Bell Labs fires Hendrik Schon for Data Falsification 169
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."
hmmm (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:hmmm (Score:3, Informative)
Lucent was spun off in 1996, thus Bell Labs wasn't part of your incidents in 1998.
BTW -- There are claims of Verizon, Qwest and others doing exactly the same thing today. Sad.
Re:hmmm (Score:1)
The system works? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:The system works? (Score:3, Informative)
It's fairly big news. Fraud of this scale is reprehensible. Plus I'm sure they want to make sure he never works again.
Re: The system works? (Score:4, Funny)
> I think because that type of forgery has a huge impact on their bottom line. I mean they were spending millions on what this guys claimed, and would have spent millions more.
Shouldn't they hope he goes to work with their competitors?
Re: The system works? (Score:1)
Re:The system works? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The system works? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The system works? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
It buys them them the sort of respect in the scientific community that being open about bugs and security flaws buys Debian or OpenBSD in the hacker community. Quietly sweeping this under the carpet would create among scientists the sort of sentiment MS and others recieve from hackers and admins when those companies hide or ignore security holes.
3rd time telling this story on /, (Score:2)
thusly, im impressed. way to can the liars. now if only we could do this with sales teams
Re:3rd time telling this story on /, (Score:2, Funny)
Oh... that was a typo!? Nevermind..
T
Re:3rd time telling this story on /, (Score:2)
In other news.... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:In other news.... (Score:2)
"Throw yourself at the ground and miss"
Re:In other news.... (Score:2)
It isn't that simple. When you throw yourself to the ground, something has to catch your attention in a very large way. You cannot simply throw yourself to the ground and miss, you will land face first into the dirt.
For example, if you throw yourself to the ground and see a translucent purple dancing octopus fly by in a miniature P38 propeller-driven fighter plane, you will probably so surprised that you forget to land. Once this happens, as long as you do not consciously realize that you haven't yet landed, you'll be airborne.
For further reference, please see the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy entry on "flight."
Re:In other news.... (Score:1)
YOU GET FIRED!
No Nobel for you, now go sit down.
Twist of Fate... (Score:1, Interesting)
Well, I guess Ask Slashdot will still have new content for people to flame each other over.
Re:In a MORE ironic twist... (and even more offtop (Score:2)
Hey Schon! (Score:2, Funny)
Shit Happens (Score:1)
Re:Shit Happens (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Shit Happens (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Shit Happens (Score:2)
Re:Shit Happens (Score:1)
Re:Shit Happens (Score:2)
MISCONDUCT (Score:1)
Re:MISCONDUCT (Score:2)
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?
Re:MISCONDUCT (Score:1)
Patrick Stewart: Remove the Stone of Shame.
(they remove the 1 ft^3 Stone of Shame)
Homer: WOOHOO!
Patrick Stewart: Attach... the Stone of Triumph!
(they attach the 10 ft^3 Stone of Triumph)
Homer: Awwwwwww...
I would conclude... (Score:1)
Re:I would conclude... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I would conclude... (Score:2)
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.
Re:I would conclude... (Score:2)
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.
Re:I would conclude... (Score:1)
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.
Re:I would conclude... (Score:2)
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.
Questionable (Score:3, Interesting)
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..
Re:Questionable (Score:1)
And the lab did sell stuff to customers who borrowed money from them in an attempt to boost revenues. It only worked until the customers went bankrupt, and Lucent had to take several big hits to their bottom line. Their sales still have not returned to growth.
Re:Questionable (Score:4, Interesting)
It is not a sin to come up with seemingly crackpot theories. In fact that's almost synonymous with ingenuity. What is a horrible, unforgivable crime is to tamper with data to fit it to model and not vice versa. To a scientist, real data is (or should be) holy and must be treated with due reverence.
Re:Questionable (Score:5, Insightful)
It is the hunch that usually leads scientists to study the phenomena/theories in question in the first place. The hard part is devising an experiment to prove/disprove what you're looking for without too many intervening factors that can get in the way. In fact, sometimes just coming up with the experiment itself is worthy of a Nobel Prize.
But scientists should NEVER EVER fake data, no matter HOW STRONGLY they believe they are right. If they're that sure, then they can publish all the theoretical articles they want. But NEVER publish fraudulent data as true. Science is about truth, truth is about absolute, not about hunches. That's why scientists do (or should, if they don't shy away from it) report estimated uncertainties for all experimentally-determined values and data points. If scientists didn't adhere to these lofty expectations, one wouldn't be able to believe any of the journals, which would be a major setback for all fields of science. If you had inherent mistrust of scientists, then science would become just like politics [whitehouse.gov].
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.
Sorry, this guy WAS given the benefit of the doubt for many years. His results were irreproducible, which as you know, is one of the main characteristics of science. Everything must be reproducible. He claimed to grow Aluminum Oxide films that could withstand far greater electric fields before breaking down than anyone else on the planet, which is odd considering people mimicked his exact sputtering/growth techniques. For years nobody could reproduce any of his experiments. Much of the discord boiled down to a specific sputtering chamber Schon had back in Germany, where he claimed he was able to grow his thin films. Eventually Schon tried to regrow some films again in this chamber, and said he was unable to repeat his earlier work.
I worked in a physics lab [harvard.edu] this past summer where nearly every day at lunchtime the professor (Dr. Michael Tinkham, who's rather reknowned in superconductivity circles) would hold up a copy of Physics Today with a picture of Schon and warn us of the consequences of abandoning truth in favor of increased publications.
What Prof. Tinkham pointed out to us is that Schon became something of a minor deity in the realm of experimental physics, getting significant publications, usually quite often in the top physics journals such as Nature, Science, Physical Review, etc. The problem was that he soon had a reputation of greatness to maintain, so he may have gotten a little clumsy regarding data acquisition and analysis, in favor of keeping his astonishing rate of publications steady.
Eventually, things caught up to him. I'm not sure how much of his questionable work was little details that slipped though his fingers, how much was semi-conscious oversight, and how much was flat-out fabrication and fraud. But after he was caught then all his work became suspect.
The worst thing he did was re-use a dataset entirely, claiming it was a plot of something else, and left the exact same noise spurs and other anomalies.
Usually it's rare to find such blatant scientific fraud, but there was another recent fraud [physicstoday.org].
At least he's not moving the Lab's money into offshore shell companies to show earnings.
Sure, and at least he's also not killing people. But in the realm of science, what he's done is destroy the credibility that scientists strive for, and even NEED to be respected for. It's great that he's been caught, and hopefully it'll be a lesson to any up-and-coming experimentalists that no matter how much you believe in your theories, you have a committment to truth.
Maybe there should be some kind of hippocratic oath for scientists, that would be cool.
Re:Questionable (Score:2)
Of course, the idea behind peer review is that everyone's ideas are suspect anyway until the results have been reproduced.
Tis a shame to single out a man for damnation on the basis of one slip when damnation is the default case.
Bulltish (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Questionable (Score:2)
The purpose of peer review is NOT to wait for reproducibility but to make sure the article in question is WORTHY enough to be printed. One usually assumes the data is accurate, but one questions the math and physics behind the various deductive claims.
Tis a shame to single out a man for damnation on the basis of one slip when damnation is the default case.
It wasn't ONE case, it was SEVERAL suspicious data sets, which eventually got noticed when a graph, supposedly representing different data, was used AT LEAST TWICE.
In other words, after several slips, and finding out UTTER FABRICATION used by the scientist, then the man is 'singled out' to be judged if he is worthy of 'damnation'. Don't worry, Bell Labs gave him his trial, for the past several months, and now they have determined he is GUILTY.
Re:Questionable (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with all of this - falsification of data is the ultimate scientific crime. The analogy with recent accounting fraud is quite a good one - not only will nobody hire this guy as a scientist again (as nobody would hire some ex-CEO/CFOs from fraudulant companies) but he has destroyed much that was good (as many employees and shareholders of the bad companies had their livelyhoods destroyed) - any work based on what he did is now worthless, and old and possibly correct work he did is worthless, because nobody knows what they can trust.
For the scientist, this is like a child-molestation conviction for a teacher - it makes him completely unhirable. I think that because of the seriousness of fraud charges, scientists are very unwilling to bring them. I suspect that, like child-molestation a generation or two ago, that it very often gets swept under the carpet.
Re:Questionable (Score:2)
In many cases, though, I don't think it's because of the fear of fraud charges that keeps scientists honest.
I think what is USUALLY the case is that scientists have a tendency to be truthful to their work because that is the nature of science - finding out truth of either physics or chemistry or astronomy, you name it.
If the up-and-coming scientists were after fame and/or glory and/or riches, there are far easier and more efficient ways to achieve those goals than in science. And especially because the road to PhD and beyond is definitely not easy, that usually leaves the most devoted.
One would hope that this devotion to science would overpower any desire to falsify data. I think in Schon's case, though, he may have let the fame he had (albeit in a small circle) get to his head so he could keep up with his publications.
He got too greedy, and it caught up to him. I think this is interesting because in light of this, many professors are now scrutinizing their student's work more carefully then they may have previously. After all, if one's advisor's name will go on a publication, that advisor doesn't want to be associated with the next Schon.
Re:Questionable (Score:1)
The four kings in this holy world are: weighing scales, books, freedom and the liberal party?
Re:Questionable (Score:1, Offtopic)
There are 4 things in this world that are sacred: books, children, liberty and courtesy.
Am I right? This is with the aid of an online dictionary, and my vague knowledge of declensions.
Re:Questionable (Score:2)
Ugh. This is scientific fraud of the worst sort.
Not in question (Score:1)
I believe the word for that is "conjecture." A conjecture is far removed from "fact". Evidently this Dr. Schon invented "facts". This is a VERY bad thing.
Good science is science you can trust. If something is a scientific fact, then other scientists can build upon it, and do. If fact turns out to be fiction, then dependent labors are wasted.
Liar probably fits here.
Not really. (Score:1)
I'd say it is more of an after sight then anything else. You literaly have billions of people through the ages making different hypothesises, when the scientific data eventualy comes along that happens to match that particular data, then everyone will tend to point back and say "ah ha! that guy was ahead of his time!"
Re:Questionable (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Police and prosecutors may just have a 6th sense that can lead them to correct hypotheses about the identity of the guilty party even when evidence does not back them up, but few would want to give them the benefit of the doubt and base the criminal justice system upon their conjectures.
~Phillip
Re:Questionable (Score:1)
From abroad, it looks like the PATRIOT Act instantiated this principle.
But then, Washington only follows the lead of Hollywood who worships such behaviour for their movie heros since a long time.
Re:Questionable (Score:1, Interesting)
BTW. The experiment also involved an extremely impressive feat of surveying by the US Navy.
shoen (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:shoen (Score:2)
Really, isn't the last thing we want a proven liar doing going to be teaching the impressionable young physicists of tomorrow?
The scientific method works (Score:3, Insightful)
Only sometimes... (Score:1)
It only works part of the time. Unfortunately. And even when it does, it usually takes many years, often decades. Nobody in science wants to check what they don't want to see debunked; i.e. their pet theory.
The rest of the time, they just make up `epicyclical' explanations for discordances as keep business as usual for as long as it lasts. [Epiclyclical, like the epicycles made up to refuse the evidence that Earth was not at the center of the universe].
and who caught him? (Score:4, Funny)
more information (Score:4, Informative)
Unfotunately not all that uncommon (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
All too true :-( (Score:1)
Just publish publish publish, no mattern what, no matter how inanical, no matter how pointless, no matter how fake. No publications, no career. And the more significant your research, the less it will get funded. And the less likely you'll get something publishable out of it: it either doesn't work, or it works too well and your papers are revolutionary and get rejected. Better play it safe...
It's so rotten! >:-(
Science is in an advanced state of decay. Perhaps the time has come for us to look for a replacement...
Re:All too true :-( (Score:1)
The concept of science, or just how it is used by dodgy companies? You might just as well make the statement `Music is getting worse`. Its not true. At the end of any given year, you have all the music you used to have, plus whatever new music was produced that year. Even if its zero, you`ve not gone backwards.
Going backwards (Score:2)
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.
Overeager? (Score:1)
Lucent has been sinking for years (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Lucent has been sinking for years (Score:2, Interesting)
Still, though, I'm very glad to see that they maintained the intelligence, backbone, and ethics to bounce Schon's sorry ass.
Tomas
"Very funny, Scotty. Now beam down my clothes!"
Re:Lucent has been sinking for years (Score:1, Interesting)
I agree with your sentiments about the labs.
I would love to get about 25 ex-BL researchers together and write a book about the downfall.
It turns out... (Score:3)
Booms in space (Score:1)
or explain the sound in space we hear in movies.
That's easy: Radio interference.
Re:It turns out... (Score:1)
And then go on to replace science with something more "reliable"...
L.Ron Hubbard, move over...
I cheated in Chemisty when I was a junior! (Score:2, Funny)
Stupid Reporter (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Stupid Reporter (Score:1)
Agreed. But what I don't grok is how he, or any hard-science researcher, can even think for a second that they will get away with BSing data to support bogus claims. Sure, they can get away with it in the short term, but eventually when nobody can reproduce the results, the data will be scrubbed to prove the results... bogus data = bogus results. Game over.
This is as shortsighted as creating an executable that apparently does something amazing, like predicting the last 20 years of winners in a tri-state lottery (the assumption being that if you can predict past winning lottery numbers, then you can predict future winning numbers as well). The author gets the "XYZ...Profit" treatment... until someone looks at the source code, which won't even compile, nor does it contain any code that could reasonably predict past lottery winning numbers, let alone future winning numbers. The obvious conclusion is that the executable contains the lottery historical data, and is therefore not predicting anything at all. How could that programmer not expect anyone to look at the source code, let alone a researcher not expect their unreproducable results not have the associated supporting data scrubbed?
*Boggles*
What happened to Journalists? Re:Stupid Reporter (Score:1)
They're not nearly as talented as Hollywood gives them credit for. The Lois Lane (nose for a story, get it at any cost) archetype in TV and movies doesn't exist anymore, thanks to institutionalized journalism coursework and mandatory "crap jobs" (internships, etc.) turning off prospective students who might have enough intellect and integrity to be the next Walter Cronkite. They're more likely to go into something less sleazy, like political science or law.
I've seen this phenomenon from two angles: as a quoted source for a story in the New York Times (of all places!), where I was quoted selectively and out of context, to ensure that the "spin" of the article was supported by my comments. My friend had warned me, "Here is an opportunity for you to be completely and totally misquoted." I thought he was joking.
The other side is my brother, who got a journalism degree last year. He spent 6 months in a crap internship (this is Ann Arbor, Michigan), and when they could no longer keep him around (bad economy, they tell him), he has resorted to being a shift manager at a supermarket. One of the problems is that he doesn't have any skills in ass-kissing, apparently.
Even "legends" like Donaldson and Jennings seem to be more like "antiques" who spent enough time standing with a microphone reading notecards in front of various places of interest around the world, they've earned the right to sit behind a desk and read a teleprompter, trying none-too-hard to hide their political spin when they make snide guffaws at things they disagree with.
Even Reuters and AP releases, which rarely bear the names of the contributing journalists, seem to be including snide commentary and spin now, based on the bias of the author. At the very least it's become more and more sensationalist, more "tabloid-esque."
The only section of newspaper I can actually stand to read anymore is the editorial stuff. At least the columnists are telling you up front that they are only giving you an "opinion." Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back to listen to National Public Radio, since the local (Ohio) reporters are finally done whining about yesterday's execution of a guy who raped a murdered a little girl. Aside from the occasional intellectual elitist liberal spin from a small contingent of their regulars, NPR usually does a pretty good job at factual reporting and well-informed opinion pieces.
Isn't This Like RIAA? (Score:2, Insightful)
Let the humour begin (Score:1)
described as the only conclusive case of scientific misconduct ever identified in the history of the prestigious laboratory
Um, wouldn't that have been Ritchie and Thompson with UNIX
Stop The World, I Wanna Get Off (Score:2)
Re:Stop The World, I Wanna Get Off (Score:1)
Santa Claus 1836 - 2000 [sympatico.ca]
Falsified Molecular Scale Computing Experiments (Score:1)
One scientist at the facility noted, "He booted it up right in front of us. I'm pretty sure I heard the Windows 2000 startup tune, and everything." They were later horrified to discover that Schon was simply lying.
Nobel Prize? (Score:2)
Shit... probably just get my ass fired.
Oh wait. =)
My favorite quote from the Reuters article... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Sigh(ence)... (Score:2)
I guess things like this just show that science and religion are not so different as some would think.
Re:Sigh(ence)... (Score:1)
Re:Sigh(ence)... (Score:1)
- Bathing is bad.
- The world is flat.
- The universe revolves around the Earth.
Now presents that the theory of evolution cannot be true because it does not fit into their view of things... Lame.
Next: Dr. Robert Gallo ? (Score:1)
I had this article by 2 hours (Score:2)
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.
Excellent article from last week about Schon (Score:1)
Re:That's one.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's one.. (Score:1)
Sometimes people lie about discoveries to make a buck. Does anyone honestly think the alchemists were just making honest mistakes about turning lead into gold?
At least two (Score:1)
Apparently, it is pretty unusual. I recently heard a report on NPR about another case, and they were saying it was pretty much unique. The research involved in this case was the discovery of new elements. It wasn't conclusive that he had falsified, but there was some stuff that was pretty hard to explain any other way. The guy involved insisted that he hadn't and colleagues couldn't really believe it, except for the evidence.
Re:That's one.. (Score:2)
Re:That's one.. (Score:1)
That's a reference to the case I was referring to. It was element 118 that was claimed to be discovered. There's a much more detailed comment with a link and everything, so I guess mine was redundant (sorry).
Re:CS Academic research ripe for this.. (Score:2, Informative)
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).
Re:CS Academic research ripe for this.. (Score:2)
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
Re:"Results that Contradict Known Physics..." (Score:1)
Re:Sparing the Co-Authors (Score:1)
Re:Sparing the Co-Authors (Score:2)
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.
Re:Sparing the Co-Authors (Score:2)
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.
Re:God help you (Score:1)
Your second argument is specious - no scientific theory is even proven correct, they are merely continuing to demonstrate that, under given circumstances, they aren't wrong.
Elgon
Re:What about the HP Sabotage? (Score:2)
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 [theregister.co.uk].
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.
Re:Al Gore Invented the Internet (Score:1)