April 22, 2013

Briefly

  • Roger Peng comparing the recent Excel Economics incident to an earlier case of scientific fraud in cancer bioinfomatics

One has to wonder if the academic system is working in this regard. In both cases, it took a minor, but personal failing, to bring down the entire edifice. But the protestations of reputable academics, challenging the research on the merits, were ignored. I’d say in both cases the original research conveniently said what people wanted to hear (debt slows growth, personalized gene signatures can predict response to chemotherapy), and so no amount of research would convince people to question the original findings.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Richard Penny

    On the job creation and destruction point I see it as all part of the “I’m doing useful stuff” mantra. I had a clever boss once – there are such things – who also used to ask about what I wasn’t doing. As she pointed out I better be able to prove what I was doing was more important than what I was not doing.

    Also even a couple of hours work counts you as employed by the ILO defintions which StatsNZ uses.

    11 years ago