Also this week: a game of (scientific) telephone, yet another retraction for Steven Newmaster, and more. We even have a link from Meghan this week!
From Jeremy:
The latest on the invasive Colombian hippo population descended from escapees from Pablo Escobar’s private zoo. I found this to be kind of a depressing story in the predictability with which it’s played out over the years. Though the writer does try to end it on a hopeful note.
A major result in honey bee navigation behavior–that bees have an internal “odometer” to measure distances–has been called into question for data manipulation, and for reusing and relabeling images. That link goes to a Science news article. One of the papers concerned was recently slapped with an editorial Expression of Concern. The PI, prominent bioengineer Mandyam Veerambudi “Srini” Srinivasan, stands behind the result and denies misconduct. Here are PubPeer threads on the papers concerned if you want to have a look for yourself. I had a quick look and…yikes. Some of the anomalies look very difficult to explain as anything other than deliberate fabrication. Which makes me wonder if some of the people quoted in the linked article defending Srinivasan are going to come to regret those quotes. Looking back on the #pruittdata scandal, one thing that’s both striking, and to the credit of everyone involved, is that no one said anything publicly that turned out to be embarrassing to them later. No one was publicly quoted saying that they believed Pruitt’s results were real, or that Pruitt’s results couldn’t possibly be fake because other labs have replicated them, or that Pruitt’s a great guy who would never fabricate data, or etc.
Former UCLA EEB prof Peter Kareiva has posted his account of his experiences there, as they relate to Priyanga Amarasekare’s case. tl;dr: there’s a long history of powerful people at UCLA treating Priyanga badly, and punishing her for criticizing the department. I was previously aware of the general thrust of the history here, although not the details.
Another retraction for botanist Steven Newmaster, recently found to be a serial fraudster by his employer Guelph University. I was interested–and surprised–that three of Newmaster’s co-authors on this paper (none of whom are based at Guelph) all disagreed with the retraction. Given the overwhelming evidence that the data underpinning this paper were faked, I’m having trouble imagining good reasons for disagreeing with this retraction (as opposed to understandable-but-bad reasons, or not-understandable-and-bad reasons).
Last week I linked to arguments that, when it comes to big complicated questions like the effects of social media and smartphones on mental health, you shouldn’t care what the studies say. But if you do care what the studies say, here’s Peter Gray’s critique of the evidence underpinning Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation.
Is academia systematically hostile to weird nerds? Click through to find out exactly what the author means by “weird nerd”. My impression is that the answer varies a lot by field, and that mathematics in particular is very friendly to weird nerds.
From Meghan:
A new paper explores where the claim that 8% of the world is covered in lichens came from and how it spread so far. Part of what is interesting is that one of the authors played a key role in the number spreading. They refer to it as a game of scientific telephone, and I’m sure there are other cases of this occurring! I’m curious if others know of similar examples. The closest I can come up with right away is the idea that there are 10 times as many bacterial cells as human cells in the human body, which was later revised to a 1:1 relationship.
Coming up next:
Next week, in honor of the Major League All-Star Game, the post Jeremy was born to write: academia vs. baseball! 🙂