August 6, 2011
The list of UK journalists involved in phone hacking just gets longer. After the Mirror it is now the turn of the Guardian.
The Guardian newspaper may have been a major player in exposing the phone hacking scandal in Murdoch’s News of the World, but is not itself free from the cancer. Their investigations executive editor, David Leigh is a self-confessed hacker (5 years ago) but seeks to justify himself because his ends were in the public interest!!
David Leigh obviously considers himself an inherently good guy such that his means are justified by his ends. I am afraid Mr. Leigh’s ethics are a little confused, a little arrogant and not very convincing. The Daily Mail reports that he is to be questioned by the police.
UPDATE! It now seems that David Leigh was probably also involved in some kind of nefarious activity against the anti-global warming community after Climategate. It would seem that police provided him – or the Guardian – with information in contravention of the Data Protection Act. A form of “information laundering” perhaps!!
Forbes: Jeff Bercovici
Here’s one more irony in a saga that already has plenty of them: The Guardian, the paper most responsible for bringing the phone hacking at News of the World to light, is harboring a confessed phone hacker. That would be investigations executive editor David Leigh, who, in 2006, volunteered that he had used some “questionable methods” to get scoops, including listening to a subject’s voicemail and lying about his identity on phone calls. That admission drew shrugs at the time, but the Guardian’s avidity in pursuing justice for other phone-hackers has given it new relevance. …
Does Leigh’s defense — that what he did was permissible because it was in the public interest and he was transparent about it after the fact — hold water? I put that question to Kelly McBride, who teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute. She thinks it doesn’t.
“The problem with that is he’s suggesting that the ends justify the means,” McBride says. “In most ethical reasoning it doesn’t because it’s a subjective call. For him, it’s exposing bribery and corruption. For somebody else it might be exposing that some pop star lip synchs over his songs.” (That might sound like a big leap of relativism, but think of all the stories that fall somewhere in the middle, like political sex scandals.)
…. Setting aside the lofty realm of ethics, there’s still the practical application of the law to consider. Leigh writes that “there is a public interest defence available under the Data Protection Act” that, in theory at least, protects him from prosecution while enabling the phone-hackers from News of the World to be brought to justice.
Even if that’s the case, McBride says journalists who choose to break the law ought to be prepared to accept the full consequences. That, in itself, is a useful guide for determining whether a story is one of overriding public interest or just a sexy scoop. “If you get 30 days in jail for trespassing, it’s got to be worth going to jail for 30 days,” she says.
Tags: David Leigh, Guardian, Hacking, News of the World, News of the World phone hacking affair, Rupert Murdoch
Posted in Ethics, Media | 2 Comments »
August 6, 2011
Some good may be coming out of the zu Guttenberg affaire.
Many PhD thesis awarded – mainly to politicians – by German Universities are now under investigation and the initiative is coming from the media and on-line websites. The apparent speed with which the Universities are moving is – I think – unprecedented. It is also a tribute to the power of the internet for change (not forgetting the misuse of that power as evidenced by the “hate-sites” and the Norway massacre). But the Universities themselves rarely investigate without external pressure and some measure of scandal. And as Gerard Fröhlich points out scientific “cheaters” usually have venerable establishment figures as their protectors.
Gerhard Fröhlich, University of Linz, from an interview in the online Journal of Unsolved Questions:
Self control mechanisms are a myth in science ( and just) to avoid any serious external control. I have studied all fraud affairs precisely and in almost every case anonymous allegations coupled with mass media outrage – in most recent years with an interim period of outrage on the internet – were necessary before the institutions themselves agreed to take action. Science and its sponsors, media and politics, everybody wants heros, “Uebermenschen”. The lion’s share of uncovered scientific cheaters were supermen or superwomen, shooting stars in their field, decorated with honors and predicted to win the Nobel Prize.
In every case, though, an elderly gentleman held his protective hand over them to award them an official seal of scientific credibility.
Prof. Debora Weber-Wulff summarises the status of the various actions /investigations ongoing at German Universities. From Prof. Debora Weber-Wulff’s blog:
The media barrage has not let up, as there are new candidates up every few days. So here is my modest attempt to get you up to date:
- Mathematics professor at the University of Potsdam censured
This blog reported in May 2010 on the plagiarism dispute between Gumm and Denecke. The University of Potsdam has just revoked the rights that the now-retired Denecke had to still supervise dissertations, and he is to remove the publication from his CV, and withdraw the book from the market.
- Veronica Sass
Doctorate rescinded by the University of Konstanz
- Matthias Pröfrock
Doctorate rescinded by the University of Tübingen
- Silvana Koch-Mehrin
Doctorate rescinded by the University of Heidelberg, she has legally challenged the decision
- Georgios Chatzimarkakis
Doctorate rescinded by the University of Bonn
- Bijan Djir-Sarai
Plagiarism level is currently at 60% of the pages, the University of Cologne is investigating
- Uwe Brinkmann
Doctorate rescinded by the University of Hamburg
- Margarita Mathiopoulos
Plagiarism level is currently at 46 % of the pages, the University of Bonn is investigating
- Siegfried Haller
Plagiarism level is currently at 21 % of the pages, the University of Halle-Wittenberg is investigating
- Jürgen Goldschmidt
is the most recent member of the club, clocking in at a plagiarism level of 10% of the pages, the Technical University of Berlin is investigating. The entire nation is having a good laugh at his footnoting technique, which includes “Tagesschau vom 02.12.2004” (on page 42 of the dissertation), “WDR vom 24.03.2007” (on page 51), and best of all “Super Illu 17/2005” (on page 45). SUPERillu is a weekly family magazine often read in Eastern Germany, leading Spiegel Online to headline “Magna cum Super-Illu“. Mr. Goldschmidt tried to delete two sites that he runs on the topic of his dissertation, as they contained the sources for some of the plagiarism. Luckily, the Internet Archive had kept a copy for posterity.
- Bernd Althusmann
The weekly newspaper Die Zeit hired investigators to look into the dissertation of the minister of education of Lower Saxony, currently the speaker for the national committee on education. The calls for him to step down are getting louder and louder.
- Roland Wöller
The dissertation of the minister of education from Saxony was investigated in 2008, when it was determined that he had incorporated large portions of a master’s thesis by another student into his work without proper attribution. The University of Dresden sent him a sharp letter reprimanding him and requesting that he “fix the footnotes” for future editions of the book, but they did not rescind his dissertation at the time. The thesis is being re-investigated by people outside of VroniPlag. Update: The media is trying to make a scandal out of this, as there is nothing else to report on. Flurfunk debunks the scandal.
Tags: Debora Weber-Wulff, Gerhard Fröhlich, German Universities, Plagiarism, politician PhD's, rescinded PhD's, zu Guttenberg
Posted in Ethics, Germany, Science, scientific misconduct | 1 Comment »
August 6, 2011
The Times They Are a-changin’
1. The UK Met Office is an ardent follower of the Global Warming Doctrine but even they have had to now admit that global warming has “paused”.
“Two research papers shed new light on why the upper layers of the world’s oceans have seen a recent pause in warming despite continued increases in greenhouse gases.”
But the religion of global warming need not worry. The pause is – conveniently – only due to “natural variability”. The Met Office does however admit that the science is a long way from being settled and that with more measurements (and perhaps with a little less slavish acceptance of model results) “it would be possible to account for movement of heat within the ocean and do a better job of monitoring future climate change”. One can hope that they may be returning to a science based on observations leading to models leading to further measurements to validate the models , but religions are not cast aside so easily!
The independent studies from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) and the Met Office show how natural climate variability can temporarily mask longer-term trends in upper ocean heat content and sea surface temperature.
The upper 700 metres of the global ocean has seen a rise in temperature since reliable records began in the late 1960s. However, there has been a pause in this warming during the period from 2003 to 2010. The papers published this week offer explanations for this.
Climate model simulations from KNMI show that such pauses in upper ocean warming occur regularly as part of the climate system’s natural variability. … A different set of model simulations from the Met Office supports the idea of heat moving to the deeper ocean explaining the recent pause in upper ocean warming.
The same research also suggests that with deeper ocean observations it would be possible to account for movement of heat within the ocean and do a better job of monitoring future climate change.
GRL website (KNMI paper)(Katsman, C.A. and G.J. van Oldenborgh)
GRL website (Met Office paper) (Palmer, M. D., D. J. McNeall, and N. J. Dunstone)
2. In the meantime a study at Lancaster University charges that “inaccurate climate forecasts costs the world considerable money” and “the overwhelming focus on limiting green house gases alone may well be mis-guided”.
Climate change forecasts used to set policy and billions of pounds in investment are flawed, according to new research from Lancaster University Management School (LUMS).
Complex climate models have been used by scientists to reach a consensus (through the International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC) of global warming of 0.2 °C per decade. But this fundamental finding for governments and the global population continues to be fiercely contested by sceptics of the role of human activity in climate change. The competing interest groups involved have led to a decline in confidence generally in the wake of claims of manipulated data from the University of East Anglia, and incorrect projections – such as Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 .
The new study by Robert Fildes and Nikolaos Kourentzes at the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting applies the latest thinking on forecasting to the work of climate change scientists, in a bid to make 10 and 20 year ahead climate predictions more accurate and trustworthy for policy-makers, and help address growing doubts over the realities of climate change. Such decadal forecasts have the most relevance to current thinking and policy plans and if they are to be credible and useful, they need to demonstrate their accuracy. But the forecasts produced by the current models do not achieve this.
The authors set out a new basis for ‘decadal’ forecasting which is to be a major component of the next IPCC assessment report. Using a combination of models, with statistical benchmarking as checks, current forecasts prove almost certainly less accurate than they could be. Inaccurate climate forecasts costs the world considerable money. The implication is that the climate modelling community needs to open up its research agenda. As yet it has not demonstrated that it can produce better forecasts than simpler statistical methods. A consequence of this, explored by Fildes and Kourentzes, is that the overwhelming focus on limiting green house gases alone may well be mis-guided. The hydrologist Keith Beven’s work on modelling carried out in the Lancaster Environment Centre leads to the same conclusion. In short, eclectic forecasting methods and a wide range of policy responses are what is needed if we are to overcome the problems of emerging warming.
Tags: climate change, climate change models flawed, environment, global warming, Lancaster University, Met Office, ocean heat, pause in global warming
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Science | 1 Comment »
August 5, 2011
In spite of the US extending its debt ceiling over last weekend with great unnecessary drama, the stock markets this week have all given in to the bears. Massive losses of stock prices have been sustained from Tokyo to Bombay to London to Wall Street.
That the bears have managed to bring so many markets down strikes me as being mainly opportunistic. Of course the underlying weakness of the markets lies in the economic profligacy primarily of the US and also in Europe in Greece, Italy and Spain. But the weakness of the Euro allows the German manufacturing sector to flourish. And the “workers of the world” in China and India and Brazil and Germany have not been strong enough to resist and counteract the alarmist views now pervading the stock markets. A double dip recession now seems inevitable.
A curious combination of the irresponsibility of having bloated public sectors (albeit in over-zealous attempts at “do-gooding”) together with the ravenous greed of the financial speculators who feed upon others but create no real wealth themselves.
I do not know how long it will last or how deep this second dip will go, but bricks and mortar and the “making of real things” that people want will eventually prevail. So I shall get rid of my shares in any companies that do not make “real things” and create real wealth.
Tags: bricks and mortar companies, Business, financial greed, Investing, Market crash, public sector profligacy, Stock market
Posted in Behaviour, Business, Economics, Economy | Comments Off on Hold on to bricks and mortar while stock markets crash as the bears go on a rampage
August 5, 2011
Ryanair has its points but caring for its passengers is not one of them. From The Local:
A furious Swedish family has blasted a Ryanair cabin crew after a passenger slipped into cardiac arrest and was just offered a sandwich and soda.
“We want Ryainair to apologise,” disgruntled passenger Billie Appleton told the Aftonbladet newspaper. Appleton’s stepfather, 63-year-old Per-Erik Jonsson, fell ill during the flight back to Sweden from England on Sunday and at one point went into cardiac arrest. According to Appleton, staff onboard were hopelessly ill-equipped to treat him.
“They said he had low blood pressure and gave him a sandwich and a soda. And they made sure he paid for it,” she told the newspaper. The incident occurred about an hour into the flight to Sweden when Jonsson broke into a cold sweat and asked his wife for some water. Suddenly his wife realised that Jonsson had lost consciousness and while she alerted staff, Appleton, a nurse, intervened. “He didn’t respond when I tried to shake him. But after I slapped him in the chest, he began breathing again,” she said, adding that staff only reacted when she shouted for a doctor and that he needed oxygen.
Their diagnosis, according to Appleton, was that it was a blood pressure problem and that he should have something to eat. She claimed that once the situation had stabilised, the only attention they got from the crew was when they asked for payment for the food and drink.
Tags: a sandwich and a soda, Cardiac arrest, Ryanair, treatment of passengers
Posted in Aviation, Behaviour, Ethics | Comments Off on A sandwich and a soda (paid for) is Ryanair’s treatment for a heart attack!
August 5, 2011
A 36 year old Norwegian, Peder Nøstvold Jensen has admitted to being the blogger “Fjordman” to the paper VG. The mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik refers 111 times to Fjordman in his manifesto. He has been questioned and police attorney Paal-Fredrik Hjort Kraby said to the media that they are confident it is the right person.
UPDATE!! Tax records show that Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen was born in 1975 and is tax resident in the county of Møre and Romsdal and in the municipality of Ålesund. His tax records (in Norwegian kronor) are remarkably (and a little incredibly) modest:
Peder Nøstvold Jensen : image VG
“I have been obliged to issue a statement to the police, and I am going public because my name will be known to the public anyway and that there will be a witch hunt after me from the media” says Jensen, who says that police seized his computer on Thursday. “I will never blog under the pseudonym “Fjordman” again. I have lost the desire because it is linked to such a person”, he says.
Jensen has a master’s degree from the University of Oslo in culture and technology and studied Arabic at the University of Bergen and at the American University in Cairo. In 2004 he completed his dissertation on Iranian relations, censorship and blogging. He states in the introduction that he has lived and worked in the Middle East for several years. He has received money from abroad. It is known that in 2007 Jensen received 10 000 Norwegian kronor from Edward S. May who blogs inder the name Baron Bodissey and who runs the Islam-critical blog Gates of Vienna. Jensen began to express himself online in the early 2000’s, under the name “Norwegian kafir” on various blogs. He started blogging under the name Fjordman in 2005. This blog was closed down later that year, and Jensen went under the pseudonym Fjordman writing for – among others – Gates of Vienna. Jensen also contributed to Document.no, Brussels Journal, Global Politician, FrontPageMag, Jihad Watch, Faith Freedom International, Little Green Footballs, Free Republic and Daily Pundit. Several sites last week removed all Fjordman’s contributions. Parts were deleted from Little Green Footballs, but has been preserved by other bloggers.
“I’ve tried to think whether it’s something I have worded wrongly, but I’ve never had someone attack someone because of what I wrote”.
It seems that Peder Jensen’s conscience is pricking him slightly – but only after his identity was discovered by the police. He may not be responsible for Breivik’s actions but he surely bears responsibility for his own words and – to some extent – their consequences.
Tags: Anders Behring Breivik, Fjordman, Norway massacre, Peder Nøstvold Jensen
Posted in Behaviour, Norway, Politics | 3 Comments »
August 4, 2011
The UK News of the World hacking scandal is like a cancer across all the tabloids where the spread is only gradually being revealed. It has now enmeshed the Mirror and covers the time when Piers Morgan was the Editor. CNN – his current employer – is revelling in Murdoch’s scandal but is steering well clear of the allegations against Morgan.
The Independent:
Piers Morgan under fire from Heather Mills hacking claim
The former editor of The Mirror, Piers Morgan, was under intense pressure last night after Sir Paul McCartney’s ex-wife came forward to claim a journalist had bragged to her about hacking sensitive messages left on her phone.
Heather Mills said she received a call from an executive at Mirror Group Newspapers in 2001 “quoting verbatim” voicemails left by the singer after the couple had had a row. Her comments undermine Mr Morgan’s claim that he knew nothing about phone hacking – as the voicemails appear to be the same as those which he later admitting hearing.
In a 2006 newspaper article, Mr Morgan referred to hearing a recorded message which Sir Paul had left for Ms Mills while she was away in India. He wrote: “At one stage I was played a tape of a message Paul had left for Heather on her mobile phone. It was heartbreaking. The couple had clearly had a tiff, Heather had fled to India, and Paul was pleading with her to come back. He sounded lonely, miserable and desperate, and even sang ‘We Can Work It Out’ into the answer phone.”
Last night Ms Mills said: “There was absolutely no honest way that Piers Morgan could have obtained that tape that he has so proudly bragged about unless they had gone into my voice messages.” However she said the journalist who contacted her was not Mr Morgan. …
Footballer Rio Ferdinand and TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson (also) believe they were hacked by the Mirror group.
Piers Morgan of course is protesting his innocence but his protests ring very hollow. Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes) has more on Piers Morgan’s hacking knowledge and his “insider” share dealings.
A website called FirePiersMorgan.com has sprung up and claims
Morgan knew about the hacking while he was at the NOTW and that Morgan is named in a Scotland Yard complaint about a U.S. victim of hacking.
CNN is maintaining an uncomfortable silence on Morgan’s many connections to the scandal. It has not mentioned him once in its 100-plus segments on the crisis in Rupert Murdoch’s meda empire. It’s odd because although Morgan has denied he knows anything about phone hacking, he’s probably the best expert CNN could hope to have for commentary on the story. And he’s on the channel every night.
Tags: CNN, Heather Mills, News of the World phone hacking affair, Piers Morgan, Rupert Murdoch, The Mirror Group
Posted in Ethics, Media | Comments Off on Hacking scandal spreads to Mirror and Piers Morgan’s protests ring hollow
August 4, 2011
An instance of actual measurements over the last 30 years rather than just model results. Overall, sea ice extent is increasing in the Antarctic, contrary to climate model predictions for the 21st century, and this increase is accelerating and has strong regional and seasonal signatures.
A new paper in Climate Dynamics, DOI: 10.1007/s00382-011-1143-9
(H/T The Hockey Schtick)
Sea Ice Trends in the Antarctic and Their Relationship to Surface Air Temperature during 1979 to 2009 by Qi Shu, Fangli Qiao, Zhenya Song and Chunzai Wang
Sea ice trends in the Antarctic and their relationship to surface air temperature during 1979–2009
Abstract:
Surface air temperature (SAT) from four reanalysis/analysis datasets are analyzed and compared with the observed SAT from 11 stations in the Antarctic. It is found that the SAT variation from Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is the best to represent the observed SAT. Then we use the sea ice concentration (SIC) data from satellite measurements, the SAT data from the GISS dataset and station observations to examine the trends and variations of sea ice and SAT in the Antarctic during 1979–2009. The Antarctic sea ice extent (SIE) shows an increased trend during 1979–2009, with a trend rate of 1.36 ± 0.43% per decade. Ensemble empirical mode decomposition analysis shows that the rate of the increased trend has been accelerating in the past decade. Antarctic SIE trend depends on the season, with the maximum increase occurring in autumn. If the relationship between SIC and GISS SAT trends is examined regionally, Antarctic SIC trends agree well with the local SAT trends in the most Antarctic regions. That is, Antarctic SIC and SAT show an inverse relationship: a cooling (warming) SAT trend is associated with an upward (downward) SIC trend. It is also concluded that the relationship between sea ice and SAT trends in the Antarctic should be examined regionally rather than integrally.
As put by Skeptical Science – “The most common misconception regarding Antarctic sea ice is that sea ice is increasing because it’s cooling around Antarctica. The reality is the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica has shown strong warming over the same period that sea ice has been increasing. Globally from 1955 to 1995, oceans have been warming at 0.1°C per decade. In contrast, the Southern Ocean (specifically the region where Antarctic sea ice forms) has been warming at 0.17°C per decade. Not only is the Southern Ocean warming, it’s warming faster than the global trend. This warming trend is apparent in satellite measurements of temperature trends over Antarctica”.
Antarctic Climate and Sea Ice Variability – a Brief Review by Marilyn Raphael, UCLA Geography, WRCP Workshop on Seasonal to MultiDecadal Predictability of Polar Climate, October 2010
ABSTRACT
Antarctica’s remoteness, the difficulty of conducting research there and the paucity of observations, are some reasons why the Antarctic climate and sea ice variability are not as well understood as in the Arctic. However, research has shown that the climate of Antarctica including its sea ice is dictated by numerous influences with origins ranging from the Tropics to local atmosphere/surface interactions. Over the period of record indications are that much of Antarctica is warming, led by the Antarctic Peninsula. Regional changes in atmospheric circulation, sea surface temperatures and sea ice may explain this warming. Overall, sea ice extent is increasing, contrary to climate model predictions for the 21st century, and this increase has strong regional and seasonal signatures. Sea ice variability is strongly influenced by ENSO, Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) and by zonal wave three (ZW3) among other large scale atmospheric circulation mechanisms. The Antarctic climate and sea ice variability are reviewed with respect to the atmospheric and oceanic mechanisms that influence them.
Tags: Antarctica, climate models, Climate of Antarctica, global warming, increasing sea ice, Measurement of sea ice, Sea ice, Southern Ocean
Posted in Antarctic, Climate, Science | Comments Off on Antarctic sea ice is increasing and rate of increase is accelerating
August 3, 2011
I have long thought that scientific publications (and scientific endeavour in general) cannot be exempt from liability for scientific misconduct – at least a civil liability even if any criminal liability would depend upon the extent of any fraud involved in a publication or in the performance of scientific activity. The liability would obviously start with the scientists/authors but the entire publishing chain including reviewers, editors and publishers and those who commission the science or the ghost writing must carry their share of responsibility and cannot be exempt.
In a scientific context I think ghostwriting – of itself – is tantamount to fraud.
Why cannot a concept of tort or “product liability”apply to scientists?
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.
Ghostwriting and guest authoring in industry-controlled research raise “serious ethical and legal concerns, bearing on integrity of medical research and scientific evidence used in legal disputes,” say two University of Toronto law professors:
Legal Remedies for Medical Ghostwriting: Imposing Fraud Liability on Guest Authors of Ghostwritten Articles
by Simon Stern, Trudo Lemmens PLoS Med 8(8): e1001070. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001070
Summary Points
- Ghostwriting of medical journal articles raises serious ethical and legal concerns, bearing on the integrity of medical research and scientific evidence used in legal disputes.
- Medical journals, academic institutions, and professional disciplinary bodies have thus far failed to enforce effective sanctions.
- The practice of ghostwriting could be deterred more effectively through the imposition of legal liability on the “guest authors” who lend their names to ghostwritten articles.
- We argue that a guest author’s claim for credit of an article written by someone else constitutes legal fraud, and may give rise to claims that could be pursued in a class action based on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).
- The same fraud could support claims of “fraud on the court” against a pharmaceutical company that has used ghostwritten articles in litigation. This claim also appropriately reflects the negative impact of ghostwriting on the legal system.
CTV News says:
Academics who lend their names to medical and scientific articles that they didn’t actually write are doing little more than prostituting themselves, according to two law professors at the University of Toronto. ….
Academic ghostwriting is a little-known practice that finally came to the public’s attention after some popular drugs like the now-discontinued painkiller Vioxx started showing serious problems.
Lawsuits revealed that studies that suggested the drugs were safe and effective were often not written by the scientists listed as the authors. Instead, they were ghostwritten by writers working for the drug companies that make the medications. The scientists listed as authors were offered payment in return for attaching their names.
The problem of course is that doctors rely on information in the medical literature to make treatment decisions. That’s when “ghostwritten” articles can have devastating effects: by swaying doctors to give patients improper and even harmful treatment. ….
Tags: Ghostwriter, liability for scientific misconduct, Medical ghostwriter, PLoS Medicine, Scientific Fraud, Scientific literature, Scientific misconduct
Posted in Ethics, Fraud, Medicine, Science, Scientific Fraud, scientific misconduct | 3 Comments »
August 2, 2011
The case of fraud by Bengü Sezen a chemist at Columbia University goes back many years and was a scandal in 2007 and briefly reported back in December 2010 by Retraction Watch.
Bengu Sezen
Further details have now emerged from the Office of Research Integrity and are put together by Chemical and Engineering News which “show a massive and sustained effort by Sezen over the course of more than a decade to dope experiments, manipulate and falsify NMR and elemental analysis research data, and create fictitious people and organizations to vouch for the reproducibility of her results.”
A Master of Fraud (MFr) and it strikes me that she could probably have achieved great things if she had spent half as much creativity in real research as she did in duping her peers. Fraud by correction fluid in the age of photo-shopping seems particularly ingenious!!
Dalibor Sames: image njacs.org
No doubt there are extenuating circumstances but for this deception to have continued for a decade does not do any credit to her supervisor Prof. Dalibor Sames. Whether Sames has been subjected to any sanctions by the University is not clear. His role has been the subject of many posts and one “inside story” is available here.
The total number of papers retracted by Sames seems to be eight with Sezen involved in 6 of them.
C & EN carries the story:
Bizarre new details of the Bengü Sezen/Columbia University chemistry research fraud case are revealed in two lengthy reports obtained by C&EN this week from the Department of Health & Human Services. The documents—an investigative report from Columbia and HHS’s subsequent oversight findings—show a massive and sustained effort by Sezen over the course of more than a decade to dope experiments, manipulate and falsify NMR and elemental analysis research data, and create fictitious people and organizations to vouch for the reproducibility of her results. Sezen was found guilty of 21 counts of research misconduct by the federal Office of Research Integrity (ORI), which is housed at HHS, in late 2010 (C&EN, Dec. 6, 2010, page 10). A notice in the Nov. 29, 2010, Federal Register states that Sezen falsified, fabricated, and plagiarized research data in three papers and in her doctoral thesis. Some six papers that Sezen had coauthored with Columbia chemistry professor Dalibor Sames have been withdrawn by Sames because Sezen’s results could not be replicated. The ORI findings back Columbia’s own investigation.
The Sezen case began in 2000 when the young graduate student arrived in the Columbia chemistry department. “By 2002, concerns about the reproducibility of Respondent’s [Sezen’s] research were raised both by members of the [redacted] and by scientists outside” Columbia, according to the documents, obtained by C&EN through a Freedom of Information Act request. The redacted portions of the documents are meant to protect the identities of people who spoke to the misconduct investigators.
By the time Sezen received a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 2005, under the supervision of Sames, her fraudulent activity had reached a crescendo, according to the reports. Specifically, the reports detail how Sezen logged into NMR spectrometry equipment under the name of at least one former Sames group member, then merged NMR data and used correction fluid to create fake spectra showing her desired reaction products.
The documents paint a picture of Sezen as a master of deception, a woman very much at ease with manipulating colleagues and supervisors alike to hide her fraudulent activity; a practiced liar who would defend the integrity of her research results in the face of all evidence to the contrary. Columbia has moved to revoke her Ph.D. ……
…… After leaving Columbia, Sezen went on to receive another Ph.D. in molecular biology at Germany’s Heidelberg University. At some point during the Columbia investigation, however, Sezen vanished, though some reports place her at Turkey’s Yeditepe University. Her legacy of betrayal, observers say, remains one of the worst cases of scientific fraud ever to happen in the chemistry community.
See also
Julia Wang’s – The Sames and Sezen case, 2007
Chemical Villain of 2006: Dalibor Sames
The Sezen Files – Part II: Unraveling the Fabrication
Tags: Bengü Sezen, Columbia University, Dalibor Sames, Master of Fraud, Scientific Fraud, United States Office of Research Integrity
Posted in Corruption, Ethics, Science, Scientific Fraud, scientific misconduct | 4 Comments »
