61–70 of 363 posts
If journals retract, they lose reputation. Thus they have incentives to ignore the problems, which explains the authors results.
but mostly likely they'll never publish that author again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here, "random assignment" means randomly assigning half the participants to each of two bins, I think.
How do participants get assigned to the respective halves?
1. Shuffle the list of participants.
2. Put the front half of the list into one half of the trial, and the back half of the list into the other half.
Generalizing this to more than two groups is straightforward. This algorithm is mentioned sidethread, by sterlind, with the (meaningless) modification of splitting the list even-and-odd instead of front-and-back. As I mentioned there, you can only do this if the list of participants is fixed before the beginning of the study, which is not in general the case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is their story related to you knowing scientists?
I am simply providing a counter-example of academic integrity to make the point that one's personal experiences, good or bad, may not reflect what is generally true of academica/science.
I tried to contact the format student but also nothing. There were a few more similar instances before I became completely disillusioned and left the phd program after 4 years, totally burned out with little to show.
To this day I hate that lab and the whole institution. Rotten to the core.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if the person producing the output is not responsible for it really working, it almost certainly won't. Even innocently this will be the case with anything complex Indeed, there's a great example in the article itself, in a totally unrelated area: > I felt these journals generally did their best, and the slowness of the process likely comes from the bureaucracy of the process and the inexperience editors have with…
> these reasonable journals weren't able to use their retraction process even though they wanted to, because the process never gets used and therefore isn't in a usable state. Actually, this made me think about a journal purposefully running intentionally spurious papers, with a challenge to the readership to identify which paper was fake. If the system worked, that would cause every paper published in the journal to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dont worry about it. It becomes a trap and many of them loose their minds as them dig themselves into deeper and deeper holes not knowing what else to do. Source: shrink in the family at a univ counselling center. At the end of the day they are misguided people. Even though there is a high price, their function is to train the survival skills of the honest folk who rise up the food chain. And dont have any doubt they…
I don't particularly care about him per se (though i'm sorry to burst your model of society, from what I hear over my residual science network, I'm pretty sure he's oblivious or doesn't care), I'm a bay area dev, and I'm making enough money and have made good investments in friend's startups that my only regret is not having started sooner. Hopefully I'll be able to cash out with enough to do my own biotech, so I'm j…
Misguided/driven/ambitious people are always looking for shortcuts and they will find them. Its like dealing with mosquitos, cockroaches, weeds, software bugs and cancer. It never ends.
When people ask about historical scientific issues, like how did historical scientific consensus conclude the sun revolving around the earth. And it took Copernicus to right the wrongs.
Simply look at the kind of scientific shenanigans happening now, false results, outright fraud, huge reproducibility issues in scientific studies. And many scientific communities just going along with the shenanigans. Explains many things in science.
In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…
What about Editor's ethics or lack thereof? I got accepted in a Chinese-oriented journal (i.e. most of the Editorial Board were Chinese) - I am not just 'saying' this, I'm saying because the OP mentioned "it's a Chinese thing" over results and datasets, whatever, I digress. On the last revision round, the Editor told me that I was lacking some references, which he promptly send me. Turned out that 6 out 6 of his 'rec…
Edit: just to be clear: I didn't at the time read that as "submission tax". More of, trying to be helpful and using things they personally were familiar with. Most, if not all, of the extra references would make our paper better... If we weren't fighting that damned page limit, that is.
In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…
God damn, just this paragraph alone made me remember why I ran like hell after my undergrad even during the financial crisis of 2008's horrible job market and being up to my eyeballs in debt; I saw the politicking behind what it took just to get a department to give a nod to a tenured professor's peer reviewed paper.
It was fucking pathetic and I've never been more ashamed of my what would be my profession than that but it set the tone for what to expect and made me realize just how irreparably marred that system is. It was followed by a sense of dread that nothing I could do would ever change that and I turned down the offer to work in said professor's lab to carry things on into grad school (MS) and just worked as hard as possible to pay off my debts and pivot my Life entirely. I'd rather sweep and clean floors helping a small business grow into something real than ever go back to that despicable environment.
Academia is definitely a mind-prison, and a trap for so many brilliant minds that may not have ability or wherewithal to try their hand a startup or have the necessary paperwork (citizenship) to take on private sector work, which itself carries a ton of pitfalls.
There are some benefits to the University model but I really hope COVID disrupts the monopoly Universities have over this domain for good! Ed-tech really should be much bigger source of funding and development, but FAANG just keeps suckering in people that could otherwise do something actually useful for Society.
> What do you think he did? Nothing, of course. He kept on the talks circuit, still talking about how exceptional his discovery was, and to date there have been no retractions. He even won the NIH grad student of the year award.
> Oh. What happened to the grad student? He's a professor in the genomics department at UW.
He is literately the academic 'Big Head' character from Silicon Valley that every lab/department has. I'd speak of my own experiences further, nothing as bad as yours, but I really don't feel like ruining my evening any further.
> I am also from a molecular biology background and saw this often. We call these guys the "Golden Boys". They are super successful, but completely useless. If you still believe live is fair, wake up sunshine.
Same, I should have made the leap to Microbiology in JR year, but I just wanted to GTFO and even abandoned by double major (Biochemistry) work just to speed up the process.