16 years of Alzheimer's research possibly down the toilet

I take your word the data is fake but when I was in high school I saw the gayest guy of all time do an interpretive dance of Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" in front of a classroom of 30 people who laughed the entire time. I was so entertained I was fully accepting of that guy and his pal on bass guitar.

 

Wait, has it not changed? I haven't published or researched in a while, but I was told of these databases that I know wasn't widely known or important 5 or 6 years ago.

 

Yes, Schön was definitely an idiot, I remember watching some interview/documentary around the time he got caught and it's like people wanted to believe him and for whatever reason overlooked the numbers initially, he was definitely getting a little too big/ego driven I thought too, especially with the number of papers coming out iirc.

Hahah, that's a great thing to point out too on the trial, it was so crazy, I mean I honestly couldn't believe how far he got, it seemed like he was set for a Nobel until everything fell apart.

 

Yeah, I think this thread should be in regular Hangout, I'm glad I visited to catch it. I normally don't post in D&D too much, but nothing against those that do.

 

SSRIs prob don't work as well as they're billed. How many billions have been sunk into these magic happy pills from teens to elderly?

https://www.economist.com/science-a...edical-explanation-for-depression-is-rebuffed
A popular medical explanation for depression is rebuffed

 

I was not... not commenting... on your database point.
I was ... not commenting... on the general quality and reproducibility of any social science data.

 

Just want to add: lots of activity in physics trying to prove Einstein wrong, but it hasn't really happened. General Relativity looks as solid as ever, even though people publish a lot of "yeah, but what if, like, half a typewriter crossed the event horizon of a black hole -- then we would find the flaw in GR." And string theory, despite thousands and thousands of publications doesn't have a shred of proof. It's been a wandering and strange time for theoretical physics, for sure. It's amazing how much Einstein's ideas have stood test after test, even with the latest gravitational wave discoveries and black hole observations -- all consistent with his theories, to the letter so far.

 

I first read that as "a round up of students found..."

 

I don't think General Relativity is that solid and relatively early on General Relativity was shown to be flawed once people seriously started looking at quantum effects. Relativity is a very robust theory but so are Newton's laws and for the vast majority of engineering you don't need to go beyond Newton. The problem is that those don't explain everything and that is the ultimate goal of Physics.

So far ideas of String Theory, Super-Symmetry, Quantum gravity, are also all theories that have their own problems in their own way but they do address the issue of how do you reconcile Relativity with quantum which is the fundamental problem with relativity.

Just as a personal aside my dad has been looking at this a lot recently. He can't stand String Theory but he's been looking (mathmatically that is) the idea that quantum effects are what governs the Universe. So in that sense Relativity is actually a subset of Quantum Mechanics.

 

Thanks for those thoughts and the anecdote of your father's interests.
I'll DM you at some point. I won't quibble further here. It's an area of great interest and detailed research for me.

 

@B-Bob what do you think of Heisenberg? And of von Braun? As a scientist of similar age?

 

No one asked me, but I'm uncertain about this Heisenberg fellow....but that is because I have my principles...

 

No problem. Please DM me. If you want to read some of my father's papers would be happy to share.

He's a retired physics professor. Most of his career was spent in biophysics studying things like electric currents across cell membranes. Since he retired he's been spending a lot of time on cosmology.

 

Research paper fraud is still a thing, and it's getting worse.
https://www.theguardian.com/science...ers-push-research-credibility-to-crisis-point
‘The situation has become appalling’: fake scientific papers push research credibility to crisis point

Tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals in an international scandal that is worsening every year, scientists have warned. Medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.

Last year the annual number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. Most analysts believe the figure is only the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud.

“The situation has become appalling,” said Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University. “The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse.”

The startling rise in the publication of sham science papers has its roots in China, where young doctors and scientists seeking promotion were required to have published scientific papers. Shadow organisations – known as “paper mills” – began to supply fabricated work for publication in journals there.

The practice has since spread to India, Iran, Russia, former Soviet Union states and eastern Europe, with paper mills supplying fabricated studies to more and more journals as increasing numbers of young scientists try to boost their careers by claiming false research experience. In some cases, journal editors have been bribed to accept articles, while paper mills have managed to establish their own agents as guest editors who then allow reams of falsified work to be published.
Dr Dorothy Bishop: ‘People are building careers on the back of this tidal wave of fraudulent science.’ Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian
“Editors are not fulfilling their roles properly, and peer reviewers are not doing their jobs. And some are being paid large sums of money,” said Professor Alison Avenell of Aberdeen University. “It is deeply worrying.”

The products of paper mills often look like regular articles but are based on templates in which names of genes or diseases are slotted in at random among fictitious tables and figures. Worryingly, these articles can then get incorporated into large databases used by those working on drug discovery.

Others are more bizarre and include research unrelated to a journal’s field, making it clear that no peer review has taken place in relation to that article. An example is a paper on Marxist ideology that appeared in the journal Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine. Others are distinctive because of the strange language they use, including references to “bosom peril” rather than breast cancer and “Parkinson’s ailment” rather Parkinson’s disease.

Watchdog groups – such as Retraction Watch – have tracked the problem and have noted retractions by journals that were forced to act on occasions when fabrications were uncovered. One study, by Nature, revealed that in 2013 there were just over 1,000 retractions. In 2022, the figure topped 4,000 before jumping to more than 10,000 last year.

Of this last total, more than 8,000 retracted papers had been published in journals owned by Hindawi, a subsidiary of the publisher Wiley, figures that have now forced the company to act. “We will be sunsetting the Hindawi brand and have begun to fully integrate the 200-plus Hindawi journals into Wiley’s portfolio,” a Wiley spokesperson told the Observer.

The spokesperson added that Wiley had now identified hundreds of fraudsters present in its portfolio of journals, as well as those who had held guest editorial roles. “We have removed them from our systems and will continue to take a proactive … approach in our efforts to clean up the scholarly record, strengthen our integrity processes and contribute to cross-industry solutions.”

But Wiley insisted it could not tackle the crisis on its own, a message echoed by other publishers, which say they are under siege from paper mills. Academics remain cautious, however. The problem is that in many countries, academics are paid according to the number of papers they have published.

“If you have growing numbers of researchers who are being strongly incentivised to publish just for the sake of publishing, while we have a growing number of journals making money from publishing the resulting articles, you have a perfect storm,” said Professor Marcus Munafo of Bristol University. “That is exactly what we have now.”

The harm done by publishing poor or fabricated research is demonstrated by the anti-parasite drug ivermectin. Early laboratory studies indicated it could be used to treat Covid-19 and it was hailed as a miracle drug. However, it was later found these studies showed clear evidence of fraud, and medical authorities have refused to back it as a treatment for Covid.

“The trouble was, ivermectin was used by anti-vaxxers to say: ‘We don’t need vaccination because we have this wonder drug,’” said Jack Wilkinson at Manchester University. “But many of the trials that underpinned those claims were not authentic.”

Wilkinson added that he and his colleagues were trying to develop protocols that researchers could apply to reveal the authenticity of studies that they might include in their own work. “Some great science came out during the pandemic, but there was an ocean of rubbish research too. We need ways to pinpoint poor data right from the start.”

The danger posed by the rise of the paper mill and fraudulent research papers was also stressed by Professor Malcolm MacLeod of Edinburgh University. “If, as a scientist, I want to check all the papers about a particular drug that might target cancers or stroke cases, it is very hard for me to avoid those that are fabricated. Scientific knowledge is being polluted by made-up material. We are facing a crisis.”

This point was backed by Bishop: “People are building careers on the back of this tidal wave of fraudulent science and could end up running scientific institutes and eventually be used by mainstream journals as reviewers and editors. Corruption is creeping into the system.”​

 

This is really disheartening...

 

So much is going on with Harvard...and not with good happenings.

 

Is this not the result of late stage capitalism
where the ends justifies the means
Where the ends don't matter as much as the marketing and advertising

It's more important to produce and get publicity than it is to actually being worthy of the capital given for it
Being a GREAT RESEARCHER moniker is more important than being a GREAT RESEARCHER
The moniker if properly marketed brings in more money and resources than the actual work

Rocket River

 

This is such a naive statement and probably (I hope) taken out of context from a much longer comment.

Every scientist "manipulates" their images, and I don't mean that as a hot take or an anti-science take. If you take a photo and want to highlight some feature of the content, do you manipulate images? Probably, right?

A scientist can add a color scale to heighten certain features. Tweak the contrast. Crop the margins. Etc. It's basically framing which all humans do every durn time they try to communicate something.

The question is what is unethical or misleading manipulation. Most scientists don't have a great and clear answer to that. If you ask most of us, we say, "well, I know unethical conduct when I see it." Now mix in a few miserable grad. students or post-docs who desperately want their big story at a high-profile journal. Then you've got some case like this, where somebody presumably went "too far" and made sketchy, misleading alterations. So I hear people wanting jail time, but I would bet dollars to donuts, there was a grad student or postdoc involved who literally thought they weren't doing anything wrong. Just trying to make the big boss happy and establish career credentials.