MUScoop
MUScoop => The Superbar => Topic started by: MuggsyB on December 02, 2022, 10:59:15 AM
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He may have engaged in academic fraud in a number of scientific journals including modifying, copying, and altering images over a pretty lengthy period of time. Wow....just wow.
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Wow. Stanford has certainly had a number of events dent their reputation recently.
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After an investigation by the student newspaper too.
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If he did it he will be punished. As it should be.
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Wow. Stanford has certainly had a number of events dent their reputation recently.
Karma for the Lopez twins in 2008
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Tiger Woods is cutting back on golf. He is an alum. Done deal.
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He may have engaged in academic fraud in a number of scientific journals including modifying, copying, and altering images over a pretty lengthy period of time. Wow....just wow.
I'm someone extremely critical of academic fraud in any form, and well versed in such investigations.
It is definitely good that Stanford is doing an investigation, but I see a lot of smoke and pretty much no fire. He has been a prominent researcher for decades with an extremely impressive publication record.
They are looking into 4 articles amongst those. 3 of which, he previously identified minor issues with (such as those being investigated), reported them to the journals, who deemed the errors inconsequential so the publications remained. The journals then forgot to post a letter indicating the minor errors.
The 4th doesn't seem to have had the same filed.
None of the issues that have been found alter the story, and are either honest errors (almost assuredly by a student), or carelessness (also by a student), in manners that at the time no professor would have likely caught.
With as long and storied of a career he had, and the deep dives that were done looking into his publications, I'm a little surprised that they didn't find more minor instances like this (they've been identified more lately because of automated methods to check images).
Now, I still think this is a reasonable big deal because he is a university president, but to me it shows the exceedingly high bar of expectations for science. These are minor errors/carelessness likely by a trainee, the types that most people make a dozen times a day at there own job with zero consequence, but in science not seeing these types of errors, or being careless in this way can end your career and permanently ruin your reputation.
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None of the issues that have been found alter the story, and are either honest errors (almost assuredly by a student), or carelessness (also by a student), in manners that at the time no professor would have likely caught.
The quoted expert literally said it would alter results and it was a level of detail that was almost certainly intentional.
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The quoted expert literally said it would alter results and it was a level of detail that was almost certainly intentional.
The academic defending the academic.
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The quoted expert literally said it would alter results and it was a level of detail that was almost certainly intentional.
Which quoted expert? There have been a lot of experts looking at these, including a panel of experts for 3 of the articles in question, who found years ago that they did not significantly alter the overall results (as I said "Story" meaning the conclusions). The one expert that I've seen say otherwise, is not in expert in the actual field, but an expert in image manipulation, which is assessing that the manipulated image is part of the results so it affects the results, which is a change in meaning of the word "results" from what people care about (we mean the overall conclusions of the paper, e.g. overall conclusions or story).
Note, the remaining one, he was not a major author (an inner author), which means that the data in question may not even have come from his lab/research.
The academic defending the academic.
As I said it is good that Stanford is investigating this. If I was an administrator there, I'd have ordered an investigation. I'd also expect the it would result in a correction to the papers in question, and possibly a retraction, not because any part of the conclusions were incorrect, but rather because a replacement image is long gone.
I wouldn't call what I wrote a defense, but rather putting this into context. This is being played in some media reports as some major fraud, Muggsy whether intentional or not did something similar. From what has been presented so far, this is not major fraud. And shows the high bar for science integrity that even 20+ years later when technology to digitally inspect images emerges, the field goes through all old papers to see if anything is amiss, and no matter how inconsequential the possible alteration, they investigate and in some cases people are fired.
Imagine someone going over your entire work record, and the record of those you supervised for the past 20+ years looking for any possible mistakes, or mistakes you missed of your supervisees? How many errors would they find?