scientific fraud
esiegel | May 21, 2013"Science literacy is a vaccine against the charlatans of the world that would exploit your ignorance." -Neil deGrasse Tyson
Well, I guess it's that season again. The charlatan who claims to have invented a cold fusion device -- the same device whose flaws were exposed here two years ago -- has just held an "independent test" of his device, and there's now a physics paper out claiming that this device works, and must be powered by some type of nuclear reaction!
Image credit: G. Levi et al.; get the whole paper here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1305.3913v2.pdf.
Well.
Look, let's get a few things…
gregladen | July 29, 2011According to a newly published paper in the journal "Remote Sensing" the Earth's atmosphere releases into space more heat than climate scientists had previously estimated in a way that effectively removes concern about fossil CO2 being released into the atmosphere.
The reason scientists have this wrong, according to the article's authors, Roy Spencer and William Braswell, is that climate scientists use a fundamentally flawed model of atmospheric heat dynamics and radiation of heat from the surface of the climate system into space. The senior author, Spencer, has previously argued that…
grrlscientist | June 9, 2009tags: book review, Plastic Fantastic, How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World, physics, ethics, fraud, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Jan Hendrik Schön, Eugenie Samuel Reich
Physicist Jan Hendrik Schön was too good to be true. After graduating from the University of Konstanz in 1997, he was hired by Bell Labs in New Jersey, where he quickly rose to scientific fame. By 2000, he had published eight papers in the world's most prestigious journals, Nature and Science. One year later at the height of his career, he was publishing one scientific paper every eight days --…
oracknows | March 18, 2009Two days ago, I deconstructed Andrew Wakefield's clumsy attack on Brian Deer, the investigative journalist whose investigations uncovered Wakefield's massive conflicts of interest and, most recently, his scientific fraud. Now, right here in the very comments of this blog, Brian Deer has responded:
Obviously, because Our Andy's statement purports to be a complaint to the UK Press Complaints Commission, I can't yet comment on the substance (although I have mentioned just a couple of generic Wakefield claims right up at the top, here: http://briandeer.com/solved/wakefield-veracity.htm).
But, in…
oracknows | March 12, 2009Science as it is practiced today relies on a fair measure of trust. Part of the reason is that the culture of science values openness, hypothesis testing, and vigorous debate. The general assumption is that most scientists are honest and, although we all generally try to present our data in the most favorable light possible, we do not blatantly lie about it or make it up. Of course, we are also all human, and none of us is immune to the temptation to leave out that inconvenient bit of data that doesn't fit with our hypothesis or to cherry pick the absolutely best-looking blot for use in our…
oracknows | February 23, 2009One thing that's become apparent to me so far in 2009 is that, while 2008 was the year of the antivaccinationist, 2009 is already shaping up to be a very bad year for antivaccinationists. A very bad year indeed, and this is a very, very good thing--if it can be sustained.
But first, let's take a look at last year. In 2008, Jenny McCarthy was the new and fresh celebrity face of the movement that believes that autism and all manner of other neurodevelopmental disorders are caused by vaccines and that the government and big pharma are suppressing The Truth. She had emerged in the fall of 2007…
oracknows | February 12, 2009Last night, I lambasted Countdown host Keith Olbermann for having been played by the antivaccine movement and having unjustly slimed British journalist Brian Deer. Clearly, Olbermann was so blinded by his hatred of Rupert Murdoch that all chief apologist for the antivaccine movement, former freelance journalist David Kirby, had to do was mention that The Times of London, the newspaper that published Brian Deer's excellent investigative report nailing anti-MMR guru Andrew Wakefield to the wall for falsifying data, is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and it was like waving the proverbial red cape in…
oracknows | February 10, 2009I'm not as big a fan of Keith Olbermann as I used to be. Indeed, sometimes he strikes me as the liberal version of Rush Limbaugh, not to mention a blowhard. However, occasionally, he still has it, and when he's on, no one skewers the dishonest better than he does. For instance, after a media flack and the usual inclusion of Bill O'Reilly as runners up, meet Andrew Wakefield, the Worst Person in the World for February 10, 2009:
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That about sums it up right now.
I wonder how long before the antivaccinationist loons…
oracknows | February 7, 2009Pity Andrew Wakefield.
Actually, on second thought, Wakefield deserves no pity. After all, he is the man who almost single-handedly launched the scare over the MMR vaccine in Britain when he published his infamous Lancet paper in 1998 in which he claimed to have linked the MMR vaccine to regressive autism and inflammation of the colon, a study that was followed up four years later with a paper that claimed to have found the strain of attenuated measles virus in the MMR in the colons of autistic children by polymerase chain reaction (PCR). It would be one thing if these studies were sound…