In a graduate product design class I took, our semester project was to design and build and make cost estimates for development of an IOT product. "Internet of things" wasn't a phrase yet, but that's what you'd call it today. We had to incorporate these ultra low power sensor/processor things the professor had his name on and he was a big promoter of. At the beginning of the semester his grad assistant presented her invention from a previous year, which she won awards for and had presented and written about and was part of her PhD work. It was a home health monitoring device and she showed plots of a month of data from sampling herself (pointing out she was the only woman on her project). It was very inspiring and I was very impressed by her. Jump to mid-semester, I randomly have a team of MBA students and me; the three of them were going to do all of the writing and I just had to do all of the engineering by myself (yay). I'm battling in the lab for hours trying to get the damn thing to read a voltage. I keep putting time of the GA's calendar for help, and she keeps blowing me off or passing me in the hall and saying "ummm maybe try this?" or she'd give me another device to see if the last was defective. In principle, she should have been able to point out whatever I was doing wrong in 15minutes or less, but weeks of this avoidance went on. Eventually, after asking everyone in the department where she was and letting people know I was trying to meet with her and just sitting at her desk at our appointed time for over an hour waiting, she caught me in a hall, conspicuously looked both ways to see that nobody was around, and said "look, the things don't work. They've never worked. My device never worked. I made up the plots based on what they theoretically should have been if the product worked. I'm grading the projects. Just focus about the write-up of the business plan." So my work was done. And at the end of the semester, nobody's product worked, but most people acted like theirs did. Ours obviously didn't work, but we made up some shit about it being a mock-up because we didn't have the budget for some of the components. ... A professional photographer took shots of my team that were used in promotional material for the school.
I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
271–280 of 363 posts
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
> how can we achieve the same in healthcare, that is let outsiders contribute and advance the state of the art? The Biohacking community is actually really adept, and had made a lot of progress in making Science accessible, prior to COVID you had teams already working together across continents and different time zones. So when someone like Josiah Zayner wanted to tackle a COVID vaccination trial on himself and other…
Josiah's videos about demystifying the COVID vaccine all got taken down, then the entire channel got shut down. Super disappointing move by YouTube. It was definitely one of my favorite channels for science education.
(squinting suspiciously) ... exactly why did they get taken down? The Algorithm has a well-earned reputation for being capricious, but there's also a ton of good-sounding bullshit out there.
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#273Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is medical research shit science?
At least my research is. Mainly due to hierarchical pressure. And from what I see around me, most medical papers must be read with a healthy dose of skepticism. I've personally witnessed incredible feats of dishonesty that I won't describe here. There are multiple reasons degrading research quality. An important one is spreadsheet incompetence. Another one is that medical research goes hand in hand with academic achi…
I'm a postdoc at a medical school, and this hasn't been my experience. At least in our setup, clinical data tends to be channeled into a collaboration with a computational lab who are better stewards of data handling. Is there cherry picking and over selling the results? Sure. Outright dishonesty is something I have yet to see in my current institution (I did see a fair deal of fudging in my graduate institute, though)
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#275You are not fighting science, you are fighting politics. China obviously wants to forbid violent movies and games for minors, so they come up with these fantasy studies. Very similar phenomenons also just happened in the west, where news and politics wanted to suppress critical scientists. News was stronger. You also have to fight corruption all the time. Paid studies are constantly published to support some companie…
Makes sense overall, but why would they care about getting it published in an English-language Western journal? If they just want to convince their own people they can publish it in state-owned media, and it's not a democracy so it's not like they really need to convince anyone.
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#276How do we prevent fraud? Is there a way to change the incentives? Statistical analysis of results to detect bogus numbers? Only cite research that has been independently replicated and apply a "provisional" label to the first results? Then only cite the duplicating lab and not the first one, so the incentive is there for doing the grunt work?
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#277In 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…
> The epilog is that after a decade of floundering I realized that even though I am pretty good at science, I was no good at playing academic politics and quit the pursuit; I drove for lyft/uber for a bit, and now I'm a backend dev.
I'm really sorry. It seems a lot of people are hit by a wall of cruelty. More is less in our lives.
Have you thought of joining some biohacklab to keep enjoying your talent and curiosity on your original field ?
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#278I think there should be a bounty for revealing the truth
Was just thinking that if sci-hub were more like a git repo or wiki with editors and peer comments, it would add a great deal of transparency, and pretty much destroy this anti-pattern. FOSS still has a lot of vulnerabilities, but it has also caught a lot of vulnerabilities and more people know what to look for. Perhaps this is why there is so much resistance to sci-hub, because there are so many compromised editors…
sci-hub has not tried to move anything in that direction.
I would guess that opposition to sci-hub is mainly because it could reduce barriers to entry, and de-value traditional journals. For established researchers the high level of gatekeeping caused by journals is in their favor, since they know how to play the game, and many other want-to-be-researchers do not.
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem isn't that such people are getting away with unearned good feelings and so the fact that some may feel bad later isn't a solution or a reason not to worry. The problem is that they are wasting scientific resources (e.g. the time of the careful intern trying to reproduce flawed results), polluting research by publishing misleading findings, and discouraging legitimate research.
The problem is that there is no working system in place that makes such abuses of scientific truth visible. We would need to get away from inefficient communication via publications and set a system in place that tracks findings in detail, and whether they can be replicated first. But there is no willingness to do so after the US of A deeply harmed the scientific mission and academics by introducing infuriatingly dum…
> But there is no willingness to do so after the US of A deeply harmed the scientific mission and academics by introducing infuriatingly dumb economical incentives into science.
What are you referring to here?
Re: I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?
#280We are dealing with 5+ papers that are fraudulent and another 5+ newer papers that are most likely fraudulent, too. That is, there have been 20, 25+ reviewers looking at those papers. Their job was to carefully read them and double check the numbers. All of them gave those papers a pass. I am at a loss here. The authors' behaviour is outrageous, but this story is also about a broken reviewing process, partly due to w…
^ This exactly! "Peer-reviewed" by whom?...
Journals typically list their referees per issue, but they do not say who reviewed which paper.