Category Archives: Current events

Pseudonymity and Google.

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In case you haven’t been following recent developments with the much-hyped Google+ (hailed by social media mavens as in position to replace both Facebook and Twitter), you may not have heard the news (e.g., in the linked ZDnet article by Violet Blue) that Google unceremoniously deleted “[a] striking number of Google+ accounts”, many apparently owing to the requirement that people with Google+ accounts must be registered under their “real names”.

A follow-up from Violet Blue notes that the real-name policy is not being enforced uniformly (e.g., Lady Gaga’s profile is still intact), and that the disabling of accounts that seems to have started July 22 or so was notable in that there were no notifications sent to users ahead of time that their accounts would be disabled (or why). Moreover, there seem to be at least a few cases where people deemed out of compliance with the real-name policy loss access not only to Google+ but also to other Google products like Gmail and Google Docs.

There are plenty of posts kicking around the blogosphere in response to this, pointing out legitimate reasons people might have for not using their “real name” online. (In the past, I wrote such a post myself.) You should definitely read what SciCurious has to say on the matter, since she explains it very persuasively.

There are those who argue that a real-name policy is the only effective deterrent to bad online behavior, but I have yet to see convincing evidence that this is so. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better citizen of the blogosphere than SciCurious, and “SciCurious” is not the name on her birth certificate or driver’s license. However, I’d argue that “SciCurious” is her real name in the blogosphere, given that it is connected to a vast catalog of blog posts, comments, interviews, and other traces that convey a reliable picture of the kind of person she is. Meanwhile, there are people using their legal names online who feel free to encourage violence against others. Is it more civil because they’re not using pseudonyms to applaud car-bombs?

Google, being a private company, is of course free to set its own terms of service (although enforcing them consistently would be preferable). That means it can set the rules to require people who want the service to sign up using their legal names. However, unless they are going to require that you submit documentation to verify that the name you are using is your legal name (as, apparently they have from some folks trying to get their Google+ accounts back) it strikes me that the safest default assumption is that everyone is signing up with an assumed name. How do you know that Paul Butterfield is Paul Butterfield if he’s not scanning his passport for you, or that Janet D. Stemwedel isn’t a totally made-up name?

The truth is, you don’t.

And if Google wants to get so far into its users’ business that they do know who we all officially are, that’s going to be enough of an overreach that a bunch of people drift off to Yahoo or Hotmail or some other company that isn’t quite so desperate for a total information dossier.

All of this is disappointing, since Google+ looks like it might be a spiffy little product. But if it can’t get out of beta without Google burning through the good reputation it had with netizens, pseudonymous or not, who were most likely to embrace it, Google+ may have all the success and longevity of Google Buzz and Google Wave.

A modest proposal to Amazon.com or California big-box outlets.

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… whichever can muster a shred of corporate social responsibility.

As has been noted elsewhere, Amazon.com is put out that states are asking it to collect sales tax on online purchases. You may have had occasion to notice that most states are still experiencing major economic difficulties. Especially given major anti-tax sentiments among lawmakers, the states are relying on sales taxes for an ever increasing proportion of state revenue.

Yes, sales taxes are regressive, and tend to hit the poor more heavily than the rich. But my guess is that some non-negligible proportion of Californians making online purchases with Amazon are living comfortably above the poverty line.

Amazon.com is so committed to not collecting California sales tax that it is prepared to spend several buckets of money to get a measure on the ballot to free it from having to collect the sales tax.

Meanwhile, word on the streets is that the brick-and-mortar big-box retailers that are Amazon’s biggest competition here — who, naturally, collect sales tax on purchases — are prepared to spend their own buckets of money to urge a “no” vote on the ballot measure.

I offer this proposal in the hopes of being able to dodge yet another situation where we’re calling for a plague on both your houses.

Amazon:
The state of California needs that sales tax revenue at the moment, surely more than Jeff Bezos needs it. California consumers (at least the ones who still have disposable income to spend) are sold on the convenience you offer and the wide range of goods you sell. They happily pay sales tax on online purchases they make with other retailers. You won’t lose them by collecting sales tax, at least, not too many of them.

However, you may lose a bunch of them if you pour lots of money into a ballot measure. The whole governing-by-ballot-measure thing has gotten pretty tired, and it’s expensive, and we don’t love it when big corporations buy all that commercial time to lie to us about our best interests.

So, why not collect that sales tax and look like a benevolent corporate entity rather than greed made flesh (or whatever the cyber-retail equivalent of “flesh” might be)? Heck, you could even just meet us halfway and create a sales tax opt-in toggle for California consumers who would like to avail themselves of Amazon’s selection and convenience without feeling like greedhead-supporting scumbags?

Big-box retailers in California:
I get where you’re coming from here. You’re not wrong that Amazon gets an unfair advantage by dodging collecting California sales tax. And undoubtedly the Amazon-bankrolled ballot measure will be supported by all sorts of misleading (and self-serving) claims that you’ll want to counter.

But this is a golden opportunity to be the less evil of corporate entities here. That might reward you with dividends, whether from California consumers, or communities who make zoning decisions, or lawmakers, down the road.

Why not take that money that you’re prepared to spend to defeat the get-Amazon-out-of-sales-tax-collection ballot measure and use it to create jobs in California communities?

I reckon that embarking on such an unorthodox move would get you all sorts of free publicity from reporters on the economic and political beats, among others. Probably some bloggers would talk it up, too.

The California budget is broken enough that we need every dollar we can get to support crumbling infrastructure, essential services to the poor and the sick, little things like education. This is not an auspicious time to be pouring money into fighting about whether Amazon.com can keep stiffing California. The corporate entity that steps away from the expensive game of chicken and uses its power and money for good may end up winning lots goodwill from California consumers — goodwill that carries over to better economic times (assuming someday we’ll have those) when people have more money to spend and want to feel good about where they’re spending it.

On the other hand, both sides can stay the course and help Californians feel better about pulling back from consumer culture.

Harvard Psych department may have a job opening.

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… because Marc Hauser has resigned his faculty position, effective August 1.

You may recall, from our earlier discussions of Hauser (here, here, here, and here), that some of his papers were retracted because they drew conclusions that weren’t supported by the data … and then it emerged that maybe the data didn’t support the conclusions on account of scientific misconduct (rather than honest mistakes). Harvard mounted an inquiry. Hauser took a leave of absence from his position while the inquiry was ongoing. Harvard found Hauser “solely responsible, after a thorough investigation by a faculty member investigating committee, for eight instances of scientific misconduct under FAS standards.” In February, Hauser’s colleagues in the Psychology Department voted against allowing him to return to the classroom in the Fall. Meanwhile, since Hauser’s research was supported by grants from federal funding agencies, the Office of Research Integrity is thought to be in the midst of its own investigation of Hauser’s scientific conduct.

So perhaps Hauser’s resignation was to be expected (although it’s not too hard to come up with examples of faculty who were at least very close to scientific fraudsters — close enough to be enabling the fraud — who are still happily ensconced in their Ivy League institutions).

From Carolyn Y. Johnson at the Boston Globe:

“While on leave over the past year, I have begun doing some extremely interesting and rewarding work focusing on the educational needs of at-risk teenagers. I have also been offered some exciting opportunities in the private sector,” Hauser wrote in a resignation letter to the dean, dated July 7. “While I may return to teaching and research in the years to come, I look forward to focusing my energies in the coming year on these new and interesting challenges.”

Hauser did not respond to e-mail or voicemail messages today.

His resignation brings some resolution to the turmoil on campus, but it still leaves the scientific community trying to sort out what findings, within his large body of work, they should trust. Three published papers led by Hauser were thrown into question by the investigation — one was retracted and two were corrected. Problems were also found in five additional studies that were either not published or corrected prior to publication.

“What it does do is it provides some sort of closure for people at Harvard. … They were in a state of limbo,” said Gerry Altmann, editor of the journal Cognition, who, based on information provided to him by Harvard last year, said the only plausible conclusion he could draw was that some of the data had been fabricated in a study published in his journal in 2002 and retracted last year. “There’s just been this cloud hanging over the department. … It has no real impact on the field more broadly.”

Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be a mixed message in those last two paragraphs. Either this is the story of one bad apple who indulged in fabrication and brought shame to his university, or this is the story of a trusted member of the scientific community who contributed many, many articles to the literature in his field and now turns out not to be so trustworthy. If it’s the latter, then we’re talking about potential impacts that are much bigger than Harvard’s reputation. We’re talking about a body of scientific literature that suddenly looks less solid — a body of scientific literature that other researchers had trusted, used as the basis for new studies of their own, perhaps even taken as the knowledge base with which other new findings would need to be reconciled to be credible.

And, it’s not like there’s no one suggesting that Marc Hauser is a good guy who has made important (and presumably trustworthy) contributions to science. For example:

“I’m deeply saddened by the whole events of the last year,” Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard, said today. “Marc is a scientist of enormous creativity, energy, and talent.”

Meanwhile, if the data from the Harvard investigation best supports the conclusion that Hauser’s recent work was marred by scientific misconduct characterized by “problems involving data acquisition, data analysis, data retention, and the reporting of research methodologies and results,” this seems to count against Hauser’s credibility (and his judgment). And, although we might make the case that teaching involves a different set of competencies than research, his colleagues may have decided that the his to his credibility as a knowledge-builder would also do damage to his credibility as a teacher. The Boston Globe article notes:

Another researcher in the field, Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said today that Hauser’s departure was not unexpected. “Once they didn’t let him teach –- and there are severe restrictions in his ability to do research — you come to office and what do you do all day?” he said. “People in the field, we’re just wondering — this doesn’t change anything. We’re still where we were before about the [other] studies.”

What could Hauser do at work all day if not teach and conduct research? Some might suggest a full slate of committee work.

Others would view that as cruel and unusual punishment, even for the perpetrator of scientific misconduct.

State budget cuts mean … executive salary increases?

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The California State University Board of Trustees met July 12. As expected, they approved yet another student fee increase. Because, how could they not when they’re facing down at least a $650 million budget cut for the 23-campus system?

Not so expected (at least by those of us not on the inside) was their vote to pay Elliot Hirshman, the new president of San Diego State University, an annual salary of $400,000. Because … remember that $650 million budget cut for the 23-campus system?

How is this supposed to work again?

It should be noted that California Governor Jerry Brown sent a letter to the Board of Trustees urging them not to approve this salary increase. The letter (PDF here) is so clear in identifying the problem that I’m going to quote the whole thing:

As this Board well knows, California is still struggling to overcome the effects of the great recession which forced tens of billions of dollars in state budget cuts.

The state university system has been particularly hard hit with painful sacrifices on the part of faculty and students alike. As trustees, you have to make tough calls and strive as best you can to protect our proud system of higher education.

It is in this context, and prompted by the salary decision you are about to make today, that I write to express my concern about the ever-escalating pay packages awarded to your top administrators.

I fear your approach to compensation is setting a pattern for public service that we cannot afford.

I have reviewed the Mercer compensation study and have reflected on its market premises, which provide the justification for your proposed salary boost of more than $100,000. The assumption is that you cannot find a qualified man or woman to lead the university unless paid twice that of the Chief Justice of the United States. I reject this notion.

At a time when the state is closing its courts, laying off public school teachers and shutting senior centers, it is not right to be raising the salaries of leaders who — of necessity — must demand sacrifice from everyone else.

If it were me writing the letter, in the last paragraph I might also mention the already deep cuts to the CSU (many of which I’m sure have been obvious to the students at SDSU, as they have been to students here at SJSU). This is a situation where maybe President Hirshman and the trustees are banking on the students not following state news, because if they do keep up on current events, it might get awkward.

Of course, it’s being reported that some of the 12 trustees who voted to approve Hirshman’s compensation package (3 voted against it) say it’s necessary to pay him so much because of “the complexity of running a major university and the salaries that other university presidents around the country are paid”. This strikes me as a variant of the old saw that “we need to pay administrators so much because of how much they could be making in the private sector”.

Maybe it’s the larger class sizes, the absence of funds for graders or for work-related travel, or possibly the fact that the existence of my public-employee pension (which, given the way this job is going, I might not live long enough to use) has been used to demonize me and other CSU faculty like me in the minds of the voters, but I need to call shenanigans on this.

Could university administrators be making buckets of money in the private sector? It’s not clear to me that the private sector is doing a lot of hiring these days. But if they are, I’m inclined to tell those administrators, Vaya con Dios. Do what you must to feed your family, to fortify your compound, to get your yacht ready for the sailing season, to find fulfillment, but right now we can’t afford you. In a perfect world, maybe we could pay you what you feel you’re worth, but this, my dear, is nothing like a perfect world.

I’m sure your cash-strapped students can fill you in on some of the local details of its imperfection.

In the meantime, it’s worth noting that this newly increased salary doesn’t put President Hirshman close to the top slot of best-compensated California public employee. That honor goes to UC Berkeley football coach Jeff Tedford, at $2.3 million a year, with UCLA basketball coach Ben Howland ($2.1 million) a close second.

For comparison, Jerry Brown earns $173,987 a year to be Governor of the state.

Blogospheric navel-gazing: where’s the chemistry communication?

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The launch last week of the new Scientific American Blog Network* last week prompted a round of blogospheric soul searching (for example here, here, and here): Within the ecosystem of networked science blogs, where are all the chem-bloggers?

Those linked discussions do a better job with the question and its ramifications than I could, so as they say, click through and read them. But the fact that these discussions are so recent is an interesting coincidence in light of the document I want to consider in this post.

I greeted with interest the release of a recent publication from the National Academy of Sciences titled Chemistry in Primetime and Online: Communicating Chemistry in Informal Environments (PDF available for free here). The document aims to present a summary of a one-and-a-half day workshop, organized by the Chemical Sciences Roundtable and held in May 2010.

Of course, I flipped right to the section that took up the issue of blogs.

The speaker invited to the workshop to talk about chemistry on blogs was Joy Moore, representing Seed Media Group.

She actually started by exploring how much chemistry coverage there was in Seed magazine and professed surprise that there wasn’t much:

When she talked to one of her editors about why, what he told her was very similar to what others had mentioned previously in the workshop. He said, “part of the reason behind the apparent dearth of chemistry content is that chemistry is so easily subsumed by other fields and bigger questions, so it is about the ‘why’ rather than the how.'” For example, using chemistry to create a new clinical drug is often not reported or treated as a story about chemistry. Instead, it will be a story about health and medicine. Elucidating the processes by which carbon compounds form in interstellar space is typically not treated as a chemistry story either; it will be an astronomy-space story.

The Seed editor said that in his experience most pure research in chemistry is not very easy to cover or talk about in a compelling and interesting way for general audiences, for several reasons: the very long and easily confused names of many organic molecules and compounds, the frequent necessity for use of arcane and very specific nomenclature, and the tendency for most potential applications to boil down to an incremental increase in quality of a particular consumer product. Thus, from a science journalist point of view, chemistry is a real challenge to cover, but he said, “That doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of opportunities.” (24)

A bit grumpily, I will note that this editor’s impression of chemistry and what it contains is quite a distance from my own. Perhaps it’s because I was a physical chemist rather than an organic chemist (so I mostly dodged the organic nomenclature issue in my own research), and because the research I did had no clear applications to any consumer products (and many of my friends in chemistry were in the same boat), and because the lot of us learned how to explain what was interesting and important and cool to each other (and to our friends who weren’t in chemistry, or even in school) without jargon. It can be done. It’s part of this communication strategy called “knowing your audience and meeting them where they are.”

Anyway, after explaining why Seed didn’t have much chemistry, Moore shifted her focus to ScienceBlogs and its chemistry coverage. Here again, the pickings seemed slim:

Moore said there is no specific channel in ScienceBlogs dedicated to chemsitry, but there are a number of bloggers who use chemistry in their work.

Two chemistry-related blogs were highlighted by Moore. The first one, called Speakeasy Science, is by a new blogger Deborah Bloom [sic]. Bloom is not a scientist, but chemistry informs her writing, especially her new book on the birth of forensic toxicology. Moore also showed a new public health blog from Seed called the Pump Handle. Seed has also focused more on chemistry, in particular environmental toxins. Moore added, “So again, as we go through we can find the chemistry as the supporting characters, but maybe not as the star of the show.” (26)

While I love both The Pump Handle and Speakeasy Science (which has since relocated to PLoS Blogs), Moore didn’t mention a bunch of blogs at ScienceBlogs that could be counted on for chemistry content in a starring role. These included Molecule of the Day, Terra Sigillata (which has since moved to CENtral Science), and surely the pharmacology posts on Neurotopia. That’s just three off the top of my head. Indeed, even my not-really-a-chemistry-blog had a “Chemistry” category populated with posts that really focused on chemistry.

And, of course, I shouldn’t have to point out that ScienceBlogs is not now, and was not then, the entirety of the science blogosphere. There have always been seriously awesome chem-bloggers writing entertaining, accessible stuff outside the bounds of the Borg.

Ignoring their work (and their readership) is more than a little lazy. (Maybe a search engine would help?)

Anyway, Moore also told the workshop about Research Blogging:

Moore said that Research Blogging is a tagging and aggregating tool for bloggers who write about journal articles. Bloggers who occasionally discuss journal articles on their blog sites can join the Seed Research Blogging community. Seed provides the blogger with some code to put into blog posts that allows Seed to pick up those blog posts and aggregate them. Seed then offers the blogger on its website Researchvolume.org [sic]. This allows people to search across the blog posts within these blogs. Moore said that bloggers can also syndicate comments through the various Seed feeds, widgets, and other websites. It basically brings together blog posts about peer-reviewed research. At the same time, Seed gives a direct link back to the journal article, so that people can read the original source.

“Who are these bloggers?” Moore asked. She said the blog posts take many different forms. Sometimes someone is simply pointing out an interesting article or picking a topic and citing two or three articles to preface it. Other bloggers almost do a mini-review. These are much more in-depth analyses or criticisms of papers. (26)

Moore also noted some research on the chemistry posts aggregated by ResearchBlogging that found:

the blog coverage of the chemistry literature was more efficient than the traditional citation process. The science blogs were found to be faster in terms of reporting on important articles, and they also did a better job of putting the material in context within different areas of chemistry. (26)

The issues raised by the other workshop participants here were the predictable ones.

One, from John Miller of the Department of Energy, was whether online venues like ResearchBlogging might replace traditional peer review for journal articles. Joy Moore said she saw it as a possibility. Of course, this might rather undercut the idea that what is being aggregated is blog posts on peer reviewed research — the peer review that happens before publication, I take it, is enhanced, not replaced, by the post-publication “peer review” happening in these online discussions of the research.

Another comment, from Bill Carroll, had to do with the perceived tone of the blogosphere:

“One of the things I find discouraging about reading many blogs or various comments is that it very quickly goes from one point of view to another point of view to ‘you are a jerk.’ My question is, How do you keep [the blog] generating light and not heat.” (26)

Moore’s answer allowed as how some blog readers are interested in being entertained by fisticuffs.

Here again, it strikes me that there’s a danger in drawing sweeping conclusions from too few data points. There exist science blogs that don’t get shouty and personal in the posts or the comment threads. Many of these are really good reads with engaging discussions happening between bloggers and readers.

Sometimes too, the heat (or at least, some kind of passion) may be part of how a blogger conveys to readers what about chemistry is interesting, or puzzling, or important in contexts beyond the laboratory or the journal pages. Chemistry is cool enough or significant enough that it can get us riled up. I doubt that insisting on Vulcan-grade detachment is a great way to convince readers who aren’t already sold on the importance of chemistry that they ought to care about it.

And, can we please get past this suggestion that the blogosphere is the source of incivility in exchanges about science?

I suspect that people who blame the medium (of blogs) for the tone (of some blogs or of the exchanges in their comments) haven’t been to a department seminar or a group meeting lately. Those face-to-face exchanges can get not only contentious but also shouty and personal. (True story: When I was a chemistry graduate student shopping for a research group, I was a guest at a group meeting where the PI, who knew I was there to see how I liked the research group, spent a full five minutes tearing one of his senior grad students a new one. And then, he was disappointed that I did not join the research group.)

Now, maybe the worry is that blogs about chemistry might give the larger public a peek at chemists being contentious and personal and shouty, something that otherwise would be safely hidden from view behind the walls of university lecture halls and laboratory spaces. If that’s the worry, one possible response is that chemists playing in the blogosphere should maybe pay attention to the broader reach the internet affords them and behave themselves in the way they want the public to see them behaving.

If, instead, the worry is that chemists ought not ever to behave in certain ways toward each other (e.g., attacking the person rather than the methods or the results or the conclusions), then there’s plenty of call for peer pressure within the chemistry community to head off these behaviors before we even start talking about blogs.

There are a few things that complicate discussions like this about the nature of communication about chemistry on blogs. One is that the people taking up the issue are sometimes unclear about what kind of communication it is they’re interested in — for example, chemist to non-chemist or chemist-to-chemist. Another is that they sometimes have very different ideas about what kinds of chemical issues ought to be communicated (basic concepts, cutting edge research, issues to do with chemical education or chemical workplaces, chemistry in everyday products or in highly charged political debates, etc., etc.). And, as mentioned already, the chemistry blogosphere, like chemistry as a discipline, contains multitudes. There is so much going on, in so many sub-specialities, that it’s hard to draw too many useful generalizations.

For the reader, this diversity of chemistry blogging is a good thing, not a bad thing — at least if the reader is brave enough to venture beyond networks which don’t always have lots of blogs devoted to chemistry. Some good places to look:

Blogs about chemistry indexed by ScienceSeeker

CENtral Science (which is a blog network, but one devoted to chemistry by design)

Many excellent chemistry blogs are linked in this post at ScienceGeist. Indeed, ScienceGeist is an excellent chemistry blog.

Have you been reading the Scientopia Guest Blog lately? If so, you’ve had a chance to read Dr. Rubidium’s engaging discussions of chemistry that pops up in the context of sex and drugs. I’m sure rock ‘n’ roll is on deck.

Finally, David Kroll’s blogroll has more fine chemistry-related blogs than you can shake a graduated cylinder at.

If there are other blogospheric communicators of chemistry you’d like to single out, please tell us about them in the comments.
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*Yes, I have a new blog there, but this blog isn’t going anywhere.

What are honest scientists to do about a master of deception?

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A new story posted at Chemical & Engineering News updates us on the fraud case of Bengü Sezen (who we discussed here, here, and here at much earlier stages of the saga).

William G. Schultz notes that documents released (PDF) by the Department of Health and Human Services (which houses the Office of Research Integrity) detail some really brazen misconduct on Sezen’s part in her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University and in at least three published papers.

From the article:

The documents—an investigative report from Columbia and HHS’s subsequent oversight findings—show a massive and sustained effort by Sezen over the course of more than a decade to dope experiments, manipulate and falsify NMR and elemental analysis research data, and create fictitious people and organizations to vouch for the reproducibility of her results. …

A notice in the Nov. 29, 2010, Federal Register states that Sezen falsified, fabricated, and plagiarized research data in three papers and in her doctoral thesis. Some six papers that Sezen had coauthored with Columbia chemistry professor Dalibor Sames have been withdrawn by Sames because Sezen’s results could not be replicated. …

By the time Sezen received a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 2005, under the supervision of Sames, her fraudulent activity had reached a crescendo, according to the reports. Specifically, the reports detail how Sezen logged into NMR spectrometry equipment under the name of at least one former Sames group member, then merged NMR data and used correction fluid to create fake spectra showing her desired reaction products.

Apparently, her results were not reproducible because those trying to reproduce them lacked her “hand skills” with Liquid Paper.

Needless to say, this kind of behavior is tremendously detrimental to scientific communities trying to build a body of reliable knowledge about the world. Scientists are at risk of relying on published papers that are based in wishes (and lies) rather than actual empirical evidence, which can lead them down scientific blind alleys and waste their time and money. Journal editors devoted resources to moving her (made-up) papers through peer review, and then had to devote more resources to dealing with their retractions. Columbia University and the U.S. government got to spend a bunch of money investigating Sezen’s wrongdoing — the latter expenditures unlikely to endear scientific communities to an already skeptical public. Even within the research lab where Sezen, as a grad student, was concocting her fraudulent results, her labmates apparently wasted a lot of time trying to reproduce her results, questioning their own abilities when they couldn’t.

And to my eye, one of the big problems in this case is that Sezen seems to have been the kind of person who projected confidence while lying her pants off:

The documents paint a picture of Sezen as a master of deception, a woman very much at ease with manipulating colleagues and supervisors alike to hide her fraudulent activity; a practiced liar who would defend the integrity of her research results in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Columbia has moved to revoke her Ph.D.

Worse, the reports document the toll on other young scientists who worked with Sezen: “Members of the [redacted] expended considerable time attempting to reproduce Respondent’s results. The Committee found that the wasted time and effort, and the onus of not being able to reproduce the work, had a severe negative impact on the graduate careers of three (3) of those students, two of whom [redacted] were asked to leave the [redacted] and one of whom decided to leave after her second year.”

In this matter, the reports echo sources from inside the Sames lab who spoke with C&EN under conditions of anonymity when the case first became public in 2006. These sources described Sezen as Sames’ “golden child,” a brilliant student favored by a mentor who believed that her intellect and laboratory acumen provoked the envy of others in his research group. They said it was hard to avoid the conclusion that Sames retaliated when other members of his group questioned the validity of Sezen’s work.

What I find striking here is that Sezen’s vigorous defense of her’s own personal integrity was sufficient, at least for awhile, to convince her mentor that those questioning the results were in the wrong — not just incompetent to reproduce the work, but jealous and looking to cause trouble. And, it’s deeply disappointing that this judgment may have been connected to the departure of those fellow graduate students who raised questions from their graduate program.

How could this have been avoided?

Maybe a useful strategy would have been to treat questions about the scientific work (including its reproducibility) first and foremost as questions about the scientific work.

Getting results that others cannot reproduce is not prima facie evidence that you’re a cheater-pants. It may just mean that there was something weird going on with the equipment, or the reagents, or some other component of the experimental system when you did the experiment that yielded the exciting but hard to replicate results. Or, it may mean that the folks trying to replicate the results haven’t quite mastered the technique (which, in the case that they are your colleagues in the lab, could be addressed by working with them on their technique). Or, it may mean that there’s some other important variable in the system that you haven’t identified as important and so have not worked out (or fully described) how to control.

In this case, of course, it’s looking like the main reason that Sezen’s results were not reproducible was that she made them up. But casting the failure to replicate presumptively as one scientist’s mad skillz and unimpeachable integrity against another’s didn’t help get to the bottom of the scientific facts. It made the argument personal rather than putting the scientists involved on the same team in figuring out what was really going on with the scientific systems being studied.

Of all of the Mertonian norms imputed to the Tribe of Science, organized skepticism is probably the one nearest and dearest to most scientists’ basic understanding of how they get the knowledge-building job done. Figuring out what’s going on with particular phenomena in the world can be hard, not least because lining up solid evidence to support your conclusions requires identifying evidence that others trying to repeat your work can reliably obtain themselves. This is more than just a matter of making sure your results are robust. Rather, you want others to be able to reproduce your work so that you know you haven’t fooled yourself.

Organized skepticism, in other words, should start at home.

There is a risk of being too skeptical of your own results, and there are chances to overlook something important as noise because it doesn’t fit with what you expect to observe. However, the scientist who refuses to entertain the possibility that her work could be wrong — indeed, who regards questions about the details of her work as a personal affront — should raise a red flag for the rest of her scientific community, no matter what her career stage or her track record of brilliance to date.

In a world where every scientist’s findings are recognized as being susceptible to error, the first response to questions about findings might be to go back to the phenomena together, helping each other to locate potential sources of error and to avoid them. In such a world, the master of deception trying to ride personal reputation (or good initial impressions) to avoid scrutiny of his or her work will have a much harder time getting traction.

The economy might be getting better for someone …

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… but I daresay that “someone” is not the typical student at a public school or university in the state of California.

The recent news about the impact of the California State budget on the California State University system:

The 2011-12 budget will reduce state funding to the California State University by at least $650 million and proposes an additional mid-year cut of $100 million if state revenue forecasts are not met. A $650 million cut reduces General Fund support for the university to $2.1 billion and will represent a 23 percent year over year cut to the system. An additional cut of $100 million would reduce CSU funding to $2.0 billion and represent a 27 percent year-to-year reduction in state support.

“What was once unprecedented has unfortunately become normal, as for the second time in three years the CSU will be cut by well over $500 million,” said CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed. “The magnitude of this cut, compounded with the uncertainty of the final amount of the reduction, will have negative impacts on the CSU long after this upcoming fiscal year has come and gone.”

The $2.1 billion in state funding allocated to the CSU in the 2011-12 budget will be the lowest level of state support the system has received since the 1998-99 fiscal year ($2.16 billion), and the university currently serves an additional 90,000 students. If the system is cut by an additional $100 million, state support would be at its lowest level since 1997-98.

Two immediate responses to these cuts will be to decrease enrollments (by about 10,000 students across the 23 campuses of the CSU system) and increase “fees” (what we call tuition, since originally the California Master Plan for Higher Education didn’t include charging tuition, on the theory that educated Californians were some sort of public good worth supporting), yet again, by another $300 per semester or so.

“Why cut enrollments?” I hear some of you ask. Well, because the state still puts up a portion of the money required to actually educate each enrolled student (although that portion is now less than half of what the students must put up themselves). So 10,000 less students means 10,000 less “state’s share” expenditures. And, short term, that’s a saving for the tax payers. Long term, however, it may cost us.

Those students circling the tarmac, hoping to be admitted to the CSU (or University of California) system as students, are only going to cool their heels in community college for so long. (Plus, the community colleges are impacted by the decrease in transfer slots due to slashed enrollments, and have had their budgets cut because of the state’s fiscal apocalypse.) At a certain point, many of them will give up on earning college degrees, or will give up on earning them in California. And if the place where they earn those college degrees is less enthusiastic about slashing education budgets to the bone, these erstwhile Californians may well judge it prudent to put down roots, since it will make it easier to secure a good education for their offspring or partners, or a good continuing education for themselves.

I do not imagine a brain drain would do much to help California’s economy to recover.

In possibly related “what is the deal with our public schools?!” news, the elder Free-Ride offspring will be starting junior high (which, in our district, includes seventh and eighth grades) in the fall. The junior high school day consists of just enough periods for English, math, science, social studies, lunch, and one elective.* The elective choices include things like wood shop, or home economics, or band, or a foreign language. But unless your child has mastered bilocation, there is no option to take French and band, or mechanical drawing and Mandarin. Plus, school is out at like 2:15 PM — well before the standard 9-to-5 workday is over. Of course, this doesn’t take into account how many parents work more than eight hours a day (and may be hesitant to complain about it because at least they still have jobs) or how much time they have to spend commuting to and from those jobs. The bottom line seems to be that the public is unwilling to fund more than five academic periods per day of junior high. The public doesn’t even appreciate the utility of keeping the young people off the streets until 3 PM.

Verily, I suspect that only thing holding us back from abolishing child labor laws is that the additional infusion of labor would make our unemployment numbers worse, which rather undermine the narrative that the economy is turning a corner to happy days.

This lack of progress addressing the budgetary impacts on education — indeed, this apparent willingness to believe that education shouldn’t actually cost money to provide — makes me a big old crankypants.
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* There is probably also some provision for physical education, because there is still something like a state requirement that there be physical education.

Does the punishment fit the crime? Luk Van Parijs has his day in court.

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Earlier this month, the other shoe finally dropped on the Luk Van Parijs case.

You may recall that Van Parijs, then an associate professor of biology at MIT, made headlines back in October of 2005 when MIT fired him after spending nearly a year investigating charges that he had falsified and fabricated data and finding those charges warranted. We discussed the case as it was unfolding (here and here), and discussed also the “final action” by the Office of Research Intergrity on the case (which included disbarment from federal funding through December 21, 2013).

But losing the MIT position and five year’s worth of eligibility for federal funding (counting from when Van Parijs entered the Voluntary Exclusion Agreement with the feds) is not the extent of the formal punishment to be exacted for his crimes — hence the aforementioned other shoe. As well, the government filed criminal charges against Van Parijs and sought jail time.

As reported in a news story posted 28 June 2011 at Nature (“Biologist spared jail for grant fraud” by Eugenie Samuel Reich, doi:10.1038/474552a):

In February 2011, US authorities filed criminal charges against Van Parijs in the US District Court in Boston, citing his use of fake data in a 2003 grant application to the National Institutes of Health, based in Bethesda, Maryland. Van Parijs entered a guilty plea, and the government asked Judge Denise Casper for a 6-month jail term because of the seriousness of the fraud, which involved a $2-million grant. “We want to discourage other researchers from engaging in similar behaviour,” prosecutor Gregory Noonan, an assistant US attorney, told Nature.

On 13 June, Casper opted instead for six months of home detention with electronic monitoring, plus 400 hours of community service and a payment to MIT of $61,117 — restitution for the already-spent grant money that MIT had to return to the National Institutes of Health. She cited assertions from the other scientists that Van Parijs was truly sorry. “I believe that the remorse that you’ve expressed to them, to the probation office, and certainly to the Court today, is heartfelt and deeply held, and I don’t think it’s in any way contrived for this Court,” she said.

Let me pause for a moment to let you, my readers, roll your eyes or howl or do whatever else you deem appropriate to express your exasperation that Van Parijs’s remorse counts for anything in his sentencing.

Verily, it is not hard to become truly sorry once you have been caught doing bad stuff. The challenge is not to do the bad stuff in the first place. And, the actual level of remorse in Van Parijs’s heart does precisely nothing to mitigate the loss (in time and money, to name just two) suffered by other researchers relying on Van Parijs to make honest representations in his journal articles and grant proposals.

Still, there’s probably a relevant difference (not just ethically, but also pragmatically) between the scientist caught deceiving the community who gets what such deception is a problem and manifests remorse and the scientist caught deceiving the community who doesn’t see what the big deal is (because surely everyone does this sort of thing, at least occasionally, to survive in the high-pressure environment). With the remorseful cheater, there might at least be some hope of rehabilitation.

Indeed, the article notes:

Luk Van Parijs was first confronted with evidence of data falsification by members of his laboratory in 2004, when he was an associate professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Within two days, he had confessed to several acts of fabrication and agreed to cooperate with MIT’s investigation.

A confession within two days of being confronted with the evidence is fairly swift. Other scientific cheaters in the headlines seem to dig their heels in and protest their innocence (or that the post-doc or grad student did it) for significantly longer than that.

Anyway, I think it’s reasonable for us to ask here what the punishment is intended to accomplish in a case like this. If the goal is something beyond satisfying our thirst for vengeance, then maybe we will find that the penalty imposed on Van Parijs is useful even if it doesn’t include jail time.

As it happens, one of the scientists who asked the judge in the case for clemency on his behalf suggests that jail time might be a penalty that actually discourages the participation of other members of the scientific community in rooting out fabrication and falsification. Of course, not everyone in the scientific community agrees:

[MIT biologist Richard] Hynes argued that scientific whistleblowers might be reluctant to come forwards if they thought their allegations might result in jail for the accused.

But that is not how the whistleblowers in this case see it. One former member of Van Parijs’ MIT lab, who spoke to Nature on condition of anonymity, says he doesn’t think the prospect of Van Parijs’ imprisonment would have deterred the group from coming forwards. Nor does he feel the punishment is adequate. “Luk’s actions resulted in many wasted years as people struggled to regain their career paths. How do you measure the cost to the trainees when their careers have been derailed and their reputations brought into question?” he asks. The court did not ask these affected trainees for their statements before passing sentence on Van Parijs.

This gets into a set of questions we’ve discussed before:

I’m inclined to think that the impulse to deal with science’s youthful offenders privately is a response to the fear that handing them over to federal authorities has a high likelihood of ending their scientific careers forever. There is a fear that a first offense will be punished with the career equivalent of the death penalty.

Permanent expulsion or a slap on the wrist is not much of a range of penalties. And, I suspect neither of these options really address the question of whether rehabilitation is possible and in the best interests of both the individual and the scientific community. …

If no errors in judgment are tolerated, people will do anything to conceal such errors. Mentors who are trying to be humane may become accomplices in the concealment. The conversations about how to make better judgments may not happen because people worry that their hypothetical situations will be scrutinized for clues about actual screw-ups.

Possibly we need to recognize that it’s an empirical question what constellation of penalties (including jail time) encourage or discourage whisteblowing — and to deploy some social scientists to get reliable empirical data that might usefully guide decisions about institutional structures of rewards and penalties that will best encourage the kinds of individual behaviors that lead to robust knowledge-building activities and effectively coordinated knowledge-building communities.

But, it’s worth noting that even though he won’t be doing jail time, Van Parijs doesn’t escape without punishment.

He will be serving the same amount of time under home detention (with electronic monitoring) as he would have served in jail if the judge had given the sentence the government was asking for. In other words, he is not “free” for those six months. (Indeed, assuming he serves this home detention in the home shared by his wife and their three young children, I reckon there is a great deal of work that he might be called on to do with respect to child care and household chores, work that he might escape in a six-month jail sentence.)

Let’s not forget that it costs money to incarcerate people. The public picks up the tab for those expenses. Home detention almost certainly costs the public less. And, Van Parijs is probably less in a position to reoffend during his home detention, even if he slipped out of his ankle monitor, than is the guy who robs convenience stores. What university is going to be looking at his data?

Speaking of the public’s money, recall that another piece of the sentence is restitution — paying back to MIT the $61,117 that MIT spent when it returned Van Parijs’s grant money to NIH. Since Van Parijs essentially robbed the public of the grant money (by securing it with lies and/or substitute lies for the honest scientific results the grant-supported research was supposed to be generating), it is appropriate that Van Parijs dip into his own pocket to pay this money back.

It’s a little more complicated, since he needs to pay MIT back. MIT seems to have recognized that paying the public back as soon as the problem was established was the right thing to do, or a good way to reassure federal funding agencies and the the public that universities like MIT take their obligations to the public very seriously, or both. A judgment that doesn’t make MIT eat that loss, in turn, should encourage other universities that find themselves in similar situations to step up right away and make things right with the funding agencies.

And, in recognition that the public may have been hurt by Van Parijs’s deception beyond the monetary cost of it, Van Parijs will be doing 400 hours of community service. In inclined to believe that given the current fiscal realities of federal, state, and local governments, there is some service the community needs — and doesn’t have adequate funds to pay for — that Van Parijs might provide in those 400 hours. Perhaps it will not be a service he finds intellectually stimulating to provide, but that’s part of what makes it punishment.

Undoubtedly, there are members of the scientific community or of the larger public that will feel that this punishment just isn’t enough — that Van Parijs committed crimes against scientific integrity that demand harsher penalties.

Pragmatically, though, I think we need to ask what it would cost to secure those penalties. We cannot ignore the costs to the universities and to the federal agencies to conduct their investigations (here Van Parijs confessed rather denying the charges and working to obstruct the fact-finding), or to prosecutors to go to trial (here again, Van Parijs pled guilty rather than mounting a vigorous defense). Maybe there was a time where there were ample resources to spend on full-blown investigations and trials of this sort, but that time ain’t now.

And, we might ask what jailing Van Parijs would accomplish beyond underlining that fabrication and falsification on the public’s dime is a very bad thing to do.

Would jail time make it harder for Van Parijs to find another position within the tribe of science than it will already be for him? (Asked another way, would being sentenced to home detention take any of the stink off the verdict of fraud against him?) I reckon the convicted fraudster scientist has a harder time finding a job than your average ex-con — and that scientists who feel his punishment is not enough can lobby the rest of their scientific community to keep a skeptical eye on Van Parijs (should he publish more papers, apply for jobs within the tribe of science, or what have you).

When the news coverage departs from physical reality.

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On NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, Dina Temple-Raston told Renee Montagne how Osama Bin Laden tried to evade detection:

[O]ne intelligence official told us that nothing with an electron actually passed close to him, which in a way is one of the ways they actually caught him.

Temple-Raston went on to clarify that suspicions were raised when bin Laden’s compound (which has been described as a “mansion” and was certainly bigger than the neighboring houses) had neither telephone service nor internet connections.

But, let us note for the record that all the furniture, walls, floors, window treatments — indeed, Osama bin Laden himself — were almost certainly lousy with electrons, and that these electrons would have been in motion. Electrons were not only passing close to Osama bin Laden — they were passing in him and through him. Matter, in this universe, is made up of atoms, and ions, and aggregates of these, that contain electrons!

Verily, in the event that bin Laden’s compound was actually electron free, I reckon the strong positive charge of the place would have given him away much sooner.