Annals of Gaming (the System)

Stephen Budiansky describes a scheme once used by the Case Law School to get ahead in the US News ranking that is way too awesome: Three birds in one stone! [Hat tip: Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber]

Their other tactic was pure genius: the law school hired as adjunct professors local alumni who already had lucrative careers (thereby increasing the faculty-student ratio, a key U.S. News statistic used in determining ranking), paid them exorbitant salaries they did not need (thereby increasing average faculty salary, another U.S. News data point), then made it understood that since they did not really need all that money they were expected to donate it all back to the school (thereby increasing the alumni giving rate, another U.S. News data point): three birds with one stone!

"Fraud in a Glass of Wine"

Ashutosh Jogalekar has an excellent post -- Fraud in a Glass of Wine: The Dipak Das Case -- on research misconduct by the UConn researcher Dipak Das.

Das has been at the university since 1984 and got tenure in 1993, so it’s curious why he decided to fabricate results in the last decade or so. I am quite ready to believe that his work on the complex effects of resveratrol on disease may have run into roadblocks, prompting him to start making up results that he wanted to see but which he didn’t. Most research these days and especially biomedical research is a complex game. In some ways we are trying to bite off more than we can chew. In such cases wishful thinking can dominate, and when expected results don’t pan out because of the complexity of the system under consideration, it becomes easier to succumb to desperation and temptation. The resveratrol story may fit into this paradigm, with initial reports suggesting a tantalizingly simple connection between the drugs and aging and more recent reports questioning this connection. Yet again, nature is not just more complex than we imagine, but it is more complex than we can imagine.

Scientist-Administrators in Legal Trouble

Three different cases. Three different reasons. All from the US. Only one is about research misconduct and its aftermath; the other two are financial disputes..

1. Judy Mikovits:

   ... Dr. Mikovits left her position as research director at the institute in a dispute over management practices and control over research materials. The institute sued her, accusing her of stealing notebooks and other proprietary items. Dr. Mikovits was arrested in Southern California, where she lives, and jailed for several days, charged with being a fugitive from justice.

   After her split with the institute, Dr. Mikovits denied having the missing laboratory materials. But a lab employee, Max Pfost, said in an affidavit that he took items at her request, stashing notebooks in his mother’s garage in Sparks, Nev., before turning them over to Dr. Mikovits.

   At one point, “Mikovits informed me that she was hiding out on a boat to avoid being served with papers from W.P.I.,” Mr. Pfost said in the affidavit. Some lab items have since been returned.

   In December, a judge ruled against her in the civil case. The criminal case is pending ...

2. Craig B. Thompson:

   The president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York is in a billion-dollar dispute with his former workplace, a cancer institute at the University of Pennsylvania, over accusations that he walked away with groundbreaking research and used it to help start a valuable biotechnology company.

   Dr. Craig B. Thompson, now of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, is being sued. In a lawsuit, the Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute at Penn described its former scientific director, Dr. Craig B. Thompson, as “an unscrupulous doctor” who “chose to abscond with the fruits of the Abramson largess.”

   The dispute reflects the importance that academic research centers now place on turning discoveries made on their campuses into sources of revenue. Some have engaged in protracted legal battles to ensure compensation for their intellectual property. Yale, for example, won more than $1 million in compensation and legal fees in 2005 from a Nobel laureate it had accused of taking its technology.

3. Craig Grimes:

   Former Pennsylvania State University electrical engineering professor Craig Grimes, considered a world leader in materials science, has been charged with misusing $3 million in federal research grants.

   The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania accused Grimes on Jan. 31 of misusing $1.2 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health and of falsifying information when applying for a $1.9 million grant through the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act. If convicted, Grimes could face up to 35 years in prison fines of up to $750,000.

Two Potential Game Changers in Indian Higher Ed

First, the government has put in place a framework for vocational education [Prashant Nanda has the story in today's Mint].

This is something I heard about nearly two years ago from someone who claimed this initiative would create a vocational education system with a potential to rival that in Germany. I'll wait for experts in this area to offer their views on how good this policy framework really is.

Here's the press release:

The Scheme envisages Seven certificate levels with each certificate level with approximately 1000 hours each certificate, with each 1000 hours being made of certain number of hours for vocational competency based skill modules and the rest for general learning simultaneously integrated and providing a Diploma for vocational education after the certificate level five or leading to a Degree for vocational education after level seven in the university system, subject to their statutory approval, is highlight of the scheme.

A student can choose to avail of competency based skill learning along with general education in this scheme without losing the possibility of changing course and moving at any certificate level into a formal system of education and vice versa. This would ultimately provide a full multi-entry exist system between vocational education, general education and the job market.

AICTE would seek to provide the requisite statutory approvals to any institutions wishing to conduct these programmes from the Academic Year 2012 throughout the country. The institutions can choose a maximum of 500 students per institute in any five sectors, 100 students per sector.

The success of this program depends crucially on how well it's implemented, so we have to wait for the details of the regulations (by AICTE?) under this broad policy framework.

The second initiative will create an ETS like entity to run entrance exams / aptitude exams. Here's an excerpt from this Mint story filed by Prashant Nanda:

The body will take over the preparation and administration of entrance exams, besides the delivery of national-level exams through a dedicated group of professionals, researchers and independent experts having knowledge of the assessment and testing field, without involving teachers.

It will begin by managing tests such as the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE) and the joint entrance exam of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT-JEE), both key graduation entrance tests for engineering and science fields. [...]

CBSE chairman Vineet Joshi said, “It will be an Indian ETS. It will do research for preparing question papers, administer and conduct exams.”

The Nair Affair: The System's Counterattack

Perhaps in response to Dr. Madhavan Nair's demands, ISRO has posted online the Main Report of the Chaturvedi-Narasimha Committee (or HPRC, the High-Powered Review Committee), and Conclusions and Recommendations of the High Level Team (HLT) headed by Mr. Pratyush Sinha. With its scathing tone and language, and blunt naming of names, the HLT excerpts are especially revealing.

To get a quick sense of why the deal fails the smell test, see the news summaries here, here, or here.

Though the government sounded conciliatory last week (following Dr. Nair's loud, indignant protests), it appears ready to play hardball now. First came the release of two reports, along with a note on follow-up actions taken by ISRO in light of the findings of HPRC and HLT. It now says the ban on Nair and three others will stay even while floating a whisper balloon about keeping open the option of a criminal investigation.

* * *

As I said earlier, the allegations against Nair and his associates are entirely about commercial, financial, strategic, procedural aspects of the Devas deal -- in short, its about the administrative actions of ISRO leadership. Nair needs to stop using "oh no, Indian science is under attack" as a shield, not only because it is wrong, but also because his outbursts are now being countered with something that's even more obnoxious: the patriotism bomb:

The central government cancelled the Antrix Corporation-Devas Multimedia deal for reasons of national security and not for purported loss of revenue in sale of spectrum, Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office V. Narayanasamy has said.

Nair's indignant stance early on may have won him some supporters. In addition to David and Goliath, there's also Kafka lurking in the story when Nair said he did not even know what The System was punishing him for! In such a battle, it is difficult to take the side of The System.

But Nair's later utterances have undermined his case. For example, Nair's original claim that he never met the Sinha panel (HLT) has now been countered, forcing him to change his story. And his personal attacks on his successor at ISRO are so unwittingly self-incriminatory that Nair himself has now become the butt of jokes about his "management style." [What good does it do to your credibility when you claim that you handpicked an incompetent to the throne?]

Nair appears to be admitting that there might have been some errors of judgement. Let's see how long this phase lasts ...

* * *

See also: Nair's interviews in Rediff and Outlook.

Talking of naming things ...

... how about this: naming bathrooms through endowments? Financial desperation is not the only reason for universities to choose this method of fund-raising, as illustrated by this story from Harvard:

As first reported by Above the Law, Harvard Law School recently opened the Falik Men’s Room. Like tuition, bathrooms seem to cost more in Cambridge. William Falik told Above the Law he received the honor – if you want to call it that – after donating $100,000 to his alma mater to create a public interest fellowship in his father's honor. Falik didn’t return messages from Inside Higher Ed seeking comment, but his office voicemail confirmed that his surname is pronounced exactly as it’s spelled. With a gift of that size, Harvard Law's dean for development and alumni relations Steven Oliveira said he was happy to play along with Falik's wishes.

Read the article for more toilet humor.

The most interesting job in government

It has got to be the job of coming up with cringe-worthy names for higher ed initiatives.

So far, I could cite as an example the category of Institutions of National Importance Says something about the importance (national or otherwise) of other higher ed institutions, doesn't it?

Now, we have a far more cringe-worthy example. It's a UGC initiative called "Universities with Potential For Excellence. If you "win" this "status", would you want to advertise it on your website?

What next -- universities with potential for sub-par performance?

Sheesh!

Disseminator

Benjamin Wallace in New York Magazine: The Virgin Father -- a truly fascinating portrait of an offbeat American who's "the father of fifteen children—and counting" primarily through his sperm donation. There are many angles to the story, all of it very, very interesting, but I'm just going to post this excerpt about why FDA got involved in this man's dissemination business:

Although sperm is neither a food nor a drug, the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research regulates those who traffic in it, enforcing frequent and comprehensive tests designed to curb the spread of communicable diseases and genetic disorders. Historically the agency has focused only on traditional sperm banks, not private donors, but Trent was unprecedentedly public about what he was doing. When the FDA first contacted him, he had naïvely signed a piece of paper confirming that he was “an establishment.” In August 2010, using that as a pretext, the FDA sent three agents to his house, where for several days they interviewed him and copied his records. Trent had by then made 340 donations to some 46 different recipients. The scrutiny was time-consuming and stressful; he didn’t have a lawyer and worried than he might land in prison.

By November, the FDA determined that Trent wasn’t screening for diseases nearly often enough, and it issued its cease-­manufacture order. Trent replied that he wished to contest it. He wasn’t charging money, as he explained, and he was helping people. He knew that he was celibate, that he was disease-free, and that he took extraordinary measures to safeguard his DNA. He considered his relationship with his recipients to be “intimate.” Why should the government regulate what he was doing, when anyone, with who knew what health issues, could walk into a bar and have a one-night stand? A government-accountability public-interest group, Cause of Action, agreed, seeing the FDA action as a ringing example of regulatory overreach, and filed a brief on Trent’s behalf. “We questioned him as to the parameters of his relationship with recipients,” Amber Taylor, the chief counsel for Cause of Action, says. “We took away that he’s a very generous, helpful person who sees people in need who could not have children without some form of assistance, who are often lower income or underserved by the fertility-medicine industry.” Trent is currently awaiting a decision by the FDA on whether to grant him a hearing, and in the meantime, the cease-manufacture order has been suspended.

Quote of the Day

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
-- H.L. Mencken [in A Little Book in C major (1916)]

[Source: WikiQuote.]

A big con at UConn?

At 60,000 pages, the University of Connecticut's report into alleged misconduct by Dipak Das is so huge that its executive summary alone runs to 49 pages!

The Retraction Watch blog has been all over this case with several posts (each with links to all the relevant documents).

A Boston Globe   editorial -- UConn’s account of research flaws should be a model for others -- praises UConn for its handling of the Das case, and contrasts it with Harvard's handling of the Hauser case:

... after the federal government’s Office of Research Integrity relayed a complaint in 2008 of possible misconduct in a research paper produced by Das’s center, UConn launched an extensive investigation. After the special review panel concluded that Das and his team had manipulated images in dozens of instances, UConn sent letters to 11 journals that had published their work, vowed to return $890,000 in federal grants, and started disciplinary proceedings. The university also noted that it is investigating others in Das’s lab.

UConn’s detailed reporting of the Das situation contrasts sharply with, for instance, Harvard’s limited explanation of its inquiry into the work of renowned psychologist Marc Hauser. Even after an investigating committee found Hauser “solely responsible . . . for eight instances of scientific misconduct,’’ administrators were remarkably vague about the nature of his offenses. A dean’s letter noting that the data in one of Hauser’s published experiments “did not support the published findings’’ left open an obvious question: Why not?

Thanks to Richard Symonds for his comment-alert about the Boston Globe editorial.

One for the Annals of Gaming

... Gaming the System, that is. An alternate title would be: Journal Editors Behaving Badly.

Here's the abstract of the article by Allen W. Wilhite and Eric A. Fong that appeared in Science:

Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing

Despite their shortcomings (1–4), impact factors continue to be a primary means by which academics “quantify the quality of science” (5). One side effect of impact factors is the incentive they create for editors to coerce authors to add citations to their journal. Coercive self-citation does not refer to the normal citation directions, given during a peer-review process, meant to improve a paper. Coercive self-citation refers to requests that (i) give no indication that the manuscript was lacking in attribution; (ii) make no suggestion as to specific articles, authors, or a body of work requiring review; and (iii) only guide authors to add citations from the editor's journal. This quote from an editor as a condition for publication highlights the problem: “you cite Leukemia [once in 42 references]. Consequently, we kindly ask you to add references of articles published in Leukemia to your present article” (6). Gentler language may be used, but the message is clear: Add citations or risk rejection.

The full article may be behind a paywall, but EurekAlert has a good summary.

How many continents are there?

It's all so confusing that the number could be anything you want it to be, as long as you can justify your choice.

Very nicely done. Watch:

Hat tip: Lisa Wade at Sociological Images.

Marc Hauser's Scientific Misconduct

Princeton psychologist Charles Gross has an excellent article: Disgrace: On Marc Hauser. In addition to the information unearthed by other people (which Gross excerpts and summarizes), there is some new reporting -- some of it is about confirming others' findings. The entire article is worth reading, especially for Gross' own take on the specific instances of Hauser's misconduct.

I want to focus on two things in the following excerpts. The first is the gratifying new piece of information in Gross' article about the three whistleblowers:

[...] For graduate students, the PI is usually the most important person in their scientific life, acting as mentor, supervisor, model, adviser, critic, editor, co-author, supporter, reference and sometimes rival.

All labs are like complicated families, but each lab is complicated in its own way. Along with sibling rivalries, there are battles for attention, praise, identity, privacy and independence. The intimate relation of a PI to his graduate students often lasts as long and as intensely as a familial one. For a graduate student to blow the whistle on his or her mentor is an extraordinary and very risky step. Aside from the emotional and psychological trauma, whistleblowing by graduate students about their PI, even if confirmed, often ruins their careers. If the PI is fired or loses grant support, members of his or her lab usually stand to lose nearly everything—their financial support, their laboratory facilities, their research project and sometimes their credibility. But in the Hauser affair things have turned out very differently: the three whistleblowers whose action prompted the Harvard investigation have gone on to successful careers in scientific research. [Bold emphasis added]

There is one part of the saga that still remains infuriatingly inaccessible: the findings of Harvard's own investigation committee. Here's Gross:

The procedures and conclusions of the investigation raise many questions. Its methods and results remain secret. Its procedures bore no relation to the due process that is the goal of our judicial system. We have no clear idea of the exact nature of the evidence, of how many studies were examined and if anyone besides the three whistleblowers and Hauser was asked to testify. I was told by one of the whistleblowers that, to this person’s surprise and relief, the committee, which included scientists, did look carefully at evidence, even going so far as to recalculate statistics.

Aside from their potential injustice to the accused and accusers, the secrecy of the investigation and the paucity of specific facts in the conclusions are deleterious to the entire field of animal cognition. Exactly what kind of irregularities existed in the “eight instances of misconduct” and what they might imply for other papers by Hauser and for the field in general remained unclear.

Manu Joseph on the "Mother of All Exams"

He's talking, of course, about the JEE. Here's the concluding paragraph:

It is improbable that the I.I.T.’s will ever regain their old glory. The circumstances of the nation have changed, and the smartest Indians do not need an engineering degree to find a place in the world or to make a decent living. Also, the government has not invested enough in the I.I.T.’s, and the most talented scientific minds have the option to enroll in genuinely outstanding centers of learning in the West instead of being stuck in a place that has derived its prestige largely from the fact that only one in 50 cracks its entrance exam.

A pitch for liberal arts education

This one is by an Indian student, Vedika Khemani, who, studied "studied history, economics, linguistics, philosophy and creative writing ... while taking intensive physics and mathematics classes" at Harvey Mudd College. Khemani is doing a PhD in theoretical physics at Princeton.

An excerpt:

The ability to synthesize different perspectives into the big picture is far more powerful than narrow expertise in any single field. The social sciences offer perspectives from vantage points separated by time, place and society. Drawing and painting offer perspectives on what perspective even means. Critical thinking is the logical result of being able to simultaneously synthesize multiple ideas in one’s mind.

Real-world problems rarely ever have textbook solutions. More than anything, the purpose of a college education is to learn how to think critically and what questions to ask. Liberal arts colleges aim to mold their students into well-rounded, well-informed global citizens with a wide skill set [...]