An interesting tweet

It's been eons since my last post. Could be due to the lack of interesting things I've run into, or my laziness to write them down. Probably more of the latter.

So earlier today an interesting tweet showed up on my Twitter.

@WileamYP Submit your abstract & present your research in Condensed Matter Physics-2015 http://t.co/Nc3xZv4JeX pic.twitter.com/81PTVnedeg
— James Taylor (@matterphysics) September 23, 2014

Hmm, something doesn't feel quite right here.

I tweet very rarely. I don't even check Twitter regularly. If not for the test notification Twitter sent to my phone, I wouldn't know of that tweet. The point is, I've been keeping a very "low profile" on Twitter. Well, except for my profile description, which proudly says "Condensed matter physics." So how on earth did I get that tweet?

Out of curiosity, I checked the attached link, which leads to the website for the "conference". Here's a screenshot:

So the web page includes a famous photograph (I recognized Einstein; he's in the center), blatantly taken from this page?!


Next, note the flag beside the site address. It's from a Firefox plugin called Flagfox, which displays the location of the web server based on its IP address.
Well, why would a conference to be held in the States serve its website from India?

The website address also sounds too generic to me. And further down below, where the presentation topics are listed, another out-of-place thing (which I highlighted in orange) shows up. In my opinion, the topics themselves are somewhat too broad, aren't they?

Then all of a sudden I remembered one of Prof. Terry's discourses, which can be read here (in Indonesian). There he mentions Jeffrey Beale's website, which keeps track of so-called "predatory" journal publishers.

Of course, I headed straight there to check if the host for this "conference" is included in the list. And it is. Cukup tau aja. 

Thanks to the Flagfox team for a wonderful piece of software. And thanks to Prof. Terry for writing the aforementioned article; it has helped me very much today.

And so that concludes my logfile today. I'll write again when anything interesting comes up.