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MIT Professor Fired over Fabricated Data
karvind writes "CNN is running a story where MIT has fired an associate professor of biology for fabricating data in a published scientific paper, in unpublished manuscripts, and in grant applications. Luk Van Parijs, 35, who was considered a rising star in the field of immunology research, admitted to the wrongdoing. The revelations are a serious blow to MIT, which prides itself on its reputation as a scientific powerhouse. The announcement also serves to answer the rumors that have been swirling on the campus since Van Parijs vanished from the campus more than a year ago and had his lab disbanded without any comment from the university. Readers may remember the infamous Jan Hendrik Schön from Bell labs."
I agree there is a lot of corruption. And in most cases I have found that it is foreigners, like Indians and Chinese. In this case it was a European. There is corruption in America, but at a lower level then other countries.
I'll get modded to hell for this so I'm posting as AC.
I hate to say it, but this is what you get when you promote Free/Open Source Software, especially to the degree that such software is promoted at known left-wing campuses like MIT's.
Basically, the underlying philosophy of Free/Open Source Software is that it is alright to copy someone else's work, as long as you make your changes public. This inevitably encourages people to take the 'path of least resistance', completing their project in less time but only contributing a fraction of the total work. This laxity, or laziness, is soon seen as the norm. Lo and behold, when someone at a F/OSS software-heavy campus like MIT starts a project and finds that no-one has done the heavy lifting for him already, he still sees it as his right to get full reward with fractional work. It's easy to see how this leads to falsification of data.
It really is too bad - given all the real advantages of F/OSS, like the Open Source - but I think F/OSS should be curtailed, or even counter-legalized, in order to stop the decline in American work ethic and scientific rigour.
Just think about what could be done without the monetary restrictions, or even if they could be significantly reduced. If the US had instead used for scientific research the $200 billion they wasted on Iraq, who knows how far ahead of the world they could be. Investing that much money in something constructive, like scientific research, would reap tremendous benefits. Even half of that dollar figure could fund a lot of cutting-edge research.
Now, I don't want to change the subject, but waging war (when there is no threat that anything will happen to your own country) is a great way to inject growth into the economy. War destroys and then corporations have an incentive to get government grants (our tax dollars) to help rebuild another country's economy and everything we destroyed. Slowly but surely (like the Borg) the US will assimilate Iraqi culture like we do with everything else. In the process, more Iraqi's will lose their "traditional" values and practices, and a entire younger generations of Iraqi's will become another mindless consumer-oriented MTV generation. We will move our Walmarts, Home Depots, McDonalds, and Starbucks as well as big government contractors into Iraq (if these companies are not over there already). It's all about US hegemony. Let's force our way of life onto them. If you don't like it you can stagnate and die.
You know, when I studied philosophy, we actually had to know real things. Advanced logic, tons of history...In the branch I was in (Cognitive Science), we had a neuroanatomy requirement, and a good number of math and CS courses, which in turn required physics and yet still more math.
Sad to see a philosophy major who thinks that he can learn it all in a chain coffee shop. Must be specializing in Continental "You want frys with that" philosophy.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Einstein can say that...Because he had both.
Most people who quote sayings like that use it because they lack one, and are trying to pretend like it's not important.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.