Off The Record: Time Stands Still for The Daily Galaxy

Oh peachy! I was having a browse through the blogs just now and I stumbled across an interestingly titled article called New Theory Nixes “Dark Energy”: Says Time is Disappearing from the Universe. This is going to be good! I mused.

I really enjoy the Dark Energy debate. On so many levels, invoking Dark Energy as a possible answer to the rapid expansion of the Universe in the infinitesimally short moments after the Big Bang seems like a logical notion. There has to be a force acting in the reverse to gravity, it’s the only way we can explain how our Universe is expanding now.

However, like the Pluto debate, there’s a lot of anger in the opposing wings. The reasons why the IAU would choose to demote the dinky plutoid seems like planetary blasphemy to many (although, personally, the IAU could call Pluto an asteroid and I doubt my blood would boil too much). Mention Dark Energy, and you can expect the “that’s not science, that’s nonsense!” argument to echo too.

Dark Energy, in all honesty, is a tough theory to argue, but cosmologists have formulated this theory based on a collection of evidence from a range of sources. Until a better idea comes around, Dark Energy will remain as some invisible force that’s messing with our cosmos.

But hold on, what’s this article about time disappearing? There IS an alternative theory, and The Daily Galaxy has the scoop! Let’s have a read.

Oh… but what’s this? There’s no links to external sources… oh yes there is, they’re at the bottom — not hyperlinked, just printed. OK, no biggie, would be nice to link to the source material you are using, but hey, we can’t all be the world’s best bloggers can we.

Hmmm… that’s strange. Two of the referenced sources are over two years old, and the other no longer exists. In fact, I remember this research, I read about it ages ago. This isn’t new research. In fact, this isn’t a new article, it is an exact copy of an article written by Rebecca Sato, posted by The Daily Galaxy on January 3rd, 2008: Is Time Literally Slowing Down and Disappearing From the Universe?

So basically, The Daily Galaxy is recycling its own articles. Why? I’m not too sure, but I’m thinking the Dark Energy debate is still pretty lively; it’s no bad thing to be publishing articles about this subject around now. And there was me thinking The Daily Galaxy was a reputable source of science writing that doesn’t stoop to misleading tricks to boost traffic–

Hold on, they’ve done this before. Oh, and again… and again.

Please, not again!

In actuality, this is a new twist on an old technique used by the site to squeeze as much traffic out of the web as possible. In the past, they’ve re-published old articles as “Daily Galaxy Classics.” Obviously that didn’t work, so now they pretend that old news is just as good as new news (and their audience won’t notice). Genius.

If you read The Daily Galaxy, check their sources. Also, do the famous teacher-plagiarism-Google trick on each of the Daily Galaxy articles you see (copying and pasting a section of text — paragraph-length — into Google). If it’s a unique article, you’ll just have that article indexed. If not, you’ll see that article, plus an old Daily Galaxy article (from the “archives”) and every other site that linked back to the old article.

I’m sorry Daily Galaxy, but misleading your own readers just ain’t cricket.