Elsevier ‘published six fake journals’

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We all knew that scientific publishing is a great racket in terms of extracting money from universities. But we could at least console ourselves that the content was peer-reviewed. Well, guess what? According to The Scientist of 7th May 2009,

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals but did not disclose sponsorship the company has admitted. Elsevier is conducting an ‘internal review’ of its publishing practices after allegations came to light that the company produced a pharmaceutical company-funded publication in the early 2000s without disclosing that the ‘journal’ was corporate sponsored.

The allegations involve the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine a publication paid for by pharmaceutical company Merck that amounted to a compendium of reprinted scientific articles and one-source reviews most of which presented data favorable to Merck’s products. The Scientist obtained two 2003 issues of the journal — which bore the imprint of Elsevier’s Excerpta Medica — neither of which carried a statement obviating Merck’s sponsorship of the publication. An Elsevier spokesperson told The Scientist in an email that a total of six titles in a “series of sponsored article publications” were put out by their Australia office and bore the Excerpta Medica imprint from 2000 to 2005. These titles were: the Australasian Journal of General Practice the Australasian Journal of Neurology the Australasian Journal of Cardiology the Australasian Journal of Clinical Pharmacy the Australasian Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine and the Australasian Journal of Bone & Joint Medicine . Elsevier declined to provide the names of the sponsors of these titles according to the company spokesperson.

Publish on Scribd and name your price

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From this week, Scribd is allowing authors to charge for content. According to the NYTimes,

The Scribd Web site is the most popular of several document-sharing sites that take a YouTube-like approach to text, letting people upload sample chapters of books, research reports, homework, recipes and the like. Users can read documents on the site, embed them in other sites and share links over social networks and e-mail.

In the new Scribd store, authors or publishers will be able to set their own price for their work and keep 80 percent of the revenue. They can also decide whether to encode their documents with security software that will prevent their texts from being downloaded or freely copied.

Authors can choose to publish their documents in unprotected PDFs, which would make them readable on the Amazon Kindle and most other mobile devices. Scribd also says it is readying an application for the iPhone from Apple and will introduce it next month…

Social Networks Eclipse E-Mail

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Alongside the explosive growth of online video over the last six years, time spent on social networks surpassed that for e-mail for the first time in February, signaling a paradigm shift in consumer engagement with the Internet.

The surprising thing is that anyone should be surprised by this.

[Source.]

Mainstream media and bloggers — remind me: which are the parasites?

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Lovely Salon.com piece by Glenn Greenwald, prompted by the ruckus over Maureen Dowd’s lifting of a para from a well-known blog.

Typically, the uncredited use of online commentary doesn’t rise to the level of blatant copying — plagiarism — that Maureen Dowd engaged in. It’s often not even an ethical breach at all. Instead, traditional media outlets simply take stories, ideas and research they find online and pass it off as their own. In other words — to use their phraseology — they act parasitically on blogs by taking content and exploiting it for their benefit.

Since I read many blogs, I notice this happening quite frequently — ideas and stories that begin on blogs end up being featured by establishment media outlets with no credit. Here’s just one recent and relatively benign example of how it often works: at the end of March, I wrote a post that ended up being featured in many places concerning the unique political courage displayed by Jim Webb in taking on the issue of criminal justice reform and the destruction wreaked by our drug laws. The following week, I was traveling and picked up a copy of The Economist in an aiport, which featured an article hailing Jim Webb’s political courage in taking on the issue of criminal justice reform and the destruction wreaked by our drug laws.

Several of the passages from the Economist article were quite familar to me, since they seemed extremely similar to what I had written — without attribution or credit…

The transit

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Astonishing photograph of the NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, last Tuesday (May 12).

The photographer, Thierry Legault, made the image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera.

Thanks for Brian for spotting it.

The analog divide

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My daughter needed to find out her National Insurance number — which, for reasons too tedious to relate but connected with her Dad’s failure to register for child benefit after her Mum’s death — had not been sent to her. I had made some telephone inquiries from which I learned that a number had indeed been allocated to her, but that she would need to attend an interview at the local JobCentre (to which she was to bring suitable forms of identification) before she could be given a number.

Last week she went by herself and was given the runaround by the staff — told to phone the national number, which told her that she didn;t have a number and would have to apply for it and that she needed to download the form, etc. etc. She came home rather dejected by this, so I arranged to go with her this morning.

It was the first time I’ve ever been inside a Job Centre. The clients present included a goodly number of people who looked as though life had dealt them a poor hand of cards. Some were badly dressed; a few looked miserable or confused or just depressed. The staff were professional in manner, but somewhat defensive in posture. Several burly security guards were very much in evidence. The atmosphere was one of watchful tension. And one can understand why: sometimes people turn up who are angry, confused, drunk, abusive or perhaps even psychologically disturbed. And they can lash out at an official who they see as the representative of an indifferent establishment.

The staff of the JobCentre have to tread a tightrope. On the one hand they have to help people who really need assistance from the state, and who are sometimes in really dire straits. On the other, they have to be watchful against benefit fraud, for perched on their shoulders like a vengeful parrot is the moralising, scolding Daily Mail.

It was an instructive moment to make my first visit to such an establishment. There I saw the front-line troops of the Welfare State, ever-vigilant to ensure that fraudsters don’t get benefits to which they are not entitled (and determined to crack down on them severely whenever they are detected). Meanwhile, over in the Mother of Parliaments, we have MPs who have been discovered conducting the most staggering kinds of ‘benefit’ fraud — and yet who seem to think that if they pay back their ill-gotten gains then everything will be all right.

As I stood waiting for my daughter to be interviewed for her NI number I fell to thinking about what would happen if someone who’d been caught over-claiming a state benefit in the JobCentre just shrugged his shoulders, reached into his wallet, and tried to hand over a sheaf of tenners to one of the officials behind the bullet-proof cubicle glass as atonement for his sins. You only have to do the thought-experiment to understand the rage that people feel about the MPs.

But of course the injustice is even worse in the case of bankers. At least MPs have had to endure some degree of personalised obloquoy. But, with the exception of a few named individuals like ‘Sir’ Fred Goodwin — most of the Savile-Row-suited non-execs who presided over the banking catastrophe have been bailed out without even having to endure the indignity of public exposure.

A worrying question is what will be the outcome of this public rage. It’s too profound to be bottled up. So it will be vented somewhere. Smashing the windows of the Goodwin mansion was just the opening salvo. My guess is that it will be vented in elections — first the upcoming European elections, and next year the UK general election. One opinion poll published at the weekend showed that currently 40% of the British electorate would vote for “none of the above” if an election were held tomorrow.

So what we might have is the kind of incoherent electoral chaos that occurred in Holland in the election after Pim Fortuyn was murdered — an election that returned to the Dutch Parliament a rag-bag collection of clowns and reduced Dutch governance to farcical levels for several years. Is this what lies ahead for us?

Are Your “Secret Questions” Too Easily Answered?

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In a word, yes.

In research to be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy this week, researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University plan to show that the secret questions used to secure the password-reset functions of a variety of websites are woefully insecure. In a study involving 130 people, the researchers found that 28 percent of the people who knew and were trusted by the study’s participants could guess the correct answers to the participant’s secret questions. Even people not trusted by the participant still had a 17 percent chance of guessing the correct answer to a secret question.

“Secret questions alone are not as secure as we would like our backup authentication to be,” says Stuart Schechter, a researcher with software giant Microsoft and one of the authors of the paper. "Nor are they reliable enough that their use alone is sufficient to ensure users can recover their accounts when they forget their passwords.”

The least-secure questions are simple ones whose answers can be guessed with no existing knowledge of the subject, the researchers say. For example, the answers to the questions “What is your favorite town?” and “What is your favorite sports team?” were relatively easy for participants to guess. All told, 30 percent and 57 percent of the correct answers, respectively, appeared in the top-five list of guesses.