I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ecclesiastes
9:11
Heterosexual Electrode
Weird things are happening in science. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) had published a paper titled "Research on Arsenic Removal with Heterosexual Electrode Heterogeneous Materials in Water."
However, when you download the full text of the article you see that it is in Chinese. Only the title and the abstract are in English. So it may be not that big of a deal. The scientists who do not know English machine-translated their article. After all "heterosexual" has such an innocent synonym as "straight." But wait, there are more. Another IEEE publication has the title "Optical force and its applications based on heterosexual phosphorene waveguide."
When you download the full text of the article you see that one of the authors, Liang Pan, is from Purdue University. A simple search reveals that he is an Associate Professor there and has a PhD from Berkeley. So he should know English. Earlier I wrote about a professor who did not read even the title of the paper he cited. This one did not read even the title of the paper he wrote.
If you consider not just the titles but the full texts of the articles you find more pornography. Like "mutual attraction of heterosexual charges", "heterosexual structure of carbon", or "heterosexual photonic crystal." I found 18 such articles. Almost all from China. Albeit published by Western publishers like Elsevier, Springer, and Taylor and Francis. There is one exception, however. The paper with "a new approach of heterosexual-design of SEI" comes from Cornell.
The corresponding author, Lynden A. Archer, is Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering and James A. Friend Family Distinguished Professor in Engineering at Cornell. Two other authors are graduate students there. Should know English. It looks like nobody of the authors read the paper they wrote. Neither did the reviewers.
The reader may wonder how did I find those papers. There is the PubPeer website where any scientists can comment on any scientific paper. So, I went there to post a comment on a different topic. As usual I have read the recent comments by other users. One of them was on a nonsensical paper which had both "basketball" and "air pollution" in the title. When I read the abstract of that paper, I discovered that in addition it mentioned "Heterosexual Ellipse." That was probably a synonymization of "straight path." These days the journals check submitted papers for plagiarism. To avoid being caught the scientists run plagiarised text through synonymizers. The result is a weird text. This is, perhaps, how some of the aforementioned articles came to be. Another possibility is the use of machine translation which often produces weird text. Yet another possibility is that text editor offered to replace an unfamiliar word with something it knows. I recall that when I wrote one essay Microsoft Word suggested to replace the name of composer Cimarosa with "comatose." Anyway, I decided to search technical journals for the word "heterosexual" which is not supposed to be there. And found something.
The reader may wonder how such things could happen. To understand this, I suggest to read the other essays on this website. They will give you the relevant background and supply the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. I suggest to start with the article Forest manager gives a math talk - profs suspect nothing.
Mikhail Simkin
September 6, 2021
