Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

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Why cannot a concept of tort or “product liability”apply to scientists?

November 28, 2010

Cases of scientific misconduct do not seem to lead to any significant sanctions. Scientists are not subject to the codes of ethics that other professions have (even if they are not always complied with). Lawyers and doctors and engineers can be “disbarred” or otherwise forbidden from practising their professions when found guilty of incompetence or fraud.  Why then can a physicist or a chemist or a biochemist not be subject to the same professional sanctions for misconduct? Learned Institutes of Physics or Chemistry or Mathematics rarely get involved in the ethics breaches of their members. Scientists also need to be held responsible (liable) for their work and in cases of fraudulent science or misconduct, the sanctions applied need to be seen to be in balance with the extent of the offence.

There have been many cases of scientific misconduct where the offender seems to get little more than a slap on the wrist or a mild reprimand. In some cases they leave one institution and merely move to another. Their degrees are rarely revoked and they usually continue “working” or faking work in some other institution.

Retraction Watch addresses the details of the case of the fraud committed by Dr Jatinder Ahluwalia at University College London which led to the retraction of a paper in Nature.

Earlier this month, we posted an item about the retraction of a 2004Nature paper, “The large-conductance Ca2+-activated K+ channel is essential for innate immunity.” (That post was followed up with provocative comments from a researcher not affiliated with the authors, about what should happen to papers whose results can’t be replicated.)

One of the paper’s authors, Jatinder Ahluwalia, hadn’t signed the retraction, and the notice referred to “Supplementary Information” that hadn’t yet been made available. Today, University College London (UCL) posted that supplementary information, which was the report of a panel that investigated charges of research misconduct against Ahluwalia. That report fills in a lot of details about what preceded the retraction.

UCL’s investigation found that Ahluwalia:

  • falsified the results of experiments conducted by him, on UCL premises, thereby committing research fraud, as defined by paragraph 1.1.iv of the UCL Procedure for Investigating and Resolving Allegations of Misconduct in Academic Research. It was alleged that Dr Ahluwalia altered the numbering of files of research results so as to misrepresent the results of experiments conducted by him;
  • further falsified and misrepresented the results of experiments conducted by him, on UCL premises, by the use of materials other than those specified in the reports of the results of those experiments, thereby committing research fraud, as defined by paragraph 1.1.iv of the UCL Procedure for Investigating and Resolving Allegations of Misconduct in Academic Research;
  • interfered with the experiments of others so as to distort their results, thus falsifying the results of research experiments conducted by others employed by UCL on UCL premises, thereby committing research fraud, as defined in paragraph 1.1.iv of the UCL Procedure for Investigating and Resolving Allegations of Misconduct in Academic Research. It was alleged that Dr Ahluwalia deliberately contaminated chemicals used by other researchers in their experiments so as to falsify the results of those experiments, in order to conceal the falsification by him of the results of his own experiments.

Dr Ahluwalia is currently employed as a Senior Lecturer & Programme leader in BSc & MSc Pharmacology at the School of Health and Biosciences, University of East London,  Stratford Campus, Romford Road, London E15 4LZ, United Kingdom. For having committed fraud and engaged in sabotage and even though he is no longer employed by UCL, it does not seem that his behaviour has led to any significant sanctions.

Recently a Harvard University investigation found its high-profile Professor Marc Hauser guilty of 8 counts of misconduct and sent him on a year’s “book leave” and he will resume his activities next year. He does not lose tenure and his degrees are not revoked and the sanction seems relatively mild in relation to his behaviour.

The product that researchers and scientists produce is publications – mainly as papers published in scientific journals and as books. Scientific misconduct (whether plagiarism or faking data or inventing data or cherry picking data) leads occasionally to dismissals (but not always) and generally very little else. It seems to me that the concept of tort or “product liability” should be applicable to the work of scientists and researchers where their work is the result of faking data, fraud or other misconduct since it would be work that “had not been done in good faith”. Tort would apply because the ramifications of their misconduct would extend far beyond their employment contracts with their employers.

Tort  (from Wikipedia) is a wrong:

that involves a breach of a civil duty owed to someone else. It is differentiated from criminal wrongdoing which involves a breach of a duty owed to society, and also does not include breach of contract. Tort cases may comprise such topics as auto accidents, false imprisonment, slander and libel, product liability (such as defectively designed consumer products), and environmental pollution (toxic torts).

Clearly a researcher has a civic duty to his co-workers, his department, his institution, his publishers and to the global community working in the same field. Scientific misconduct is a clear breach of these duties and any such researcher must then be both accountable and liable. Sanctions in such cases must be commensurate and seen to be commensurate with the offence. A year’s sabbatical from Harvard or merely moving across town to be employed at another university does not seem to be in balance with the weight of the misconduct.

The employment contract of a researcher with any institution no doubt has the appropriate language which allows sanctions (including dismissal) for breach of contract. However the liability of a fraudulent researcher – especially with published papers and books – goes beyond a simple breach of contract with his employer and extends to the entire community of workers in the field and even to all readers who may be influenced by the fraudulent work. For commensurate sanctions to be possible it becomes necessary for the concept of tort to be introduced and for  “product liability” to reside with the researcher whereby he can be held accountable by the entire audience his “product” is addressed to.

Authors of scientific papers and books need to be responsible and liable for their products.

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Posted in Behaviour, Ethics, Law, Philosophy, Science | 4 Comments »

Why Forecasts need to be wrong

October 7, 2010

 

The Lorenz attractor is an example of a non-li...

Image via Wikipedia

 

This started yesterday as a short comment on the changing forecasts by Hathaway on solar activity in Solar Cycle 24 but has now become something else.

As clarification, I  distinguish here between prophecies and forecasts  where:

  • I take prophecies to be a promise about the future  based primarily on faith and made by prophets , witchdoctors, soothsayers and politicians such as “You will be doomed to eternal damnation if you don’t do as I say”,
  • I take “forecasts” to be an estimate of future conditions based on known data with the use of calculations, logic, judgement, some intuition and even some faith. They are extrapolations of historical conditions to anticipate – and thereby plan for -future conditions.

(more…)

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Posted in Behaviour, Business, Climate, Management, Philosophy, Science, Solar science | Comments Off on Why Forecasts need to be wrong

Habitable planet to be discovered in May 2011?

September 22, 2010

The only thing certain about forecasts is that they are more often wrong than right – and I exclude forecasts made entirely on known science or “laws” of nature where the level of uncertainty is insignificant (e.g. the sun will rise tomorrow). Nevertheless “Future History” which is a study of how forecasts evolve and how accurate they have been is a most powerful tool when making judgements about directions to follow and actions to be taken. In management “Future History” methodology is, I think, one of the most powerful tools for the development of corporate strategies and action plans.

The New Scientist reports that :

“Two researchers have used the pace of past exoplanet finds to predict that the first habitable Earth-like planet could turn up in May 2011”.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors that fit on a chip doubles about once every two years – a trend now known as Moore’s law. Samuel Arbesman of Harvard Medical School in Boston wants to see if scientometrics – the statistical study of science itself – can similarly be used to not only study past progress but also to make predictions.

He and Greg Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz, are testing the idea with exoplanets. Over the past 15 years or so, the pace of planet discoveries has been accelerating, with some 490 planets now known. “It is actually somewhat similar to Moore’s law of exponential growth,” Arbesman says.

To predict when astronomers might find the first planet similar in size to Earth that also orbits far enough from its star to boast liquid water, the team scoured the discovery records of 370 exoplanets.

They focused on two basic properties needed for habitability: a planet’s mass and its surface temperature. They used these two factors to assign each planet a ‘habitability metric’ ranging from 0 to 1, where 0 was uninhabitable and 1 is close to Earth’s twin.

A rough estimate of each planet’s habitability was then plotted against the date of its discovery. Using different subsets of the 370 planets, the researchers made curves from the individual points and extrapolated the curves to find when a planet would be found with a habitability of 1. They then analysed the range of discovery dates to determine which would be most probable.

Habitable planets: http://t2.gstatic.com/images

Their calculations suggest there is a 50 per cent chance that the first habitable exo-Earth will be found by May 2011, a 75 per cent chance it will be found by 2020, and a 95 per cent chance it will be found by 2264.

In fact, exoplanet researchers have made forecasts of the future informally, plotting the mass of planets against the date of discovery to see how the field is progressing. “We’ve done that for many years at conferences,” says Eric Ford of the University of Florida in Gainesville. “The new aspect of this paper is putting an uncertainty on those predictions and unfortunately the uncertainty is quite large.”

One source of uncertainty is how factors like changes in funding and the development of new techniques and technology can alter the pace of discovery. “Like the stock market, past returns are no guarantee of future performance,” Ford says.

“There are always these complex factors of how science is actually done,” Arbesman agrees. But he says the forecasting technique could still prove useful, even if these factors are not accounted for directly. In part, that is because new technologies tend to take a while to ramp up, so they may not lead to sharp jumps in the number of discoveries made.

Previously, Arbesman has quantified how the ease of discovering new mammalian species, chemical elements, and asteroids affects the rate of their discovery. New species and asteroids are more difficult to find the smaller they are, and indeed larger ones are found first. For chemical elements, the opposite is true, since the bigger they are, the rarer and more unstable they tend to be.

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Posted in Philosophy, Science, Social Science | 1 Comment »

Mapping Sterotypes

September 21, 2010

Yanko Tsvetkov, a Bulgarian designer and illustrator living in London, has produced seven maps in which countries and regions are labelled according to the stereotypes of their inhabitants held by the people of other.

Excellent stuff.

nationalities.http://alphadesigner.com/project-mapping-stereotypes.html

Europe from the US

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/8013399/Smelly-people-commies-and-dirty-porn-Europe-mapped-by-national-stereotypes.html

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Posted in Art, Philosophy, Social Science | Comments Off on Mapping Sterotypes

Hawking, God, creation and gravity

September 2, 2010

There have been headlines today regarding Stephen Hawking’s new book The Grand Design (co-written by US physicist Leonard Mlodinow) to be published on 9th September.

 

Defense Meteorological Satellite Program

Image via Wikipedia

 

“God did not create the Universe”

is the BBC headline.

Citing the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting a star other than our Sun, he said: “That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions – the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass – far less remarkable, and far less compelling as evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings.” He adds: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. ….Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist…..It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”

But if The Big Bang and  all the subsequent creation events flow naturally and inevitably from the law of gravity, what still remains is to explain where the law of gravity came from or from what it flows naturally and inevitably……….

No matter how much more is discovered by science we will still have the space of the “unknown unknowns” (a la Rumsfeld) where we do not even know what questions are feasible – let alone what question to ask.

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Posted in Philosophy, Physics, Science, Space | 4 Comments »

Misconduct at Harvard or is it scientific fraud?

August 11, 2010

Harvard does not want to say very much but the story was broken by the Boston Globe.

Harvard University psychologist Marc Hauser — a well-known scientist and author of the book “Moral Minds’’ — is taking a year-long leave after a lengthy internal investigation found evidence of scientific misconduct in his laboratory.

Scientist Marc Hauser’s studies include work on the cognitive and evolutionary underpinnings of language.

As reported in Nature:

A 3-year investigation has found evidence of scientific misconduct in publications by prominent Harvard University psychologist Marc Hauser, the Boston Globe reports today.

Hauser’s research, which has frequently been highlighted in newspapers and on television, has addressed the evolutionary roots of human language, mathematical ability, and morality. His 2006 book, Moral Minds, argued that the human brain is programmed to embrace certain moral principles. Earlier this year, Hauser co-authored a study that found no impact of religion on how humans respond to moral dilemmas (for more, see ‘Morals don’t come from God’).

But by then, Hauser’s lab was already the subject of a Harvard University investigation. According to the Globe article, the trouble centers on a 2002 paper published in the journal Cognition (subscription required). Hauser was the first author on the paper, which found that cotton-top tamarins are able to learn patterns – previously thought to be an important step in language acquisition. The paper has been retracted, for reasons which are reportedly unclear even to the journal’s editor, Gerry Altmann.

Two other papers, a 2007 article in Proceedings of the Royal Society B and a 2007 Science paper, were also flagged for investigation. A correction has been published on the first, and Science is now looking into concerns about the second. And the Globe article highlights other controversies, including a 2001 paper in the American Journal of Primatology, which has not been retracted although Hauser himself later said he was unable to replicate the results. Findings in a 1995 PNAS paper were also questioned by an outside researcher, Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany, who reviewed the original data and said he found “not a thread of compelling evidence” to support the paper’s conclusions.

This sounds more like fraud.

Not for the first time at Harvard and surely not the last.

How many “peers” have been duped along the way?

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Posted in Ethics, Non-Science, Philosophy | Comments Off on Misconduct at Harvard or is it scientific fraud?

Global warming – science versus political correctness

August 3, 2010

When a scientific question diverges from a treatment of evidence, facts or theories it is often based on beliefs (and a belief by definition comes into play only when facts are lacking). Hypotheses and theories necessarily must rely – to some extent – on belief.

As soon a question regarding facts becomes instead a question regarding beliefs it leads to a political label (right wing, left wing, capitalist, communist, liberal, fascist). A political label generally assumes an adherence to a particular set of beliefs on many diverse topics. A scientific discussion then becomes a political argument. Positions on any topic under the umbrella of the political label – whether or not relevant to the topic under discussion – are then used to “discredit” or “support” a particular belief.

But I note that the “tools” used in political argument are the same whichever side of the political divide one is. These “tools” are used to reinforce the views of those already in agreement or to “convert” those on the fence.  They are only rarely used to “convert” those on the other side of the divide. These tools are for the manipulation of belief and have nothing whatever to do with science or the scientific method. The “tools” commonly used are

  • Alarmism (or the pseudo-science precautionary principle which permits common-sense to be ignored)
  • Claiming to be the “majority” view (and this is resorted to because a “majority” in a democracy is ascribed the “right” to summarily over-rule and oppress a minority)
  • Guilt, wrongness, injustice or immorality  – all by association
  • Ridicule
  • Distortion, misrepresentation and even fraud
  • Inquistions against heretics and witch hunts

The entire AGW argument – for it  has degenerated into a political argument and is no longer a scientific discussion (if it ever was one) – is permeated by the use of such tools. The sound and fury mask the underlying question which remains:

What is the magnitude and significance of man-made effects on the global climate?

My position is that I don’t know.

I believe that it is not of any great significance – but not that it is absent. I believe that whatever effect man has pales into insignificance compared to what the sun does primarily through the oceans and – only then – through and to the atmosphere.

There are those who believe – note “believe” – that posing the question is itself a matter of belief and denies the obvious. For posing the question I have been given various political labels. But the simple fact is that the answer is not obvious and not a settled science for me.

It is entirely a political matter – and perfectly valid as a political matter but it is not a matter of science – when the belief in something so dreadful in the future – but which cannot be proven – is used as a vehicle for satisfying greed (carbon trading, so-called environmental subsidies or research funding) or a political agenda.

There is nothing wrong with having a political agenda. But it cannot be labelled science.

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Posted in Alarmism, Environment, Non-Science, Philosophy, Science | Comments Off on Global warming – science versus political correctness

Global Warming: “The science is terrible but—perhaps the psychology is good.”

July 10, 2010

Anthony Watts has a post revisiting the late Michael Crichton‘s 2003 lecture at Caltech which I had not seen before.

A lucid and eloquent exposition which I reproduce below. Reading it now in 2010 it is still fresh, applicable and apposite. It should be required reading for any young scientist of the dangers of religion or politics masquerading as science.

“Aliens Cause Global Warming”

A lecture by Michael Crichton
Caltech Michelin Lecture
January 17, 2003

My topic today sounds humorous but unfortunately I am serious. I am going to argue that extraterrestrials lie behind global warming. Or to speak more precisely, I will argue that a belief in extraterrestrials has paved the way, in a progression of steps, to a belief in global warming.

Charting this progression of belief will be my task today.

Let me say at once that I have no desire to discourage anyone from believing in either extraterrestrials or global warming. That would be quite impossible to do. Rather, I want to discuss the history of several widely-publicized beliefs and to point to what I consider an emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science-namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy.

I have a special interest in this because of my own upbringing. I was born in the midst of World War II, and passed my formative years at the height of the Cold War. In school drills, I dutifully crawled under my desk in preparation for a nuclear attack.

It was a time of widespread fear and uncertainty, but even as a child I believed that science represented the best and greatest hope for mankind. Even to a child, the contrast was clear between the world of politics-a world of hate and danger, of irrational beliefs and fears, of mass manipulation and disgraceful blots on human history. In contrast, science held different values-international in scope, forging friendships and working relationships across national boundaries and political systems, encouraging a dispassionate habit of thought, and ultimately leading to fresh knowledge and technology that would benefit all mankind. The world might not be avery good place, but science would make it better. And it did. In my lifetime, science has largely fulfilled its promise. Science has been the great intellectual adventure of our age, and a great hope for our troubled and restless world.

But I did not expect science merely to extend lifespan, feed the hungry, cure disease, and shrink the world with jets and cell phones. I also expected science to banish the evils of human thought—prejudice and superstition, irrational beliefs and false fears. I expected science to be, in Carl Sagan’s memorable phrase, “a candle in a demon haunted world.” And here, I am not so pleased with the impact of science. Rather than serving as a cleansing force, science has in some instances been seduced by the more ancient lures of politics and publicity. Some of the demons that haunt our world in recent years are invented by scientists. The world has not benefited from permitting these demons to escape free.

But let’s look at how it came to pass.

(more…)

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Posted in Philosophy, Science | Comments Off on Global Warming: “The science is terrible but—perhaps the psychology is good.”

Spanish citizenship for Pablo the Psychic Octopus?

July 10, 2010

Though Paul, who was born in the UK predicts that Germany will win tonight’s third place match, he has also predicted a win for Spain in tomorrows final.

In Germany there are now various suggestions of how Paul should be sliced, squashed, marinaded, fried, broiled, grilled or baked.

All of Paul’s predictions have been true in this World Cup. In Spain there are moves  to rechristen him Pablo and provide him with Spanish citizenship. Spain’s defensive midfielder Sergio Busquets said Friday that the Spaniards are in love with the octopus and and out of gratitude they want to re-christen it Pablo.

“We guess it is a Spanish octopus. We are in love with it and want to name it Pablo,” said Busquets.

Paul’s predictions require the choice of mussels but whether he will take to paella is not known. Paul’s religious and political affiliations are also not known.

But I think Paul is quite safe. His keeper’s at Sea Life Oberhausen are seeing a marked increase in the number of visitors to the aquarium and it it can be expected that Paul’s psychic abilities will be tested in new fields when the World Cup is over.

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Posted in Philosophy, World Cup | 1 Comment »

The Octopus Strikes again

July 8, 2010

I returned just in time to watch the match. My forecast (hope) about Germany was wrong and Spain is in the World Cup final for the first time ever.

Good Luck to them but I pick Holland for the final –  3rd time lucky perhaps?

Ramos was a disgrace. A great pity that he does not just rely on his indisputable skill and feels it necessary to play dirty.

Germany had their chances but Spain just edged it. The burden of beating the prediction by Paul the Octopus was just too much for Schweinsteiger and his manschaft. Özil was impressive again- but he needs a little more stamina to last the entire 90 minutes.

Paul the octopus

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Posted in Philosophy, World Cup | 1 Comment »

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