Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
March 15, 2012
It was high time and even though they have tried before, the new measures just announced by the Chinese Education Ministry will hopefully begin to curb the widespread plagiarism, data manipulation and even data fakery that allegedly goes on.
India needs to institutionalise something similar. The Society of Scientific Values in India is an independent body and tries valiantly to act as a watch-dog but it has no teeth and no official standing. Of course in India the danger with creating institutions under a Ministry – and therefore under a Minister – is that the institution will very quickly become politicised. And Indian politicians are perhaps not the best choice when it comes to monitoring and establishing ethical standards. Nevertheless a start has to be made and the Ministry of Science and Technology in India is the natural home of an institution to promote ethical standards in scientific research and at institutes of higher education. The key will be to provide the backing of the Ministry to give it sufficient weight but to maintain its independence from party political influences. Giving such an institution semi-judicial status is one way but could be very heavy handed.
China Daily reports:
China’s Ministry of Education on Wednesday issued new rules to supervise universities’ scientific research and academic activities in order to “effectively prevent and curb academic misconduct.”
(more…)
Tags:China, China Education Ministry, ethics, India, Scientific misconduct, Society for Scientific Values
Posted in Academic misconduct, China, Ethics, India, Science, scientific misconduct, Technology | Comments Off on Chinese Government tries to get to grips with science misconduct. When will India follow?
March 14, 2012
Professor Akihisa Inoue
Professor Akihisa Inoue is the President of Tohoku University, is a leading materials scientist and the author of over 2,500 publications. But criticism from other Japanese scientists (as on this Japanese website) has now led to at least 7 retractions for plagiarism. Three investigations have been conducted so far with rather wishy-washy conclusions. The investigations are in uncharted territory since Japan has no established processes for handling cases of scientific wrong-doing. There is no institution or body for supervising ethics or misconduct in research. And now yet another investigation committee is proposed. Without the guidance of precedent Tohoku University and even the Japanese Science and Technology Agency are not really sure how to proceed – especially when the allegations are against as prominent a person as the President of a University. Almost a classic case of what in industry would be called “paralysis by analysis” where every analysis shirks the task of coming to conclusions, declines to make judgements and merely proposes further analysis.
Nature reports:
Japan fails to settle university dispute
It has been a rough year for materials scientist Akihisa Inoue, the president of Tohoku University in Japan.
(more…)
Tags:Akihisa Inoue, Japan, Nature, paper retraction, Paralysis by analysis, Scientific misconduct, Tohoku University
Posted in Academic misconduct, Ethics, Japan, Science, scientific misconduct | Comments Off on Tohoku University struggles to handle transgressions by its President Akihisa Inoue
March 10, 2012
A recent post by John O’Sullivan reminded me that it is time for the next solar minimum that is on its way to be named after the man who predicted it. Theodor Landscheidt (born in 1927 in Bremen, Germany, died on May 20, 2004) was an author and amateur climatologist. In 1989, Landscheidt forecast a period of sunspot minima after 1990, accompanied by increased cold, with a stronger minimum and more intense cold which should peak in 2030 which he described as the “Landscheidt Minimum”.
The sun goes through its cycles as it will and at its own pace and we continue to struggle to try and decipher the various cycles that exist, what causes them and what effects they have on the earth. Some of the cycles known or hypothesised to exist are the:
- 11 year sunspot cycle
- 22 year magnetic cycle
- 87 year Gleissberg cycle
- 166 year “unnamed” cycle
- 210 years Suess or de Vries cycle
- 2,300 years Hallstat cycle
- 6000 years Xapsos and Burke cycle
Landscheidt’s paper is here: New Little Ice Age instead of Global Warming?
(more…)
Tags:Dalton minimum, Landscheidt Minimum, Little Ice Age, Maunder Minimum, solar cycle, Solar variation, Theodor Landscheidt
Posted in Climate, Science, Solar science | Comments Off on Solar cycles and the Landscheidt minimum
March 9, 2012
Two articles appear in The Hindu today.
Rahul Siddharthan has an opinion piece about the CNR Rao and SB Krupanidhi plagiarism case and brings out the issues involved and the responsibility of senior scientists. Their responsibility in determining and establishing the atmosphere in which research is carried out is obvious. But what is more disturbing is a news article where Professor Krupanidhi is quoted extensively. He continues to trivialise the acts of plagiarism and refuses to take any responsibility for the papers published under his supervision.
No science in ‘cut and paste’
More instances of plagiarism come to light
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Tags:CNR Rao, cut and paste, cut and paste science, India, Indian Institute of Science, Krupanidhi, Plagiarism
Posted in Academic misconduct, Ethics, India, Science, scientific misconduct | 1 Comment »
March 2, 2012
Sticking to science – and experimental science at that – while ignoring the politicisation and religious overtones of “climate science”, Henrik Svensmark continues to painstakingly build his cosmic theory of climate change.
Supernova remnants → cosmic rays → solar modulation of cosmic rays →variations in cluster and sulphuric acid production → variation in cloud condensation nuclei → variation in low cloud formation → variation in climate.
When experiments or observations show that model predictions are wrong it is time to ditch the falsified hypotheses and to build new hypotheses. Far too often in ” global warming science” the hypotheses and the models become “incontrovertible dogma” and rather than test the falsifiability of the hypothesis with observations and experiment, data are fudged to fit the dogma. Svensmark’s approach is an oasis of proper science in a desert of pseudo-science.
Nigel Calder reports:
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Tags:climate change, Cloud condensation nuclei, cloud seeding, Cosmic ray, Henrik Svensmark, Nigel Calder, solar effects
Posted in Climate, Science, Solar science | 2 Comments »
February 28, 2012
An interesting paper from Curry et al. providing further evidence of a relationship between melting ice in the Arctic regions and widespread cold outbreaks in the Northern Hemisphere. Forcing mechanisms are all the rage where feedback loops lead to runaway effects. In general – in my experience with things technical – natural feedback loops are most often self-correcting. Sometimes they may appear in the short-term to amplify effects but in the long-term they drive back to an equilibrium condition. If feedback mechanisms are not known or if the true cycle-time of the feedback is unknown then short-term effects can be misleading.
Jiping Liu, Judith A. Curry, Huijun Wang, Mirong Song, and Radley M. Horton. Impact of declining Arctic sea ice on winter snowfall. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 27, 2012 DOI:10.1073/pnas.1114910109
Newswise:
Since the level of Arctic sea ice set a new record low in 2007, significantly above-normal winter snow cover has been seen in large parts of the northern United States, northwestern and central Europe, and northern and central China. During the winters of 2009-2010 and 2010-2011, the Northern Hemisphere measured its second and third largest snow cover levels on record.
“Our study demonstrates that the decrease in Arctic sea ice area is linked to changes in the winter Northern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation,” said Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. “The circulation changes result in more frequent episodes of atmospheric blocking patterns, which lead to increased cold surges and snow over large parts of the northern continents.”
Tags:Arctic, atmospheric blocking, feedback mechanisms, ice melting, Northern Hemisphere, Polar Regions, Sea ice, self-correction
Posted in Climate, Science, Weather | Comments Off on Self-correcting feedback mechanisms? When warming leads to cooling
February 27, 2012
Patrick Dunleavy (Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science) and Chris Gilson (Managing Editor of the EUROPP blog) discuss social scientists’ obligation to spread their research to the wider world and how blogging can help academics break out of restrictive publishing loops.
Five minutes with Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson
One of the recurring themes (from many different contributors) on the Impact of Social Science blog is that a new paradigm of research communications has grown up – one that de-emphasizes the traditional journals route, and re-prioritizes faster, real-time academic communication in which blogs play a critical intermediate role. They link to research reports and articles on the one hand, and they are linked to from Twitter, Facebook and Google+ news-streams and communities. So in research terms blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now.
But in addition, social scientists have an obligation to society to contribute their observations to the wider world – and at the moment that’s often being done in ramshackle and impoverished ways, in pointlessly obscure or charged-for forums, in language where you need to look up every second word in Wikipedia, with acres of ‘dead-on-arrival’ data in unreadable tables, and all delivered over bizarrely long-winded timescales. So the public pay for all our research, and then we shunt back to them a few press releases and a lot of out-of-date academic junk.
Blogging (supported by academic tweeting) helps academics break out of all these loops. It’s quick to do in real time. It taps academic expertise when it’s relevant, and so lets academics look forward and speculate in evidence-based ways. It communicates bottom-line results and ‘take aways’ in clear language, yet with due regard to methods issues and quality of evidence. …..
(my emphasis)
Tags:Blog, Research, Social science
Posted in Media, Science, Social Science | Comments Off on LSE on Blogging: “Blogging is .. one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now”
February 25, 2012
The plagiarism by Prof. CNR Rao (Science Advisor to the Indian PM) and Prof. SB Krupanidhi of the Indian Institute of Science which was the subject of an earlier post seems to be growing. It extends at least to 2 more papers as revealed by a commenter, x1, on Rahul Siddharthan’s blog post and as reported in the Calcutta Telegraph.
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UPDATE!! The body-count is growing and has now reached 5 papers. The intrepid sherlock here is again X1. (Comments 50 & 51)
Perhaps it is time for the PM to side-line this Scientific Advisor. At best he is a lazy and not very conscientious supervisor and at worst his ethical standards are sadly lacking. Keeping him on sends the clear message to the entire Indian scientific community that
- ethical standards are not that important,
- copying a few paragraphs without attribution is not such a big deal and can just be glossed over, and
- supervisors bear no responsibility or liability for what their students get up to and can pass the buck downwards
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Neither CNR Rao nor SB Krupanidhi come out of this very well. Their competence to supervise research leaves much to be desired. Krupanidhi, particularly, seems not even to believe that plagiarism is a serious breach of ethics.
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Tags:C. N. R. Rao, Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Krupanidhi, Plagiarism, Scientific misconduct
Posted in Academic misconduct, India, Science, scientific misconduct | 5 Comments »
February 25, 2012
Joerg Zwirner has been following this for some time at his AbnormalScience blog. Retraction Watch also posted about this. But it has now reached the ORI and even the main-stream media.
Yet another case of a Person of Indian Origin (PIO), Dr. Bharat B Aggarwal of the MD Anderson Cancer Center, being suspected of massive scientific misconduct this time at the University of Texas. Apparently 65 papers are being reviewed for the manipulation of images.
Deccan Herald:
A prominent Indian-American researcher at (the) University of Texas is under scanner for alleged falsification and fabrication in various publications regarding cancer fighting properties of plants.
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Tags:Abnormal Science, Bharat B Aggarwal, image manipulation, M D Anderson Cancer Center, ORI, Scientific misconduct, University of Texas at Austin
Posted in Academic misconduct, Medicine, Science, scientific misconduct | Comments Off on Prominent Indian-American researcher being investigated at the University of Texas
The k2p blog 