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Bell Labs fires Hendrik Schon for Data Falsification
Raiford writes "Bell Labs has fired physicist Hendrik Schon for falsifying scientific data. Schon was thought to be a likely candidate for the Nobel prize based on the promise his reported research findings had for the advancement of molecular scale computing. In a Reuters report the dismissal was described as the only conclusive case of scientific misconduct ever identified in the history of the prestigious laboratory."
"the only conclusive case of scientific misconduct ever identified in the history of the prestigious laboratory"
Now if only the rest of the company could claim the same. I'm still pissed at them for stealing my companies customers. We would sell people ISDN back in 1998 and two weeks after the install our local baby bell would come to their door pitching their services. It turned out they were flagging our orders and sending their dsl sales team out to steal our customers.
Bastards
This guy pulled a fast one but when nobody could replicate Bell Labs investigated further. So I think that is a good thing. Checks. Balances.
Its odd that they make a big thing out of finding the forgery though. What does that buy them? Why not say "Ouch!" fire him and move on?
mom worked with PHD holder. PHD holder faked PHD. faked results. mom tells university. university tells mom to keep quiet or she gets fired. university quietly lets go of him 2 years later.
...
thusly, im impressed. way to can the liars. now if only we could do this with sales teams
"Old man yells at systemd"
it was recently discovered that there is no such thing as this so called "gravity." So all of you can quit obey this "law" and fly around. I mean it, stop, STOP IT, you DON'T have to sit there tether to the ground, get up and go float away!!
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
118? how do you know? I think they're falsifying their data ;)
"Old man yells at systemd"
...in an ironic twist of fate /. reports that Google News is up and running, and then proceeds to only post news items from the main Google News page.
Well, I guess Ask Slashdot will still have new content for people to flame each other over.
I hear these guys are hiring!
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
I feel bad for the guy tjhough..ruined at 32.
he should not only be fired, but stripped of any titles and exiled.
...that this man wasn't much of a scientist. Real scientists don't worry so much about whether they are right or wrong, they just want to know.
I have a feeling that sometimes scientists just have a 6th sense that lead them to correct hypothesises even when data does not back them up, and technology later, sometimes generations later, is able to support their ideas.
I dont know what he was working on, but I would like to give the guy the benifit of the doubt until I can read the report and experimental data.
At least he's not moving the Lab's money into offshore shell companies to show earnings..
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
The more science gets commercialized the more there will be people who are willing to "stretch" their imagination just a bit to get that fame and fortune, and the less there is public sharing of scientific findings in the name of intellectual property, the harder it will be to weed out these liberal interpretations of the scientific method. I am a scientist for the love of knowledge, my computer is analysing real data at the very moment and it is cool to be the first person in the world to see something come out of that. To be paid for the work is just an added bonus. The open/proprietary debate has been going on in the scientific community far longer than there have been modern IT.
Existence usually comes as a surprise (Idem)
I do some physics research with similar materials. I saw the papers involved, and the graphs. I have no idea how he thought he could get away with that. same noise patterns. It's nuts. funny when he said a week or so ago, "I'm having some trouble reproducing the results. It's not working for me now." I suppose he'll go teach high school physics now or something.
Now you can see why the scientific community insists on reproducible experiments. If you can't reproduce it, you can't trust the data. That's how Cold Fusion was debunked. Now only some of the garbage that gets reported as "news" in our mainstream media was half as well checked out.
Bah, this is nothing new.
Sometimes people lie about discoveries to make a buck. Does anyone honestly think the alchemists were just making honest mistakes about turning lead into gold?
engineer-in-a-box 2.0....
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Apparently, it is pretty unusual. I recently heard a report on NPR about another case, and they were saying it was pretty much unique. The research involved in this case was the discovery of new elements. It wasn't conclusive that he had falsified, but there was some stuff that was pretty hard to explain any other way. The guy involved insisted that he hadn't and colleagues couldn't really believe it, except for the evidence.
3 page executive summary 127 page Committee's Report (Appendix F lists the papers in question; Appendix H gives Schon's response)
I heard a story about a biological researcher who went to some lengths to forge his results. When confronted with the accusation he produced his raw data and even autoradiograms. It eventually came out that he had decided where he wanted his results, and had then used an iodine isotope to create the bands on his blot.
Due to the extreme competition that exists in most research these days, forged results are only going to become more and more common.
It still depends on what kind of news you're looking for.
6th sense that lead them to correct hypothesises
I believe the word for that is "conjecture." A conjecture is far removed from "fact". Evidently this Dr. Schon invented "facts". This is a VERY bad thing.
Good science is science you can trust. If something is a scientific fact, then other scientists can build upon it, and do. If fact turns out to be fiction, then dependent labors are wasted.
Liar probably fits here.
I hope this is a lesson learned for the young man in question. Falsification and manipulation of pure data is an extremely difficult blot to overcome on ones career. Once it has been proven that the individual has manufactured results, that individual will be questioned and any future publication summarily dismissed for the rest of his life. Even if the future results are valid. There is a very old saying, "Young, dumb, and full o' come".....
Stupid Humans.....
"I have a feeling that sometimes scientists just have a 6th sense that lead them to correct hypothesises even when data does not back them up, and technology later, sometimes generations later, is able to support their ideas."
I'd say it is more of an after sight then anything else. You literaly have billions of people through the ages making different hypothesises, when the scientific data eventualy comes along that happens to match that particular data, then everyone will tend to point back and say "ah ha! that guy was ahead of his time!"
Scientists+HR+business people==shit
People were getting laid off left and right, management had no idea what was going on, and the company was telling employees to buy stock options while the stock tanked from $60 to under a dollar. What a sad ending for one of the great American Research Labs.
That's a reference to the case I was referring to. It was element 118 that was claimed to be discovered. There's a much more detailed comment with a link and everything, so I guess mine was redundant (sorry).
...that Hendrik Schon was publishing science-fiction. Bucky Balls! Since he is already a published and widely read writer, he should stay in the field, and write some novels. Maybe he could make the Star Trek transporter seem plausible, or explain the sound in space we hear in movies.
How ya like dat?
Ok.. I cheated once too... I didn't falsify results... I just copied my results off Kelly who sat next to me. The proff always thought I was one of the better students and that Kelly and I excelled. Well Kelly did... I just sniffed TriCloraEthonal all year. Got some screwed up brain cells now...
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
Scientists at rival laboratories, however, had difficulty reproducing the results of Schon's work, thwarting a checks-and-balances process integral to the scientific method.
Um, no. If the "checks-and-balances process" were being thwarted, then it would have been circumvented or avoided somehow. This is an example of the process working as it's supposed to. You don't need a checks-and-balances system if everyone in the field is always going to be a good boy at all times. What happened here is that someone wasn't, and the scientific process caught him at it.
I would love it if these wire services would assign beats to reporters by taking into consideration what subjects they actually understand. They should also be fluent in the language in which they are writing, and display some comprehension of the words they're using.
And the brethren went away edified.
I mean, after all, the need to produce is becoming more important than the need to produce quality. Sure, it is like cheating at solitaire, but what are the incentives NOT to cheat?
Maybe he should have used the DMCA to to prevent this gross infringement of his intellectual rights! At least now he can be hired to work on DRM withouth anybody knowing what he's really up to.
;-)
described as the only conclusive case of scientific misconduct ever identified in the history of the prestigious laboratory
Um, wouldn't that have been Ritchie and Thompson with UNIX
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Quite a lot of stuff of questionable quality is published, in my experience, and you don't have to go very far to find it. A lot of the time, it's a rather honest 'mistake' (in the sense that a sloppy or incorrect methodology is a mistake). After all, few have the time to check through every step of a paper, and that generally occurs only when you're working in the same field.
However, the 'hot' or 'important' topics tend to get more review than most, and out-and-out fabrication of results is rare (not too rare, unfortunately; this is the second case in research physics I've heard of in my short life; the other was that mess in the lab at Berkeley).
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
Company CEO's, Stock Analysts, My Fiancee and now this lying thug. Next thing you know, I'll discover there really is no Santa.
One scientist at the facility noted, "He booted it up right in front of us. I'm pretty sure I heard the Windows 2000 startup tune, and everything." They were later horrified to discover that Schon was simply lying.
Man, if I falsified my data, I wouldn't get no Nobel Prize.
Shit... probably just get my ass fired.
Oh wait. =)
"...his work led to speculation by some peers that he could one day be nominated for a Nobel Prize, a high honor."
Glad they specified that. Otherwise, I might have thought they were referring to some other Nobel prize, like maybe the Gertrude P. Nobel Prize in Experimental Cosmetology.
It only works part of the time. Unfortunately. And even when it does, it usually takes many years, often decades. Nobody in science wants to check what they don't want to see debunked; i.e. their pet theory.
The rest of the time, they just make up `epicyclical' explanations for discordances as keep business as usual for as long as it lasts. [Epiclyclical, like the epicycles made up to refuse the evidence that Earth was not at the center of the universe].
``L'imagination au povoir.''
Just publish publish publish, no mattern what, no matter how inanical, no matter how pointless, no matter how fake. No publications, no career. And the more significant your research, the less it will get funded. And the less likely you'll get something publishable out of it: it either doesn't work, or it works too well and your papers are revolutionary and get rejected. Better play it safe...
It's so rotten! >:-(
Science is in an advanced state of decay. Perhaps the time has come for us to look for a replacement...
``L'imagination au povoir.''
Yes, but his was also not experimental physics.
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
This is spot on, and needs to be emphasized. The committee let the coauthors off *much* too easily. Remember that one of the issues that was raised was that the *same figures* showed up various *different* papers, often reporting results for entirely different experiments, etc. Unquestionably the papers must have been circulated among a variety of scientists at Lucent. Wasn't anybody really *reading* these papers, and thinking about them, before they were submitted? It may go a bit far to call this "complicity in fraud"; often a coauthor's name appears on a paper because he/she contributed some small piece to the research. But clearly a few of the senior coauthors appear to have been severely negligent, or criminally lazy.
You have just delineated one of the basic tenets of science - repeatability.
Your second argument is specious - no scientific theory is even proven correct, they are merely continuing to demonstrate that, under given circumstances, they aren't wrong.
Elgon
To get folks up to speed, HP blamed low benchmark scores on one HP engineer. Then they fired him. Then they sued him. Makes you think twice about recommending any set of compiler flags, doesn't it? :-(
See this Register article.
The Bell Labs case is different; it's much more a case of integrity rather than just benchmark scores. Clearly the labs felt that their integrity was being hurt by one sore thumb, but I do not see it at all as a bunch of vindictive uppity-up's taking their wrath out on a little guy.
This is one of the things that bugs me about science; scientists who work to prove a theory instead of testing a theory. Pressure from society, government, employers, and often arrogance gives us scientists who sacrifice the truth to validate their ideas, knowing that somewhere down the line the falsehood will be discovered.
I guess things like this just show that science and religion are not so different as some would think.
> I only single out CS as I have experience in the area.
That'a pretty much where mine is too, so we're on the same page.
>I must say that one gets the impression that a lot of "dubious" stuff is published
well, I haven't read too many systems papers, given my proclitivities, but theory papers include proofs. sometimes there are bugs in the proofs, but these are easier to check than experimental results, and so are. (Yesterday during lunch we reproved that PRIMES is in P.)
I found a bug in a protocol proposed in a paper that was just published at CRYPTO. This doesn't men the work was "dubious" in any way, just that their proof made an unwarranted assumption, and that they made a mistake. It was a very good paper, in toto.
>There is also a lot of pointless stuff being done as well.
Depends on where you're coming from. Most researchers have had good reasons for choosing the problems that they do. Of course, the concept of a "natural problem" counts for me, where it might not for you.
> Unlike Physics, no one really seems to bother with repeatability of results though.
Hmm... besides theory, which takes about 25 years to go into circulation (figure from Lenore Blum, I don't know where she got it from), isn't a lot of CS research used by outside people fairly rapidly? If implemented correctly, and it doesn't meet expectations, I'd expect some information circulation...
Lea
There's incredible pressure to publish, even if your name isn't first.
The convention as to whose name goes on the paper and whose name goes first varies throughout academia. In Biology, for example, it is very common for the guy who got the funding to be named first, even if he didn't do any of the work. In Physics it's a bit more equitable most of the time, but not always.
Large collaborations (often there are hundreds of authors in a big collider experiment) have committees to decide on what's published and what's not. In some cases your name automatically goes on all collaboration publications unless you specifically object.
Some fine institutions are so good at internally refereeing their own papers that if it gets submitted to Phys Rev, it's almost guaranteed to be published.
Other institutions are not so good, and random junk comes out.
I would guess that Bell Labs would like to be nearer the "fine institutions" rather than the junk ones.
The (external) referees that approved the papers for publication deserve some of the blame too, but not all of it - when it comes to the first data of its kind, there really isn't much they can compare against.
I would love it if these wire services would assign beats to reporters by taking into consideration what subjects they actually understand. They should also be fluent in the language in which they are writing, and display some comprehension of the words they're using.
:P
They're not nearly as talented as Hollywood gives them credit for. The Lois Lane (nose for a story, get it at any cost) archetype in TV and movies doesn't exist anymore, thanks to institutionalized journalism coursework and mandatory "crap jobs" (internships, etc.) turning off prospective students who might have enough intellect and integrity to be the next Walter Cronkite. They're more likely to go into something less sleazy, like political science or law.
I've seen this phenomenon from two angles: as a quoted source for a story in the New York Times (of all places!), where I was quoted selectively and out of context, to ensure that the "spin" of the article was supported by my comments. My friend had warned me, "Here is an opportunity for you to be completely and totally misquoted." I thought he was joking.
The other side is my brother, who got a journalism degree last year. He spent 6 months in a crap internship (this is Ann Arbor, Michigan), and when they could no longer keep him around (bad economy, they tell him), he has resorted to being a shift manager at a supermarket. One of the problems is that he doesn't have any skills in ass-kissing, apparently.
Even "legends" like Donaldson and Jennings seem to be more like "antiques" who spent enough time standing with a microphone reading notecards in front of various places of interest around the world, they've earned the right to sit behind a desk and read a teleprompter, trying none-too-hard to hide their political spin when they make snide guffaws at things they disagree with.
Even Reuters and AP releases, which rarely bear the names of the contributing journalists, seem to be including snide commentary and spin now, based on the bias of the author. At the very least it's become more and more sensationalist, more "tabloid-esque."
The only section of newspaper I can actually stand to read anymore is the editorial stuff. At least the columnists are telling you up front that they are only giving you an "opinion." Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to listen to National Public Radio, since the local (Ohio) reporters are finally done whining about yesterday's execution of a guy who raped a murdered a little girl. Aside from the occasional intellectual elitist liberal spin from a small contingent of their regulars, NPR usually does a pretty good job at factual reporting and well-informed opinion pieces.
or explain the sound in space we hear in movies.
That's easy: Radio interference.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Now if they would only fire Dr. Robert Gallo of the CDC for *his* scientific misconduct. :-(
I had this by a good 2 hours.
2002-09-25 17:53:47 Bell Labs Physicist Fired for Falsifying Data (articles,science)
I am sooo angry I think I'm going to loop those 'dude you got a Dell' machine until my head exploded into little bits.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
On rightwing claims that Gore claimed to have invented the internet from http://www.coup2k.com/mm4.html CNN'S WOLF BLITZER: I want to get to some of the substance of domestic and international issues in a minute, but let's just wrap up a little bit of the politics right now. Why should Democrats, looking at the Democratic nomination process, support you instead of Bill Bradley, a friend of yours, a former colleague in the Senate? What do you have to bring to this that he doesn't necessarily bring to this process? AL GORE: Well, I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be. But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system. During a quarter century of public service, including most of it long before I came into my current job, I have worked to try to improve the quality of life in our country and in our world. And what I've seen during that experience is an emerging future that's very exciting, about which I'm very optimistic, and toward which I want to lead. By the way, although the press has debunked this stupid story about a million times, Republicans keep banging that tired old drum. Why? Because they cannot attack Gore's morality (he was never a pantyhound like George W.), or his policies (most Americans give Gore and the Democrats the edge on the issues). So they keep throwing lies around, hoping some will catch on. Some do. The world is full of stupid people. CASE IN POINT: (I don't have to name names, do I?) MORE ON GORE AND THE INTERNET FROM BOB DELAY (Yes, 'that' Delay... READ ON) From: Bob DeLay To: thediva@coup2k.com BCC: bc_pubshort@yahoo.com ; MWO Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2001 12:54 AM Subject: al gore and the internet Sometimes I feel so all alone in the world. According to Microsoft's very own reference resource, BOOKSHELF '96, Al Gore did pretty much invent the internet. We might assume that Microsoft would have a pretty good handle on that particular issue and would know what they're/it's talking about. Here's an excerpt from an article entitled, "The Internet: How did it originate?" "In 1991, Vice President Al Gore, then a U.S. senator, proposed widening the architecture of NSFNET to include more K-12 schools, community colleges, and 2-year colleges. The resulting legislation expanded NSFNET and renamed it NREN (National Research and Educational Network). This bill also allowed businesses to purchase part of the network for commercial uses. The mass commercialization of today's Internet is the direct result of this legislation." (That is a verbatim, copied-and-pasted quote.)
An article called Big Trouble in Big Physics delved deeply into this situation and to how this could've occured.
You obviously haven't listened to any new music. =)
Introduce enough falsified experiments, and you definitely will go backwards. My point is that there's normally a "best hypothesis" for any given phenomenon, or set of phenomena. One goal of science is to always improve understanding, by rejecting a hypothesis which is demonstrated incorrect by repeated experimentation - in favor of a hypothesis which does a better job of predicting the data. If enough bad experiments are reported, bad hypothesies may begin to be accepted over better ones. That's going backwards.
Granted, the old work still exists, but tricking people into accepting bad science definitely hurts. Especially if you're the sucker who bases your work on the bad hypothesis.
Science only has validity as long as it has credibility. We've gone for so long being able to implicitly trust "science" that it's hard to imagine a world where "science" had been so harmed that it was no longer trustworthy. It could happen. Sure, the scientific method will still remain and be valid, but the problem is that any given experiment normally incorporates at least SOME assumptions, and if those assumptions are based on bad science - it's hard to do good experiments.
Especially if some external agiency *cough*Catholic church*cough* gets to decide for society which hypothesies are "good" and which are "bad."
Also, music does not have a permanent lifetime. I defy you to locate a copy of the Goober and the Peas song, "Dear Grandpa." Therefore, it is possible for music to get worse, as good music can be lost, and bad music produced.
Education is the silver bullet.
The concept of science, or just how it is used by dodgy companies?
I give you the best answer I know, from epistemology: Science is what those who call themselves scientists do.
Using that definition, science is rotten to the core. Now, the idea that gave rise to science is alive and well, thank you; the spirit of free inquiry that was embodied in science is still with us and going strong, it's just that it has moved on away from science, and is incarnating in new things. Free software is one; there are others, and yet others we have to create. Free inquiry is still with us; it's just no longer happening in science for the most part.
May be we should think of science as an expended booster rocket: it got us here, it did a marvelous job, but it cannot take us any further. Time for us to discard it and move on. An new era of discovery is waiting...
``L'imagination au povoir.''
The King and his advisor are overlooking the battle field:
King: "How goes the battle plan?"
Advisor: "See those little black specks running to the right?"
K: "Yes."
A: "Those are their guys. And all those little red specks running
to the left are our guys. Then when they collide we wait till
the dust clears."
K: "And?"
A: "If there are more red specks left than black specks, we win."
K: "But what about the ^#!!$% battle plan?"
A: "So far, it seems to be going according to specks."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...