Science journal mistakenly advertises "hot, young housewives"

[Greji]

Eminent scientific journal gets hit for sex


Chinese 'classical poem' was brothel ad

This is fucking classic! I love it.... Good thing they consulted with a resident specialist before they published...

[Zeth3D]

That is epic

[hundefar]

Linguist blog "Language Log" has the details on this story:

Much of what actually occurred is reported by Christopher Schrader ("Jadefrauen für Max Planck") in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Nr. 288, Dec. 11, 2008, page 16). Christina Beck from the MPF obtained the Chinese text as a picture from the "Fotoagentur Visum," which is a well established agency located in Hamburg. The picture had been found under the search entry "chinesische Schriftzeichen," but when I checked last week, it was no longer there. According to my sources, what MPF did was apparently to choose a text simply for "aesthetical reasons," a matter of pure exoticism.

Now, here is the crucial point: MPF did show the text to a female "Sinologist," and I know the name of the person who is said to have looked at it before publication, but I will not reveal who she was because nothing would be gained by further embarrassing her. I shall mention only that the word "Sinologin" in German must not mean exactly the same thing that "Sinologist" does in English, namely, an accomplished philologist who specializes in Chinese, especially from earlier periods (at least that is how I have always understood it). Rather, a Sinologin might refer to someone who only knows a year or two of Modern Mandarin. This, in fact, is the case in the present instance, where the person in question is a scientist who happens to know some Chinese.

If a trick was intentionally played on anyone, it was by the photographer who supplied Visum with a salacious text without warning them about its contents. It is clear that Visum is not in the business of checking the content of the words in the photographs that they market to their customers, but offer such images only for visual qualities. I wrote to as many people as I could at Visum to find out who sold them the photograph with the text that ended up on the front cover of MPF. So far, they have not responded to my inquiries.

Of course, none of this would have happened if MPF had done the sensible thing and sought the advice of some of the real Sinologists who work in, for example, the History of Science Institute at MPI. I know a couple of them (Dagmar Schäfer and Martina Siebert) who are very sharp and have excellent Chinese reading skills; they would never have been hoodwinked into thinking that such a sloppy advertisement was a classical poem.

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