Sokal Hoax reborn..

...this time with BS health science.

//Because the whole thing was a bullshit hoax put on by a journalist to make the point that, at least when it comes to studies around diet and health, the journals and the media the reports on their papers are largely full of crap. Go read that entire thing, because it's absolutely fascinating, but I'll happily give you the truncated version. John Bohannon, who has a Ph.D in molecular biology of bacteria and is also a journalist, conspired with a German reporter, Peter Onneken, to see how badly they could fool the media to create BS headlines. They did this by turning John Bohannon into Johannes Bohannon (obviously) and creating a website for The Institute of Diet and Health, which isn't actually a thing. Then they conducted a very real study with three groups: 1 group eating a low-carb diet, 1 group eating their regular diet, and 1 group eating a low-carb diet and a 1.5oz bar of dark chocolate daily. After running background on the groups, conducting blood tests to correct for disease and eating disorders, and hiring a German doctor and statistician to perform the study, away they went. The results?
Onneken then turned to his friend Alex Droste-Haars, a financial analyst, to crunch the numbers. One beer-fueled weekend later and... jackpot! Both of the treatment groups lost about 5 pounds over the course of the study, while the control group’s average body weight fluctuated up and down around zero. But the people on the low-carb diet plus chocolate? They lost weight 10 percent faster. Not only was that difference statistically significant, but the chocolate group had better cholesterol readings and higher scores on the well-being survey.

Bam, results! Not just results, but results the media would absolutely love to sink their idiotic teeth into. The problem? Well, the method for running the entire study was bullshit.
Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a “statistically significant” result. Our study included 18 different measurements—weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc.—from 15 people. (One subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false positives.

Think of the measurements as lottery tickets. Each one has a small chance of paying off in the form of a “significant” result that we can spin a story around and sell to the media. The more tickets you buy, the more likely you are to win. We didn’t know exactly what would pan out—the headline could have been that chocolate improves sleep or lowers blood pressure—but we knew our chances of getting at least one “statistically significant” result were pretty good.

Bohannon goes into some of the gory math, and it really is fun to read, but this is pretty easy to understand. With a small enough sample size and testing for as wide a range of results and factors as possible, you absolutely expect to find greater variance than if your study was testing for less factors or had a higher sample size. It's simple: people are different and testing less people makes those difference statistically appear to be more significant. //

Be skeptical, even about "sciency" things.

Fraudulent science?

Used to influence politics?

Incredible!

Data Faked In Study About Gay People Changing Voters’ Minds

A study claiming that gay people advocating same-sex marriage can change voters’ minds has been retracted due to fraud.

The study was published last December in Science, and received lots of media attention. It found that a 20-minute, one-on-one conversation with a gay political canvasser could steer voters in favor of same-sex marriage. Not only that, but these changed opinions lasted for at least a year and influenced other people in the voter’s household, the study found.

Donald Green, the lead author on the study, retracted it on Tuesday shortly after learning that his co-author, UCLA graduate student Michael LaCour, had faked the results.

“I am deeply embarrassed by this turn of events and apologize to the editors, reviewers, and readers of Science,” Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University, said in his retraction letter to the journal, as posted on theRetraction Watch blog.

LaCour has not responded to requests for comment from BuzzFeed News, but tweeted this Wednesday morning:

Science is self-correcting...

...in the same way that bank fraud is self-correcting.

//The narrative seems similar to that in the growing number of cases of peer review manipulation we’ve seen recently. What tipped off the editor was minor spelling mistakes in the reviewers’ names, and odd non-institutional email addresses that were often changed once reviews had been submitted, in an apparent attempt to cover the fakers’ tracks. Those “reviewers” had turned in reports across several journals, spanning several subjects.

It would seem that a third party, perhaps marketing services helping authors have papers accepted, was involved//

Interesting.

For all you science-worshippers, check out Retraction Watch, where yesterday's unassailable proofs become fodder for a qui tam action.

Global Warming and Corruption in Science

This is from 2010, but I'm posting it because I keep having to demonstrate that, yes, scientists will lie.

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

Chilling error: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrongly asserted that glaciers in the Himalayas would melt by 2035

Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.//

Science Fraud

Researcher fakes AIDS research results for $19 million, and is penalized by not being allowed to re-apply for funding for three whole years.

An Iowa State University professor resigned after admitting he falsely claimed rabbit blood could be turned into a vaccine for the AIDS virus.

Dr. Dong-Pyou Han spiked a clinical test sample with healthy human blood to make it appear that the rabbit serum produced disease-fighting antibodies, officials said.

The bogus findings helped Han’s team obtain $19 million in research grants from the National Institutes of Health, said James Bradac, who oversees the institutes’ AIDS research.

The remarkable findings were reported in scientific journals but raised suspicions when other researchers could not duplicate Han’s results.

The NIH uncovered the scam when it checked the rabbit serum at a lab and found the human antibodies.

Han resigned from his university post as an assistant professor of biomedical studies  in October. His case came to light this week when it was reported in the Federal Register.

Han agreed last month not to seek government contracts for three years, the register said.

Not the Standard Model of Science.

This article outlines that science may not be as "self-correcting' as we have been led to believe.

Bad news for science-worshippers...


...more fraud in science

One in twelve Belgian medical scientists admits having “made up and/or massaged data”: Survey

with 8 comments

A recently released survey of Belgian scientists suggests that Flemish medical researchers admit to having made up or massaged data more often than their counterparts around their world.

The survey, by the Dutch science magazine Eos with the help of Joeri Tijdink, of VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, and the Pascal Decroos Fund for Investigative Journalism, found that

Of the 315 participating scientists, four (1.3%) admit to having made up data at least once in the last three years. If what they say is true, this probably concerns fraud that is still undiscovered. 23 respondents (7.3%) admit to having selectively removed data or results to make research match a hypothesis, so-called ‘data massaging’. Overall, about 8% of the Flemish medical scientists admits to recently having made up and/or massaged data.

Eos compares those figures to those in a meta-analysis by Daniele Fanelli that we often quote, and finds that the Flanders survey paints a worse picture than other studies. Fanelli’s study found that about 2% of scientists in a number of disciplines around the world admitted to faking or massaging data, and that

an average of 14% of the respondents had noticed made up or manipulated data in colleagues’ research. Here, too, Flemish figures are much higher: 47% has witnessed such practices in their direct surroundings or heard about them firsthand.

The survey also tried to pinpoint the reasons for fraud, and pressure to publish came out on top. Read the whole piece here.

How much of science is a poker game where everyone is afraid to call?

Peer-reviewed mathematics journal accepts paper published by a computer-generated nonsense phrase generator.

When Alan Sokal tricked Social Text into publishing a nonsensical parody of postmodernist criticism, he thought the journal’s failure to spot that the article was a hoax revealed a shocking lack of intellectual rigour. John Sturrock, writing about it in the LRB, noted that Social Text exists in a different realm of discourse from Nature and that Sokal’s contribution, for all its faults, was a ‘jauntily expressed’ piece of ‘extreme provocation’, and as Sokal knew, the kind of thing that Social Text existed to promote. Well yes, but, as legions of letter writers responded, don’t things you publish sort of have to make sense?

Last month That’s Mathematics! reported another landmark event in the history of academic publishing. A paper by Marcie Rathke of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople had been provisionally accepted for publication in Advances in Pure Mathematics. ‘Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and Problems in Applied Formal PDE’ concludes...

...Baffled? You should be. Each of these sentences contains mathematical nouns linked by the verbs mathematicians use, but the sentences scarcely connect with each other. The paper was created using Mathgen, an online random maths paper generator. Mathgen has a set of rules that define how papers are arranged in sections and what kinds of sentence make up a section and how those sentences are made up from different categories of technical and non-technical words. It creates beautifully formatted papers with the conventional structure, complete with equations and citations but, alas, totally devoid of meaning. Nate Eldredge – the blogger behind That’s Mathematics! – wrote Mathgen by adapting SCIgen, which does something similar for computer science. Papers generated by SCIgen have been accepted for publication at academic conferences and journals that claim to carry out peer review.

There is this hopeful note of sanity:

Neither Marcie Rathke nor the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople is willing to pay the ‘processing charges’ levied by Advances in Pure Mathematics, so we will never know if the work would actually have made it to publication. Academic journals depend on peer review to ensure the rigour and value of submissions. The less prestigious the journal, the harder it is to find competent reviewers and the lower they will have to set the threshold, until at some point we arrive at, essentially, accept-all-comers vanity publishing. The murkier the business model and the lower the standards outside the mainstream, the harder it is for academics to challenge the status of the prestige journals, locking academics into the situation Glen Newey describes.

More Fraud in Science.

From Boston.com:

Marc Hauser, a prolific scientist and popular psychology professor who last summer resigned from Harvard University, had fabricated data, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and described how studies were conducted in factually incorrect ways, according to the findings of a federal research oversight agency posted online Wednesday.

The report provides the greatest insight yet into the problems that triggered a three-year internal university investigation that concluded in 2010 that Hauser, a star professor and public intellectual, had committed eight instances of scientific misconduct. The document, which will be published in the Federal Register Thursday, found six cases in which Hauser engaged in research misconduct in work supported by the National Institutes of Health. One paper was retracted and two were corrected, and other problems were found in unpublished work.

Although Hauser “neither admits nor denies committing research misconduct,” he does, the report states, accept that federal authorities “found evidence of research misconduct.”

In a statement, Hauser described the scrutiny of the past five years as a “long and painful period” and apologized to all who had been burdened by the investigation.

“Although I have fundamental differences with some of the findings,” Hauser wrote, “I acknowledge that I made mistakes. ... I let important details get away from my control, and as head of the lab, I take responsibility for all errors made within the lab, whether or not I was directly involved.”

Hauser agreed to a number of restrictions for three years, including excluding himself from serving as an advisor to the US Public Health Service, agreeing to have his work supervised if it is supported by federal funding, and having an institution vouch for the validity of any research supported by such grants.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Hauser now works at the Alternative Education Program at Cape Cod Collaborative, providing educational opportunities for at-risk youth.

“I am relieved that this investigation is now complete, allowing me to turn my full energy to the next chapter of my career,” Hauser wrote. “I look forward to making new contributions to human welfare, education, and the role of scientific knowledge in understanding human nature.”

The finding outlines a wide gamut of unethical scientific practices, which Harvard investigators detailed in a confidential document forwarded to the federal Office of Research Integrity, an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency also conducted its own additional analysis, according to the finding.

“What is the new information are the details of how many monkeys, or how many data points appear to have been manipulated or fabricated,” said Gerry Altmann, the editor of the journal Cognition and a psychology professor at the University of York said in an interview after reading the report Wednesday. “I don’t know what would happen if they were to explore more than the three studies that were published,” and the other unpublished papers mentioned in the report.

The report describes research misconduct in work supported by four National Institutes of Health grants, including scientific papers that were published, submitted for publication, and experiments that were never published. According to the federal findings:

-Hauser fabricated data in a 2002 Cognition paper that was later retracted, which examined monkeys’ ability to learn patterns of syllables. He never exposed monkeys to a particular sound pattern described in the experiment, despite reporting the results in a graph.

-In two experiments, researchers measured monkeys’ responses to patterns of consonants and vowels, a process called “coding” their behavior. Hauser falsified the coding, causing the results to pass a statistical test used to ensure that a particular finding was not just a chance result. Colleagues coding the same experiments came up with different results. Hauser “acknowledged to his collaborators that he miscoded some of the trials and that the study failed to provide support for the initial hypothesis,” the report said.

-A paper examining monkeys’ abilities to learn grammatical patterns included false descriptions of how the monkeys’ behavior was coded, “leading to a false proportion or number of animals showing a favorable response,” the findings stated. In an early version of the paper, he falsely reported that all 16 monkeys responded more strongly to an ungrammatical pattern than a grammatical one. Records reviewed by investigators found that one monkey responded in the opposite way and another responded equally. Hauser claimed that the behavior was coded by three scientists, when in fact he was the only one who measured their behavior. Then, when the manuscript was revised, he provided a false numerical description of the extent of agreement among multiple observers in coding behavior, despite being the only observer. All issues were corrected before publication.

-In a published experiment that examined monkeys’ responses to gestures, Hauser incorrectly reported results and also falsely said all trials were videotaped, when only 30 out of 40 were found for one trial. Hauser “was not responsible for the coding, analyses, or archiving but takes full responsibility for the falsifications reported in the published paper,” the report said. The experiments were later repeated, confirming the results.

-In another published experiment, the primates were identified with natural markings, tattoos, or ear notches to avoid re-testing the same animal, but only half the animals could be distinguished with such measures. The experiment was repeated and published, upholding the original finding.

-After initially coding rhesus monkeys’ responses to strings of sounds, Hauser and a research assistant discovered a problem with the coding procedures. Hauser recoded the behaviors, and the new coding differed in 36 cases from the original, nearly all of them in a way that would produce a result that was significant. Hauser “subsequently acknowledged to his collaborators that his coding was incorrect and that the study failed to provide support for the initial hypothesis,” the report said.

And:

Altmann said that Hauser had made positive contributions to his field, but that the shortcuts described in his experiments were unacceptable. Informally, he said, the field now recognizes some of his findings -- such as the one that was retracted from the journal Cognition in 2010 -- as unlikely to be successfully repeated, but no formal investigation is planned of his vast body of work. In that 2002 Cognition paper, Hauser and colleagues had found that cotton-top tamarin monkeys have the ability to learn patterns of syllables, a skill that had been seen in infants that was thought to play a role in the ability to learn language.

Hauser probed the evolutionary roots of human abilities such as language and studied whether morality was innate or learned -- questions that piqued the interest not only of scientists but of the general public. He wrote popular books and his work was frequently featured in the media. He was known for his interdisciplinary approach, running a laboratory with cotton-top tamarin monkeys but also collaborating with colleagues who studied infants and posing moral conundrums to people over the Internet.

How to commit science fraud.

Percolator examines the fraudulent career of Dutch social scientist Diederick Stapel, who was succesful at hoodwinking his fellow professors until younger researchers blew the whistle.

What's interesting is that there is now an effort to study how much of published social science research is "bunk."

If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous—particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an article in 2008 in any of these three journals: Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, or the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. The project is part of Open Science Framework, a group interested in scientific values, and its stated mission is to “estimate the reproducibility of a sample of studies from the scientific literature.” This is a more polite way of saying “We want to see how much of what gets published turns out to be bunk.”

Scientific Fraud.

Stephen Gould was so invested in proving that science had been misused for racism that he fabricated data.

The late scientific icon, Stephen Jay Gould, botched and perhaps faked his critique of a racist 19th-Century scientist's skull collection, suggests a second look at his efforts

In a 1978 Science paper, Gould (1941 - 2002) , reported that the Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), "a prominent Philadelphia physician," had mis-measured the cranial capacities of his 1,000-skull "American Golgotha" collection gathered from around the world, to suit his racist beliefs. The finding led to one of Gould's best-known books, The Mismeasure of Man, a critique of scientific racism.


"Morton is now viewed as a canonical example of scientific misconduct. But did Morton really fudge his data?," asks a PLoS Biology study led by anthropologist Jason Lewis of Stanford University. "Are studies of human variation inevitably biased, as per Gould, or are objective accounts attainable, as Morton attempted?"

So, the study team remeasured the skulls collected by Morton, now owned largely by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia.

Overall, they find, Morton did make mistakes in measuring skull capacity (he first stuffed them with seeds, and later lead shot to measure their brain size). But the mistakes were random. The random mistakes didn't favor any racial theory of larger brain sizes for white people over others.

"Given how long Gould's work has been criticized in this arena, I'm a little surprised that it took this long for the work to be done to write this article," says the University of Texas's David Prindle, author of Stephen Jay Gould and the Politics of Evolution. "People who dislike Gould's work will likely go on disliking him even more after this article. People who are fans of his writing will likely go on supporting his views."

And:

What's more, the researchers found Gould made some mistakes in his re-analysis of Morton. "Our analysis of Gould's claims reveals that most of Gould's criticisms are poorly supported or falsified," they conclude:

Samuel George Morton, in the hands of Stephen Jay Gould, has served for 30 years as a textbook example of scientific misconduct. The Morton case was used by Gould as the main support for his contention that ''unconscious or dimly perceived finagling is probably endemic in science, since scientists are human beings rooted in cultural contexts, not automatons directed toward external truth''. This view has since achieved substantial popularity in ''science studies''. But our results falsify Gould's hypothesis that Morton manipulated his data to conform with his a priori views. The data on cranial capacity gathered by Morton are generally reliable, and he reported them fully. Overall, we find that Morton's initial reputation as the objectivist of his era was well-deserved.