Archive for the ‘scientific misconduct’ Category

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Nobel laureate resigns from American Physical Society because of its stand on global warming

September 14, 2011

In October last year Professor Hal Lewis resigned from the American Physical Society because “It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave”.

Yesterday another high profile member (Nobel prize winner for physics in 1973  Dr. Ivar Giaever) also resigned for much the same reason.

WUWT:

Nobel prize winner for physics in 1973 Dr. Ivar Giaever resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society (APS) on September 13, 2011 in disgust over the group’s promotion of man-made global warming fears. 

Here’s the resignation letter:

From: Ivar Giaever [ mailto:giaever@XXXX.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 3:42 PM
To: kirby@xxx.xxx
Cc: Robert H. Austin; ‘William Happer’; ‘Larry Gould’; ‘S. Fred Singer’; Roger Cohen
Subject: I resign from APS
Dear Ms. Kirby
Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because I can not live with the statement below:
“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.
The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.
If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now”.
In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.Best regards,
Ivar Giaever
Nobel Laureate 1973PS. I included a copy to a few people in case they feel like using the information.
Ivar Giaever
XXX XXX
XXX
USA
Phone XXX XXX XXX
Fax XXX XXX XXX  

The supposedly “settled” science is looking decidedly wobbly.  And any science justifed on the basis of a “consensus” is fundamentally suspect .

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Fraud, scientific misconduct | Comments Off on Nobel laureate resigns from American Physical Society because of its stand on global warming

Political goals distort the science done by the US National Parks Service

September 13, 2011

This is not the first time of course that slanted and pre-determined conclusions to suit a political agenda are drawn from supposedly “rigorously peer-reviewed research”. Peer-review carried out correctly is no doubt very effective but it also always discourages the non-establishment view. And if the establishment has a preconceived “belief”, then any views dissenting from that orthodoxy are easy to suppress.

ABC reports:

There are new allegations of scientific misconduct being directed at the National Park Service. A park service study claims an oyster farm in the Point Reyes National Seashore is harming wildlife, but there are disturbing new questions about the science behind that study. 

The Drakes Bay Oyster Company has been at Point Reyes since the 1930s, but the National Park Service says it must close in 2012 in order to return it back to wilderness. The park service released a study in April claiming to have evidence the oyster farm is a threat to harbor seals, driving them out of their home in Drakes Estero. However, an independent analysis by outside experts shows that evidence is slanted to make the oyster farm look bad.

Addendum (21st September 2011)

It seems (not yet confirmed) that the paper in question is Modeling the effects of El Nino, density-dependence,and disturbance on harbor seal (Phoca vitulina) counts in Drakes Estero, California: 1997–2007 by Becker, Press and Allen,
MARINE MAMMAL SCIENCE, 25(1): 1–18 ( January 2009), Society for Marine Mammalogy, DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-7692.2008.00234.x

I think the problematic paragraph could be this one in the Results section
Disturbance rates in the upper estero (subsites OB, UEF, UEN) significantly
increased with oyster harvest (rs = 0.55, P < 0.03) (Fig. 2B). This correlation
is highly robust to sample size. For example, there was still a significant positive
correlation (rs = 0.53, P < 0.04) of disturbance rate with oyster harvest even
when removing the 2006 disturbance, four of the 2007 disturbances (including two
disturbances on 1 day in 2007 that the mariculture company challenged), and four of
the 1996 disturbances (nine total) from the analysis. Similarly, oyster harvest levels
in years with oyster related disturbances were significantly higher (U = 43, n =
13, P1−tail < 0.04). 

The independent study itself seems to have been done by heavyweights in the world of science led by Corey S Goodman:

“This is a published paper, it’s publicly available, it’s been supported by taxpayer dollars, it’s done by government scientists,” said biologist Corey Goodman, Ph.D. Goodman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and he has published more than 200 scientific papers. He was asked by a Marin County supervisor in 2007 to look into how the park was conducting scientific research and he’s been pouring over data ever since. ……. 

It took the National Park Service three months to hand over their data to Goodman. When he finally got it, he shared it with statisticians at Stanford and U.C. Davis to see if they could replicate the results. “And what I find is that none of the conclusions in the paper are valid,” said Goodman. ……That’s why Goodman is charging the park service with distorting science to fit their ultimate goal of closing the oyster farm. 

Further details of Dr. Goodman’s charges of scientific misconduct are here.

The author of the Parks Service paper seems to have gone into hiding and the Parks Service is in a defensive mode.

ABC7 wanted to hear from the park service scientist who wrote the study, Dr. Ben Becker, director of the Pacific Coast Science and Learning Center at Point Reyes National Seashore. We asked the park service for an interview, left messages for Becker, and sent emails, but never heard back. We even went to his house to get answers, but Becker refused to answer our questions.

Park service spokesman Melanie Gunn told us in an email that Becker’s paper “went through a rigorous peer review process.”

But merely invoking peer-review -which is notoriously patchy in its quality – and which often ends up as being “pal-review” is unlikely to be enough in this case.

Goodman’s concerns were still enough to raise the interest of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California. The senator has asked the Marine Mammal Commission to do an independent review of the park service study and now she wants the park service to delay its environmental impact statement on the oyster farm until after that review. She sent a letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

In it the letter, Feinstein says: “I fear that if the Department of Interior does not stand behind the independent analysis, it will be another example of a lack of credibility at Point Reyes National Seashore.”

The park service says it is cooperating with the review but still plans to release its report this month, adding that “Dr. Becker continues to work with the Marine Mammal Commission on any remaining questions the Commission may have.”

Related: Peer review and the corruption of science

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Posted in Science, scientific misconduct | 1 Comment »

Dutch social psychologist sacked for faking data over a “prolonged period”

September 12, 2011

On September 7th, Tilburg University officially suspended Diederik Stapel, who heads the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research. University Rector Philip Eijlander said that Stapel had admitted to using faked data and said that he would not be allowed to return.

Diederik Stapel

Stapel’s homepage on the Tilburg University website has been removed “by the administrator”.

Mark van Vugt is a Netherlands evolutionary psychologist who currently holds a professorship in psychology at the VU University (Vrije Universiteit) Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and has affiliate positions at the Institute for Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at University of Oxford, UK, and the University of Kent, UK. Mark van Vugt writes about his colleague Diederik Stapel in Psychology Today:

After the high profile case of Marc Hauser, the Harvard psychologist found guilty of serious scientific misconduct there is the recent case of my colleague, Diederik Stapel, a social psychology professor in the Netherlands who has been suspended by his university after admitting to have fabricated experimental data over a prolonged period.

The extent of his fraud is yet unclear but it has produced shock waves among the international social psychology community.

Stapel was the poster boy of Dutch social psychology, having published in the major psychology journals, and receiving various grants and prestigious awards for his research on social cognition and stereotyping. In a recent article published in Science, he and his colleagues showed that in a messy environment (a dirty railway station) White participants were more prejudiced against a Black person. The authenticity of these results is now being investigated…

The Science article that is being investigated is Coping with Chaos: How Disordered Contexts Promote Stereotyping and Discrimination by Diederik A. Stapel and Siegwart Lindenberg, Science 8 April 2011: Vol. 332 no. 6026 pp. 251-253 DOI: 10.1126/science.1201068

But this is not the only article being investigated and there may be a rash of retractions to come.

Science Insider writes:

A Dutch social psychologist whose eye-catching studies about human behavior were fodder for columnists and policy makers has lost his job after his university concluded that some of the data in those studies were fabricated.

Tilburg University today officially suspended Diederik Stapel, who heads the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research. But in a TV interview today, university Rector Philip Eijlander said that Stapel had admitted to using faked data and said that he would not be allowed to return.

Stapel has worked at the university, located in southern Netherlands, since 2006. He is known as a prolific researcher and a successful fundraiser. His studies appeared to offer new insights into the workings of the human mind; for instance, a Science paper published in April showed that people are more likely to stereotype or discriminate in messy environments.

In the TV interview, Eijlander says he was first contacted on 27 August by “junior researchers” in Stapel’s lab who alleged that his conduct was fraudulent. Stapel immediately admitted that there was “something strange” in his papers, Eijlander says, and “yesterday, he told me that there are faked data.” The university has asked Willem Levelt, a psycholinguist and former president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, to lead a panel investigating the extent of the alleged fraud. Eijlander says that all “tainted papers” will be retracted.

As to the whistleblowers, Eijlander told the television interviewer that “I have a lot of respect for them, because they found it very difficult.”

Just last week, Stapel made headlines with a press release claiming that thinking of eating meat makes people “more boorish” and less social. The announcement, which said that “meat brings out the worst in people,” raised eyebrows because the study hadn’t yet been written up, let alone published.

Roos Vonk, a psychologist at Radboud University Nijmegen and a collaborator on the study, wrote on her blog today that she believes the latest study is likely among those based on fabricated data. She writes that her conclusion is based on the fact that, although the results had been collected by Stapel’s group, “when we discussed [them], I thought it was odd that Diederik didn’t mention the name of his assistant.” But at the time, she writes, the possibility of fraud didn’t occur to her.

Roos Vonk writes further as she apologises on her blog

I regret very much that this has happened and I will do everything what I can so that trust in the scientific work within social psychology will recover. It is conceivable that this extensive lapse of a few colleagues effects the reputation of our entire profession. I understand that this way can work, but I want to stress that this is a single exception  probably much more shocking and shameful for me and my colleagues than for outsiders, because we all in our education are imbued with the importance of integrity.

An interesting UPDATE from Retraction Watch:

An alert Retraction Watch reader has pointed us to a 1999 paper by Stapel with the impossibly ironic title: “Framed and misfortuned: identity salience and the whiff of scandal.”

In the article, which appeared in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Stapel and two colleagues reported the results of survey they’d conducted of Dutch psychologists in the wake of a major plagiarism scandal involving an unidentified Dutch clinical psychologist (“we decided to use neither the name of the person who was accused of plagiarism nor the university to which he was affiliated,” they wrote).

Put briefly, the researchers claimed to have found (rather unsurprisingly) that hows psychologists identified themselves professionally dictated how strongly they were affected personally by the scandal. Money quote:

Whether social psychologists view an article about a plagiarist clinical psychologist as relevant or irrelevant to the self may thus be determined by whether their social identity is narrowly defined (‘social  psychologists’), so as to exclude the plagiarist, or broadly define (‘psychologists’) to include the plagiarist.

Stapel’s group also showed that psychologists from the accused’s own university felt the shame of his alleged misdeeds more than those from other institutions.

And from what Roos Vonk has written it would seem that his collaborators indeed feel a stronger sense of shame than others.

It would seem that much of the research by Diederik Stapel will now be investigated and a number of his papers are likely to be retracted. In addition to the Science paper which is already under investigation some of his other earlier publications are:

I wonder whether cognitive psychology is particularly subject to the faking of data – possibly because faking is relatively easy when the data are so often subjective and so little of it is required to be reproducible or quantitative.

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Posted in Academic misconduct, Behaviour, Ethics, psychology, Scientific Fraud, scientific misconduct | 4 Comments »

The Heidelberg affidavit: German Universities take action to prevent PhD fraud

September 12, 2011

I have long felt that the work of researchers and scientists cannot and should not be devoid of liability (whether criminal or civil liability) in cases of scientific misconduct or fraud. Recently two University of Toronto law professors argued that medical ghostwriting where medical or pharmaceutical companies finance the writing of favourable, peer-reviewed,  scientific articles should be considered fraud and liable as such.

Now after the retraction of a splurge of PhD’s awarded to German politicians, the academic community is acting to protect the reputation and the value of their PhD’s. Heidelberg University and Bonn University – among others – are tightening their regulations. The NY Times  reports:

The plagiarism scandals that rocked the political world in Germany this year have led to a period of soul-searching among academics and researchers around the country. They have also prompted calls for stricter controls at German universities. …. After several cases in which doctoral theses were described as using unattributed material from earlier works — the most prominent of which pushed Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg to resign as defense minister — German universities have questioned the way doctoral candidates are tested. Some academics insist that the system is generally sound, pointing out that in the half-dozen high-profile cases where plagiarism was found, the doctoral degree was ultimately retracted.

… the University of Bonn, which in July retracted the doctoral title of Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a member of the European Parliament, the university will publish extensive and explicit guidelines so that doctoral students know exactly what is expected.

Heidelberg University, which in June formally retracted the doctorate of Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a member of the European Parliament, announced in August that it would begin demanding that doctoral students sign a legally binding affidavit, attesting original authorship. Signing a false statement on such an affidavit can prompt legal action in the local courts, which can lead to a fine and even to a prison sentence of up to three years under the German penal code.

Professor Thomas Pfeiffer, speaking for the university, said the threat of possible legal action, in addition to the embarrassment of a retracted doctorate, would act as a further deterrent.

Faculties at the University of Bonn, Heidelberg University and the University of Bayreuth have all retracted doctorates after internal commissions determined that students-turned-politicians had plagiarized. They are demanding that all doctoral theses be submitted as an electronic copy, to help spot-checking with plagiarism-detection software, a step considered just as important as a deterrent for would-be plagiarists as it is a detection mechanism.

Read the whole article

The Heidelberg affidavit seems a relatively simple and effective way to go. It is pre-emptive and should act as a deterrent without being oppressive. Of course one would wish scientific research to be carried out in an open atmosphere which is not clouded by suspicion. But since the rewards of scientific misconduct – whether as academic or political advancement or in monetary gain – can be very high, suspicion and rivalry will remain unless a system of liability is introduced. This would not only create accountability but would also encourage the taking of responsibility for one’s own work. In fact, if scientists and researchers automatically bear a certain liability for the integrity (not the quality) of their work, then an open atmosphere could actually be promoted.

I see no reason why an extension of the “Heidelberg affidavit” could not be applied to all research workers regarding the integrity of their work and be an integral part of any employment contract.

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Posted in Behaviour, Ethics, Germany, Science, scientific misconduct | Comments Off on The Heidelberg affidavit: German Universities take action to prevent PhD fraud

A hotbed of intrigue: Bahman Bakhtiari sues Peter Sluglett after being fired from Utah University’s ME Center

September 8, 2011

Two months ago Bahman Bakhtiari was fired from the University of Utah’s Middle East Center for a pattern of plagiarism. Now he has filed  a suit last Friday in 3rd District Court against Peter Sluglett, the center’s senior-most faculty member and a former Director of the Center himself.

Deseret News:  Bakhtiari alleges that two senior faculty leaders at the center conspired to eliminate him after personality conflicts. He also alleges in the lawsuit that a senior faculty member, who was a former center director, lied about having a Ph.D. from UCLA and that faculty conspired to cover it up.

Bakhtiari served as center director from July 2009 to June 2011. He was brought in from the outside by the Dean of the College of Humanities to replace an existing faculty member. The suit states that from the onset, Bakhtiari was disliked by senior center faculty and that the political science department, which oversees the center, refused to support his tenure. The suit states that the dean of humanities ended up granting him tenure through the department of languages and literature.

Last June, a U. faculty committee investigated complaints of alleged plagiarism against Bakhtiari. In a unanimous vote, the committee found that Bakhtiari committed “a pattern of plagiarism that is harmful to the university’s academic integrity.” …

Although the committee stopped short of termination and revocation of tenure, University of Utah Interim President A. Lorris Betz overrode the decision and terminated Bakhtiari on June 30. ….

Bakhtiari alleges in his suit that center faculty actively dug through his career history to find justification to get rid of him. According to U. documents, evidence of plagiarism was found in six scholarly publications, including Bakhtiari’s 1984 Ph.D. dissertation, an online newsletter and an op-ed piece published in The Salt Lake Tribune. The suit states Bakhtiari is seeking damages for interference with economic relations, invasion of privacy, breach of contract and defamation.

Both Peter Sluglett and the Middle East Center are no strangers to internecine dispute, intrigue and academic “dirty tricks”. Sluglett gets mixed reports as a teacher.

Sluglett is also apparently  a self-anointed expert in recent Iraq history:

February 03, 2006  

Sluglett gets Slugged: I noted with some pleasure that Wafaa’ Al-Natheema knocked Peter Sluglett down a peg or two. She posts the full email exchange on her blog. Professor Peter Sluglett considers himself an expert on modern Iraqi history with good reason – he has studies the subject for 30 years. Along with his late wife, Marion Farouk Sluglett, they wrote one of the important books on modern Iraqi history called “Iraq since 1958”. However, he uses that position to stifle any debate on Iraqi history. He considers himself the expert and nobody has the right to contradict him. The problem is that in many cases he is wrong.

The Middle East Center itself is no stranger to controversy where Sluglett was Director before Ibrahim Karawan – who resigned and was then succeeded by Bahman Bakhtiari.

April 4, 2008 

Karawan Resigns over Middle East Center Dismissals  

Ibrahim Karawan, director of the Middle East Center, announced his resignation yesterday before a lecture at the Hinckley Institute of Politics. Karawan said he is resigning because two of his colleagues were forced out of the center by Dean Robert Newman of the College of Humanities. “They were basically moved out of the center, not according to what they wanted, and moved to other departments,” Karawan said.

He questioned whether the action was justified and what the impact will be on the governing structure of the center and its ability to receive funding from the U.S. Department of Education. … Peter Sluglett, a professor of Middle Eastern history, and Harris Lenowitz, a professor in Hebrew, both received letters from Newman informing them that they could continue teaching but would no longer be able to hold leadership positions in the center. Sluglett and Lenowitz both have joint appointments in the center and their departments — history and languages and literature, respectively — and both teach cross-listed courses. ….

On March 13, Lenowitz said he received a letter from Newman that read: “It has come to my attention that you have contributed consistently toward creating an atmosphere in the Middle East Center that lacks collegiality and can no longer be tolerated.” Sluglett said he also received this letter, but he doesn’t think other faculty members have any problems with his behavior…….

Leaving aside the legal positions and claims and counter-claims which will run their course, the Middle East Center and its faculty strike me as being a bunch of  rather petty, uncivilised, amoral and childish group of academics. Petty intrigue, academic dishonesty and scientific misconduct seems to come quite naturally to them.

Playing their games of intrigue appears far more important to them than academic rigour or integrity. Whether they should be getting any funding at all from the US Department of Education ought to be a question being asked.

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Posted in Academic misconduct, Education, Middle East, scientific misconduct | 6 Comments »

Sangiliyandi Gurunathan on his way to another private University in South India

September 5, 2011

Kalasalingam University recently took strong action against a Professor and 6 PhD students for scientific misconduct which included data manipulation and plagiarism. Dr. G Sangliyandi, Senior Professor and Head, Department of Biotechnology, and Dean, International Relations, Kalasalingam University was directed to resign from the University. The 6 PhD students involved had their registrations cancelled.

His name has been removed from the Department of Biotechnology page at the university website but still appeared on the International Relations page last week.

It seems that Dr. Gurunathan has been offered (and is said to have accepted) a position at another private University in Southern India – also at a Department of Bio-technology but it has not been possible to confirm this. 

One reader comments that all the six students involved are still continuing at Kalasalingam University

All the 6 research scholars, whose Ph.D registration has been cancelled are still doing (continuing) their research work in the department itself on the support of Prof. Dr. K. Sundar.

If this is true then it seems that Sangiliyandi Gurunathan is being assigned all the blame for the wrong-doings at his lab and not primarily the students he had initially blamed. Presumably the students have new PhD registrations and stern warnings about maintaining good conduct and about the ethics of plagiarism and image manipulation!

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Are Universities cracking down on academic and scientific misconduct?

September 3, 2011

It may just be a passing gust of a cleansing wind but I do have a perception that universities are becoming much more responsive to allegations of academic dishonesty and scientific misconduct.

Investigations of misconduct at academic institutions have long been notorious for the amount of time they take (usually many years) and for always protecting “the establishment”. But I think I detect a change.

Investigations are speeding up and sanctions against those found guilty are beginning to be more than symbolic slaps on the wrist. The frequency of enforced resignations and dismissals seem to be increasing. I perceive a trend and I hypothesise that it is partly in response to the on-line scrutiny and negative publicity which comes from the blogosphere. 

Close on the heels of the recent Ahluwalia resignation /dismissal come these two cases:

1. Academic impropriety with Professor Julius Nyang’oro considered to have improperly helped athletes to cheat at the University of North Carolina. He is tied to two athletes who were kicked off the football team. In one case he did not detect or ignored blatant plagiarism and in the other he allowed a freshman to take a senior graduate level course and awarded him a suspiciously high grade. Nyang’oro apparently rarely gave low grades in his classes:

College athletes and accommodating professors

UNC professor resigns amid football investigation

UNC’s Afro-American studies head resigns amid questions of football …

2. A well known cardiac researcher Zhiguo Wang has been dismissed from the Montreal Heart Institute for scientific misconduct following retraction of two papers in the Journal of the Biological Chemistry just a month ago.  Wang also has an appointment at the University of Montreal, and is senior research scholar of the Fonds de Recherche en Sante de Quebec, a ChangJiang scholar professor, and a LongJiang scholar professor of China. The dismissal comes less than a month after the publication of the retraction notices.

Authors retract two JBC papers on how heart rhythms go awry; Montreal Heart Institute looking into why

Montreal heart studies ‘withdrawn’ – Zhiguo Wang’s arrhythmia research being investigated after retractions 

Montreal hospital dismisses cardiac researcher over misconduct allegations

There have been a number of other cases recently in Germany as well where the speed of the investigations by the academic institutions have been unprecedented (zu Guttenberg and Bulfone-Paus as examples).

Perhaps it’s all just in my mind – or even wishful thinking – but I have the distinct impression that a cleansing wind is beginning to blow. The world wide web may already be having an impact on combating academic dishonesty and scientific misconduct by forcing institutions to be more responsive. There is much on-line which is still malicious or untrue or just plain rubbish. But the amount of “solid” comment has achieved a  “critical mass”. The blogosphere can no longer be merely ignored it seems.

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Posted in Academic misconduct, Education, scientific misconduct | Comments Off on Are Universities cracking down on academic and scientific misconduct?

Harvard criticised for being too lenient with Hauser

September 1, 2011

I don’t know to what extent the Harvard Crimson represents student opinion at Harvard but it is likely that they represent at least a substantial body of opinion among the student body.  In an editorial today, they come down very hard against what they perceive as being the rather lenient treatment of Marc Hauser by the University. He was found guilty of scientific misconduct, sent on a years “gardening” leave but kept his tenure and his lab. He was then allowed to return and continue his research but was not allowed to teach. He then resigned or was allowed to or invited to resign. The University investigation seems to be over though the Office of Research Integrity investigation into the misuse of Federal grants may still be ongoing.

The Crimson thinks that allowing him to save face was a little too lenient:

In April, we argued that Harvard should have taken a more aggressive stance in response to the findings of the investigative committee and fired Hauser. Hauser’s prohibition from further research and teaching would have been a logical consequence of his actions. It would have forcefully upheld the imperative for honesty and accuracy in the sciences. Tenure, a privilege given to distinguished professors, is no shield for academic misconduct.

.. despite (a) measure of closure that Hauser’s resignation brings to this situation, it remains that the University should have taken stronger and earlier disciplinary action against him. 

.. By firing Hauser, Harvard would have sent a firm message that academic dishonesty is not tolerated. In contrast, Hauser’s resignation is an evasion of full culpability and deemphasizes the gravity of his actions. Allowing Hauser to save face and graciously depart his position offers little recourse for the multitude of scientific malfeasances that were committed.

.. Harvard undergraduates are held to high standards regarding academic discipline—professors with positions of influence should be equally, if not more, accountable for their deeds. By refusing to take bold action and instead allowing for a willing resignation, the University has downplayed the severity of his academic dishonesty.

Strong words.

Of course the University has also been criticised by Hauser’s friends and supporters  for being too hard on him!

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University of Peshawar Vice Chancellor defends himself

August 30, 2011

The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Peshawar,  Dr Azmat Hayat Khan was found guilty of plagiarism by a three-member committee of the Higher Education Commission that was constituted to probe the matter. The Higher Education Commission had submitted its report to the Governor of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa who is also the Chancellor of the university.

The Vice Chancellor has now put forward his story publicly and explained the plagiarism claims are not justified:

The News

Speaking out for the first time since he was accused of plagiarism, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Peshawar Prof Dr Azmat Hayat Khan Sunday rejected the allegations against him as baseless. A pressure group in the university is politicising the issue for its personal gains, he told The News in an exclusive interview.

… He said that the case was in the court and he could not comment much about it. However, I have challenged the jurisdiction of the Higher Education Commission. The letter of the HEC was written on malafide intention to the Khyber Pakhunkhwa governor in May 2011, he argued….

The Vice-Chancellor said that he had done his PhD in 1990 on the Durand Line and his thesis were challenged after 21 years, which was self-explanatory of the malafide intent behind the issue. He said that the Indian Office Library was the primary source of files for him. If you see my book you will come to know that I have quoted the original sources of information which is the same that Mst Kulwant Kaur has done. I mean both the authors have quoted original sources with different citations, he argued. In my book on several occasions I have mentioned in the footnotes that for further details see Kulwant Kaur’s book, Pak Afghan Relations. Now if I wanted to steal somebody’s work, I would not have referred to his or her book, he added.

Regarding the letters of a faculty member of the university to various quarters accusing him of giving life threats to him and his family members, Dr Azmat Hayat said he was an academician and believed in the sanctity of pen and book. ìAlso, I belong to a well-reputed family of Peshawar. People know me and my family very well. I cannot even think about such mean practices, he stated.

Read whole interview

 

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Posted in Education, Ethics, scientific misconduct | 1 Comment »

Jatinder Ahluwalia – End-game in progress

August 27, 2011

Jatinder Ahluwalia’s career of scientific misconduct has cut a swathe through academia over the last 15 years but is now approaching its end-game as Imperial College reviews the award of his PhD.

At Cambridge University he lost his studentship funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council at the end of 1997, and was dismissed from the graduate studies program in 1998. He then went on to “earn” his PhD at Imperial College after which he was employed at University College London. An investigation at UCL  found that not only had he faked experimental results but also that he had sabotaged the experiments of some of his colleagues. He resigned or was dismissed by UCL in 2009 but then turned up as a senior lecturer at the University of East London. As retractions of his papers and allegations by co-workers mounted, UEL also investigated and Imperial College started checking the experiments which had led to the award of his PhD. Earlier this year he “left” UEL. Retraction Watch has documented the entire, sorry story.

This week another paper of his was retracted and Imperial College announced that the results on which his PhD were based could not be replicated. Imperial will now set up a committee to review the award of his doctorate.

The academics asked to independently re-run the experiments were unable to replicate the findings published in the paper Activation of capsaicin-sensitive primary sensory neurones induces anandamide production and release and so the authors decided to withdraw this from the Journal of Neurochemistry. The findings also formed the basis of Dr Ahluwalia’s PhD. The College has therefore written to Dr Ahluwalia to notify him that it believes it has grounds to investigate the validity of the data in his PhD. It will be convening a panel to review the award in accordance with its policy for investigating allegations of research misconduct.

I find it an incredible waste that in so many cases of scientific misconduct there is such a great deal of misplaced creativity and ingenuity – and even hard work – which goes into the misconduct and in then covering it up.

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Posted in Science, scientific misconduct | 2 Comments »

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