Updated: This Hauser thing is getting hard to watch

let me repeat what happened. i coded everything. then [a research assistant] coded all the trials highlighted in yellow. we only had one trial that didn’t agree. i then mistakenly told [another research assistant] to look at column B when he should have looked at column D. … we need to resolve this because i am not sure why we are going in circles.” … The gist of the information is that, as appropriate to good practice, the protocol was originally designed to blind (or deafen) coders to the monkeys’ stimulus, so that the coder would merely observe a monkey in each trial, with the sound off and no knowledge of which pattern was being played, and score the monkey’s changes in behavior.

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Marc Hauser, monkey business, and the sine waves of science

As many know, Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser was placed on a year’s leave yesterday after an internal Harvard investigation found problems in some of the data supporting a 2002 paper on monkey cognition, and, according to coverage at the Globe and elsewhere, perhaps some others as well. … The longer source is Horace Freeland Judson’s “The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science” , a splendid account of not only how outright fraud occurs, but how pressure to produce, which is intense in most research universities, can lead to the sort of atmosphere DrugMonkey alludes to.

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