Four Sci-Techish Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. Stanford's President, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, will soon be resigning (and retracting or correcting five widely-cited papers) after an investigation sponsored by the university found "manipulation of research data."

One of the first to catch some of the problems was Elisabeth Bik, who is known for her prowess at catching image manipulation in scientific papers, and was the subject of a fascinating profile in the New York Times last year.

Within, she recounts how she got started:

Although this was eight years ago, I distinctly recall how angry it made me. This was cheating, pure and simple. By editing an image to produce a desired result, a scientist can manufacture proof for a favored hypothesis, or create a signal out of noise. Scientists must rely on and build on one another's work. Cheating is a transgression against everything that science should be. If scientific papers contain errors or -- much worse -- fraudulent data and fabricated imagery, other researchers are likely to waste time and grant money chasing theories based on made-up results.

But were those duplicated images just an isolated case? With little clue about how big this would get, I began searching for suspicious figures in biomedical journals.

Bik has since reviewed over 100,000 papers, discovering doctored or duplicated images in 4,800 (and other problems in another 1,700). And she has reported her findings despite being on the receiving end of vitriol and legal threats.

Among her recommendations to combat the problem -- which she warns AI is poised to make harder to catch -- is the following:

Journals should pay the data detectives who find fatal errors or misconduct in published papers, similar to how tech companies pay bounties to computer security experts who find bugs in software.

I think this would go a long way towards realizing the faster responses to impropriety we need to protect scientific integrity and progress.

2. Safari's poorly-designed date-picker caused 1/3 of a medical startup's support calls. A developer at Geneticure, whose client base is mostly elderly, elaborates, aided by a screen capture of the date picker:

This is what pops up when you tap on a date field. Not bad... unless you're trying to pick your birth date, which happens to be in 1945.

There is no option to manually enter the correct date. The only obvious path forward is to tap the left arrow button 924 times to get back to 1945. The not-obvious path forward -- which our elderly users cannot find -- is to tap "December 2022", which pops open this rolodex-type thing...

I sympathize with a commenter at Hacker News, who says, "Any and every date picker that doesn't allow text input of the date is ridiculous."

That said, I love the second iteration of the startup's solution: a dropdown for the name of the month (which eliminates any confusion over month-day-year versus day-month-year) and text entry for day and year.

"This corresponds to what an observer with a telescope would see from Mars." More details in caption at via. (Image by NASA, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)

This solution appropriately employs the best of both the text-based and graphical interface worlds.

3. Google now offers online appointment scheduling. Go here to try it out.

4. At In the Pipeline, pharma-blogger Derek Lowe passes along word of a paper about the aftermath of a damaging fire in a chemistry lab.

It should be required reading for anyone working in a laboratory, in part because the vast majority of the literature in that area is focused on prevention, rather than mitigation.

Notably, the fire was worsened by the fact that human inattentiveness/error blocked detection of the fire from knowledge of the fire by first responders, giving it time to grow and do much more damage than it should have.

The incident reminds me of the research facilities in Houston that took major damage when they were flooded by Tropical Storm Allison back in '01.

If I recall correctly, one of the buildings had part of its backup generation infrastructure inside its basement, rendering the building without electricity. The Wikipedia article is good on the overall scope of the damage, but we knew someone who lost so much work that it made more sense to quit than to finish her doctorate.

It is that element of the paper that is most valuable. Yes, it will cause people to take prevention very seriously, but it also makes clear such things as the value of redundant, off-site data backups.

Do what you can to prevent disaster, but don't count on the things you don't control working every time.

-- CAV