wegman
stoat | March 26, 2012Nice article in physicstoday.
Other stuff
* Wiley coverup: The great Wegman and Said "redo" to hide plagiarism and errors - the Wegman stuff keeps rumbling on. Wegman reminds me of the TSA guy here - what he says isn't believeable, but he has powerful organisations propping him up, because having him admit error would be embarrassing.
* Hansen Wins - Wabbett sez the US is going to require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. That would be a good result, but the wrong way to do it. The right way is a carbon tax, not an…
stoat | February 24, 2012Retraction Watch have an article up about the Wegman plagiarism stuff (also covered by Eli).
GMU aren't making the full report public, though, doubtless to protect the guilty (which I think largely means the shoddiness of the report). There is an oddity in what they have released:
As sanction, Professor Wegman has been asked to apologize to the journal involved, while retracting the article; and I am placing an official letter of reprimand in his file
How can Wegman retract the article? It was retracted by the editors some time ago, on the grounds of plagiarism.
Don't forget, though, that…
stoat | June 2, 2011[May 26th: Pulled to the top to update with the Nature editorial which, as well as noting the paper being pulled, also notes the mysteriously dilatory George Mason University investigation.
June 3rd: And pulled again, since Science have a piece on the actual retraction, and again note the GMU lack-of-progress.]
Well, this is exciting: Climate study gets pulled after charges of plagiarism says USA today:
Evidence of plagiarism and complaints about the peer-review process have led a statistics journal to retract a federally funded study that condemned scientific support for global warming...…
illconsidered | November 23, 2010The wheels continue to fall off the Wegman Report.
"It kind of undermines the credibility of your work criticizing others' integrity when you don't conform to the basic rules of scholarship," Virginia Tech plagiarism expert Skip Garner says.
Further down:
Allegations under review
"The matter is under investigation," says GMU spokesman Dan Walsch by e-mail. In a phone interview, Wegman said he could not comment at the university's request. In an earlier e-mail Wegman sent to Joseph Kunc of the University of Southern California, however, he called the plagiarism charges "wild conclusions that…
stoat | November 21, 2010Well yes, as is slowly becoming obvious. Deltoid reports USA today (or you can also look at the full Mashey). In the curious world of academe (which I presume Wegman aspires to) plagiarism is a no-no far more serious that just getting the wrong answer; and has the virtue of being fairly easy to spot.
But whilst plagiarism is bad (possibly even fatal) for your academic reputation, it doesn't directly say anything about science, or the validity of conclusions. It is evidence that the author has been sloppy and - in this case - bolsters the argument that the author didn't really understand what…
illconsidered | October 19, 2010Readers here are probably already familiar with the Wegman report "strange scholarship" scandal but if not read up on it a bit at Eli Rabbet's place. The mess goes much deeper, but the relevant aspect is an ongoing plagarism investigation into Wegman by George Mason University. The GMU investigation was pushed forward by a formal complaint by Raymond Bradely because passages from his text, Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, were copied and placed verbatim, uncited and without quotation marks into Wegman's report.
Now, to the subject of this post. I don't recall…