11–20 of 22 posts
Prominent? Based on what? I've never heard of Jinggangshan University before. It's not even top 5 in Jiangxi province, where there ain't many universities.
Google says http://www.google.com/search?q=%E4%BA%95%E5%86%88%E5%B1%B1%E...
Results 1 - 10 of about 367,000 for 井冈山大学
It's not established until 2003.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with your assertion, due to the consequence of a similar series of faked results first reported on earlier this week. Essentially, people wasted 2 months of distributed computing time trying to use the data from a fake crystal structure. Unsurprisingly, these were unsuccessful. Hundreds of thousands of compute hours were wasted and people were diverted from making real discoveries because the structure was…
a similar series of faked results first reported on earlier this week Wait, is this a separate scandal? What's with all this bogus crystallography?
The results were certainly different but perhaps the lab is the same. I'll check when I'm not on my iPhone.
Anyone have an idea just how significant this is in the scheme of things?
As a rule this sort of fraud isn't. If the result is important, people will try to do work based on it and sooner or later figure out that the foundation is rotten and why. Most of the time the work isn't important, except to the "scientist" himself in accumulating published papers ("publish or perish"). This is one of the reasons there's no need to directly double check every scientific conclusion, instead you tend…
However, your conclusion doesn't follow for fields where experimental results are few and far between. Fraud would be much harder to detect in a field like astrophysics or econometrics. There simply isn't enough data, so rather than contradicting the fraudulent results, you will probably just average truth with lies.
Prominent? Based on what? I've never heard of Jinggangshan University before. It's not even top 5 in Jiangxi province, where there ain't many universities.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."
The original title was just "editorial," but adding the word "prominent" does sound like spin to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with your assertion, due to the consequence of a similar series of faked results first reported on earlier this week. Essentially, people wasted 2 months of distributed computing time trying to use the data from a fake crystal structure. Unsurprisingly, these were unsuccessful. Hundreds of thousands of compute hours were wasted and people were diverted from making real discoveries because the structure was…
We disagree on how huge of a setback it is, "how significant this is in the scheme of things" as the original question put it. A setback, yes. Huge for those who wasted their time? Maybe. But compare it to, say, Lysenkoism. That was a huge setback for Soviet biology.
When I was in university, I had a friend who had faked her thesis to get a Master's degree from a university in Beijing. She admitted to me that she had simply found an obscure English journal paper and translated it into Chinese. I wouldn't be surprised if this incident happened in the same atmosphere that existed at her school: new grad students who have grown accustomed to cheating on their way through undergrad,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with your assertion, due to the consequence of a similar series of faked results first reported on earlier this week. Essentially, people wasted 2 months of distributed computing time trying to use the data from a fake crystal structure. Unsurprisingly, these were unsuccessful. Hundreds of thousands of compute hours were wasted and people were diverted from making real discoveries because the structure was…
a similar series of faked results first reported on earlier this week Wait, is this a separate scandal? What's with all this bogus crystallography?
As such, they're way easier to falsify than papers in even really closely related fields. I've spent plenty of time pulling structures from ICSD and other databases populated off Acta Cryst; my PhD was in computational mineralogy - but a raw simulation isn't a publishable result in the way data hot off the diffractometer can be.
By the way, if anyone here gets the chance to visit a neutron source (eg Isis, isis.rl.ac.uk), take it! Amaaaazing machines.