scientific
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I took a course in compuational science from this guy.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Wegman_Report
The so-called Wegman Report (14 July, 2006), written by statistician Edward Wegman, David W. Scott and Yasmin Said, purported to critically examine Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick” “past temperature” reconstruction and its critiques by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKittrick. The report is now remembered as the epitome of global warming denier stupidity, in terms of both its factual errors and its college freshman-level plagiarism from textbooks and Wikipedia.
The course was great. But the report generated a retracted paper.
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They did a science?
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That its inclusion in a legitimate journal could lead people to doubt the rigor of every other academic article, ultimately eroding faith in science as a whole.
So, um, people should be aware that “published in a peer reviewed journal” doesn’t mean that something good science and that formal peer review is only a part of peer review. For finding out what the peers really think laymen are better served by reading science writers rocking their rolodexes at e.g. arstechnica or theatlantic.
Which is not to say that Science of the Total Environment should be publishing arrant nonsense; of course it shouldn’t be.
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Well, that means that it is cited but that figure can be gamed in various ways. (BTW, this journal seems to be published weekly. Maybe that’s more normal in some field, but that sounds positively bonkers to me.)
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This verbiage is, and I do not kid or exaggerate, precisely the kind of stuff that some of my neighbors believe or would believe.
I want to make it clear that some of them have PhDs or have other credentials that adult people sometimes value. These days I have a harder time valuing those credentials or making assumptions about whether such people have operational capacity for logic and science-based critical thinking.
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If you want to read ((and laugh at) a preprint.
In conclusion, for the first time, we provide a hypothesis, which posits that the carbonate-silicate geochemical cycle and associated geological-geophysical changes mediate human disease, namely, SARS-CoV-2-associated COVID-19. Using insights from Neolithic- Traditional Chinese Medicine (and other Indigenous Knowledge), and the chiral-induced spin selectivity effect in biomolecules, we provide evidence supporting a hypothesis, which posits serpentinization- induced lithospheric LWMAs in Proterozoic cratons, in a weakened geo- magnetic field, mediate SARS-CoV-2-associated COVID-19 outbreaks via the magnetic catalysis of iron oxides-silicate-like minerals and SARS- CoV-2 from biogenic molecules in humans. Humans and constituent biogenic molecules are forms of condensed matter (van der Gucht, 2018; Marx, 2020a). This work seeks to advance the science of public health, as it lays the foundation for the unification of dynamics in the ferromagnetic-like iron-containing human-biosphere and geosphere via the empirical laws and the theoretical frameworks of condensed matter physics (van der Gucht, 2018; Marx, 2020b).
Okay, so who has been huffing glue while reading their old Earthdawn and Shadowrun manuals?
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Having a virus in your DNA is totally a thing(if you are badass enough to be a parasitoid wasp); but that’s about the only overlap with reality I can see here.
Ancient retroviruses make up a significant chunk of our DNA. These critters really do integrate themselves into our genome and hide out there. Coronavirus is absolutely not a retrovirus and absolutely does not do this.
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Oh yes, impact factor is a fairly dated way of evaluating the quality of a journal and can easily be gamed by self-citation or the methods mentioned above. But a cursory perusal of STOTEN’s other articles suggests there is interdisciplinary research published there that is more mainstream (which is not to say it is excellent research). Their about section reads:
“Science of the Total Environment is an international multi-disciplinary journal for publication of novel, hypothesis-driven and high-impact research on the total environment, which interfaces the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and anthroposphere.”
It seems like the kind of place people go once their papers are rejected from higher impact journals. However, it doesn’t appear to be a predatory journal or a flimsy type of OA journal. It’s striking that an article like this one could have made it past the editors and is a real black eye for them.
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I was thinking this must be a Sokhal-type hoax, but I fear it was actually serious. Passed peer review? I shudder to think who the “peers” were…Deepak Chopra?
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