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China's Research Ambitions Hurt By Faked Results
Hugh Pickens writes "AP reports that plagiarizing or faking results is so rampant in Chinese academia that some experts worry it could hinder China's efforts to become a leader in science. China's state-run media recently rejoiced over reports that China publishes more papers in international journals than any other country except the US; but not all the research stands up to scrutiny. In December, a British journal retracted 70 papers from a Chinese university, all by the same two lead scientists, saying the work had been fabricated, and expressing amazement that a fake crystal structure would be submitted for publication. 'Academic fraud, misconduct and ethical violations are very common in China,' said professor Rao Yi, dean of the life sciences school at Peking University. 'It is a big problem.' Last month the Education Ministry released guidelines for forming a 35-member watchdog committee and has asked universities to get tough but Rao remains skeptical. Government ministries are happy to fund research but not to police it, Rao says. 'The authorities don't want to be the bad guy.'"
The Chinese approach to ethics is almost purely situational. Compound this with a manipulative media, and what you get are fat, happy citizens who are staunchly nationalistic and xenophobic. All they care about is money.
If you want some positive moderation, reply to the above true statement about the Chinese changing only the nationality.
but they police citizens, opinions, the media, the internet....
it's what I call:
contradiction
too
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Perhaps the scientist's cheating is a response to their government's insane minimum requirements for the number of publications a scientist with a government grant must have.
If working 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, is not enough to meet the requirements from the only funding available, what should they do? Give up and sell hot-dogs in wallstreet?
I don't know, though. This is just a hypothesis.
Some of the Gucci handbags they make are not so authentic either.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
Listen, I think the more science that happens, the better. And I completely support Chinese scientists attempting to make China a science powerhouse.
But at the moment they have no real reason to self-police. If the reputation cost to a journal of accepting a Chinese paper is too high (if fabrication is too rampant), they'll reject them out-of-hand to protect their reputation. Then, the legitimate scientists in China will need to kick some ass in their academia in order to be let back in.
Whether it's factories selling the latest iPod design for cheap knockoffs, or faked research, China has been playing fast and loose with the rules of international relations. They're with the big boys now, for better or worse, and people are starting to not excuse them for it.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
As discussed here many times before (this is not new): Chinese scientists are judged by number of publications, just that. Just the number. As a result a PhD student will do their best to pump out as many papers as possible, as the more they manage to get published the better future career prospects they have.
The quality of the papers is simply not taken into account when it comes to job offers.
And then this is the obvious result. Lots and lots of papers, with little to no really new information, and on top of that a lot of made-up stuff by the ones that really have nothing new but still need the numbers.
In December, a British journal retracted 70 papers from a Chinese university, all by the same two lead scientists, saying the work had been fabricated, and expressing amazement that a fake crystal structure would be submitted for publication.
The problem isn't just with China. The real issue is how and why journals would even be accepting fake "scientific research" to be published. So many cultured and educated people complain about Wikipedia having lax standards because you don't need a PhD to contribute.
The whole "scientific" publishing business are just ivory tower elites making money off of their diplomas and the authority that it bestows. Real science is done through allowing free access to data sets and experimental methods to the public so that research results can be reproduced. Fake science is relying on the personal authority of a PhD. or editorial board to decide what is real.
"AP reports that plagiarizing or faking results is so rampant in Chinese academia that some experts worry it could hinder China's efforts to become a leader in science."
I know a Chinese student who works hard, but there comes nothing original from him. But, as he is so afraid of displeasing his supervisor I cannot think he would ever dare. However, this is not inside China. I can imagine it is worse inside China, as their quest for "winning" over the West, and the USA in particular, is enormous.
Post ww2 it was a mess. By the 1960's it was a real North Korea, no food, cook your neighbour mess.
Then China made a deal with Nixon and they joined the rest of the world again.
Be like EU/UK/US and let your scientists have the freedom to raise cash, be funded, fail, dream and work on projects for decades. China did not have the time.
Go Soviet and steal everything in easy reach and then steal some more. Long term your not trusted and are always a gen behind.
So China flooded the west with grad students to suck up the 'how to study' feel and report back.
Slave wages at home saw an influx of hi tech production lines too.
No big brands to push quality, no quality control, no political/science long term reality.
Just toxic production lines and a flow back of quality tech from the US.
What stays at home and is not in the mil, is useless, expensive, sheltered, protected and politically unstable.
Study hard, publish papers, get good flat, join Party, get rich quick does not produce a good long term results.
The Party knows this but rapid, cheap, lifestyles buys the party a few decades.
Decades to build national brands and sell quality to the world on slave wages.
China has its best in Africa, the US, learning, understanding, extracting and building.
The raw materials and know how have to come together to create wealth.
Papers in international journals is just PR and jobs at home while the real work is been done.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
how can we trust the results of this article?
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
I mean, seriously. If it was some white dude in Wall Street caught in fraud, or some Ivy-League professor caught cheating on his results, we'd blame the perp for cheating, and the regulatory bodies for not catching the perp.
But the minute it becomes Something About The Savage Yellow People, you get all these amateur anthropologists, who make well-reasoned and completely accurate statements, like this:
I mean, the article makes it clear; the Chinese government doesn't want to police, and they're pushing for results (which is why they're crowing about the large numbers of papers published). Isn't that evidence enough for making wrong-doing easier?
China could learn from the USSR/Russia, where higher degrees (doctorates etc) need to be vetted by the central government (Higher Attestation Committee). China really should know better given that Academic Prestige -> State Power.
That and Confucius should really be brought out of the woodwork (probably even more than what they are already doing) and socially elevate scientists and hold them to higher moral standards, again like the USSR.
Well, the authorities don't mind being the bad guy when they restrict internet access.
We do this because many people who have the pleasure of working with China have such similar experiences of being treated royally and being ripped off. If these were isolated incidents, we would all point to the perpetrator as the guilty party, but what experience has shown us is precisely that it isn't the case of a few bad apples. Rather, there seems to be a systemic problem (maybe cultural, maybe a problem with incentives, who knows) that leads to a huge amount of what we Westerners would consider dishonesty conducted in Chinese business (and as we see here in education as well).
You can act like a typical mefite and claim whatever moral high ground you want, but when the vast majority of those of us who have experiences in China all come back and say the same thing, it's you who is probably wrong, not us.
Chinese competition is making it difficult for all the rest of us honest cheats. Seriously. How do you expect to compete when your faked diploma & artfully contrived CV accompanied by an equally worthless motivation letter can be copied by any consumables-hungry chinese worker? We might have to start validating this information...
I wonder what happened to those two profs from Jian who sent in all those fabricated crystal papers.
Sadly, although I am looking to do business in China in the future, I have come across many anecdotes from people who tell me it is very dangerous.
- Someone I know well lost millions due to Chinese side refusing to pay for computer equipment sold
- One firm in Hong Kong told me mainland companies prefer to hire their CFOs from Hong Kong because they are seen as being more trustworthy
- Several companies that had focused on China, leaving it and heading to Japan, due to difficulty in finding trustworthy partners.
I think China has reached a point where cheating in one way or another is limiting its growth potential severely. The main factor in considering a project in China is how not to get screwed. This is not a theory I made up, but actually what has come up in discussions about 2 different companies who have asked me to sell their products in China.
The news articles attached suggest that academia is also completely ridden with cheating unfortunately. I can't see that the country will be able to get anywhere in the future without a sweeping change. I don't think it is a matter of imprisoning or killing academics like China has done with financial or government people in the past. The only idea I have is for someone to give John Boswell a grant to translate the Symphony of Science videos into Chinese. This could be mandatory viewing for all academics, and the leaders of universities would be required to institute programs for instilling a new culture of honesty in students and having papers tested before they leave the university. Another idea is to create a bilingual (Chinese-English) transparency website that can be used to discover cheating authors and to also post what happened to them when they were discovered.
The attempt would be to supplant this supposedly celebrated part of Chinese culture and redirect the energy into an understanding of what science is really about. Clearly, you cannot perceive the wonder, or make great contributions, if you cheat. The linked articles suggest that this understanding is not yet mainstream in China, or is too overshadowed by the economic chaos.
India, however, is much, much worse.
Poles melting soon, anyone...?
Yes, the journals should start mostly ignoring articles from academics in China, very little alternative, journals simply cannot fact check every article. I'd imagine China's strongest academics would still publish once their papers were referred to the journal by a respected western academic, but that'll hopefully stay rare.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Good. Let them put up a farce about a major facet of the image they project to the outside world. The Soviets did that, and look where they wound up.
I'm not going to argue for or against the cultural component to the problem - but I do think there are parallels between modern China and the United States around 1900. The big industrialists are king, and the government is more concerned with keeping those rich entrepreneurs happy than with bothering them about pesky laws. It's really a "wild west" sort of mentality.
I expect that a decade or two having to deal with the rest of the industrialized world will largely straighten this out, whether the root is cultural or just newness to capitalism (or some amalgam of the two, which I think is probably the most likely).
#DeleteChrome
China is a highly authoritarian regime, no surprises that their equivalent of the ministry of truth is DoublePlusCooking the results :D
China, home of the counterfeit milk, pet food, and luxury designer brands. Gee you think that there might be a problem with China's lack of standards.
When you are dealing with science, if you want results, you have to do it right. Science is a process of knowing about the natural world. When done right, it allows us to separate things that are probably true from things that are probably false better than anything else. As such, we discover new things and develop new technologies to make our lives better.
However, that only work when you do it right. If you just make shit up, your results are worthless. After all I can write up a study that shows I have psychic powers. I can have mountains of fabricated data to support that. However, that won't do anything to actually give me any psychic powers.
So, while individually the faked up research may do well for the scientist in question, getting them a better job and so on, nationally it'll set China back. Their fake research won't generate real results when you get down to it.
As Feynman said "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." This was with regards to the Colombia disaster. Here was a case of faking up the science to support the conclusion that was wanted, which was that things were safe. Well, all that was for naught, as the reality was it was NOT safe and blew the fuck up.
Same deal with any science. If a Chinese scientist fakes results on a study of a silicon doping technology to allow for smaller transistors, and a Chinese fab then tries to build equipment based on it, it won't work. Doesn't matter that there was a paper saying it would, if the research isn't true, it doesn't help. The laws of physics are what they are, we can't change them. All we can do is understand them. If our understanding is wrong, well then tough shit for us, our stuff won't work like we predict.
People who cheat will get executed.
It's pretty normal for serious corporate or political wrongdoing already.
Right, so how is this different from most of Western Academia? After all, the only way to get a professorship here is to publish as many papers as possible. Screw the quality of whatever it is you are doing, and how you got your name on most of the papers in your CV. After all, your work will be judged by people outside your own field of work, so all they'll end up doing is counting papers.
There might be some weak taboo here in the West that You Shall Not Be Caught Cheating, but that is as far as I would put the differences between what the article describes, and what is going on over here.
Just my 0.2$E-32
A.
I'm not sure why that's relevant to the discussion at hand. War isn't normal morals, and misinformation and acting unpredictably has been part of it in western warfare too, long before they heard of Sun Tzu.
E.g., even heard of the Trojan Horse? How's that for deceit in warfare? That's about a war from the 12'th century BC, while Sun Tzu is generally accepted to have lived in the 6'th-5'th century BC, while some place him as late as 3'rd century BC.
Where was that morality of western religions then? Or maybe using war strategies to make general points about a culture's morality is just silly. Society doesn't work by the same rules, not here and not in China.
But if you want to discuss civillian morals in the same age as Sun Tzu lived, how about The Rape Of The Sabines episode? The Romans had a shortage of women, so they invited the citizens of nearby cities (Sabines included, but not only) to a great festival in honour of Neptune. Then at a signal from Romulus himself they killed the men -- their guests! -- and took the women for themselves.
Does it sound to you like those western moral systems were that great? We're not talking about warfare feints and deceit, we're talking an atrocity against their neighbours they were at peace with. (Though not for long. It put Rome at war with three cities immediately.)
And lest you think it's just an ancient thing, the practice of "rehabilitating marriage" in which a raped woman is given to the rapist to save honour only came to a screeching halt in Italy in 1965. It used to be more like described as two teenagers having run away together, but it turns out most cases were abduction and rape by force, as a way to make a girl's family marry her to some guy she didn't want.
Western morals and religious rules, eh?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Peke" in my native language (filipino) is our rough translation for "fake".
It was hard to keep my face straight when I read the name of that university.
Pet peeve: Profane people propagating perfunctory pedantry.
It seems that science coming from the old Soviet Union was top notch by comparison. Although there were some egregious cases (such as with Lysenkoism) of ideologically-driven suppression of science, overall it seems that Soviet scientists were very well respected by their international peers, most especially in mathematics and physics. Their scientists received several Nobel Prizes, whereas the it seems that the People's Republic of China doesn't actually have even one: none of the four Nobel Laureates of Chinese descent did the work which won them their prizes while they were in China, under the Chinese system of scientific research, and all of them, ironically, had at some point become citizens of the United States. Compare this with the Soviet prize winners, all of whom worked under the auspices of the Soviet scientific research institutes when they did their prize-winning work.
The Soviet experience shows that a repressive, totalitarian society is still able to produce cutting-edge science, so the fact that China is doing so badly in this area probably has nothing to do with their form of government. You might say that if they really wanted to be a scientific and research powerhouse they're doing it wrong. They might look to how the USSR did its work in the Cold War years if they wanted a "socialist" model on how to do science so as to be respected internationally.
'The authorities don't want to be the bad guy.'
Really? That's such an ironic thing to say of the chinese authorities...
East Anglia University is in China?
I'm a university prof in Japan. The Chinese students we get here are awesome. I try to get as many of them in my classes as possible. They actually do the work (very different from Japanese students) and come to class with something interesting/insightful to say (again, very different from Japanese students). I don't think you could give me enough of them.
That being said, I did not have the same experience when I was teaching in the US. The Chinese students there cheated like mad. My friend (Japanese) who is now teaching in the US writes me at least once a month asking, "What should I do with all these Chinese students? They're all cheating!" I tell her to fail them, but she's too nice.
Another friend taught in China for 2 years before joining our faculty here. She is Singaporean of Chinese descent. Her parents made her go to Chinese school so she could grow up to be a proper Chinese lady. Here is what she decided: Mao destroyed China. Having grown up on classics and traditional moral teachings, and being fluent and literate in Mandarin, she thought she knew what she'd be getting into when she went there. But she found that people were petty, dishonest, and did baffling things like take more than one handout, rather than one per person ("They're not worth anything!" she finally screamed). She concluded that when you kill off everyone with an education (or they run away to Taiwan or elsewhere), you're left with provincial morons who are greedy and lack social values. Then you impose a system on them that cannot provide for even their most basic needs, and they learn to grab anything they can get right now because they may never get another chance.
And that's the reading of China that I've decided is the closest. It cannot be overstated how much Maoism changed that country, and mostly for the worse.
The authorities don't want to be the bad guy.
Seriously?
Is there another country named China I'm not aware about?
Post-doc biologists at Harvard have to publish 70 papers in 7 years (if memory serves) to even qualify for a junior faculty position. There's no way that a scientist can publish ten papers per year that are worth jack squat, and the result is that most of the papers coming out of Harvard are garbage that get published because of where they come from. This isn't a China-only problem.
Thank-you for pointing this out.
In reading this whole thread, I am getting a MASSIVE propaganda vibe off the entire thing.
Basically, the stress test of truth I sometimes use around here works like this. . .
"If 98% of Slashdot is united in praise or condemnation on any subject, then somebody somewhere is playing the social-engineering violin extremely well, because this bunch can't even agree on the direction of gravity's pull. -Nor should they, which means something is wrong."
I guess it's true; if you sustain a BS message for long enough, it becomes self-referential and emotionally true. How can we have come so far, learned so much and still fall for the same old and tired psychological ploys?
-FL
Encourage authorities in China to be the bad guy.
You guys are a bunch of racist potty mouths. You have not EVER read the art of war. If you had you would speak of it like someone who had. Your summery is bloody retarded. " Asian religions in general lack the fixed rules" Racist prick. Like what rules ... the rules of Jesus who said thou shalt not kill! Killing is a way of life in USA. Death penalty ring a bell dumb ass? Sound like a thing Jesus would do? Oh no but I guess it's just China and those Chinese religions that are at fault not people. Or how about Jesus over turning the money tables... you seen the popes asshat? His hat alone is worth more than a years pay in dirt poor Africa. I could go on to show the global infection on morality its called "The human condition" so wake up stupid.
I often review papers for signal processing journals and conferences. I find that about 2/3 of what I review is from China or Korea and that a large proportion of it is crap. I never saw any hint of a paper being fabricated though, it usually just looks like some kind of undergrad project. What I've been told is that there's a pressure on publishing a lot, which probably explains the poor quality.
Folks, this has nothing to do with Asian vs. Western culture in general. This is about one thing, very specificially... WITHIN the framework of modern Western society (which dominates the whole world today, including China) China's government has been more heavily promoting and rewarding success in education and research, whereas the Western governments largely reward and promote success in business. Both do what they do without any regard to ethics. The result in China is lying and cheating in academia. The result in the West is lying and cheating in business, which in its milder forms is known as marketing and has become so entrenched that it isn't even considered unethical anymore. In its more severe forms, which are equally pervasive, it leads to Enrons, Maddocks, industries totally dominated by monoplies, etc.
Simple and obvious.
That's basically it. It's a political talking point and a numbers game for the press and politicians. In my field I certainly read papers written by Chinese authors. I have even gone to the hassle of getting and translating papers that were written in Chinese. I know some Chinese authors and papers are good. But on average the quantity of papers is high while the quality is low. I haven't seen any instances of fraud, but the sloppiness is pretty remarkable sometimes, and the redundancy (shingling) -- truly amazing. I've seen effectively the same paper published 5 or more different ways, and it happens all the time. It's a terribly prejudiced thing to say, but that's the reality at the moment. So, colour me unimpressed if China is second in the world in paper numbers. It's a meaningless statistic.
So with the American Civil War, that too was tribal warfare. Why else was there such a split as there was, and why does it still live today?
You defined Africa's civil war as tribal war but there's no difference.
See also Northern Ireland's Protestant/Catholic wars.
that's their turf really. Most people in Europe/America will cheat. ALL Asians will.. http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2008/02/113_18811.html ~(Korea cheating)
The difference is that in the US we also take into account citations (at least in Chemistry).
For instance, if I have 7 papers in the last two years with 150 citations, I'm in demand because I'm being used as 'oh, and here's the paper of the guy who came up with the idea for this method' when others right their papers.
Now when I go up for the job against the post doc fresh from China, and he goes on about his 20 papers in the last two years with ~0~ citations (because they're essentially an abstract, a paragraph on methodology that's copy-pasted from a paper he wrote months ago and is out of date, and then his graphs/data with no conclusions drawn), the odds are against him getting the job.
Now, this is not a likely scenario, as I don't know anybody who jumps from one country's academia to another (unless headhunted) without a stop as a postdoc or with a fellowship, but in the US the value of an author is based upon quality citations as well.
I am become
I think we shouldn't bash all Chinese here, because I've seen similar cheats of smaller magnitude from US and EU scientists too. I've seen a lot of similar fake jobs in startups pretending to innovate.
Isn't maybe the whole world getting over-competitive? Because there's so much competition you are less likely to be successful with an original contribution, so it's often a more successful strategy to bluff and imitate. As bluffers get ahead and the society notices it's even more work for the real innovators to somehow prove they are not faking it, which gives yet a little more headroom to the con-artists. So I think society would be better off by raising rewards to the real innovators and punishing cheaters more severely. It will do no good to simply bash all Chinese.
Absolutely nothing.
Go ahead, keep stepping on them... you can't possibly kill more than a few million.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wow... So much overt and guiled hating here on the Chinese
The reality is that the modern Chinese scientific community is relatively new. The faculties are new, the advisors are new, the research programs are new. Right now their focusing on QUANTITY. Give them some time and they will improve their QUALITY. The checks and balances that typically contain this type of behavior (or at least curb it) in Western countries simply hasn't had time to fully take hold. We've seen similar incidents in other places recently (e.g. South Korean cloning scandal) and historically (e.g. Piltdown man anyone?).
Put your pre-conceptions aside and just have patience. These negative attitudes are destructive and accomplish nothing. It takes time to build competent institutions!
I taught research writing at a Chinese Agricultural University for a year. I am not even sure where to start about the plagiarism.
Kids would bring in things so obviously stolen that the authors name was still in the text.
Chinese react to public shame and to threats well. I likly would not have been allowed to use most of the tactics in the States or Europe. I did finally get them to write real papers after almost a year (even if they were mostly bad), and reference their sources. I just told them, "this is how we steel others ideas in the West."
I also learned a thing or two about how Chinese view theft of ideas. For several thousand years, copying famous work was a sign of respect. After all, it is all "owned" by the Emperor or the States anyway. In a sense it is all public property, and copy rights means you have a right to copy.
Now, that is fine in the old days, but not in a modern China. At the University I was at, they were doing things like genetic engineering knew super strains of rice. There was no rigid testing going on. Students were all but being encouraged to take it home to their families to plant in the rural areas. Other foreign researchers told me how labs and experiments were contaminated in all sorts of different ways; yet, everyone was being pushed to publish. Publishing was the end, and not the means to science for many of them.
After what I seen, I am certain sooner or later we are all going to pay the price for China's great experiment with Science.
Living in Chile
The Chinese approach to ethics is almost purely situational. Compound this with a manipulative media, and what you get are fat, happy citizens who are staunchly nationalistic and xenophobic. All they care about is money.
If you want some positive moderation, reply to the above true statement about the Chinese changing only the nationality.
(/. added: This exact comment has already been posted. Try to be more original...)
If only /. ran the Chinese Journal of Whateverology.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
But then students from other countries don't resort to cheating.
If you think this you are incredibly naive or racist and possibly both. Cheating is far more widespread than just students of any one ethnic group. Don't take my word for it, there is plenty of data out there supporting me.
Even in business, from what I've heard, you really, really want to be careful dealing with them.
This is true of doing business in any developing nation. Yes China is a difficult place to do business. I've seen it myself first hand. But it's not easier in India, Vietnam, Sub-Saharan Africa, parts of the Middle East etc. Severe corruption and bad policing exists in all these places. If you go to any of these places to do business you had better know what you are doing and who you are dealing with.
That was not flamebait you loser go eat shit really. That's flamebait . Guess your just another racist prick!
While that wouldn't fly in many types of research-driven sciences, I have heard that in the high-pressure ones (HIV and AIDS and cancer research), this often happens because there is too much money at stake for the professors. I am curious if this matches your experience or if this happens elsewhere?
Manipulative media, happy citizens who are staunchly nationalistic and xenophobic. Golly, that sounds so familiar, but I just can't put my finger on where I've encountered that before. I'm sure it'll come to me.
...the real fact-checking comes with other scientists try to duplicate the results. After all, Ross McKitrick's infamous degrees-for-radians paper slipped through the peer review process and was not caught until someone tried to duplicate his results and got the exact opposite conclusion.
So basically China is the wikipedia of research papers? While there is probably plenty of legitimate research being done and pubilished, there is enough fake or plagerized data to make everyone skeptical. It may be a good starting point, but never reference a Chinese paper or get laughed at by other professionals.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
A good school record is so important for students future in China that sometimes petty official will steal a good student's folder and put a mediocre relative's name on it. For the most part these records are not computerized, but exist as paper files. Its really hard to build a career once your record has been "lost". School record harken back to imperial days when the few who could pass an imperial exam could jump into the upper middle classes - a lot like getting a Harvard MBA.
Here is the difference between the west and China as of today. There seems to be a big misunderstanding of what a free market means (in either ideas or economics). For some reason people point out unethical companies or individuals (AIG, GM, Maddock) that cause destruction as a failure of the free market. But in reality it is a success. It is only because of a free market did the problems come to light. Sure it causes some loses when a cover up is exposed and the true value is realized. But the alternative is never finding out of the government covering it up. The latter is what I am afraid is happening in the US. Companies that were no longer fit to survive have been propped back up and they will only collapse later. A free market is brutal and fair. Those companies would go out of business. Now if that sounds harsh think of what it really would mean. There are still customers that need the product or service. The employees of that company still have their talents. Some company will either start or expand to make use of those employees to meet those customer needs. The same is true with education. In a free market of ideas the fake results will be caught eventually. And if your country of school establishes a reputation of shoddy research it's value will drop considerable.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I have to agree with Colonel Korn, one doesn't work & teach where one's postdoc was done.
As for 10 papers a year, that's what your grad students are for. Pick students who truly want to work on similar research. Devise experiments that have the union of topics so you can use their data, or co-author with your students when they publish. Hey, the first year of being a research professor somewhere, 10 papers the first year probably isn't going to happen, but after you build up you team, the second year it's possible. After that it snowballs.
Just some hand-waving without going into specifics.
I had the opportunity to work somewhere really cool, doing some neat research that yielded published MS thesis for the Grad students involved, several papers yearly for the 3 PI's at three different institutions(1 PhD candidate, 2PhD's), covering implementation of the apparatus, preliminary results, speculative articles on different directions to go with the research, etc., and papers by the head of the Research Institute on the big picture of the experiment. It can be done.
If you listen to some of the stories that fly around the Consumer Electronics Show, doing business in China is like waltzing in a minefield. You'd better step carefully.
Lots of high-end audio companies care about quality and specify very particular parts to go into their electronics. I've never run into such a company that moved production to China without having to deal with "As soon as we turned out backs, they started tossing in whatever cheap-shit capacitors they could find!" problems.
I wonder how many of the pro china comments in this article are by the 50 cents army.
My physics professor told me that the reason that lying in China is so rampant, is that if your experiment or research fails to achieve the desired result, you end up having to pay back all the money the government gave you. Even if your experiment comes out with valuable data or a side discovery, you have to pay the money back. That is the difference between America and China, we try and minimize the need to lie about research.
You must be as ignorant as fuck. Go read a fucking history book, you self-important twit.
More anecdotes: When I was taking classes at Northeastern, at the end of every exam - when the professor called for the exams to be turned in - the Chinese students would continue to hurriedly write while talking to each other in Chinese (I assume Mandarin, could have been Cantonese, I wouldn't know the difference). It was obvious to any casual observer they were comparing answers, and I was always incredulous the professors never did anything about it.
OTOH, in my recent classes at the University of New Mexico, the few Chinese students we had were all very good - worked hard, worked well in groups, no hint of any shady behavior. Now, this was in architecture, where you live or die by your studio work, and that is nearly impossible to fake/cheat. People can tell if you've done the work or not.
the talent necessary to have created such a record does not become the thief's Intellectual Property. Thus, where corruption reigns and their are little or no alternative routes to justice, the results are no surprise.
* Not necessarily applicable to the authors cited in the article, however, when political connections and loyalty trump competence the same corrosive results were too obvious in states outside of China.
When America first became an industrial powerhouse, it had a reputation in Europe for being an economy based on cheaters and pirates. Well-known authors commented on how their books were heavily pirated in the US. We were considered "economic puppies": hyper, pissing all over the place, and bumping into things we didn't understand[1]. Maybe it's just part of the maturing cycle.
[1] Please, no comments on Iraq.
Table-ized A.I.
I've heard this same issue come up from two different bio researchers - one doing post-doc work (French), and the other finishing his PhD (American) here in the US. They both related the same 'joke' about Chinese research, something like, "A non-PRC scientist approaches science to seek a result...a PRC-trained/educated scientist asks, "What result do you want to see?" Faking data is rampant among the Chinese students here in the US according to them, so much so that the non-Chinese are being passed over for grants here because they're shackled by such pesky things as 'ethics' and the scientific method. Afterward, when the grant donors see results blow up in their faces when reviewed by peers, they're usually too chagrined to make an issue out of it, having been made thorough fools of.
- Jack
I posit to you that declaring that "some" cultures have huge flaws is dangerous nonsense. I'm certain that ALL cultures have huge flaws that anyone in their right mind would hate.
Prove me wrong.
The Peoples Republic of China (PRC) is only missing three letters,
I, A, Y.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
It was a well known fact that our Chinese high school salutatorian was a a cheater. It's not about learning and mastering a subject you love, it's about grades. That's why I always avoid working with them.
There may be many reasons besides quality research to why a paper get cited frequently.
1. You work in a hot area which is likely to result in very significant "industry opportunities".
2. Your result is not so difficult to understand, and easy to follow up on, even though it is a first paper on something.
3. Your supervisor is famous and that gave you the required attention from the community.
4. A few important people used your stuff by chance (or by #3), and it snowballed into a "standard".
Sorry to burst your bubbles. You may not be hotter than the poor mathematician working in the building next to you.
I think the reason being that many Australian and American universities (especially the less well-known ones) are after money and admits any students that can pay. There are plenty of kids grown up in rich families in China who don't want to work hard. The current Chinese believe is pragmatism, as championed by Deng Xiaoping -- No matter it is a black or white cat, if it can catch mouse, it is a good cat. He probably came up with this line to defeat the communist hard rivals who against the reform, but at the same time, it costs morality of the whole society.
In the US, cheating and corruption occurs less often, but still a lot especially when you deal with sales people. and are usually done legally helped by its extremely complex laws. In China, corruption is wide spread but mostly done illegal because the laws are simple but a bit vague.
Hi, everyone, here's the update on what happened to the two cheating lecturers (note they are not professors) in Jinggangshan Universion in China, (in Chinese)
http://www.infzm.com/content/39587
In short: In ten days after ACSE's report was release on Dec. 19 2009,, the two lecturers got fired by the Jinggangshan University. For folks who are not familiar with what kind of college Jinggangshan Univ is, think about a local community university in your neighbourhood and the Jinggangshan college is pretty much on the same level.
Indeed faking research results is rampant in China and there are cases busted occupationally but there are still a lot good research works going on in top universities, and their results got published and recognized by international communities.
I believe the bad trend has something to do with fierce competition to get fund in Chinese academics and government's sometimes overenthusiastic support to get as much research done as possible in a short time. There's a boom in published papers for sure but the number of 'bad apples' also grow proportionally. To make things worse, some corrupted researcher are taking advantage of the language/culture gap between Chinese academy and English (US, British) ones - it's hard for English reviewers to find and verify the details of referenced works in their papers and the stories of faked results usually take much longer time to spread to Chinese academic circle, where the punishment could be done. The solution could be inviting more prominent Chinese researchers to become paper reviewers who could do a better job to verify the results, since an English reviewer probably can't tell Jinggangshan University from Tsinghua (China's MIT), but a Chinese reviewers can easily tell the huge difference between the two colleges and will put more critical opinions in reviewing.
Also, there's no need to exaggerate the incident. I personally find the "Chinese approach to ethics" thing purely laughable.
Unlike, say, our glorifying the cunning of Hannibal at Cannae? Last I've heard, it's still taught at all military academies, and was the ideal of such generals as Schlieffen of Schlieffen Plan fame or as Eisenhower. Or of Scipio at Zama? The unorthodox tactics of Nelson at Trafalgar? Alexander and his new tactics, plus such use of corruption as just buying the loyalties of some enemy cities? It seems to me like we worship a cunning general as much as any culture does.
Yes, probably not everyone knows exactly what was Nelson's innovation at Trafalgar, or why it worked, but then I guess a lot of Chinese don't know jack squat about Sun Tzu's tactics either.
Plus, that wasn't my main point. My main point is that you can't take feints and cunning tactics in war as proof that a culture values dishonesty and corruption during peace too. The same Greeks who were in awe of the cunning Odysseus and his Trojan Horse stratagem, would have probably executed anyone who tried the same kind of deception in a business transaction with his fellow Greeks.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
what the fuck is SEC going to do about fake science papers?
One might just as well ask WTF the Chinese scientific community is going to do about Wall Street fraud.
I can share two firsthand stories about Chinese science. I don't mean to claim anything larger by them, as I am a scientist in one small field and have no collective experience, but hopefully they will provide some additional firsthand accounts for discussion.
When I was studying for my PhD there was a paper from the "Chinese Science Bulletin," an English language journal from China that is indexed with all scholarly articles, on our group bulletin board. It was exactly the same paper, simply plagiarized, that my advisor had published a few years earlier in Nature (one of the most prestigious science journals, published in Britain.) I've never seen such a thing elsewhere. If an American professor of any rank was caught doing this, they would be fired immediately. This paper was reported but nothing happened.
Also, one year in grad school I was asked to help with admissions in computer science. One of the jobs grad students were to cull applications. In particular we were to get rid of all Chinese applications because they had had problems with test results being faked, and more importantly their phone interviews being conducted by someone who, when the admitted student showed up in the country, was clearly not the person who was on the phone. Again, this is totally alien to me as an American. Can you imagine faking your SAT scores and sending them to a college?
The stories in the Yahoo article therefore aren't surprising to me at all.
But the Chinese sacrifice far more than we do in order to do science. A good friend from an American university gave a series of lectures in China and had to wear a parka in the classroom as it was not heated. And he received attention and respect from the students that he found humbling. And I am quite excited that the Chinese are happy to fund science (more so than Americans, you must know!) and I expect that standards will improve as the body of good scientists who gain warranted international reputations grows (although corruption will continue in science as much as it does in their government, I am sure). I am going to a research conference in China this summer, but I unfortunately do keep experiences like this in mind when working there or reading journal articles from China.
Most Chinese I know are just not as good at faking it as the average American.
The Americans are better at faking it, that's why China is #2 just behind the US.
...
That being said, I did not have the same experience when I was teaching in the US. The Chinese students there cheated like mad. My friend (Japanese) who is now teaching in the US writes me at least once a month asking, "What should I do with all these Chinese students? They're all cheating!" I tell her to fail them, but she's too nice.
Naw, she has it correct. let them cheat. they won't get jobs here because they will suck at them, and if they are going back to china with their "education" more power to them.
Be seeing you...
http://xkcd.com/725/
What about the effect on the people who did the work? Think what will happen to their world view when they see blatant cheats getting the same marks as they do for doing hard work. It's unfair and devalues their degrees.
Really? I don't see much on the specifics of deploying crossbowmen or formations for spearmen, which makes me think it's metaphorical.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Fonterra NZ executives knew about the melamine problem in China almost one year before it gained public attention.
I am a foreigner working in China as a teacher at a college and recently set an assignment for my students. Of 390 papers submitted 138 were plagiarised - that is a strike rate of 35%. The article may be onto something here. I suppose that means that 65% didn't plagiarise though... Rick.