Sometimes it’s almost not worth trying to decide whether something is a hoax or not—whether, to say it in old-fashioned phrasing, it’s nothing to sneeze at. Vaev Tissues seems to fit snugly into this indecisively gooey category. Mandy Oaklander writes about it, whatever it is, in Time magazine: A Mysterious Company Claims to Sell Sneeze-Filled […]
Tag: hoax
Professor Dreier’s Academic Drivel Report
Peter Dreier, who is the Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and chair of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department, at Occidental College in Los Angeles, confesses his sins and exposes his academic hoax in a Feb 2016 article for The American Prospect Magazine entitled: Academic Drivel Report “Six years ago I submitted a […]
Gibberish scholarship happily fills the cracks, again
Comes another reminder that some scholarly journals, like some people, are less careful than others. [Another way to put this: if the ONLY thing you know about a report is that it was published in “a scholarly journal”, then you know almost nothing about it.] Richard van Noorden reports, in Nature: The publishers Springer and IEEE are […]
Things that sneak into the literature: Stuperspace
Odd bits of concoction occasionally find their way into otherwise somber research journals. Here’s one example: “Stuperspace,” V. Gates, Empty Kangaroo, M. Roachcock, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, vol. 15, nos. 1–2, February 1985, pp. 289–293. The abstract says: “We prove, once and for all, that people who don’t use superspace are really out of it. […]
