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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"
I hear these guys are hiring!
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
feel bad?
he brought it on completely himself.
people like this should burn. he took it as far as he could. he's little more than a pyramid con-artist.
hope he enjoys working as a tomato picker the rest of his life.
Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
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.
No, I agree with him. Note that he said *real* scientists, not *most* scientists.
Plato once divided the ambitions of people into three categories: Reason (intellect, the need to seek knowledge), spirit (the need for recognition, honor), and appetite (the need for personal gain, such as wealth).
Real scientists are largely reason, usually with a bit of spirit thrown in. If you ever meet a greedy scientist, s/he isn't a real scientist--just like if you ever meet a hacker that can't code and uses l33t speak in his AOL chat window, he isn't a real hacker.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
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.
engineer-in-a-box 2.0....
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
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.
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.
Like many physicists, I have spent a good chunk
of this morning reading the Beasley report on
this case. There is nothing about this guy or
his data that is not "troublesome", i.e. fake.
When your read that virtually every paper he
published is the result of scientific misconduct
it gets very hard to feel bad for the guy.
Instead I feel bad he is ruined at 32, not at 28.
...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?
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).
You are just as naive. I'd like to see your statistics on what a "real scientist" is. You'll have to excuse me if I don't buy into your overly romanticised perspective without some proof.
In my world, i.e. the real one. Scientists create Anthrax in labs, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons. Scientsts have been screwing each other from the dawn of science (Tesla/Edison).
Doctors are scientists too. I'm sure I could find warehouses full of case law in regards to legal matters with Doctors screwing each other over.
Their people just like everyone else. There is nothing romantic about it. They can be and often are just as corrupt as everyone else in the world. It's people like you that make them out to be perfect saints that let the bad ones slip by.
"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.
Yeah, my hearts breakin just like it did for Key Lay and all the other ilk out there. To freakin bad. He got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Tough toenails.
Stone of Shame - Simpsons episode where Homer was a member of the Stone Cutters, right?
Didn't he eventually trade in the Stone Of Shame for the Stone Of Glory?
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.
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 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?
"You'll have to excuse me if I don't buy into your overly romanticised perspective without some proof."
You don't need proof for a perspective - it's an outlook, not a hypothesis. Scientifically, if you start from an outlook, and use it to begin a hypothesis, etc., that's fine. It introduces a bias into your investigations, yes, but you need to start somewhere, and if you're willing to fairly test the hypothesis, it doesn't cause a problem. Ah, the importance of blind investigations...
As per your outlook, "in my world, i.e., the real one" - the one question I always have to ask is that you're assuming that the world is different than his statements, right? Did you ever think that the reason your world is so cynical is because you make it out to be? In your world, you assume the worst of people, which means you'll never see the really good ones. Yes, there are downsides to the alternative, which you pointed out, but there are downsides to yours as well.
People often say that it's nice to have ideals, but the real world muddles things - "there is no black and white, only shades of grey." In my opinion, people are wrong about that - the world IS black and white - it's only people believing that there are shades of grey that makes them exist.
There are some real scientists. Few. But some. And more importantly, one's individual motives aren't nearly as important as one's overall actions. "Don't try to be a great man, just be a man, and let history make its own decision." Or something like that.
Scientists are as human as anyone else, and it would be foolish to believe that the process of science is immune to the flaws of the people who carry it out.
:)
He said real scientists - real in the "ideal" sense, not real as in "real world". The ideal scientist cares only for knowledge, not whether or not he's right. Hell, being wrong is even more interesting than being right.
There are no ideal scientists. But there are some who are closer to ideal scientist than ideal-antiscientist. Personally, this guy falls into the "closer to an antiscientist" category.
What bothers me is the climate to produce out there that wants...even encourages..fast results. It encourages this kind of behavor. That's the reason behind the Enrons and the Worldcoms and the Qwests...Quick returns. Business doesn't care about what happens next year, and will gladly sell future profits down the drain for a quick cash infusion now. That's all that matters.. now. Until that attitude changes, you're going to see even more of this, the Enrons, etc.
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.