Never heard of the journal so can’t comment on it specifically, but there are many journals that will publish literally anything (several good studies publishing AI-generated gibberish and getting past peer review even before LLMs were good).
Discussion
While my instinct is to just accept your superiority of opinion over mine in situations like this…
Gotta say though you haven’t like demonstrated your conclusion - just ad hominem’d the claim as “numerological gibberish” and “nonsense” without convincing me or logically explaining why I should admit I was wrong in giving this credence 🤷‍♂️
Happy to obviously if shown why, but without that I consider your retort mid and tepid.
Minor point, no ad hominem here, I don’t know nor bother to look up the author and didn’t make any claims relating to the author at all :).
But, indeed, I didn’t back it to because I don’t understand it at all - my point is that the writing here doesn’t make a cohesive argument, I can’t understand what this “algorithm” is nor what it does, and the author doesn’t actually seem to have any conclusion in that respect either (and algorithm isn’t really the right word here anyway). More importantly even if there’s an “algorithm” (aka pattern), there’s plenty of reasons why ID numbers would follow a pattern which are process based rather than nefarious. They talk about skipped numbers in the statewide database but don’t argue what that implies (and it could mean any number of things - partitioning by area, updates causing fresh ids to be issued, etc).
If theres something here, the author is pretty bad at communicating it, and absent an argument I can understand I’m not really motivated to go try to replicate their results…I don’t have time.
Journals are trash, free markets are signal. If ya figure something out, put it to use.