Over at Slate I look from another angle at the Marc Hauser meltdown, with an emphasis on separating the problems of Hauser’s misconduct from the merits of the methods and hypotheses he was wielding. When the university last month found Hauser guilty of scientific misconduct—ugly and serious words, those, meaning in this case either […]
Continue reading →Where’d Marc Hauser go? He was here a few days ago. Roy Baumeister, Paul Bloom, Joshua D. Greene, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Joshua Knobe, Elizabeth Phelps, David Pizarro The Mayflower Inn Washington, CT & Eastover Farm Bethlehem, CT Tuesday July 20 – Thursday, July 22, 2010 Edge’s Morality show lineup, cleansed of Hauser. Hm. […]
Continue reading →Moving your blog generally creams one’s reader numbers. So I was happy to see that though I left Scienceblogs in mid-July, August was easily Neuron Culture’s highest traffic month ever. What generates so much interest? Scandal and dustups. What’s new in the world? My Marc Hauser coverage easily generated the biggest share of traffic, with […]
Continue reading →The Guardian launched a new blog network yesterday, with a strong lineup: GrrlScientist covering matters evo and orni (bird lovers, take note), Evan Harris covering policy and politics and such, Martin Robbins bringing the Lay Scientist to a new banner, and Jon Butterworth of UCL talking life and physics. I understand they’re planning to expand. You can […]
Continue reading →Jeff Neal, a spokesman for Harvard, said in an e-mail, “We are pleased that we have worked directly and effectively with the editors of the effected journals, including Cognition, to ensure that the scientific record is fully corrected. … And short of court or the university, it can hardly get worse than to have that conclusion reached by the editor of a major journal — someone with cred to protect, a lot of experience, and a privileged look at the data in question.
Continue reading →I lack time to treat them at any length, but the biggies were: • Harvard released a statement that provided a few specifics, most important being that Marc Hauser ” was found solely responsible, after a thorough investigation by a faculty investigating committee, for eight instances of scientific misconduct under FAS standards.” … It’s good to see that Harvard has answered at least the most vital and immediate of these problems, which is the doubt cast on other lab members and collaborators.
Continue reading →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.
Continue reading →But if any data has been fabricated, a cloud will be cast over all or much of his work, and that of his many collaborators, leaving other researchers unsure as to which of his experiments can be relied on. … Wade’s story — both solid and artful — ends with a painful quote from Hauser, who was reflecting in 2007 on a mentor he had: “Only once can I recall Peter giving me an explicit bit of advice, and this is when my impulsivity was getting the best of me,” Dr.
Continue reading →But if this case is anywhere near this serious — if multiple former students are accusing Hauser of outright fabrication, or if many others in the discipline have harbored grave doubts about the integrity of the data — then this case turns us back to the perennial question of how to curb such shenanigans.
…The key to the Alzheimer’s project was an agreement as ambitious as its goal: not just to raise money, not just to do research on a vast scale, but also to share all the data, making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.
Continue reading →Over at CMBR, Colin Schultz blogs on a study that found that science bloggers in particular created more diverse, less self-referential, less echo-chamberish coverage of news than even most other blogospheric areas.
…Read those entries, and their comments, and you’ll find quite a diverse view — but one that produces a richer view of the affair, and sets useful context, rather than fogging things over or reducing things to a polarized simplistic discussion.
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