Archive for the ‘Social Science’ Category

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Made-up science: “Liking” or “disliking” in general is a personality trait!

August 27, 2013

This comes into the category – not of bad science – but what I would call “made-up science” where something fairly trivial and obvious is made sufficiently complicated to be addressed by “scientific method”.

It is apparently called “dispositional attitude” and it has a 16-item scale to measure an individual’s propensity to generally like or dislike any stimulii! “This surprising and novel discovery expands attitude theory by demonstrating that an attitude is not simply a function of an object’s properties, but it is also a function of the properties of the individual who evaluates the object,”  So a “liker” likes everything and a “hater” hates everything!

“Dispositional Attitude” seems neither surprising nor so very novel. Not so very different from what has been called the “Observer Effect” in physics or the “actor-observer assymetry” in attribution theory. It is unnecessarily trying to complicate what is little more than a cliche. Beauty – or liking or hating – lies in the eye of  the beholder and if your personality wears rose-coloured glasses – surprise, surprise – everything appears red.

Justin Hepler & Dolores Albarracin, “Attitudes without objects: Evidence for a dispositional attitude, its measurement, and its consequences,”, J Pers Soc Psychol. 2013 Jun;104(6):1060-76. doi: 10.1037/a0032282. Epub 2013 Apr 15.

The Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania has come out with this Press Release:

New research has uncovered the reason why some people seem to dislike everything while others seem to like everything. Apparently, it’s all part of our individual personality – a dimension that researchers have coined “dispositional attitude.”
            People with a positive dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to like things, whereas people with a negative dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to dislike things, according to research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The journal article, “Attitudes without objects: Evidence for a dispositional attitude, its measurement, and its consequences,” was written by Justin Hepler, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Dolores Albarracín, Ph.D., the Martin Fishbein Chair of Communication and Professor of Psychology at Penn.
            “The dispositional attitude construct represents a new perspective in which attitudes are not simply a function of the properties of the stimuli under consideration, but are also a function of the properties of the evaluator,” wrote the authors. “[For example], at first glance, it may not seem useful to know someone’s feelings about architecture when assessing their feelings about health care. After all, health care and architecture are independent stimuli with unique sets of properties, so attitudes toward these objects should also be independent.”
            However, they note, there is still one critical factor that an individual’s attitudes will have in common: the individual who formed the attitudes.  “Some people may simply be more prone to focusing on positive features and others on negative features,” Hepler said.  …..  
“This surprising and novel discovery expands attitude theory by demonstrating that an attitude is not simply a function of an object’s properties, but it is also a function of the properties of the individual who evaluates the object,” concluded Hepler and Albarracín. “Overall, the present research provides clear support for the dispositional attitude as a meaningful construct that has important implications for attitude theory and research.”
Abstract:
We hypothesized that individuals may differ in the dispositional tendency to have positive versus negative attitudes, a trait termed the Dispositional Attitude. Across four studies, we developed a 16-item Dispositional Attitude Measure (DAM) and investigated its internal consistency, test-retest reliability, factor structure, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and predictive validity. DAM scores were (a) positively correlated with positive affect traits, curiosity-related traits, and individual pre-existing attitudes, (b) negatively correlated with negative affect traits, and (c) uncorrelated with theoretically unrelated traits. Dispositional attitudes also significantly predicted the valence of novel attitudes while controlling for theoretically relevant traits (such as
the big-five and optimism). The dispositional attitude construct represents a new perspective in which attitudes are not simply a function of the properties of the stimuli under consideration, but are also a function of the properties of the evaluator. We discuss the intriguing implications of dispositional attitudes for many areas of research, including attitude formation, persuasion, and behavior prediction.

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Posted in Communication, psychology, Social Science | 2 Comments »

Social psychology may be rigorous but it is not a science

August 18, 2013

Scientific American carries an article by a budding psychologist who is upset that many don’t accept that it is a science – but I think she protests too much. I have no doubt that many social psychologists study their discipline with great rigour. And so they should. (And I accept the rigour of most of the researchers in this field notwthstanding the publicity seeking, high profile fraudsters such as Stapel and Hauser who did not).

But it is not any lack of rigour which makes psychology “not a science”. It is the fact that we just don’t know enough about the forces driving our sensory perceptions and our subsequent behaviour (via biochemistry in the body and the brain) to be able to formulate proper falsifiable hypotheses.  Behaviour is fascinating and many of the empirical studies trying to pin down the causes and effects are brilliantly conceived and carried out. But behaviour is complicated and we don’t know the drivers. Inevitably measurement is complicated and messy.

Even the alchemists made rigorous measurements. But they never knew enough to elevate alchemy to a science. And so it is with psychology and with social psychology in particular. We are waiting for the body of evidence to grow and the insight of a John Dalton and a Antoine Lavoisier to lift psychology from an alchemy-like art to the true level of a science.

Her article is interesting but a little too defensive. And she misses the point. Just having rigour in measurement is insufficient to make an art into a science.

Psychology’s brilliant, beautiful, scientific messiness

 Melanie Tannenbaum

Melanie TannenbaumMelanie Tannenbaum is a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she received an M.A. in social psychology in 2011. Her research focuses on the science of persuasion & motivation regarding political, health-related, and environmental behavior.

Today, sitting down to my Twitter feed, I saw a new link to Dr. Alex Berezow’s old piece on why psychology cannot call itself a science. The piece itself is over a year old, but seeing it linked again today brought up old, angry feelings that I never had the chance to publicly address when the editorial was first published. Others, like Dave Nussbaum, have already done a good job of dismantling the critiques in this article, but the fact that people are still linking to this piece (and that other pieces, even elsewhere on the SciAm Network, are still echoing these same criticisms) means that one thing apparently cannot be said enough:

Psychology is a science.

Shut up about how it’s not, already.

But she gets it almost right in her last paragraph. Indeed psychology is still an art – but that is not additional to its being a science (by definition).

.. The thought, the creativity, the pure brilliance that goes into finding measurable, testable proxies for “fuzzy concepts” so we can experimentally control those indicators and find ways to step closer, every day, towards scientifically studying these abstractions that we once thought we would never be able to study — that’s beautiful. Quite frankly, it’s not just science — it’s an art. And often times, the means that scientists devise to help them step closer and closer towards approximating these abstract concepts, finding different facets to measure or different ways to conceptualize our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors? That process alone is so brilliant, so tricky, and so critical that it’s often worth receiving just as much press time as the findings themselves.

To keep psychology in the realms of art rather than science is not to demean the discipline or to attack the rigour of those working the field. And maybe psychologists should consider why they  get so upset at being called artists rather than scientists and why they wish to be perceived as something they are not.

There is much of the study of psychology which is brilliant and beautiful and messy – but it is not a science – yet.

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How much of “social-priming” psychology is just made-up?

May 11, 2013

There is a whole industry of social psychologists specialising in – and getting funded for – studying “social priming”. The more astonishing or contra-intuitive the result the more attention, the more publicity and the more funding the researcher seems to get. But it seems that many (maybe most) of these study results are irreproducible. It is not implausible that priming does (should) affect subsequent behaviour but social psychologists seeking fame through astonishing results (often, it seems, made-up results) have not helped their own cause. The list of questionable “social priming” results is getting quite long:

    • Thinking about a professor just before you take an intelligence test makes you perform better than if you think about football hooligans.
    • people walk more slowly if they are primed with age-related words
    •  A warm mug makes you friendlier.
    • The American flag makes you vote Republican.
    • Fast-food logos make you impatient
    • lonely people take longer and warmer baths and showers, perhaps substituting the warmth of the water for the warmth of regular human interaction

Attention-grabbing results seem to be common among social psychologists of all kinds. A made-up result which says that “the smarter a man is, the less likely he is to cheat on his partner” generates the expected headlines and spots on TV talk shows. Diedrik Stapel made up data to prove that “meat eaters are more selfish than vegetarians”. Dirk Smeesters claimed that “varying the perspective of advertisements from the third person to the first person, such as making it seem as if we were looking out through the TV through our own eyes, makes people weigh certain information more heavily in their consumer choices” and that “manipulating colors such as blue and red can make us bend one way or another”. But Smeesters too has now admitted cherry picking his data. A raft of retractions followed and is still going on.

Nature: 

A paper published in PLoS ONE last week1 reports that nine different experiments failed to replicate this example of ‘intelligence priming’, first described in 1998 (ref. 2) by Ap Dijksterhuis, a social psychologist at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and now included in textbooks.

David Shanks, a cognitive psychologist at University College London, UK, and first author of the paper in PLoS ONE, is among sceptical scientists calling for Dijksterhuis to design a detailed experimental protocol to be carried out indifferent laboratories to pin down the effect. Dijksterhuis has rejected the request, saying that he “stands by the general effect” and blames the failure to replicate on “poor experiments”.

An acrimonious e-mail debate on the subject has been dividing psychologists, who are already jittery about other recent exposures of irreproducible results (see Nature 485, 298–300; 2012). “It’s about more than just replicating results from one paper,” says Shanks, who circulated a draft of his study in October; the failed replications call into question the under­pinnings of ‘unconscious-thought theory’. ….

….. In their paper, Shanks and his colleagues tried to obtain an intelligence-priming effect, following protocols in Dijksterhuis’s papers or refining them to amplify any theoretical effect (for example, by using a test of analytical thinking instead of general knowledge). They also repeated intelligence-priming studies from independent labs. They failed to find any of the described priming effects in their experiments. ……

……. Other high-profile social psychologists whose papers have been disputed in the past two years include John Bargh from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. His claims include that people walk more slowly if they are primed with age-related words.

Bargh, Dijksterhuis and their supporters argue that social-priming results are hard to replicate because the slightest change in conditions can affect the outcome. “There are moderators that we are unaware of,” says Dijksterhuis.

But Hal Pashler, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, San Diego — a long-time critic of social priming — notes that the effects reported in the original papers were huge. “If effects were that strong, it is unlikely they would abruptly disappear with subtle changes in procedure,” he says. ….

CHE: 

This fall, Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, sent an e-mail to a small group of psychologists, including Bargh, warning of a “train wreck looming” in the field because of doubts surrounding priming research. He was blunt: “I believe that you should collectively do something about this mess. To deal effectively with the doubts you should acknowledge their existence and confront them straight on, because a posture of defiant denial is self-defeating,” he wrote.

……. Pashler issued a challenge masquerading as a gentle query: “Would you be able to suggest one or two goal priming effects that you think are especially strong and robust, even if they are not particularly well-known?” In other words, put up or shut up. Point me to the stuff you’re certain of and I’ll try to replicate it. This was intended to counter the charge that he and others were cherry-picking the weakest work and then doing a victory dance after demolishing it. He didn’t get the straightforward answer he wanted. “Some suggestions emerged but none were pointing to a concrete example,” he says.

Social psychology and social psychologists have some way to go to avoid being dismissed out of hand as charlatans.

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When the law is an ass

April 4, 2013

“‘You were present on the occasion…and, indeed, you are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.

“‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, ‘the law is a ass — a idiot. If that’s the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience — by experience.'”  Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens

Of course any society can make any law it likes to ensure the proper functioning of that society. And such laws are nothing more than rules made by the majority of that time for the functioning of the society of that time. Systems of law are thus just exercises in pragmatism for the current time. But there is an implied “sanctity” and “immutability”  to systems of law which is neither justified nor rational. They are never laws in the sense of the Natural Laws which are not time-dependent and where compliance is inherent in the formulation of the law. Even the laws of God depend upon which religion one chooses to follow and when that religion was invented. The Big Ten as handed down to Moses no longer all apply. Times change, societies change and the laws of man (and those of God as formulated by man) must follow – but they don’t. It should not be beyond the wit of man to make such laws subject to the common sense of the time. Perhaps every law made by man should also have a term of validity. But that would be asking too much. And time and time again “the law is an ass” in its formulation or in its application!

“It is a rule of evidence deduced from the experience of mankind and supported by reason and authority that positive testimony is entitled to more weight than negative testimony but by the latter term is meant negative testimony in it’s true sense and not positive evidence of a negative, because testimony in support of a negative may be as positive as that in support of an affirmative…” Blackburn v. State, 254 Pac. 467, 472 (Ariz. 1927)

Just 3 examples from today’s news.

  1. The Independent: A Dutch appeals court has lifted a ban on an organisation which lobbies for the legalisation of sex between adults and children, after finding that the group was not breaking any laws in The Netherlands. ….. an appeals court in Leeuwarden has ruled that the group, which claims it does not promote sexual abuse and insists it is “a platform for discussion of paedophilia”, could not be outlawed because its existence did not threaten society, the Dutch News website reported.
  2. (Reuters) – Amnesty International has condemned a reported Saudi Arabian court ruling that a young man should be paralyzed as punishment for a crime he committed 10 years ago which resulted in the victim being confined to a wheelchair. The London-based human rights group said Ali al-Khawaher, 24, was reported to have spent 10 years in jail waiting to be paralyzed surgically unless his family pays one million Saudi riyals ($270,000) to the victim.
  3. RollingStone: …. Despite the passage in late 2012 of a new state ballot initiative that prevents California from ever again giving out life sentences to anyone whose “third strike” is not a serious crime, thousands of people – the overwhelming majority of them poor and nonwhite – remain imprisoned for a variety of offenses so absurd that any list of the unluckiest offenders reads like a macabre joke, a surrealistic comedy routine. Have you heard the one about the guy who got life for stealing a slice of pizza? Or the guy who went away forever for lifting a pair of baby shoes? Or the one who got 50 to life for helping himself to five children’s videotapes from Kmart? How about the guy who got life for possessing 0.14 grams of meth? ….

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Is Facebook a forum for narcissists (and maybe also for narcissistic researchers?)

March 19, 2013

Facebook is providing a fertile hunting ground for simplistic “research” by a new breed of “researchers”. Social psychology is still just a discipline and has yet to reach the level of a “science”. But I note that surveys of Facebook users is multiplying and seems to have  become a new field of social psychology. The surveys are easily done, usually include a sample size of just a few hundred (small enough to access on a University campus or in a town square) and draw fanciful conclusions to capture the headlines. They provide an easy way to publication. Such “Facebook research” is not “bad science” – if even “science” at all – but much of it is trivial and just provides a quick, cheap way of getting published. In this case the “research” has been done by someone from the School of Computing at the University of Portsmouth.

The University of Portsmouth has issued a press release  about a survey which finds that “Using Facebook to look at old photos of yourself and wall posts that you have written could be as soothing as a walk in the park” and this has received much coverage. But whereas the “researchers” find this beneficial, what they they seem to be describing is a sort of narcissistic – and not very healthy – behaviour. Narcissism is when a healthy self-esteem crosses over into being an unhealthy obsession with one’s self and I would have thought that the survey results are a warning sign. But of course the behaviour described would be considered beneficial – by another narcissist.

Using Facebook to look at old photos of yourself and wall posts that you have written could be as soothing as a walk in the park. Almost 90 percent of users access the site to look at their own wall posts, and three quarters look at their own photos when they are feeling low, new research has found.

A report by Dr Alice Good, of the University of Portsmouth, has found that this kind of ‘self soothing’ use of Facebook is actually beneficial to the user’s mood, especially if they are prone to feeling low. This directly contradicts previous research that has suggested that looking at Facebook can be bad for your mental health.

Dr Alice Good

Dr Good said: “We were very surprised by these findings, which contradict some recent reports.  Although this was only a small study, we will go on to study larger groups to see if the results remain consistent.”

Dr Good, of the School of Computing, quizzed 144 Facebook users and found that people often use the social network to reminisce, using old photos and wall posts as a form of comfort.

Looking back at older photos and wall posts is the main activity, and the one that made them happiest.

Psychologist Dr Clare Wilson, of the University of Portsmouth says:

“Although this is a pilot study, these findings are fascinating. Facebook is marketed as a means of communicating with others. Yet this research shows we are more likely to use it to connect with our past selves, perhaps when our present selves need reassuring.

“The pictures we often post are reminders of a positive past event. When in the grips of a negative mood, it is too easy to forget how good we often feel. Our positive posts can remind us of this.”

The survey also found that people who have experienced mental health issues are particularly comforted by the site. Dr Good said: “The results indicate we could use self-soothing as a form of treatment for low moods.”

The study has concluded that looking at comforting photos, known as reminiscent therapy, could be an effective method of treating mental health.

Scientists already know that reminiscent therapy helps older people with memory problems.

The use of old photos, items and films can provide a way for people with short-term memory loss to feel comforted by objects that are familiar to them.

This new research shows that it could also an effective treatment for people with depression or anxiety.

The act of self-soothing is an essential tool in helping people to calm down, especially if they have an existing mental health condition. If a patient self soothes there is less chance of a problem escalating.

The report also looked at ways of accessing Facebook, with phones being the most popular method and 94 per cent admitting they had their phone on them at all time, with around 70 per cent actually preferring to access Facebook using their phone over more conventional methods, such as a PC or laptop, suggesting people have a desire for immediacy, both in accessing the site as well as for viewing photos.

This study is part of a larger research project that looks at how applications can support wellbeing and effectively self soothe.

This research is published in the journal ‘Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction’. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.

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Posted in Behaviour, psychology, Social Science | 2 Comments »

LSE on Blogging: “Blogging is .. one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now”

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)

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Marc Hauser now accused of “theft of ideas”

October 21, 2011

The Hausergate affair seemed to have reached a sort of resolution with Marc Hauser’s resignation from Harvard – but it has come back to life with accusations from Gilbert Harman, a philosophy Professor at Princeton that Hauser’s book Moral Minds may have “stolen ideas” without sufficient attribution from the 2000 doctoral thesis of John Mikhail, a graduate student at Cornell University who is now a law professor at Georgetown University.

(more…)

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Marc Hauser’s lobbyists get to work but only end up excusing scientific misconduct

August 9, 2011

Marc Hauser’s friends have started on the process of repairing some of the damage to his reputation brought about by his own misconduct. He has “resigned” from Harvard but – with a little help from his friends – he will no doubt pop-up with a fancy title at some other institution soon.

 The Harvard Crimson reports that a group of academics have written a “letter” criticising the investigation of Hauser’s misconducts by Harvard. The letter was written by Pierre Pica, a scientist at the National Center for Scientific Research, Bert Vaux, director of studies in linguistics at King’s College in the University of Cambridge, and Jeffrey Watumull, a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge. Watumull previously worked in Hauser’s lab. Eight other academics including Naom Chomsky have added their signatures.

But they protest too much about one of their own. I felt on reading their letter that while they accuse Harvard of a witch-hunt and express concern about the undermining of scientific inquiry they actually end up trivialising ethical behaviour and excusing scientific misconduct. Their concern does not ring true. The letter talks about a media frenzy against Hauser but ignores the fact that nothing came up in the media until after the 3 year investigation had shown the misconduct and Hauser had taken a year’s gardening leave.

Harvard Crimson: Monday, August 08, 2011

The letter—which was signed by MIT Linguistics Professor Noam Chomsky, one of Hauser’s mentors—criticizes the scope of the inquiry into Hauser’s research, the media frenzy that followed the release of Harvard’s findings, and insinuations that Hauser’s body of work has been thrown into question by the investigation. ….

Eight academics from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Brazil signed the letter, including Harvard Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Florian Engert. It has been circulated among top academics.

The Crimson obtained a copy of the letter—titled “Could the Process of Investigating Scientific Misconduct Undermine Scientific Inquiry?”—from the authors.

Following allegations that Hauser falsified research data, a three-year investigation into Hauser’s research found him “solely responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct,” Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith wrote in a letter last August. Reports attributed the source of those allegations to his graduate students.

In the fallout from the investigation, Hauser took a year-long leave of absence, was then barred from teaching for another year, and ultimately resigned from his tenured position this summer.

Related: Hausergate posts

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Posted in Ethics, Science, scientific misconduct, Social Science | 1 Comment »

Guttenberg plagiarism: Germans fixated with academic titles

February 18, 2011
c. 2011: Axel Völcker, DerWedding.de

Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff

The Guttenberg plagiarism saga continues while he has gone off to Afghanistan for a surprise visit – probably because it is less dangerous there right now.

Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff is Professor for Media and Computing at the HTW Berlin. She was involved in the BMBF flagship project “Virtuelle Fachhochschule” developing eLearning materials and carries out Internet- and eLearning-related projects. She also works on detecting plagiarism and has a plagiarism blog.

Following the apparently blatant plagiarism carried out by Germany’s Defence Minister for his PhD thesis, she was interviewed by TheLocal.de which includes the folllowing:

What is your assessment of the Guttenberg situation?

What the rest of the thesis is like, and which chapter the alleged plagiarism is in – that’s another question. There are communities here who say it’s OK to plagiarize a little in your methodology section, but not in others. I think this is completely bizarre. Germans have a way of talking the problem down.The excerpts that the Süddeutsche Zeitung has online are scary, because they are one-to-one copies. And that’s not OK.

What is the real issue then?
This has to do with the German tendency to love titles, they are title-fixated, and people in politics love to have a doctor title so they seem wiser. But it should be about science, for scientists to prove that they can work by themselves – it’s the first proof that they can do research on their own.

Would you say there is a culture of plagiarising and cheating among German students?
I wouldn’t go that far. There’s a download culture. Young people download their music, videos, and why not download their thesis, because they just see it as busy work – something that stands between them and the degree they think they want or need so they can make lots of money and don’t have to work any longer.

She also writes on her blog:

Guttenberg, the conservative German defense minister from Bavaria, has left the country and gone to Afghanistan. They say this was planned, but right now, he’s probably safer there than in the streets of Berlin. The opposition is gleefully taking potshots at him (metaphorically, you understand).

His supporters accuse the scientist who discovered the plagiarism of being part of a commie plot to undermine the country, if I understand their tone of voice correctly.
No one believes that a professor might sit down one evening at the computer, in the midst of writing a review of a doctoral thesis that had been around for a while, but had a very prominent author, currently under fire for other things. The professor, Andreas Fischer-Lescano of the University of Bremen, poured himself a glass of Argentine red wine, looked over the thesis and put three words into Google: “säkularer laizistischer multireligiöser” (secular lay multireligious – the thesis includes a chapter on putting references to a god in a constitution).
And he got a hit. From an article in the Neue Züricher Zeitung by Klara Obermüller, written a few years before his thesis was published. Oops. He poured another glass and tried some other terms, and some more. Fischer-Lescano wrote a scathing review, and includes as an appendix 24 word-for-word passages that are not quoted and not referenced. The review will be published the end of the month in Kritische Justiz, 44(1), pp. 112-119.
A number of journalists have spoken with me today to question this way of working. How do I look for plagiarists? “Well,” I said, “pretty much the same. Except that I prefer Austrian wine.”

As a sociological phenomenon, the rise of the “cut-and-paste” culture together with the German love of academic titles is a worthy subject for study. But what does not seem to be in doubt is that Guttenberg is just another politician who is just another fraud. And a misuse of position – whether to get an academic degree or to amass huge sums of money – is still corruption.

Why voters continue to vote for frauds is an even more interesting subject for study.


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Posted in Behaviour, Corruption, Fraud, Germany, scientific misconduct, Social Science | 3 Comments »

Paraguay suspends Natural History Museum’s “genocide” expedition

November 16, 2010
Very approximate location of the Gran Chaco (U...

Gran Chaco area: Image via Wikipedia

I posted a few days ago about the dangers of the Natural History Museum’s planned 60 – 100 strong “expedition” to the forests of Paraguay.

Today comes news that on Monday Paraguay suspended a British scientific expedition into the remote Chaco woodlands after indigenous rights groups raised concerns over the welfare of protected tribes in the region.

Sponsored by Britain’s Natural History Museum, the 45-member British-Paraguayan expedition planned to conduct a month-long survey of animal and plant life in the sprawling savanna 800 kilometers (500 miles) north of Asuncion, the ministry said in a statement.

The decision to suspend it followed “last minute” concerns raised by indigenous rights groups including Iniciativa Amotocodie, and recommendations by the Washington-based Inter-American Human Rights Commission, the environment ministry said.

“The massive presence of about 60 researchers in the land inhabited by the Ayoreo tribal groups in the remote, northern reaches of Chaco… poses significant risks to their lives and territory,” Amotocodie said in a statement.

The rights groups argued that since the tribes have had very little contact with the outside world they are at risk of contracting diseases that in some cases could prove fatal.

It would have been far better if the Natural History Museum had itself suspended the expedition and had taken the initiative to carry out the consultations which it is now forced to conduct.

Seattle pi:

Paraguay denied authorization Monday for a British-led scientific expedition to catalog plants and animals in the country’s remote northern corner, saying there isn’t enough time to consult with relatives of nomadic Indians who try to remain isolated as they pass through the area.

The non-governmental Amotocoide Initiative, an advocacy group for native Ayoreo Indians who live in the dry forests of northern Paraguay, had warned that scientists might carry European diseases to the Indians, leave trash or otherwise suffer violent encounters.

Isabel Basualdo, director of the biodiversity office of Paraguay’s environmental ministry, said in a statement that the decision follows the recommendation of the Interamerican Human Rights Commission that public hearings and all other legal requirements are complied with before such a visit.

Richard Lane, the British Natural History museum’s director of science, said the expedition had been suspended while consultations take place. “We believe that this expedition to scientifically record the richness and diversity of the animals and plants in this remote region is extremely important for the future management of this fragile habitat,” Lane said in a statement.

But some anthropologists who advocate for the Ayoreos say no outsiders should enter these dry forests, where small bands of people are still trying to live in isolation from the modern world. Irene Gauto, who represents the private environmental group Guyra Paraguay, told The Associated Press that the environment ministry “sent a letter to the British museum arguing that, for now, it’s better to delay the visit of the scientists because there hasn’t been time enough to hold public hearings with the relatives of the forest-dwelling Ayoreos,” one of 20 surviving indigenous groups living in Paraguay.

The trip was to begin Saturday to the Chovoreca and Cabrera-Timane hills near Paraguay’s border with Bolivia and Brazil, about 500 miles (800 kilometers) northeast of the capital. The scientists planned to catalog species on a private cattle ranch within a Paraguayan nature reserve. The ranch’s owners approved the trip and said indigenous people didn’t live there, Gauto said.

The government appeared ready to approve the trip. But the situation changed after a leader of the Totobiegosode subgroup of Ayoreos, Chiri Etacori, said about two dozen nomadic Ayoreos wander through the area.

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