andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1236 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: A correspondent writes: A brief update on the Stapel scandal . It seems that the Dutch universities involved were really determined to get to the bottom of this. A first part of the outcomes of the investigations are online (in English). Several “commissions” or “committees” (I guess no proper English but this is the way scandals are sorted out in Dutch politics too) were established to investigate the matter. The first commission to report is the commissie Levelt: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/ The most interesting part is this I guess: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/levelt-committee/fraud-determined/ This concerns only the articles investigated by that commission. The others (Noort and Drenth) are expected to report in the coming months. I [the correspondent] feel sorry for Stapel, but the amount of fraud is sizeable. I like the way the universities handle this—especially that they are fairly transparent. Interesting. This all seems like overkill given how obvio
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1 A correspondent writes: A brief update on the Stapel scandal . [sent-1, score-0.384]
2 It seems that the Dutch universities involved were really determined to get to the bottom of this. [sent-2, score-0.349]
3 A first part of the outcomes of the investigations are online (in English). [sent-3, score-0.118]
4 Several “commissions” or “committees” (I guess no proper English but this is the way scandals are sorted out in Dutch politics too) were established to investigate the matter. [sent-4, score-0.641]
5 The first commission to report is the commissie Levelt: https://www. [sent-5, score-0.214]
6 nl/levelt-committee/fraud-determined/ This concerns only the articles investigated by that commission. [sent-9, score-0.125]
7 The others (Noort and Drenth) are expected to report in the coming months. [sent-10, score-0.183]
8 I [the correspondent] feel sorry for Stapel, but the amount of fraud is sizeable. [sent-11, score-0.171]
9 I like the way the universities handle this—especially that they are fairly transparent. [sent-12, score-0.255]
10 This all seems like overkill given how obvious the fraud is, but given what happened with comparable cases in the U. [sent-14, score-0.458]
11 , I suppose this “Powell doctrine” approach (overwhelming force) is probably the best way to go. [sent-16, score-0.092]
12 If someone wants to argue that the plagiarism of an Ed Wegman or a Frank Fischer or a Laurence Tribe is acceptable behavior or that it is a minor infraction compared to their great contributions to the world, go for it. [sent-17, score-0.184]
13 Some commenters wonder why I keep bringing up these cases. [sent-21, score-0.196]
14 One reason is that they never seem to be resolved, so it seems good to keep the reminder that these actions have occurred and that the perpetrators remain in place. [sent-22, score-0.638]
15 Some of the others out there seem to be taking the Chris Rock approach. [sent-24, score-0.082]
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same-blog 1 0.99999988 1236 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-29-Resolution of Diederik Stapel case
Introduction: A correspondent writes: A brief update on the Stapel scandal . It seems that the Dutch universities involved were really determined to get to the bottom of this. A first part of the outcomes of the investigations are online (in English). Several “commissions” or “committees” (I guess no proper English but this is the way scandals are sorted out in Dutch politics too) were established to investigate the matter. The first commission to report is the commissie Levelt: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/ The most interesting part is this I guess: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/levelt-committee/fraud-determined/ This concerns only the articles investigated by that commission. The others (Noort and Drenth) are expected to report in the coming months. I [the correspondent] feel sorry for Stapel, but the amount of fraud is sizeable. I like the way the universities handle this—especially that they are fairly transparent. Interesting. This all seems like overkill given how obvio
2 0.32642984 989 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-03-This post does not mention Wegman
Introduction: A correspondent writes: Since you have commented on scientific fraud a lot. I wanted to give you an update on the Diederik Stapel case. I’d rather not see my name on the blog if you would elaborate on this any further. It is long but worth the read I guess. I’ll first give you the horrible details which will fill you with a mixture of horror and stupefied amazement at Stapel’s behavior. Then I’ll share Stapel’s abject apology, which might make you feel sorry for the guy. First the amazing story of how he perpetrated the fraud: There has been an interim report delivered to the rector of Tilburg University. Tilburg University is cooperating with the university of Amsterdam and of Groningen in this case. The results are pretty severe, I provide here a quick and literal translation of some comments by the chairman of the investigation committee. This report is publicly available on the university webpage (along with some other things of interest) but in Dutch: What
Introduction: Someone points me to this report from Tilburg University on disgraced psychology researcher Diederik Stapel. The reports includes bits like this: When the fraud was first discovered, limiting the harm it caused for the victims was a matter of urgency. This was particularly the case for Mr Stapel’s former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers . . . However, the Committees were of the opinion that the main bulk of the work had not yet even started. . . . Journal publications can often leave traces that reach far into and even beyond scientific disciplines. The self-cleansing character of science calls for fraudulent publications to be withdrawn and no longer to proliferate within the literature. In addition, based on their initial impressions, the Committees believed that there were other serious issues within Mr Stapel’s publications . . . This brought into the spotlight a research culture in which this sloppy science, alongside out-and-out fraud, was able to remain undetected
Introduction: As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am fascinated by academic and scientific cheating and the excuses people give for it. Bruno Frey and colleagues published a single article (with only minor variants) in five different major journals, and these articles did not cite each other. And there have been several other cases of his self-plagiarism (see this review from Olaf Storbeck). I do not mind the general practice of repeating oneself for different audiences—in the social sciences, we call this Arrow’s Theorem —but in this case Frey seems to have gone a bit too far. Blogger Economic Logic has looked into this and concluded that this sort of common practice is standard in “the context of the German(-speaking) academic environment,” and what sets Frey apart is not his self-plagiarism or even his brazenness but rather his practice of doing it in high-visibility journals. Economic Logic writes that “[Frey's] contribution is pedagogical, he found a good and interesting
Introduction: Dan Kahan writes on what seems to be the topic of the week : In reflecting on Lehrer , I [Kahan] have to wonder why the sanction is so much more severe — basically career “death penalty” subject to parole [I think he means "life imprisonment" --- ed.], I suppose, if he manages decades of “good behavior” — for this science journalist when scholars who stick plagiarized material in their “popular science” writing don’t even get slap on wrist — more like shrug of the shoulders. I do think the behavior is comparable; if anything, it’s probably “less wrong” to make up innocuous filler quotes (the Dylan one is, for sure), then to stick paragraphs of someone else’s writing into a book. But the cause is the same: laziness. (The plagarism I’m talking about is not the sort done by Wegman; its sort done by scholars who use factory production techniques to write popular press books — teams of research assistants who write memos, which the “author” then knits together & passes off as learne
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same-blog 1 0.93764311 1236 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-29-Resolution of Diederik Stapel case
Introduction: A correspondent writes: A brief update on the Stapel scandal . It seems that the Dutch universities involved were really determined to get to the bottom of this. A first part of the outcomes of the investigations are online (in English). Several “commissions” or “committees” (I guess no proper English but this is the way scandals are sorted out in Dutch politics too) were established to investigate the matter. The first commission to report is the commissie Levelt: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/ The most interesting part is this I guess: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/levelt-committee/fraud-determined/ This concerns only the articles investigated by that commission. The others (Noort and Drenth) are expected to report in the coming months. I [the correspondent] feel sorry for Stapel, but the amount of fraud is sizeable. I like the way the universities handle this—especially that they are fairly transparent. Interesting. This all seems like overkill given how obvio
2 0.90399086 766 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-14-Last Wegman post (for now)
Introduction: John Mashey points me to a news article by Eli Kintisch with the following wonderful quote: Will Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who questions the consensus view on climate, thinks Mashey is a destructive force who uses “totalitarian tactics”–publishing damaging documents online, without peer review–to carry out personal vendettas. I’ve never thought of uploading files as “totalitarian” but maybe they do things differently at Princeton. I actually think of totalitarians as acting secretly–denunciations without evidence, midnight arrests, trials in undisclosed locations, and so forth. Mashey’s practice of putting everything out in the open seems to me the opposite of totalitarian. The article also reports that Edward Wegman’s lawyer said that Wegman “has never engaged in plagiarism.” If I were the lawyer, I’d be pretty mad at Wegman at this point. I can just imagine the conversation: Lawyer: You never told me about that 2005 paper where you stole from Bria
3 0.88470829 1568 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-07-That last satisfaction at the end of the career
Introduction: I just finished reading an amusing but somewhat disturbing article by Mark Singer, a reporter for the New Yorker who follows in that magazine’s tradition of writing about amiable frauds. (For those who are keeping score at home, Singer employs a McKelway-style relaxed tolerance rather than Liebling-style pyrotechnics.) Singer’s topic was a midwestern dentist named Kip Litton who fradulently invented a side career for himself as a sub-3-hour marathoner. What was amazing was not so much that Litton lied about his accomplishments but, rather, the huge efforts that he undertook to support these lies. He went to faraway cities to not run marathons. He fabricated multiple personas on running message boards. He even invented an entire marathon and made up a list of participants. This got me thinking about Ed Wegman (sorry!), the statistician who got tangled in a series of plagiarism scandals . As with Litton, once Wegman was caught once, energetic people looked at the records and
4 0.85486811 728 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-24-A (not quite) grand unified theory of plagiarism, as applied to the Wegman case
Introduction: A common reason for plagiarism is laziness: you want credit for doing something but you don’t really feel like doing it–maybe you’d rather go fishing, or bowling, or blogging, or whatever, so you just steal it, or you hire someone to steal it for you. Interestingly enough, we see that in many defenses of plagiarism allegations. A common response is: I was sloppy in dealing with my notes, or I let my research assistant (who, incidentally, wasn’t credited in the final version) copy things for me and the research assistant got sloppy. The common theme: The person wanted the credit without doing the work. As I wrote last year, I like to think that directness and openness is a virtue in scientific writing. For example, clearly citing the works we draw from, even when such citing of secondary sources might make us appear less erudite. But I can see how some scholars might feel a pressure to cover their traces. Wegman Which brings us to Ed Wegman, whose defense of plagiari
5 0.84851086 400 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-08-Poli sci plagiarism update, and a note about the benefits of not caring
Introduction: A recent story about academic plagiarism spurred me to some more general thoughts about the intellectual benefits of not giving a damn. I’ll briefly summarize the plagiarism story and then get to my larger point. Copying big blocks of text from others’ writings without attribution Last month I linked to the story of Frank Fischer, an elderly professor of political science who was caught copying big blocks of text (with minor modifications) from others’ writings without attribution. Apparently there’s some dispute about whether this constitutes plagiarism. On one hand, Harvard’s policy is that “in academic writing, it is considered plagiarism to draw any idea or any language from someone else without adequately crediting that source in your paper.” On the other hand, several of Fischer’s colleagues defend him by saying, “Mr. Fischer sometimes used the words of other authors. . . ” They also write: The essence of plagiarism is passing off someone else’s work as
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Introduction: A correspondent writes: A brief update on the Stapel scandal . It seems that the Dutch universities involved were really determined to get to the bottom of this. A first part of the outcomes of the investigations are online (in English). Several “commissions” or “committees” (I guess no proper English but this is the way scandals are sorted out in Dutch politics too) were established to investigate the matter. The first commission to report is the commissie Levelt: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/ The most interesting part is this I guess: https://www.commissielevelt.nl/levelt-committee/fraud-determined/ This concerns only the articles investigated by that commission. The others (Noort and Drenth) are expected to report in the coming months. I [the correspondent] feel sorry for Stapel, but the amount of fraud is sizeable. I like the way the universities handle this—especially that they are fairly transparent. Interesting. This all seems like overkill given how obvio
2 0.93234205 130 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-07-A False Consensus about Public Opinion on Torture
Introduction: John Sides reports on this finding by Paul Gronke, Darius Rejali, Dustin Drenguis, James Hicks, Peter Miller, and Bryan Nakayama, from a survey in 2008:: Gronke et al. write (as excerpted by Sides): Many journalists and politicians believe that during the Bush administration, a majority of Americans supported torture if they were assured that it would prevent a terrorist attack….But this view was a misperception…we show here that a majority of Americans were opposed to torture throughout the Bush presidency…even when respondents were asked about an imminent terrorist attack, even when enhanced interrogation techniques were not called torture, and even when Americans were assured that torture would work to get crucial information. Opposition to torture remained stable and consistent during the entire Bush presidency. Gronke et al. attribute confusion of beliefs to the so-called false consensus effect studied by cognitive psychologists, in which people tend to assume th
3 0.92973721 1051 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-10-Towards a Theory of Trust in Networks of Humans and Computers
Introduction: Hey, this looks cool: Towards a Theory of Trust in Networks of Humans and Computers Virgil Gligor Carnegie Mellon University We argue that a general theory of trust in networks of humans and computers must be build on both a theory of behavioral trust and a theory of computational trust. This argument is motivated by increased participation of people in social networking, crowdsourcing, human computation, and socio-economic protocols, e.g., protocols modeled by trust and gift-exchange games, norms-establishing contracts, and scams/deception. User participation in these protocols relies primarily on trust, since on-line verification of protocol compliance is often impractical; e.g., verification can lead to undecidable problems, co-NP complete test procedures, and user inconvenience. Trust is captured by participant preferences (i.e., risk and betrayal aversion) and beliefs in the trustworthiness of other protocol participants. Both preferences and beliefs can be enhanced
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Introduction: Joseph Delaney writes : Is it fair to quote the definition of economics from the blurb for a book? If so, consider this definition in the blurb for Emily Oster’s new book: When Oster was expecting her first child, she felt powerless to make the right decisions for her pregnancy. How doctors think and what patients need are two very different things. So Oster drew on her own experience and went in search of the real facts about pregnancy using an economist’s tools. Economics is not just a study of finance. It’s the science of determining value and making informed decisions. To make a good decision, you need to understand the information available to you and to know what it means to you as an individual. So, when applied to a medical topic (like pregnancy) how does this differ from evidence based medicine? Should I be calling myself an economist? None of this mean that Emily shouldn’t write this book. My own read on the alcohol and pregnancy angle is that the current advic
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Introduction: Frank Hansen writes: I [Hansen] signed up for my first marathon race. Everyone asks me my predicted time. The predictors online seem geared to or are based off of elite runners. And anyway they seem a bit limited. So I decided to do some analysis of my own. I was going to put together a web page where people could get their race time predictions, maybe sell some ads for sports gps watches, but it might also be publishable. I have 2 requests which obviously I don’t want you to spend more than a few seconds on. 1. I was wondering if you knew of any sports performance researchers working on performance of not just elite athletes, but the full range of runners. 2. Can you suggest a way to do multilevel modeling of this. There are several natural subsets for the data but it’s not obvious what makes sense. I describe the data below. 3. Phil (the runner/co-blogger who posted about weight loss) might be interested. I collected race results for the Chicago marathon and 3
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