Slashdot Mirror
Lucent Reexamines Breakthrough Research
s20451 writes "Bell Labs' claims to have manufactured transistors consisting of a single-molecule switch are being met with skepticism in the scientific community, following difficulties in reproducing the experiment. Now a panel has been formed to investigate research misconduct related to not only that claim, but others regarding organic transistors." We've run several stories about the extremely tiny transistors and the innovative ways of assembling them which Lucent has been working on. A reader's summary of a subscriber-only story on Science's website suggests that there is strong evidence that some of the data in the published papers was faked.
FYI: (i know it's about half way off-topic but...)
Mendel faked his data on genes (hmm... signifigantly altered); we don't give him flak about it...
his error margin was zero! supposedly non of his plants even, say, got eaten by a rabbit =)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Dare I say it. This is what happens when over eager execs push researchers to publish findings before they are ready.
I hardley think this is news.
A reader's summary of a subscriber-only story on Science's website suggests that there is strong evidence that some of the data in the published papers was faked.
Do we get to see the reader's summary? Not even a link?
It makes me sad when I see companys trying to hype up their research to pump up their share price.
Now when my group does any research which has positive results we are scared to release anything because everyone assumes its simply another con.
Currently we have an asynchronous processor which releases so little EMI it looks dead in the graphs.
We tried showing this to other people but everyone nowdays refuses to beleve anything unconvesional can be good.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
they say lucent has made molecule size organic transistors. what size molecules are they talking about? a BOWLING BALL is one molecule, so that is clearly not what they mean. how do these compare to ATOMIC size is the question.
QED
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
Just think where we would be without Lucent (well, Bell Labs in particular)....
They have invented, among MANY other things...
"the transistor, the laser and wireless technologies."
90% of the tech you love and can't live without originated at Bell Labs.
You know...computers...unix...voice communication...redundant/fault tolerant data networks...etc...
Oh, and for the patent lovers in tha house...
"Bell Labs averaged one patent per business day from 1925 to 1995,
and since March 1996, patents assigned to Lucent have been issued at a rate of more than three per business day."
(Disclaimer - I do realize this is off topic a little, but I want people to think about how much great tech comes out of there!)
"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."
Traditional large companies had large
research funds and researchers had a lot of leeway in the work they performed.
As companies donw-size and cut costs, research
funding decreases and researchers have to do more
research aligned with the company. This
increases the pressure on researchers to generate
results faster.
The research community would have to have safe-guards to safeguard against suprious results.
I bought 17 shares of NYSE:LU when it was only $22/share... I figured it couldn't go any lower.
*sigh*
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
First Wolfram, then Lucent, we need some positive, confirmed, non-controversial discoveries without any cynical feedback
favours foreign citizens Go away and stop playing a dumb-American for the Slashdot crowd.
I love that Goldstein link every time I see it! HAHAHAHAH!
You've got some 'splainin' to do!
sulli
RTFJ.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic about the ginko biloba treating heart disease comment, but if you are, you're closer to the truth than you realize.
For example based on the research of Dr. Matthias Rath its been found that by simply increasing one's Vitamin C intake(500mg/day) one can drastically lower one's chances of having heart disease or treat heart disease once its already developed. Thus one can see that alternative medicine as its called can be better than conventional medicine.
For more info check here.
This was submitted yesterday to slashdot, but not posted for some reason...
For the past two years, a team at Bell Labs/Lucent, led by a young physicist named Jan Hendrik Schon, has published a dizzying array of groundbreaking work in the field of solid-state physics, which has previously
inspired discussions at Slashdot,
here
and here.
However, as reported tonight in Science (look under
the "ScienceNow" link), and I'm sure soon in Nature, it may all be a fraud. It looks like Schon has used identical data curves for very different experiments in different papers. The scale of the deception is enormous--there are duplicated graphs in at least 5, and as many as 20, papers. The fallout from this will be huge, not just for Lucent, but for the physics community as a whole, as a large number of these papers made it through the review process at the two most prestigious journals in the natural sciences, Science and Nature.
For a comparison of two plots from two seperate papers about two seperate experiments with remarbably similar data, check out here here. Scroll down to thursday may 16...
impacting
It's too bad these researchers are meeting so much skepticism. I'm sure they could prove their results if they would just pull out their single-molecule transistors and show them in action. Unfortunately, I bet that somebody just dumped the molecules into a desk drawer, and now they're hopelessly lost amongs the crumbs, dust and fuzzies at the bottom of the drawer...
Its called surival of the fittest. Once majority of the Americans start learning beyond single choice MCQs for exams then maybe there is a hope. Why else do you think all the Chinese and Indians are taking over the technology sector? They are hardworking and other major factor is that they have spent their childhood without the disease of video games.
Yes, until THEIR children become Americans. You'll see.
I am wary of anyone who slips their title or degree into their domain name...
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
New York
(API) - Lucent Technologies today admitted that in addition to errors in recent breakthrough technologies, they have found that major technologies they have been selling for years are apparently impossible. "It's the damnedest thing" said Bob Sharp who is the head of Consumer Technologies, "The whole notion of data communications over fiber is based on something someong just made up without checking to see if it was possible. We plan to cease offering these technologies until we can figure out to make it work."
Bob Dobbs, the Senior Vice-President of Internet Operations at UUNET Technologies expressed concern: "They've been charging us out the wazoo for the past few years for something that apparently doesn't even work. Our legal team is currently negotiating terms of a full refund".
In the meantime, major Internet providers are scrambling to build out their network infrastructure to support CPIP (an recent biology-based transmission protocol) in accordance with RFC1149.
Lucent stock dipped slightly at the news, but investors express full confidence that things would work out in time.
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
How much you wanna bet Hyperchip will start using these single molecule transistors in their... oh wait a minute, they have no product either!
Officials at Bell Laboratories, the research arm of Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, New Jersey, are forming a committee of outside researchers to investigate questions about a recent series of acclaimed scientific studies. Outside researchers presented evidence to Bell Labs management last week of possible manipulation of data involving five separate papers published in Science, Nature, and Applied Physics Letters over 2 years.
The papers describe a series of different device experiments, but physicists are voicing suspicions about the figures, portions of which seem almost identical even though the labels are different. Particularly puzzling is the fact that one pair of graphs show the same pattern of "noise," which should be random.
The groundbreaking papers include Bell Labs physicist Jan Hendrik Schön as lead author and his colleagues at Murray Hill and elsewhere as co-authors. Schön is the only researcher who co-authored all five papers in question. Everyone involved agrees that the questions need further investigation, but many fear that the impact could be devastating for Bell Labs and for solid state physics. Schön told ScienceNOW that he stands behind his data, and he says it's not surprising that experiments with similar devices produce similar-looking data.
Schön, who joined Bell Labs in 1998, has worked most closely with former Bell Labs physicist Bertram Batlogg--now at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich--and Bell Labs chemist Christian Kloc. His work has focused on efforts to make novel types of transistors using organic materials. He was the lead author on at least 17 papers in Science and Nature in the last 2.5 years.
Until this week, many physicists believed the impressive string of results was worthy of consideration for a Nobel Prize, although other groups have reported no success in reproducing Schön's most striking results. Last week, several physicists began to present their doubts to company managers. Bell Labs spokesperson Saswato Das says that company officials take the concerns "very seriously." Within hours of hearing of them on 10 May, Das says that Lucent management decided to form an external review panel chaired by Stanford University physicist Malcolm Beasley. Das says, "The panel will be given full freedom to make an independent review of concerns that have been raised." Physicist Paul McEuen of Cornell University, one of the first to question the data openly, says that Lucent is taking the right step: "Malcolm Beasley has great stature in the community. ... Everybody wants to get to the truth."
--ROBERT F. SERVICE
Figure legend: Striking resemblance. Bell Labs is investigating a possible duplication of data in several publications. (* The author has corrected the bottom graph.)
I'd be skeptical of any research done by Lucent in the last year, or at any other company with such serious financial problems.
The papers describe a series of different device experiments, but physicists are voicing suspicions about the figures, portions of which seem almost identical even though the labels are different. Particularly puzzling is the fact that one pair of graphs show the same pattern of "noise," which should be random.
If this ISN'T faked, a pattern showing up where current models suggest there's only noise could lead to a fundamental discovery. (Remember: "Noise" includes the output of any hidden mechanism that you don't yet understand.)
Above post was me - Ungrounded Lightning (Rod). For some reason slashdot is losing track of my login today.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Lucent scientists today reported the remarkable discovery that, contrary to conventional wisdom and accepted scientific theory noise isn't random. Said one researcher, "We'd expected self-similarity, due to the fractal nature of noise, but this is amazing!"
Researchers estimate that there are actually less than a dozen examples of true noise, which are repeated endlessly through out nature. Some observers have expressed concerns over the fact that most, if not all of them are already copywritten by the RIAA.
-- MarkusQ
They have invented, among MANY other things... "the transistor, the laser and wireless technologies."
But remember that Bell Labs is an institution, not an individual. It is composed of MANY scientists. It is not impossible that the barrel has acquired a bad apple. The trick is to find the bad apples and pull them out before they spoil the barrel.
Of course it COULD be that the research in question wasn't faked, with the anomolies coming from a clerical error, a jackpot, or a previously-undiscovered bit of physics. That's why they're INVESTIGATING, rather than just recalling the papers and canning those connected with 'em.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
No, Nicola Tesla did.
"The Great Radio Controversy
He (Tesla) invented Wireless radio, but Guglielmo Marconi was given the credit until June 1943,
when The U. S. Supreme Court finally settled the matter, after 16 months of investigating patent records and scientific publications,
and declared that Nikola Tesla was the true inventor of modern radio technology.
This was known as the Great Radio Controversy.
Unfortunately, most school children are still taught that it was Marconi, which shows
how simple it is for us to regurgitate uncorroborated legends, without checking on the up to date facts."
Also...along the Bell lines...
Bell Labs invented the "cellular concept"...many stations sharing common channels...
Satellite communications were another first.
(And yes, Arthur C. Clarke invented the idea of
geosynchronous orbits which the first Bell Labs Comm Satellite used.
This orbit is also known as the "Clarke Orbit")
"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."
From what I can tell, this should mostly be an in-house issue. Let's say that these discoveries are frauds. That means they won't ever be used in applications, and Lucent will lose out. If no other scientists are able to replicate the process, then they won't be able to reap the benefits of it either. There is a REASON for this peer review. And it seems to be working. There are many possible reasons why things are turning out like they are, fraud being one of them.
However, its possible that the procedures involved are not trivial. Its also possible that either the procedures involved to produce or the procedures involved to confirm the findings are in error. Observing a single molecule is NOT trivial. It's certainly possible to think you've got what you were looking for, when in fact it sometimes takes another pair of unbiased eyes to take a different approach and discover that all is not what it appears to be.
I'm not saying this isn't outright fraud. The only problem is, what does it benefit anyone? If the scientist involved was pocketing all the research cash and running with it, I could understand. But if the research is legitimate, and nobody is able to actually profit from any of this without a working prototype in a useful medium, which may take up to 10 more years to produce, fraud would serve little purpose except give a black eye to the researchers AND Lucent.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I think the solution to the whole business is to get away from the whole "publication counting" model of accumulating scientific knowledge and to move to a more interactive database system where the priority is on truth rather than playing the career advancement game. The goal would be to have a system where the goal was to get the right answer instead of getting the wrong answer for the "right" reasons.
You really are a loser. Karma is a mug's game.
WHO FUCKING CARES?!?!?!
I'm sick of you Tesla disciples shouting about how unfairly your hero was treated. Well, guess what. I don't care and practically no-one else does care either.
Besides, Tesla's crackpot ideas really outweigh the value of his inventions that actually worked. Thousands of monkies typing on thousands of typewriters... you know the drill.
I'd like to point out that the graphs which are posted on this site are quite obviously not a reuse of material. This S-shaped curve is the signature of a transistor of this type. It's what they do. It's what they're made for. It's no wonder that they're so similar.
If you look carefully at the two graphs, you'll see variances between the curves which indicate to me that they are clearly not the same information. Look between 0 and -3 on the horizontal axis of the first graph and between 0 and -0.5 on the horizontal axis of the second graph. In the first graph, the curve takes a slight, smooth upwards slope before hitting the falling edge. In the second graph, the curve makes a slightly jagged gradual downward slope into the falling edge without moving above the y-intecept's value. Also, if you look carefully at the graphs after the falling edge, you can see variance in the noise. Anyone with good attention to detail can see that these aren't the same graph.
Furthermore, the mislabelling of the y-axis in the second graph with an anomalous -0.2 instead of -2.0 may indeed mean that it was hand-labelled. However, this is in itself not evidence of fraud. Perhaps he did not use the labelling features of the software that generated the graph because he preferred the appearance of one done by hand. He obviously spent some time docotoring the appearance to get those nice circuit diagrams placed in the graphs.
Despite what the author of that article says, it's just not conclusive proof of tampering at all. While Dr. Schon may have lied and reused data between experiments, it's pretty clear from looking at them that these two graphs are an example of where he did so.
One thing I could never stand is to see a filthy old troll posting away the filthy goatse links of his fathers and going Blerp Blerp in between as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten mind. I could never stand to see anyone like that whatever his age might be. But more especially when he was real crapflooder like this one was.
Anyone know if Lucent have made good on their progress towards pure optical switching (ie signal goes from one fibre-optic to another without being translated into electrons to perform the switching logic)?
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
Ok, this started out as a joke, and I usually stay out of these 'whose was first' controversies, but further research for something solid turns up this:
"The court's decision, Case No. 369, identified as 'Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America vs. United States,' rendered invalid Marconi's basic patent No. 763,722 dated June 28, 1904. Tesla's patent No. 645,576 of March 20, 1900, and it's subdivision patent for apparatus No. 649,621 dated May 15, 1900, had priority. (2,4)"
Ok, I'll go check these out at The PTO. Should be interesting viewing the scan of Tesla's patent.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Lastly, the first thing that jumps out of the Tesla patent is the title "System of Transmission of Electrical Energy" - yes there's an antenna, coils, ground - so while he was searching for a way to send energy w/o wires he inadvertently creates what would be a terrific signalling system if only he'd realized the potential that would have. It's really no wonder at all he was misunderstood, letting Marconi capture the limelight with real demonstrations of signaling, not wackko lightning bolt demo's, threatening the split the earth, communicating w/ aliens, etc etc etc.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
interesting moderation scheme: the post before is the same as this one, yet modded to +3
Look at the space occupied by the Physical Review on the shelves of a library : went from less than 1 meter a year in the 1950's to maybe 20 meters nowadays...and the number of quality scientists has not increased 20fold ! At this time, it was enough to publish a paper once in a while, when a real discovery was made. When looking at the summary of a scientific journal of, say, the 30's, you see Fermi, Einstein, Brillouin, when nowadays articles are just a proof that someone did some work with the money he was given.
The review process has become a joke : either the paper goes to an indirect friend thanks to the editor (submit wisely !), and there is no actual review, or it goes to a concurrent, which makes irrelevant points (in one occurrence I know of, delaying the publication by more than a year making stupid points, and when all the objections were met, asking to change the units, and pointing minor misprints !). The referees usually do not understand the scope or actual point made in a paper, and make the stupidest comments possible (so one of my former bosses recommended to write papers in one afternoon, since the real mistakes would not be spotted anyways). This is also natural because they tend to be flooded by cut-and-paste papers from scientists who are in science only because there is some (ridicully small) money or career to be made, and they could not find a "real" job elsewhere. This is sadly true of the 3rd world, where scientists are underpaid (150$ a month anyone ?) and eagerly look for positions in developed countries, so need published papers, but their lack of money and bad education mean that they often submit utterly uninteresting papers.
This is also true from people under pressure from their supervisors because they are all on short-term contracts, so that they often resort to faking data to get the expected effect. A nice positive result created with the Gimp
(or vi data | gnuplot ) is way nicer than a boring negative result and easier to publish,
even if faked and wrong.
Sometimes the referees even resort to say "
please cite this guy", meaning, "hi, it's me,
hope you do not forget me when I need something or you refer my papers".
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Wow.
So how many monkeys did that last comment require?
Seriously...
Do you enjoy having Alternating Current (AC) power at your house?
Did you ever wonder how they are able to get it from the power plant to your house?
You can thank Mr. Tesla now.
(or may a lightning bolt from the Tesla Coil in the sky strike you down)
"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."
Why? That's easy.
It all has to do with cultural perceptions. If you pull off enough of these debacles you can:
Oh, and by the way. .
Take a glance at this much over-looked item on cold fusion to gain some insights into how these kinds of manipulation of the scientific community are used to benefit those behind the scenes. The relevant link is to a dot-mil site quietly hosting this 135 page report on the current state of behind the scenes Cold Fusion research which in no uncertain terms confirms what Pons & Flieshman were reporting all along.
-Fantastic Lad
Based on the research of some unknown guy with his own domain to publish his "results", we should definitely believe that this snake oil works.
Do you have any St. Johns' Wort links?
Fucking hippies.
~D
Did Bell Labs really
Make a transistor out of
Just one molecule?
You have a 4-digit UID and still you stooped that low to gain karma.
I can't gain karma. Even with the point I lost for that posting I still have a lot more than the cap (accumulated before the cap went on.)
I made that follow up for two reasons:
- To provide a link in my user page so I could find the thread conveniently.
- So people who think my postings are often interesting or informative would be more likely to read it than the posting of some random Anonymous Coward.
Now I don't KNOW that there are such people. But leaving the signpost helps them if they do exist, and isn't a big load on the rest of the readers if they don't.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Scientific Misconduct has been known to irreparably damage people's careers. However, the fact that others have difficulty in reproducing or verifying results may not necessarily be damning. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that Karmarkar's algorithm was controversial at the time because there was a push for patenting it and certain features needed to be kept quiet. Eventually those details were released and the algorithm revolutionized its field.
On the other hand, sometimes researchers have some unusual qualities to their apparatus or their environment that leads to very hard to explain (but locally reproducible) results. Now, if they did not have any trusted "friends" who could repeat the experiment, then they may have had to rely on their own data. The cold fusion folks got caught in that trap. However, now that the major papers have been accepted, this kind of criticism could be hard to shake.
So while I think these researchers are going to face some hard questions, wait for the inquiry.
No need to apologize. --But, what 'fallout'? Science is 95% negative results anyway. Any team which takes new Lucent data without trying to verify it through independant experimentation is a lousy lab team.
So some experimental results may have been falsified. Big deal. Basically, it sounds like some scientists were bullied by their management environment into releasing info too soon. --Which only means that Lucent management sucks and the employees of one lab are manipulated cowards. I don't see why this should be turned into a hunt for the nearest scapecoat. -A hunt supported by a blood thirsty scientific community.
If Lucent did things right, they would have set up an internal board of inquiry, figure out where the problem is, fix it, and recall the data with an apology. Instead they're all set to make an international spectacle out of the whole thing.
The board of inquiry set up is now on trial, so far as I'm concerned. --Will they have the balls to not over-react? Will they take a close look at the real problem, or are they just going to look at the lie and hang a straw man?
Also, I must disagree with you. --The last sentence of your post is descriptive of exactly the kind of sociological programming I'm talking about. This stuff only serves to shore up the walls of the current calcified structures of the scientific process, and help to slow knowledge advancement to an even worse crawl. --Because now, in order to study a new idea, a scientist must overcome the fears of not only having reputations smeared, grants cut and jobs revoked, but now also something bearing a frightening resemblance to criminal prosecution.
My theory: force one guy to lie, call him out, string him up and torture him, and you watch. Everybody else will fall neatly into line. Alternative thinkers take another blow on the chin and the corporate/military arbitors of public knowledge tighten up the reins ever more.
-Fantastic Lad
This scandal will pale in comparison to quantum computing. The writing is one the wall.
Glaucoma can cause blindness. Everyone who values his vision should use marijuana prophylactically.
C60 is not the largest all-carbon molecule. For example, some C240 forms along with other Fullerenes. Go watch some videos about buckyballs.
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,