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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a story where MIT has fired an associate professor of biology for fabricating data in a published scientific paper, in unpublished manuscripts, and in grant applications.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."
You mean like this? To sum up the case quickly, this is a tool for the automatic creation of fake but real-looking "science papers" (ironically enough, developed at the MIT), and one such paper ("A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy") was submitted to the 2005 World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, and actually accepted. At that point, of course, the authors of the tool wrote about it, the story hit Slashdot, and the organisers of the conference were quick to retract their acceptance...
Still, I think it goes to show that if someone is actively trying to dishonest in the scientific community, it's not hard to get past the safeguards. Fabricating data is something that is (I guess) comparatively hard to detect, compared to an entire document that was written without any human intervention and thus shouldn't really make any kind of sense at all, but even the fake document wasn't detected. It sure makes you wonder how many people fabricating data are actually not caught and instead get away with it.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Science is based on the belief that experimental results can be replicated in repeated experiments. I've always wondered why the global scientific community doesn't do more replication of data as part of peer review. A formal procedure for extracting the experimental specification so the experiment is performed without the prior data included in the knowledge of the experimenter. Then a comparison by another party not performing either experiment, so the data comparison is "clean". That seems a very valuable process, in validating the original, finding differences still covered by the same theory, but available for more precision, as well as training scientists - both new and old. It seem replication for the purpose of disproving flawed theories would be the most important, and most common, scientific activity. Is the relative lack of it due to the "efficiency" of the corporate science business? Shouldn't academics be spending more time replicating?
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make install -not war
I worked in the Biology department at MIT when this happened. While Van Parijs' lab was under renovations, he took up space on my floor. After that, our department(mini-department? sub-department?, whatever) provided some computing resources for their lab. I was the network/systems guy, so I took care of our machines in their lab.
One day, I noticed that the Windows box in their lab wasn't responding and had been reported as haven been taken by the Cancer Center's sysadmin guy. I talked to a buddy of mine who sits across from me and did lab work for the Van Parijs. He called and asked about the machine. A couple of minutes later, the head of the Cancer Center called him and firmly told him to drop all inquries into said machine. He said it felt like the part of The Matrix where Neo gets the 'How are you going to talk without a mouth, Mr Anderson' line.
That's when the shit hit the fan. I was a weekly regular at the Plough and Stars in Cambridge on Wednesdays, and the Van Parijs members made it out there every other week or so. After six weeks or so, the guys who confronted Luk finally started talking about it.
It was quite the news in the department. I don't know about the rest of MIT, but all of Biology, and the CCR, Whitehead, and surrounding buildings knew about it since day one. It worked out well for the members of the lab. Everybody joined up with a different lab, except for one guy. He pretty much started working for himself. He's doing some post-doc work, and in light of what happened, the department just let him start doing his own thing until he finishes up.
What I remember about Luk Van Parijs(other than that he had the most gorgeous Russian administrative assistant. I could write for hours about her. I mean, she was hot and she said things like 'I think my phone just did a core dump' Hi Masha!) was that he was pretty much a jerk. Not that remarkable being that for MIT professors this is the rule and not the exception, but a jerk nonetheless.
Anyways, everybody thinks the New Scientist article was pretty scathing.
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
People who lose sight of that, and who make stuff up to submit, are not only disrespecting their peers, they are stealing time and effort from them. For example, I lost about six months of my life because a senior colleague falsified data that I needed in graduate school. We were in the business of flying a rocket payload to look at the Sun in extreme ultraviolet light. We calibrated the photographic film at a synchrotron facility at Stanford. Our senior colleague (who later went on to become a bigwig at SPIE and in NASA's Astrobiology program) was in charge of developing the film that we exposed, at great effort, to calibrated amounts of ultraviolet light emitted by the synchrotoron. He forgot (or something) to write down which process he used on which piece of film. As a result, a year later when we were analysing our images of the Sun we couldn't make any sense of them. It took a good six months of concentrated effort to eliminate all reasonable hypotheses about what had happened, and to conclude that the film processing notes from that calibration run were simply made up. Once we knew that, we could get reasonable (if not-as-good-as-we-hoped) results from the rocket flight, using earlier calibrations. If my colleague had fessed up immediately we would have lost a few days' work rather than six months.
In the short term, the scientific refereeing process keeps out many honest mistakes or omissions, but anyone determined to deliberately slip fake results into a paper can probably get away with it. In the long term, though, there's no escape: anything made up will either be buried (because it turns out to be uninteresting or because no-one trusts it), or found out (because, if it is interesting, others will try to use or reproduce the result, and will niggle at it until the truth comes out).
True, but I've heard of this kind of thing happening quite frequently from my friends in the ahem, military equipment sector.
Not that they say it happens to them, but the stories are ridiculous, with tests designed so they can't fail, or so failures are marked as partial successes, etc, because the project cannot have any black marks against it till acquisition... after which the govt will gladly pay to upgrade baselines to fix the flaws over the next decade. Check fas.org, but the first sparrow missle, the first line of tomahawks, b1 bomber, osprey, bradley's, even the proposed missle shield, all were/are acquired with obvious, mission-comprimising flaws that cost billions-10s of billions per project to fix. The problem is the acquisition system, especially congress's oversight, doesn't have an independent verification mechanism to prove that said equipment works within required parameters, and anyone who tries to say anything generally gets discharged from the military for going outside the chain of command and "comprimising the integrity of a classified project", even if the congressmen have clearance.
So if you were ever curious why so many ex-military officers found surprisingly comfortable jobs in the defense sector, theres an idea.
The corruption in the military-industrial complex goes beyond anything we can imagine in the private sector. Actual results being valued far less than pork per district works great in politics, but tends to hurt 2 politically defenseless groups, the taxpayers who fund these nightmares, and the poor troops who end up wondering why they have to bolt sheet metal onto their hummvees while people are shooting at them.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
I'm just tired of the crap. I tell people I studied philosophy and they ask me retarded questions, "Durrr, so do we exist or not?"
I spent my time learning to write automata with higher Turing scores than morons like that, and routinely work with logic loops that would make their tiny minds asplode, and I get crap because they think their business degree, or their non-programming I/S degree was more challenging than what I studied?
It just pisses me off. It's not my fault a bunch of wankers in europe decided that their subjective experiences had external validity, and that their crackpot theories happened to fall into the fuzzy area between philosophy and religion, and it really irks me when people who know better draw no distinction between the two...It's like putting the ID people and the Evolution people in the same category.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It's not insecurity. It's sticking up for a branch of study that's gotten the shaft in the last 80 years. I got three undergrad degrees (double major, with a minor that turned into a major), including straight up CompSci, so if I was ashamed of what I'd studied, I'd just pretend like I hadn't done it. You don't see me claiming my English degree all that often ;), though having classes filled with girls did make me the envy of all my CS peers.
The thing about philosophy is that it's really about the process...If you want a branch of study that is completely focused on critical thinking, logical analysis, and proofs, philosophy is the best way to go, and the great thing about it is you don't have to go on and study metaphysics or any of the unpractical stuff if you don't want to...All the methods apply well to any other organized branch of study. Hardcore logic training has been invaluable to me in CS, much moreso than the 4 semesters of Calc I had to take.
To me, having someone put down philosophy as a whole like it's only suitable for coffeehouses is the same as someone dismissing physics because it isn't in the bible.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
In your post, you were trying to defend philosophy from the /. masses. I admire this, and agree with most of what you said to them, but still I can't shake the feeling that I have to defend philosophy against you. I hope you can excuse the impropriety. ;)
If I follow you, your problem with some varieties of philosophy is that they are "unpractical," as you put it. It isn't exactly clear which sorts of philosophy you are fingering here, so I'm going to consider two possible readings of what you specifically said. Before that though, I need to give everyone else a quick sketch of what doing philosophy in the 21st century means. It's my personal belief that a lot of the frustration that you and I both face when we're talking to people without a philosophy background is the fact that the discipline is shrouded in mystery. More than that, though, I need it to make my response to you make sense.
Now, very roughly speaking, at the very highest level of abstraction there are three ways of "doing philosophy" in academia. You can be a historical scholar, a member of the Anglo-American (aka Analytic) School, or a member of the Continental School. The work of historical scholars are pretty straight forward: they take texts written by (frequently long) dead philosophers and they try to interpret them, or they try to demonstrate the relationships between different thinkers, or things like that. What they do is quite a bit like art historians or literature experts, only in a philosophical mode. Conversely, the Analytic School and the Continental School are concerned with the production of new thought: they are the two sides of what it sometimes refered to as the Split, because, starting around, oh, 1900, they stopped talking to each other. There are many differences between the two sides of the Split, but the ones that concern us here are just these: the Analytics are primarily interested in logic, rationality, and the physical sciences plus psychology and linguistics, while writting in a clear manner akin to scientific journals, and having their power in the UK and most US schools, while the Continentals are primarily interested in art and literary criticism, the social sciences, and what might be called "The Big Questions", while frequently writting in poetic if obscure manners, and having their power in France, Germany, and select schools in the US. Russell is the most commonly known analytic, while Sartre is the most commonly known continental. (And, IMHO, these are both tragedies.)
There were huge generalizations made above I would want to fix in a formal setting (historians tend to either have continetnal or analytic tendencies, for instance), but it's good enough for the purpose at hand. To get back to your comment, then, there are two things you could be saying. Either (A) that history of philosophy, and subjecting colleges students to it is pointless because its unpractical, or (B) you could be taking a very hard analytic position against continental philosophy, that talking about the Being of Being or the Other or Deconstruction is pointless because it never matters in the real world, like, say Cognitive Science or Decision Theory does (One might imagine this argument ending with "Get a job, hippy!").
Against (A) I'd say, okay, if you really want to be that hard-headed about the singular importance of science in human education, there's nothing really I can say, but, you are also saying that the humanities in general are without practical significance. Does learning history _really_ help us avoid repeating it? Maybe occasionally, but not enough to warrent the amount of money we spend on teaching it. And the other humanities, art history, the study of dead languages, literature, even many forms of abstract mathematics: there really can't be a good way to justify them. In my mind, however, learning these things just lead to better, fuller lives, not just because of the skills you get when you do it, but because it demonstrates to you t
"Nevermore shall I return... Escape these caves of ice" -Xanadu, Neil Peart, Rush