Archive for the ‘Ethics’ Category
January 22, 2011
Earlier posts have dealt with the case of Jatinder Ahluwalia – a pharmacologist – who was found to have deceived his colleagues and probably sabotaged other’s research whose paper published in Nature was retracted. Ahluwalia was then at University College London but is now employed at the University of East London.
Retraction Watch now points out that he has published a new paper – not on pharmacology this time but about plagiarism! The paper appears in Bioscience Education, “Students Turned Off by Turnitin? Perception of Plagiarism and Collusion by Undergraduate Bioscience Students.”
Ahluwalia and his co-author, Andrew Thompsett, did the study
to provide qualitative data on the perceptions of plagiarism and collusion of final year Pharmacology students.
That he is no longer at UCL is understandable but that he is employed in the position he has at the University of East London is less understandable – not least from the perspective of the University. East London University has a history going back to 1898 as an educational institution but only became a University in 1992. It is the 3rd largest university in London in terms of student numbers and the 18th largest in the United Kingdom. But it ranks around 108th of the UK’s 115 Universities. I have difficulty to see how this University (which clearly needs to improve its ranking) could enhance its reputation by employing Ahluwalia. But perhaps Ahluwalia is a good teacher even if his reputation as a researcher in his own field is irrevocably tarnished.
The subject of his latest publication being more a social study rather than hard-core pharmacology is also understandable. And unlike many other sociologists he may have some unique qualifications to study plagiarism.
The paper itself is somewhat negative about a particular commercial product (Turnitin) and therefore of some benefit to its competitors – and that itself rings some alarm bells.
Unfortunately for Turnitin,
The results from the pilot study suggested that students did not find Turnitin (UK) easy to use neither did they perceive it as a useful learning tool.
But some questions also arise as to the the publishing Journal’s wisdom of publishing such a study – which could be considered “negative advertising” – and by such an author. Especially since they say that one of their objectives is to disseminate “good practice”. Even consumer magazines are wary of reviewing just one product in isolation without also subjecting competing products to the same tests. From their website:
Bioscience Education is an online, bi-annual electronic journal owned and published by the Centre for Bioscience. Its aims are to promote, enhance and disseminate research, good practice and innovation in tertiary level teaching and learning within the biosciences disciplines.
Set a thief to catch a thief is a well tried concept but it does require some modicum of common sense.
Tags:Academic Dishonesty, Bioscience Education, Jatinder Ahluwalia, Plagiarism, Scientific misconduct, University College London, University of East London
Posted in Behaviour, Ethics, scientific misconduct | 3 Comments »
January 13, 2011
Hotel Steigenberger, Davos: Image via Wikipedia
The World Economic Forum is requiring its strategic partners to bring along at least one woman in every group of five.
I am not sure whether this is a blow for or against gender equality. Coming as it does from the World Economic Forum for the meeting in Davos to be held in 2 weeks, I suspect that it is primarily about having a good time rather than about gender equality!!
From The Guardian:
Each year, prime ministers, bankers, business tycoons and other movers and shakers of the global elite gather at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the Swiss Alpine town of Davos. And each year, one key thing has been missing: women.
Now, in an attempt to improve the traditionally dismal gender balance at this month’s event, which starts a week next Tuesday, the WEF has for the first time imposed a minimum quota of women.
The forum’s “strategic partners” – a group of about 100 companies including Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank – have been told they must bring along at least one woman in every group of five senior executives sent to the high-profile event. Strategic partners account for 500 of the 2,500 participants expected this year at a gathering where David Cameron will rub shoulders with the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, historian Niall Ferguson, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, at least one member of the Saudi royal family and countless business supremos and members of the academic elite.
“The World Economic Forum annual meeting engages the highest levels of leadership from a variety of sectors and participation figures are a reflection of the scarcity of women in this external pool,” said Saadia Zahidi, who heads the gender parity programme at the WEF and came up with the quota plan.
At Davos, the world’s most powerful men (and a few women) broker multimillion-pound deals behind the scenes of the conferences. The forum’s black-tie dinners, cocktail parties and other less formal encounters are the ultimate networking events and those present follow the old “contacts lead to contracts” motto.
But so far, relatively few women have benefited from this high-level schmoozing. Women made up only 9-15% of those present between 2001 and 2005.
Tags:Davos, Gender equality, quota of women, World Economic Forum
Posted in Behaviour, Business, Economics, Ethics | 1 Comment »
January 13, 2011
A new paper on-line in Nature today reports a 10 year study which shows that when researchers’ put flipper bands on the birds they can seriously dent penguin survival, and also skew the results of research.
Saraux, C. et al. Nature 469, 203-206 (2011)
Nature News:
Flipper banding has been found to hurt penguins: image Benoît Gineste
Attaching bands to penguins’ flippers makes them easier for scientists to study, but may also up the birds’ death rates and lower their chances of reproducing. A team studying king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) has rekindled this debate, which has been running for more than 30 years, and thrown up an additional concern. Not only do bands placed around the birds’ flippers make life more difficult for penguins, their effects also undermine the conclusions drawn from such studies.
Yvon Le Maho at the University of Strasbourg in France, an author of the current study, published in Nature, says that the time has come for ecologists to embrace new technologies and abandon flipper bands, “certainly as a precautionary principle”.
His group’s paper also highlights a wider issue: studies on penguins can and are being used to look at the effects of climate change on ecosystems. Le Maho and colleagues have previously used electronic tagging of king penguins to show that just 0.26 ºC of warming in sea-surface temperatures could trigger a 9% decline in adult survival. If banding were used in such studies, its consequences on a population could cripple attempts to extrapolate a climate-linked trend from the data.
“It’s very difficult to anticipate what the consequences are,” Le Maho says. He says there is a problem with warming affecting ecosystems, but “the numbers have to be reconsidered” where they have been derived from banded studies…..
As long ago as the 1970s, zookeepers noticed that bands could cause wounds on penguins, especially when the birds were moulting……. Despite these findings, bands are still widely used. Le Maho and his colleagues have now added to the debate with their 10-year study. They banded 50 king penguins selected from a population on Possession Island in the southern Indian Ocean that had already been implanted with minute, subcutaneous electronic tags.
When compared with 50 unbanded birds, those fitted with bands had around 40% fewer chicks and a 16% lower survival rate over the study period.
ScienceNews also reports on the study:
And in another worrisome development, the flipper-banded penguins averaged 12.7 days away from home on foraging trips instead of 11.6. “One day or two days is a huge difference,” says ecologist and study coauthor Claire Saraux of the University of Strasbourg and France’s CNRS research network. Chicks back at the breeding site eat only when a parent swims home with food collected hundreds of kilometers, sometimes thousands of kilometers, away. And young chicks have to build up reserves to survive their first winter, when parental food delivery drops off to only a few times during the whole season.
Slower foraging fits with worries that flipper bands may be increasing drag on penguins during swimming, Saraux says. In a swimming test in a tank, an Adélie penguin wearing a band expended 24 percent more energy than an unbanded penguin.
“From an ethical point of view, I think we can’t continue to band,” Saraux says.
Tags:banding damages penguin survival, Banding rings on penguins, King Penguin, Penguin
Posted in Ethics, Science, Wildlife | 1 Comment »
January 12, 2011
Image via Wikipedia
Transparency International’s work and its Corruption Perception Index are both important and necessary, but they are just a small contribution to trying to restore ethics and integrity into public life. It mainly addresses the public sector and takes little account of the lack of ethics in the commercial world. Another problem with the CPI is that is skewed and as a perception index tends to be overly representative of the petty but widespread corruption (the so-called “facilitation fees”) in public services and among government employees. These are more common in developing countries and newly “democratised” countries where wage levels are low and institutional processes are still under evolution. But what the CPI does not address properly is the high level of corruption and fraud among politicians and bureaucrats in the developed world (Europe, the US, Japan, Korea for example) – which are not as numerous as in developing countries but where the monetary values involved are huge. If we distinguish between petty bribery and corruption on the one hand and “grand” fraud and corruption on the other, I have little doubt that the US, Europe and Japan continue not only to lead the “grand” fraud and corruption stakes by a long way but are also the most innovative in finding new ways of being corrupt.
Politicians in the European Parliament and bureaucrats in the European Union are particularly venal and are subject to even less scrutiny than the national parliaments of the member countries (where padding expenses, influence peddling and basic corruption are also well established). The latest example of institutionalised corruption in Europe comes from The Telegraph:
The EU’s financial watchdog has systemically “sabotaged” investigations and caved into intimidation from countries including France and Italy to cover up fraud, according to a senior official.
Maarten Engwirda, a former Dutch member of European Court of Auditors for 15 years, who retired 10 days ago, has alleged that abuse of EU funds was swept under the carpet by an auditing body that was supposed to expose wrongdoing.
“There was a practice of watering down if not completely removing criticism,” he told the Dutch Volkskrant newspaper yesterday.
Slim Kallas, the European Commission’s vice-president, who was responsible for anti-fraud measures from 2004 to 2010 and who is now the EU transport chief, is accused of putting “heavy pressure” on investigators to tone down findings of abuse.
Mr Kallas also clashed with the Court of Auditors over its use of strict accounting standards which meant that the EU’s annual accounts have embarrassingly never been given a clean bill of health. Mr Engwirda, 67, also described an endemic “cover-up culture” within the court and wider EU institutions that had prevented the true extent of fraud from being disclosed.
Marta Andreasen, a Ukip MEP and a member of the European Parliament’s budgetary control committee, that she had come under “huge pressure to conceal the truth about EU expenditure” before being sacked as the commission’s chief accountant for whistle-blowing in 2002. “I witnessed the arm twisting of the Auditors each time they attempted to reveal the failures in the EU accounting and control systems. They came under huge pressure to keep the accountancy fraud hushed up,” she said. “Sadly the auditors did not support me when I stood up in defence of European taxpayers. In my opinion the court is not an independent body.”
Pieter Cleppe, the Brussels spokesman of the Open Europe pressure group said: “This insider story should serve as a warning not to give in to EU demands for more money until the culture of financial irresponsibility is being dealt with more fundamentally.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/8252958/EU-financial-watchdog-systemically-sabotaged-fraud-investigations.html
Tags:corruption, Corruption Perception Index, European Parliament, European Union, Maarten Engwirda, Slim Kallas
Posted in Behaviour, Corruption, Ethics, European Union | 1 Comment »
January 9, 2011
In Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, Turkey ranks together with countries such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Slovenia but somewhat better than Italy.
A bribery ring composed of customs officials in Turkey and including the Director of the Istanbul Region has been revealed. It appears that the 34 arrested shared a bribes pool which in the period of the 6 month investigation is estimated to have contained about $125 million.
From the magnitude of the bribes pool it would seem that Turkey is well qualified for membership of the European Union and the monetary value of this case compares “well” with the Formula 1 bribery case in Germany – though that involved just one individual(?).
It was announced today that:
Thirty-four individuals serving at the İstanbul Customs Regional Directorate have been detained in a major investigation into bribery and corruption allegations at the customs department. The suspects include the chief director of the İstanbul Customs Regional Directorate.
The operation was carried out on Friday.
The allegations against the suspects include the collection of money paid in bribes in a pool and then the distribution of this money to İstanbul customs officials every Friday on the basis of rank and seniority. The investigators claim Chief Director Lütfi Ekinci was aware of this practice among his staff. Ekinci was detained in Mersin, where he was vacationing in his summerhouse.
The suspects allegedly relied on three methods to take bribes from companies importing goods to Turkey. One was to force companies that had all their documents in order to give money, calling this a “donation.” The other method was showing the value of an imported good to be nine-tenths less than the actual value on paper. In other words, an item that would normally cost TL 10 would be recorded as costing TL 1. A third method the officials used was falsifying documents and showing those products that are subject to higher taxes — such as cigarettes — as if they belong in another taxation category. The difference would be taken by the customs officials and added to the bribery pool. Investigators estimate the amount channeled into the bribe fund was TL 200 million ($125 million)…….. The center of the raids was the İstanbul Atatürk Airport Customs and the Ambarlı Customs Zone, but the raids were staged simultaneously at 20 different addresses. Hayrettin Eker, the İstanbul Atatürk Airport Customs Directorate Cargo Terminal chief, and Smuggling Intelligence and Narcotic Department Chief Coşkun Cihanoğlu were also detained in the operation. Documents and computers in the offices of the two men were seized by the police.
The police found TL 20,000 inside an envelope in Eker’s office. A total of TL 150,000 was found on other customs officials detained in the operation, which the investigators claim was taken in bribes. Investigators say the operations will extend to the companies that were involved in the customs bribery scheme.
Tags:Bribery, Chief Director Lütfi Ekinci, Corruption Perceptions Index, Customs corruption Istanbul, Transparency International, Turkey
Posted in Behaviour, Business, Corruption, Ethics, Turkey | 3 Comments »
January 7, 2011
Transparency International in its newly published Corruption Perception Index focuses understandably on the under-developed and developing countries where the endemic petty bribery and facilitation fees to augment low wage levels are the visible and easily identifiable face of corruption. Of course grand corruption is also present in these countries but perception indices are inevitably skewed and dominated by what is visible and to the number of people affected rather than reflecting the monetary value of the corruption.
My own experience suggests – but I cannot prove – that in monetary terms the levels of corruption in the developed world are orders of magnitude larger but much more sophisticated and very well camouflaged compared to cases in the developing world. But with the much higher living standards the need for highly visible petty corruption has been largely eliminated. But the greed based cases in the developed world – when they are disclosed – are usually spectacular. As has now happened in Germany.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-05/ex-bayernlb-management-board-member-gribkowsky-arrested-in-bribery-probe.html
Gerhard Gribkowsky, the former chief risk officer of German state-owned bank Bayerische Landesbank, was arrested today over allegations he accepted bribes during his tenure at the lender. Munich prosecutors are investigating him on bribery, breach of trust and tax evasion allegations, Barbara Stockinger, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors, said in an e-mailed statement today. An arrest warrant was issued and executed today, she said.
The probe is reviewing the sale of a stake in Formula One motor-sports company which Gribkowsky, 52, was responsible for overseeing. BayernLB sold the stake in 2006 without it being properly evaluated, Stockinger said. “According to the current findings, the suspect in turn received $50 million in payments disguised via two consultancy agreements,” Stockinger said.
One instance with $50 million involved to one individual!!!
My $20 facilitation bribe to speed up my visa renewal in a developing country would need to be replicated 2,500,000 times for monetary equivalence with this one case. The corruption perception index would be overwhelmed.
I have the clear impression that the monetary value of corrupt and fraudulent practices in the developed world is enormous but extremely sophisticated and rarely found out. From UK MP’s cheating on their expenses, to selling Knighthoods and other Honours , to European MP’s expense and subsidy fiddles, to billions distributed in carbon trading scams and the enormous cases of corruption/fraud whether at AIG or Lehman Brothers or by Bernie Madoff.
The monetary value of fraud and corruption in the OECD countries is probably one or two orders of magnitude greater than in the developing countries but the number of cases is probably an order of magnitude less.
The CPI is perhaps a measure of visible corruption in the public sector – but does not- and can not – reflect the monetary value of sophisticated – and invisible – corrupt practices.
Tags:BayernLB, Bribery and corruption, Corruption Perception Index, Germany corruption, OECD corruption
Posted in Corruption, Ethics, European Union, Germany | 4 Comments »
January 6, 2011
I do not know for sure but it seems likely that there is no strong link between autism and the MMR vaccine.
But the British Medical Journal which has now accused Dr. Wakefield of deliberate fraud with regard to his paper in the Lancet making the link does not cover itself with any glory. It only begs the question as to what standards they actually do have.
The “vaccination industry” promoted by Big Pharma also does not inspire much confidence that anything other than the bottom line is their primary concern. As was seen in the H1N1 vaccination circus, the beneficial links between the medical establishment (WHO) and vaccine manufacturers is widely prevalent and highly suspect. Parasitic lawyers who also have a vested interest in “proving” the link between autism and anything which could help their litigation do not impress either.
Dr Andrew Wakefield, whose research claimed a link between MMR vaccinations and autism, denies inventing data. (Reuters: Luke MacGregor)
Dr Wakefield now accuses Big Pharma (including Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries) and the journalist Brian Deer of running a smear campaign against him. That may well be so but it does not justify his payments of some £400,000 from lawyers pursuing autism litigation. Whether his book is actually to defend his work or has some other motive is highly unclear.
Dr. Wakefield, British Medical Journal, Brian Deer, Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries, The Lancet —-
A Plague on all your houses!
Sources:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/01/06/3107885.htm?section=justin
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/01/06/autism.vaccines/?hpt=T1
Tags:Andrew Wakefield, Autism, BMJ, Brian Deer, Lancet, MMR vaccine, Vaccination
Posted in Ethics, Fraud, Medicine | 1 Comment »
January 3, 2011
It comes as no surprise that diplomats and government officials are heavily involved in lobbying and “advocacy” in favour of major corporations in international trade. This applies for sales of all defence equipment, commercial aircraft, major rail transport projects, nuclear and conventional power plant and -in short – virtually all large projects where jobs at the seller’s establishment are involved.
Virtually every visit of a head of government to another country reserves a great deal of time for commercial lobbying activities. Large companies look to such visits to bring purchasing decisions to a head and the months preceding such visits are periods of intense co-operation between commercial sales people, diplomats, bureaucrats and politicians in both countries. So called “agents” (essentially middle-men with “sticky” fingers) thrive on such activity. During such periods I have seen how diplomats take directions from sales people at private companies or from the “agents”. The ability to access and trigger such “advocacy” is of huge competitive advantage for the companies involved. It is here that large international companies can bring factors outside the conventional sales criteria into play.
It is not just the US or just Boeing involved in such advocacy. Nearly every country indulges in this. The UK (British Aerospace for example), France (Areva and nuclear power or Alstom and High speed trains) or Germany (Siemens for power plants or trains or VW at car factories) are all engaged in similar advocacy. But the particular case of US diplomats acting as salesmen for Boeing is reported by the New York Times from the Wikileaks release of diplomatic cables and these reveal some of the “perks” and extra factors that are brought into play. Such as
The king of Saudi Arabia wanted the United States to outfit his personal jet with the same high-tech devices as Air Force One. The president of Turkey wanted the Obama administration to let a Turkish astronaut sit in on a NASA space flight. And in Bangladesh, the prime minister pressed the State Department to re-establish landing rights at Kennedy International Airport in New York. Each of these government leaders had one thing in common: they were trying to decide whether to buy billions of dollars’ worth of commercial jets from Boeing or its European competitor, Airbus. And United States diplomats were acting like marketing agents, offering deals to heads of state and airline executives whose decisions could be influenced by price, performance and, as with all finicky customers with plenty to spend, perks.
To get the interest of their own politicians and governments every large corporation knows that the magic key is being able to link the sale being pursued to jobs in the home-country and especially in the constituency of the home-politician. “Job creation” is the magic mantra that no politician can resist or can afford to ignore. The use of dubious agents or the use of “undue” influence or the flow of a few percent of the contract value through some side-channels or the provision of some “perks” to politicians and bureaucrats through the entire chain from supplier to purchaser become critical and pervasive.
When the potential of job creation is involved, questions of ethics are rarely raised and the system of high level corruption is perpetuated.
NYT report
Tags:Advocacy, Boeing, corruption, Diplomats as salesmen, ethics, job-creation
Posted in Corruption, Diplomacy, Ethics, International Trade | Comments Off on No surprise: US diplomats acted as Boeing salesmen
January 2, 2011
The Scientific American carries an article about the Marc Hauser case at Harvard. (Marc Hauser was found to have committed 8 cases of scientific misconduct).
Scott O. Lilienfeld argues that Hauser may only be guilty of “confirmation bias” and that it is premature to ascribe deliberate wrongdoing to him:
Hauser has admitted to committing “significant mistakes.” In observing the reactions of my colleagues to Hauser’s shocking comeuppance, I have been surprised at how many assume reflexively that his misbehavior must have been deliberate. For example, University of Maryland physicist Robert L. Park wrote in a Web column that Hauser “fudged his experiments.” I don’t think we can be so sure. It’s entirely possible that Hauser was swayed by “confirmation bias”—the tendency to look for and perceive evidence consistent with our hypotheses and to deny, dismiss or distort evidence that is not.
The past few decades of research in cognitive, social and clinical psychology suggest that confirmation bias may be far more common than most of us realize. Even the best and the brightest scientists can be swayed by it, especially when they are deeply invested in their own hypotheses and the data are ambiguous. A baseball manager doesn’t argue with the umpire when the call is clear-cut—only when it is close.
Scholars in the behavioral sciences, including psychology and animal behavior, may be especially prone to bias. They often make close calls about data that are open to many interpretations…….
………. Two factors make combating confirmation bias an uphill battle. For one, data show that eminent scientists tend to be more arrogant and confident than other scientists. As a consequence, they may be especially vulnerable to confirmation bias and to wrong-headed conclusions, unless they are perpetually vigilant. Second, the mounting pressure on scholars to conduct single-hypothesis-driven research programs supported by huge federal grants is a recipe for trouble. Many scientists are highly motivated to disregard or selectively reinterpret negative results that could doom their careers.
But I am not persuaded. When “eminent” scientists use their position and power to indulge in “confirmation bias” it is merely a euphemism for what is still cheating by taking undue advantage of their position. It is “corruption” in its most basic form. I reject the notion that such “confirmation bias” is a form of “unwitting behaviour”. It may well be behaviour which resides in the sub-conscious but that is not “unwitting” behaviour. Neither is it excusable just because it may be in the sub-conscious. It gets into the sub-conscious only because the conscious allows it to do so. When any behaviour residing in the sub-conscious conflicts with the values and morality of an individual it is inevitably ejected into the conscious. Being sub-consciously immoral but consciously moral is not feasible.
In the case of Marc Hauser, even assuming that his faults were due to “confirmation bias” then either it was behaviour which remained entirely in the sub-conscious in which case his values and morality are suspect, or it was triggered into the conscious and he continued anyway in which case it was simple cheating.
Tags:Confirmation bias, ethics, Harvard University, hausergate, marc hauser, Scientific misconduct
Posted in Behaviour, Corruption, Ethics, Philosophy, Scientific Fraud, scientific misconduct | Comments Off on Hausergate: In scientific misconduct “confirmation bias” or “fudging data” are equally corrupt
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