from context, indicating the expression of several different genes in an admirable display of parsimony.


But the allure of those figures may have distracted attention away from Figure 1... unfairly so, for the validity of Figure 1 is also crucial for two previous papers by the same authors, in OA Autism and Immunotherapy, by dint of its pre-publication there.



Some of the initial commentary perseverated on the fifth lane (control mouse #3) in the TNF gel-slice of Figure 1C, for this is as blank as the Bellman's map: increased contrast reveals a neat rectangle of blankness, and the Pubpeer contributors speculated whether this was a thumbprint of image-enhancement deletion of something (e.g. with Photoshop), or an innocent artefact of high-loss low-resolution JPG compression of an image that was naturally blank. Only the original data can resolve the quandary. But let me explain.


The authors had made semi-quantitative measurements of the RNA expression for 18 proteins in the brains of their lab animals, and also the actual protein levels, where one protein was Actin or ACT as an internal-control test of reliability (for ACT is a housekeeping gene, always turned on). Of the 14 male mouse brains available -- seven exposed to aluminium, and seven controls -- three of each were chosen, by unspecified criteria. The outcomes for each RNA (and each protein) were three data points -- for the six samples were paired up at random, and converted to three Al:control ratios, as if each pair were After-and-Before measurements on the same mouse. I am not making this up. I had to read the explanation several times to reassure myself that the procedure was not the figment of my over-heated imagination. Any of the other five possible pairings would have yielded different ratios.

In Figure 1B, the three data points per RNA are expressed as a mean and standard error, as if they were a real distribution, purportedly differing significantly from zero in seven cases (according to one-sample t-tests). Why not plot the three ratios themselves? But wait, the engarbagement gets better!

Panels 1C and 1D document the same process of extracting expression ratios for arbitrary pairs, for seven actual proteins -- the ones netted in the fishing expedition of 1B. This is presented as independent verification, as if protein levels are separate evidence from the RNA that generated them. In the event, the replications are impressively similar: for example, the mean expression ratio (fold change) for TNF-A is 3 ± 1 in 1B (with p< 0.05) and again in 1D (with p< 0.01). What are the odds?

This is especially baffling because 3rd-control-mouse TNF-A is zero for one of those pairs (that blank rectangle in Panel 1C); THEY DIVIDED BY ZERO so the fold change for that pair → .


Then they calculated mean = 3 and standard error = 1 for that distribution of three points, one of which was INFINITY, that's not how maths works. So either that lane was naturally blank (and only a rectangular hole because JPG), and the stats are bogus; or it initially contained a non-zero protein trace that Photoshop taketh away, and Figure 1C is bogus [h/t Mitracarpus Capitatus]. Neither option should gladden the hearts of the editors of Immunotherapy or OA Autism.

The initial response of authors Shaw and Tomljenovic was to accept the gravity of the problem, accepting the need for retraction in a passive-voiced manner that blamed the absence of the homework upon the appetites of the dog. "Some images have been altered.""Data had been compromised." Original data had left the lab.

Ah, Passive Voice: Is there anything that can't be accomplished by it?

It is not clear whether they accept that Figure 1 is problematic, or view the alterations as confined to Figures 2 and 4; nor when the alterations occurred. Before or after Shaw submitted the 2017 paper to J.Inorg.Biochem? Were they present in the Powerpoint version of the study -- "Gene-toxin synergy in the brain of autistic mouse model” -- presented in 2015 to the 11th Keele Meeting on Aluminium? Anyway, in a subsequent interview the authors downplayed the importance of those fabricated Figures, as if retracting the retraction:
As for Shaw, he says the altered images “were not significant anyway.”
Enquiring minds have noted that Shaw and Tomljenovic have a chapter in a new book, due in the bookshops in two weeks' time, on "Neurodevelopmental toxicity associated with the use of aluminum vaccine adjuvants" and covering similar ground to the retracting-in-the-cold 2017 paper -- for Elsevier taketh away and Elsevier giveth:

Is it irresponsible to speculate that the altered figures are necessarily unimportant because they feature in the forthcoming chapter, and it is too late to change them? It would be irresponsible not to speculate.

Perhaps the editors of the book should be appraised of these concerns, no wait:
Edited by Christopher A. Shaw, Edited by Claire Dwoskin, Edited by Lluis Lujan , Edited by Lucija Tomljenovic
[Thx Rosewind]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Table of Contents is a veritable Who's Who of the Aluminati (where "who's who" is a failed anagram of "clown car"). As well as Chapter 10 from Christopher Exley, there are contributions from both Gherardi's and Shoenfeld's groups; and Chapter 24 is Dr Little re-telling her "Sluts who use Gardasil are Punished with Infertility" campfire tale from five years ago.

But the book is not all Aluminium, for Brian Hooker is there with another version of his Alt-Stats MMR-causes-autism stylings (evidently Andrew Wakefield was not available, so instead, Chapter 27 is from Wakefield supporter and "retired sewage sludge researcher" David Lewis, with another attempt to defend medical malpractice and fraud). There is a chapter from Judy Mikovits, famed for proving that a laboratory contaminant causes Chronic Fatigue, who exchanged a career in science for one as Brave Maverick Outsider who Speaks Truth to Power Whatever the Consequences.

I am looking forward to the reviews.

Whatever is the opposite of "bonsai"

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Mrs Spat seeking the shade of a small tree.

Watch out for Doctor Dream

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Oh look, the newest couple of waste-of-bandwidth waste-of-oxygen OMICS-wannabees to start working the parasite-publisher side of the street have shown up in the mailbox. Their mooching is not 'spam' though, and was sent to me because of my eminence in the field of Sleep Medicine, which is possibly a circumlocation for "beer". I would love to send them moneys and publications, but... feeling so sleepy... can't keep my eyes... open...



These cockwombles claim to publish their American Journals from an address in Delaware, but since their website was designed by some non-English-speaking nimrods in Hyderabad, I'm going out on a limb to speculate that the "International Library of Journals" might in fact have a similar location.




Why do all these academics keep forcing me to co-author their papers?

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Publicity surrounding the recent retraction of a mouse / vaccination study has left authors Shaw and Tomljenovic with a rankling sense of injustice, and they are here to tell the Canadian media who the real victims are [hint: the answer is not "laboratory mice"]:
Lucija Tomljenovic, Shaw's co-author, said she agreed to the retraction but "had nothing to do with either collecting or analyzing any of the actual data."
Shaw said he and Tomljenovic drew their conclusions from data that was "compiled" and "analyzed" for the paper, rather than raw data.
Circumstances repeatedly prevail upon them to sign their names to and accept co-authorship of dodgy papers, despite their minimal involvement, to the detriment of their reputations:
Dr. Shaw also distanced himself and Dr. Tomljenovic from the paper that was withdrawn last year.
Dr. Shaw said he and Dr. Tomljenovic, who once worked in his lab, were only "peripherally involved."
"All of the work was conducted in the lab of the senior author, Dr. Yehuda Shoenfeld in Tel Aviv. Hence, to make the claim that this work is "ours" is not correct," Dr. Shaw said in the e-mail.*
Shaw was one of the eight co-authors on the study, but he distanced himself from the project on Thursday.
"I was not directly involved except for some editorial comments at the early stages of the manuscript," he said.*
Mystical properties of biowater
Now inquiring minds come to wonder how much more of their research output was of this coerced, unconsenting nature. Surely some form of duress was involved when they co-signed Seneff's papers from 2013 and 2014,** which are crammed with Entropic Quantumbabble and mystical Biowater and are as mad as six wolverines after a week-long methamphetamine bender:



Feel free to wander at leisure through the watery weirdness:
they order neighboring water molecules into a dynamically-structured arrangement that is far more viscous than the bulk water (variously referred to as the “exclusion zone” or the “coherence domain”), and that also exhibits other unusual properties with respect to responses to electromagnetic fields, exclusion of solutes and the mobility of protons and electrons
...
Biological water dynamics fits the criteria for such self-ordered/self-assembling systems in that it demonstrates the combination of dynamical minimal stability and spatial scaling predicted to lead to a power law for temporal fluctuations
Or just turn stright to Figure 4, a rare example of the "argumentum ad cross-section-through-an-M&M".
 
Seneff had never recovered her health and sanity after her attempts to reconstruct the Waterbox (“probably the most delicate and fragile instrument ever made by human hands”) — invented by de Selby as a way of diluting water to a point where it could be handled safely, but nowhere properly documented. “There is more to water than meets the eye,” wrote de Selby, by way of explaining why three heavy coal-hammers were destroyed during its construction.
Bonus Seneff waterbending!

Perhaps Shaw regrets signing his name to papers by Gherardi, an aluminary of the antivax movement. They reported discoveries of important phenomena such as the homeopathic inverse dose response (when nothing happens at the higher doses of AlOH where you expected to see something), and the anomalous systemic-translocation timescales, when nothing can be found upon dissecting the laboratory mice (proving that everything happened very quickly and was already over by the first 45-day round of dissections, or was happening very slowly and had barely started by the final 270-day round, or both).



That overlaps with Gherardi's hybrid nanodiamondsequence of papers, in which mice were injected with fluorescent nanodiamonds tagged with AlOH. These have the advantage of being 100% biopersistant, with no danger of dissolving in the murine bodies, making them more suitable for demonstating the permanence and bodily migration of colloidal AlOH (vaccine adjuvant) than actual particulate AlOH would be. Also there is the delightful prospect of indestructible crystalline supermice that shoot fluorescent monochromatic laser beams from their pineal glands when they escape from laboratory confinement.

The other frequent and possibly regrettable collaborator is Chris Exley, big-picture visionary and Jeremiah of the Age of Aluminium. For the last 30 years Exley has been warning the world about the titanic conflict for domination between the three forms of intelligent life that occupy Earth, with carbon, silicon and aluminium-based biochemistry (as prefigured by the 4:2:3 Riddle of the Sphinx), and the alliances that form between them:



...No, wait, that was Tim Powers. There was a lot of carbon / silicon / aluminium speculation back at the end of the 80s, it must have been something in the water, or else the Morphogenic Field. Anyway, Silicon is the natural ally of Carbon against Aluminium.

Visionary diagram of life & geologi-
cal history to tie everything together
We have previously encountered Chris Exley's review paper, the one with the title that seems more suitable for a photocopied Warning of Nighness stapled to a powerpole than for a scholarly review of the literature, published in Frontiers in Neurology:

Why industry propaganda and political interference cannot disguise the inevitable role played by human exposure to aluminum in neuro-degenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease
Edited by: Christopher Ariel Shaw
Reviewed by: Lucija Tomljenovic
Now the Frontiers publishing structure is modelled on pyramid marketing, so it features "Research Topics", whereby authors who have paid enough into the structure (by publishing often enough in Frontiers journals) are encouraged to progress to the status of Editor, and to nominate Research Topics, while recruiting their colleagues to contribute papers to each topic (starting a new tier at the bottom of the pyramid). So Exley's overwrought title was part of a Topic on "Aluminum Toxicity and Human Disease”.

Other contributions hint of epistemic closure in the peer-reviewing process, and a level of endogamy worthy of the Hapsburgs:

Biopersistence and brain translocation of aluminum adjuvants of vaccines”, Gherardi et al.
Edited by: Lucija Tomljenovic
Reviewed by: Lucija Tomljenovic
Clinical features in patients with long-lasting macrophagic myofasciitis”, Gherardi et al.
Edited by: Christopher Ariel Shaw
Reviewed by: Lucija Tomljenovic
The mobilization of aluminum into the biosphere”, Pogue & Lukiw
Edited by: Christopher Ariel Shaw
Reviewed by: Lucija Tomljenovic
For reasons unknown, these contributions are now disjuncted and dispersed across the Frontiers archives as if submitted and processed in unprompted independence, for earlier this year the publishers scrubbed all trace of that Topic from their database.

BMC journals used to follow the same useful habit of specifying the reviewers. The same sense of a daisy-chain of academic backrolling and logscratching comes through:

"Elevated brain aluminium and early onset Alzheimer’s disease in an individual occupationally exposed to aluminium: a case report”, Exley & Vickers
Reviewed by: Romain Gherardi
Reviewed by: Christopher Shaw
Slow CCL2-dependent translocation of biopersistent particles from muscle to brain”, Khan,... Exley,... Gherardi & Cadusseau
Reviewed by: Carlo Perricone[Shoenfeld / Tomljenovic collaborator]
Reviewed by: Christopher Shaw

From there, under the thrall of a sense of completion, we turn to a Press Conference in 2012, when the MMF Patient Support Group [I do not know the French for "Astro-Turf"] was lobbying the French vaccine-safety agency ANSM to fund Gherardi's research, putting the squeeze on politicians and calling in independent outside authorities to tesify to the value and quality of Gherardi's belief-system. Authorities named Exley, Shaw and Shoenfeld. The lobbying was eventually a success... €150,000 can buy a lot of nanodiamonds.

So what is this MMF -- E3M in French -- whose victims require support and mollifying medical investment? The defining characteristics of Macrophagal Myofasciitis vary according to situational requirements, ranging from "sore arm with a lingering lump", all the way to "all-encompassing unspecified malaise", a relabelling of ME/CFS that allows anyone with Chronic Fatigue symptoms to be recruited to the cause and coopted as a Martyr of Vaccination Damage (whether "sore arm" and "lump" are part of the picture or not). The condition was first observed by Gherardi et al., and is found only in France, with Gherardi and his colleagues uniquely skilled in its detection. Some would say that Macrophagal Myofasciitis exists primarily to provide a home for all the 'i's left over from converting 'aluminium' to the barbarous misspelling 'aluminum' but I could not possibly comment.
French press
Anyways, the money ran out, and the ANSM has not given Gherardi the extra €550,000 he needs to continue his vital inquiries so he went to the French press blubbing like Fotherington-Tomas. Also they have not followed his advice on banning vaccine adjuvants, which is equivalent to censoring his results, won't someone think of the children? Also sheep are closer to humans than rodents are.
un travail a été fait sur le mouton, encore plus proche de l'homme
Someone needs to take Gherardi aside and explain a few facts of mammalian phylogeny.

We started with Shaw's current attitude toward his collaborations with Professor Shoenfeld, but they are left as an exercise for the reader. Shoenfeld was last seen at RetractionWatch after the depublication of a different antivaccination paper,** complaining that the paper in question had been an important part of his activity as an Expert Witness who testifies in lawsuits for post-vaccination damages. Dude, you DON'T SAY THAT PART OUT LOUD.
Shoenfeld is the proud inventor of ASIA, "Autoimmune Syndrome Induced by Adjuvants", a syndrome so titled as to leave little doubt about his belief in its origins. ASIA subsumes MMF (or possibly vice versa from Gherardi's perspective); also Gulf War Syndrome, and "siliconosis", it is a pantechnicon or omnium-gatherum of speculative sickness.

Meanwhile:
Stealing from Oglaf is
a Riddled tradition
Shaw said he's likely finished working on papers concerning vaccines after this retraction.
"I'm honestly not sure at this point that I want to dabble in [vaccines] anymore," he said. "We have some projects that are ongoing that have been funded that we feel duty-bound to complete that are on this topic. Frankly, I doubt if I will do it again after that."
* Here is the RetractionWatch post in which Shaw claims credit for revising the zero-Shaw-involvement Shoenfeld paper so that it could be republished in Immunologic Research.**

** It is hard to understand why Shoenfeld has such bad luck with retractions. He has multiple editorial positions and you would expect him to know how to write papers that don't get depublished.
For instance he is Editor-in-Chief of Immunome Research, part of the OMICS scampire; founder and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Autoimmunity (where sloppy papers go to collectcorrigenda); and at Immunologic Research -- the eventual home of that retracted zero-Shaw-involvement paper -- he is Topic Editor for the area of "Immunoregulation and Autoimmunity".

Polydactyl policies

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After 15 hours on Twittle, @FirstCatofNZ has 522807 827 followers.
How many of them are Russian Bluebots?

Twitxtapositions

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Elmo is caused by a bacteria. He can be frightening when he seems to spring out of nowhere, but he doesn't actually do that.

I have a noble cause for skin, there's just too many of them #2 Pigments of the Imagination edition

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I programmed the Riddled Ktistec machine to scour the Interweave for exemplars of the type and synthesise them into an updated Mission Statement for the Riddled Research Laboratory and Institute for Extreme Country-Dancing... ideally something more legible and less beer-stained than what we have at the moment. It came up with a list of noble and chivalrous ambitions:
  • To act as the directing and co-ordinating organization in the field of medicine;
  • To be the worldwide, authoritative organ of the medical profession;
  • To provide leadership on health matters, form the health research agenda, articulate norms and standards, evince evidence-based policy options, and monitor and assess health trends;
  • To assist governments and national medical associations in jointly tackling health problems and improving the welfare of their citizens;
  • To chart a successful course for health care delivery globally by articulating health guidelines and standards and helping nations address their public health issues;
  • To study and evaluate all aspects of the medical health continuum, including the development of programs approved by the officers or members, to ensure an adequate continuing supply of well-qualified physicians to meet the needs of the public;
When I accused the Ktistec machine of plagiarising these items in all their grandiosity from the World Health Academy it turned off its auditory inputs and has been sulking ever since.

The Academy is primarily a vanity outlet for a New Jersey cosmetic dermatologist (insufficiently assuaged by his self-pennedWhackyweedia entry), so it need not detain us for long. But before we continue to the other member of WHA -- its Secretary-General or sometimes President of Dermatology, one Professor Torelli Lotti -- the Academy's website deserves a moment, for it is a trichobezoar of whackyness.

Building upon its goal of transforming the world (one unsightly skin condition at a time) and its claim to represent the entire global medical profession, it lists a coterie of researchers and philanthropists and Nobel Laureates as "our people"... without explicitly claiming them as members.. and few of the sterling individuals whose images festoon the site are aware of the honour bestowed upon them. Whoever was paid to construct the site got bored and finished half-way through, so the continue reading links, they go nowhere.

The WHA site (also the Whackyweedia adaptation of it) refer to its International Journal of Medicine:
The International Journal of Medicine is an international open-access, peer-reviewed general medical journal. It is a publication of the highest academic profile that will bring new and important information to the medical, scientific, and policymaking community worldwide. Board consist of Nobel Prize laureates, Lasker Award winners, and other distinguished persons. Our devotion to international health guarantees that research and analysis from all regions of the world are vastly covered. We aim to publish first-rate clinical trials that will change the way medicine is practiced.

Publication Charges
To provide open access, the International Journal of Medicine levies an article publishing charge which covers our expenses, such as journal production, and online hosting and archiving. The charge (exclusive of VAT for UK and EU authors) is $500. There are no submission or page charges, and no color charges. We understand that some authors lack funding to defray publication costs. Where only limited funds are available, the journal will either accept partial payment or offers a waiver. As a matter of policy, the International Journal of Medicine offers a 100% waiver to corresponding authors based in Hinari Band 1 countries, and a 50% waiver to authors based in Hinari Band 2 countries.
No other record of the Journal or its editorial panel of Nobel Laureates can be found on the Interlattice [unless it is coterminous with the IJM issued by some little parasite-publishing start-up in the UAE].

Never mind, there is still Dermatologic Therapy, which acquired the WHA logo and became its emergency back-up journal in 2010, also acquiring Torello Lotti as Associate Editor.

At this point the franchising of WHA Official Journals becomes confusing, for a third journal joins the party! -- GlobalDerpatology, extruded by those mendacious low-life turdmuffins lovable rapscallions at OAText, who bill it as the Official Organ of the WHA. The OAText people lie about everything (like claiming to operate out of London rather than Hyderabad), but the founder and Editor-in-Chief is a Professor Torello Lotti, and surely his word can be trusted!

But wait! A challenger appears! Lotti is also credited with founding and Editing-in-Chief a competingJournal of Figmentary Disorders for the OMICS griftdozer!* Which is alsothe Official Journal of the World Health Academy.


To the extent that this is non-tedious, it is because the episode provides a rare example of a shared sockpuppet -- a non-existent person who serves as Lotti's Editorial Assistant and featured in spam from two competing scamshops.

'... Beall noted the ostensible existence of one Amanda Venis, a high-functioning $NAME parameter who works both sides of the street. "Her"FaceBukkake page primarly peddles one of the dismal OAText travesties (Global Derpatology) but the advertisements that comprise "her"Twitter stream alternate between that journal and the Journal of Figmentary Disorders from OMICS. Of the three LinkedIn entries set up in that name, one has her working in SF as an Editorial Assistant for OMICS, while the other two have her in London, as OAText Managing Editor for Global Dermatology or, possibly, for the Interdiciplinary Journal of Chemistry.'
[Text self-plagiarised recycled from here]

As well as the Potemkin Academy, Lotti, Schwartz and their colleagues share an interest in a Californian biomed stat-up company. If any dramatic results emerge from their research in rebranding existing hair-growth placebos in exciting new packaging, they will not lack for suitable journals to announce them.

In the time he can spare from founding new journals, Professor Lotti abuses his powers-for-good as an OMICS / iMedPub editor to pimp "low dose medicine" -- which is to say, a quantum-bullshit neologistic acronym-ridden rebranding of homeopathy.


I was shocked, SHOCKED to find grifting going on in the placebo-vitiligo speciality!



Perhaps the multiple journals are intended to strengthen Lotti's reputation by diluting it repeatedly.
Before and after pigmentary disorder

* Pigmentary Disorders was evidently too specialised under Prof. Lotti's editorship to bring enough of a moneystream into the OMICS trough, so they recently booted him out and changed the title to the more lucrative and all-encompassing "Dermatology and Dermatologic Diseases".

Due to the authors’ negligence during the preparation of this retraction notice it consists of a plagiarism of an earlier retraction notice. Authors sincerely apologize for their mistakes and wish to retract their retraction

The Pink Knight rises

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"A fleeing dairy robber has been stopped in his tracks by a man wearing a pink crop top, tutu, fishnets and fairy wings on a Napier street."
There is no doubt an Origin Story to this crime-busting superhero on our streets but I DON'T NEED TO KNOW.
Nor do I care to speculate what the equivalent of the Bat-Signal will be when his assistance is needed.

The report does not provide details of the fairy-suit fabric. I am going to pretend that it was made with a lustrous, sheeny fabric with filament fibres and a high float ratio, just so as to joke about "Knights in Pink Satin".

The wonder of the tundra #3: Adventures in the book trade

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Wait, what? Five days after the nominal date for arriving on the shelves ($140 reduced 15% to $119), a book remains unavailable from the publisher or the usual on-line sources... but Tundra Books can provide a second-hand copy marked down to £282. Perhaps on-demand publication has advanced to the stage of printing used copies.


The book-shaped artefact in question was to have been the subject of a footnote or an Updatage to a recent Riddled episode, but TL;DW. It is totally a sober, balanced weighing of evidence and not a regurging of stovepiped antivax mendacity, despite the second editor's tendency to regard vaccines as the modern equivalent of the Holocaust.
Library pixies ejecting an unwanted book
The Riddled staff are wondering about the market sector that Elsevier thought they were targetting. It may be that they were under the impression that they were handling a scholarly compilation of recent advances on a topic of academic contention, rife with vying researchers who would be queuing for their copies -- or urging university libraries to acquire them. The Riddled library pixies were scornful of this suggestion. $119 is a lot to pay for a 480-page trade paperback with a shiny cover, which is to say an overpriced airport novel. Even if Controversies in Vaccine Safety had included ten detailed exegeses of the intellectual debate, it would still be plenty to pay for a ten-gloss battle.
A due Diligence
Due diligence would have disabused Elsevier of that notion. Contributors to the tome include Vinu Arumugham (on "Vaccine Induced Allergies") whose scholarly credentials consist of falsely presenting himself as a med. student, and paying the egregious shitweasels at OMICS to place on-line one of his essays in cherry-picking (other, similar exercises are self-published -- if that is the correct term for "listed at Researchgate").

Arumugham's keystone dictum is that all food allergies ensue from prior exposure to the food proteins that Big Pharma adds to vaccines, although this is accompanied by a bodyguard of ad-hoc secondary hypotheses designed to shelter it from harsh disconfirming facts. He has promoted the resulting belief system on discussion boards and skeptic blogs across the Interlattice, with the nyms of APV and Vinucube[possibly chosen as a hommage to the legendary TimeCube]. The commentariat at Respectful Insolence have watched the evolution of his scholium of thought from the beginning, with the multiplication of auxiliary hypotheses... they hope that success will not spoil him, and that he will remember his roots now that he has busted through into the Big Time.
Big Time
More detail on other contributors here and at OggiScienza. But we shouldn't forego the opportunity to point and laugh at David Lewis, Wakefield acolyte who provides the closing Chapter 27 (on "The role of institutional scientific misconduct").

Lewis is best-known for pimping a set of bowel-biopsy pathology reports that had somehow been left in his possession, in the belief that they would vindicate Wakefield's "MMR-Vaccine-causes-autism" grift, when in fact they provided proof of his fraud (for this well-meaning dumb-arsed exercise in rat-fucking, Lewis is respected in antivax circles as a 'whistle-blower'). He put the cherry atop his reputation by arguing that journalist Brian Deer is really a cats-puppet and a sock-paw for Big Pharma's war aganst Wakefield -- for there was no way that a mere journalist could understand so well the medical complexities of the accusations against Wakefield.
Lewis' own qualification is in sewage management.
You can't buy that book here, sir
Ideally, then, Deer would be the reviewer for Controversies. But as was noted supra, publication has been delayed... for a few weeks, according to one supplier, though the publishers have elsewhere been quoted as intending a permanent delay.

There remains only the mystery of Tundra Books'used copy for sale. Nick Brown has reported another occurrence of this Amazon affiliate -- a residential address in Seville -- trying to sell a purportedly-used but marked-up copy of a book not yet in physical existence. This seems to be part of their business model.

One possible explanation involves the words "stupidity tax"... a scam that only becomes apparent when there are no extant copies of the new copies they on-sell, ostensibly pre-loved and doubled in price. But I prefer to believe that they are borrowing (or will borrow at some point in the future) the Riddled time machine.

Always...uh...never...forget to check your references #3

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On account of a sheltered though idyllic childhood being taught assassination skills in an apocalyptic death-cult, I was not previously appraised of the existence of the Alzheimers Disease Fund. This is one of several astroturfed charity grifts run by Florida Man, under the umbrella rubric of Project Cure, to shake the Money Tree and lobby the gubblement to stop wasting Alzheimers / Diabetes / Prostate Cancer / Heart-Disease research moneys on science, and give the dosh to shysters and Alt-Medscammers and supplement pimps instead.
Money tree, shaken
Reassuringly, the ADF does not spend all the hard-garnered donations on further fund-raising expenses and the Executive Director's $200,000 salary... a fraction is invested in Public Education, i.e. preparing on-line PDF "reports" to promote the aluminium-causes-Alzheimers garblement. "Preparing" is here used as a term of art meaning "stealing material from elsewhere and pasting it together", for "Project Cure" is aimed at the glibertarian property-rights FREEDOM demographic, an ethos known for respecting the sanctity of other people's intellectual property.

One particular patchwork caught the eye: "Aluminum in Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Neurological Disorders". Presumably this Report emerged spontaneously from the concentration of information that comprises the Intertubes for it is is devoid of authorship, but it recycles the Aluminati oeuvre of Shaw & Tomljenovic. Ref. 86 seems especially worthy of attention. A 120-page paper in Toxicology Letters? Can this be a thing?


Alas, life is full of Disappoint, and the collision between high hopes and harsh facts leads to the usual outcome. In the underachieving time-stream that we inhabit, the link resolves to a 245-word Abstract for a conference poster, on page S92 of a Special Supplement of the journal -- set aside to Proceedings of 47th Congress of the European Societies of Toxicology -- and the "S60-S179" is in fact the title of that section of the issue (Poster Sessions Day 1). Someone has been a silly bunny.

Following the Great Gazoogle on the trail of this spurious citation leads us to Patient Zero -- a 2011 exercise in cherry-picking by Tomljenovic and Shaw, published in J.Inorg.Biochem. as was the custom of the day.


To continue the horticultural metaphor, the authors' argument in that paper relied on comparing apples with oranges, with a special emphasis on apples that were clearly labelled "Do Not Compare with Oranges". But kudos to them for accurately summarising copying sentences from the Abstract.


The ganked citation and the summary of autism-causation found their way again into a 2012 Open Letter written by Tomljenovic to the legislators of Vermont, hoping to sway them against the idea of vaccines and vaccination laws.

Perhaps the "Reality inertia" of Sheldrake's Morphogenetic Field should be blamed, or else the authors had become addicted to the smell of paste, but anyway, citation and autism-causation reappeared in a 2012 paper by Tomljenovic, Dórea and Shaw (despite its ostensible focus on the use of mercury-based antibiotics in vaccines).

With this non-existent 120-page paper so firmly established in the literature, its appearance in the Alzheimers Disease Fund report was inevitable.

Meanwhile, the Brazilian authors of the original Poster expanded it into a 2013 published paper. This has not yet been cited in the Aluminati literature, as the original claims of elevated Aluminium levels in 12 autistic children were replaced with measurements for one child of the twelve [who had elevated Cr and Ar levels as well as Al, suggesting a diet that left much to be desired].

The most recent sightings of that ganked "S60-S179" pagination are also from 2013. First a Shaw-Tomljenovic paper in the Aluminati-friendly journal Immunologic Research:

Then again in Immunologic Research, a "Guest Editorial" coauthored by Yehuda Shoenfeld, who is an editor of the journal, so where the Guest status comes from is anyone's guess. Just saying, there is a lot to be learned from reading papers rather than cut-and-pasting other people's Reference lists.

Look at the Editorial itself. Just look at it. Is that the World's Worst Metaphor, or the Worst Metaphor EVAH! ?
Evidently autoimmune diseases have a collective soul, or possibly a cardigan at risk of unraveling. Also there is a chess game in progress: in which the disease is the bishop, its pathogenesis is the rook, and they are pitted against the knight, which is the treatment. This is not the version of chess I am accustomed to, so it is just as well that 'we are adding new rules to the game'. At the same time the situation is a puzzle, one in dire need of new dowels, and this is the point where my grasp of the narrative went all thumbless. THIS IS NOT HOW YOU METAPHOR, people.
[H/t WiseWoman]

---------------------------------------------------------------
Second-Worst Metaphor sighting from the same authors (though in a French rheumatology journal):

The musical genres I listen to are so hard-core, you've probably never heard of them

Christmas Ale news NOT

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Read "brewing crisis"; was expecting news item about altercations and shenanigans in the malt-based-beverages industry. Ideally, a legal clash between rival brewers both trying to copyright the "pile of poo emoji" for their beer label.

My disappointment is too deep to be fathomed.
Legal clash involving elephants

Journalists far more sympathetic towards Worst US Mass-Murderer Until Next One after discovery that he was not only white, but also Economically Insecure

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No, really.



In other news, the local sheriff has incontrovertible conclusive truth that Paddock was crazy, and therefore not a true Scotsman representative of American Heartland Gunlicker Values.

Another victim of Political Soundness Gone Mad

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Libby Weaver bills herself as "Australia's leading nutritional biochemist", and is a "celebrity nutritionist"... this means, more-or-less, that newspappers like the Com-Post (Wellington's Paper of Note) syndicate her columnised blatherings about every superfood-du-jour because she's a celebrity, and she's a celebrity because the newspappers syndicate her columns.

So Dr Libby has a book-shaped object out! -- though judging from the size of the font, it is more a compilation of double-line-spaced tweets. From it we learn (inter alia) that a dietary folate deficiency cases Trisomy 21, a.k.a. Down's Syndrome. Challenged on this fascinating subtraction from knowledge, she has promised to amend it in the next edition, because the evidence for the link is "mixed", which is to say "imagination-based".
Research suggesting a link between folate consumption and a reduced risk of Down syndrome is "mixed" says Weaver, who will remove the reference to it from the next edition of her book.
"I was under the impression that it was common maritime practice for a ship to have a crew."
"Opinion is divided on the subject."
"Oh, really?"
"Yahs. All the other captains say it is; I say it isn't."

She does not resile, however, from her belief that oral contraception depletes the body's reserves of folate [thus causing spina bifida]. This theory was abandoned way back in the 1980s because evidence, but Dr Libby has evidently been too occupied with the nutritioning and the first-name celebriting to update her antiquated medical training.

The question of error-correcting the book becomes moot if enough purchasers take up her offer of returning it for a refund. The offer was made after another aspect of Dr Libby's time-capsule education came to light... namely the fact that the 1980s was also about the last time when it was acceptable to use the racialised, pejorative term "mongolism" instead of "Down's Syndrome".


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