Zimbardo's Lie

From this week's must-read article: Ben Blum's The Lifespan of a Lie -- The most famous psychology study of all time was a sham. Why can’t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment?:

Despite the Stanford prison experiment’s canonical status in intro psych classes around the country today, methodological criticism of it was swift and widespread in the years after it was conducted. Deviating from scientific protocol, Zimbardo and his students had published their first article about the experiment not in an academic journal of psychology but in The New York Times Magazine, sidestepping the usual peer review. Famed psychologist Erich Fromm, unaware that guards had been explicitly instructed to be “tough,” nonetheless opined that in light of the obvious pressures to abuse, what was most surprising about the experiment was how few guards did. “The authors believe it proves that the situation alone can within a few days transform normal people into abject, submissive individuals or into ruthless sadists,” Fromm wrote. “It seems to me that the experiment proves, if anything, rather the contrary.” Some scholars have argued that it wasn’t an experiment at all. Leon Festinger, the psychologist who pioneered the concept of cognitive dissonance, dismissed it as a “happening.”

A steady trickle of critiques have continued to emerge over the years, expanding the attack on the experiment to more technical issues around its methodology, such as demand characteristics, ecological validity, and selection bias. In 2005, Carlo Prescott, the San Quentin parolee who consulted on the experiment’s design, published an Op-Ed in The Stanford Daily entitled “The Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment,” revealing that many of the guards’ techniques for tormenting prisoners had been taken from his own experience at San Quentin rather than having been invented by the participants. In another blow to the experiment’s scientific credibility, Haslam and Reicher’s attempted replication, in which guards received no coaching and prisoners were free to quit at any time, failed to reproduce Zimbardo’s findings. Far from breaking down under escalating abuse, prisoners banded together and won extra privileges from guards, who became increasingly passive and cowed. According to Reicher, Zimbardo did not take it well when they attempted to publish their findings in the British Journal of Social Psychology.

“We discovered that he was privately writing to editors to try to stop us getting published by claiming that we were fraudulent,” Reicher told me.

Obituary of the 100 Dollar Laptop

Way back in March 2014, OLPC News, which used to track all the OLPC-related news and developments, bid farewell to this pipe dream riding on poor people's money. Earlier this month, Adi Robertson penned a formal detailed obituary in The Verge: OLPC’S $100 laptop was going to change the world — Then it all went wrong. Buried deep within Robertson's essay (actually, right at its end), we find this:

There’s surprisingly little hard data about the long-term impact of OLPCs on childhood education, though. Zamora points to some case studies for individual countries, and says OLPC wants to commission more comprehensive research in the future. But the organization has mostly focused on anecdotes and distribution numbers as markers of success. “OLPC was always very averse to measuring how well they were doing versus the traditional school system,” says Gros. “There have only been a very limited number of attempts to actually measure how well students were doing with OLPC versus not, because it was very hard to do.”

Ames thinks that OLPC’s high-profile failures helped temper the hype around ed-tech programs. “There was a lot of worry that OLPC would crash and take everything with it — that there would be no funding in [educational technology], there would be no funding in tech development,” says Ames. “I think ed-tech in particular can still really draw on some of the same tropes, and hasn’t fully learned the lessons that OLPC should have taught it. But both of those spaces did have to mature to some degree, and stop being quite so naive in their tech utopianism.” Non-OLPC student laptop programs are still contentious. Maine Governor Paul LePage trashed his state’s initiative as a “massive failure” in 2016, and while it’s still running, its results have been ambiguous and difficult to measure. Mitra’s Hole-in-the-Wall project won a $1 million TED prize in 2013, but critics say he still hasn’t published any rigorous studies of its effects. Bender isn’t convinced that Mitra’s minimalist computing project proved anything. “We already knew that kids could learn to use computers. They’ve been doing that since day one,” he says. “What the project did not demonstrate is that kids could use computers for learning.”

Ames says the real question isn’t whether laptop programs help students, but whether they’re more effective than other programs competing for the same money. “I think that given unlimited funding, absolutely ... Learning about technology is very important,” she says. “That said, there’s always a tradeoff. There’s always some project that will be defunded or de-emphasized as a result of this.”

Thirteen years ago, OLPC told the world that every child should get a laptop. It never stopped to prove that they needed one.

Scientific Papers with 1000+ Authors

Robert Lee Hotz has a great article in WSJ on the phenomenon of papers with long author lists (in a recent case, this list is over 24 pages long -- in fine print!). His articlle has a plot that shows that 2012 saw over 200 papers with 1000+ authors!

Hotz also goes on to discuss some of the pranks played by scientists:

Michigan State University mathematician Jack Hetherington published a paper in 1975 on low temperature physics in Physical Review Letters with F.D.C. Willard. His colleagues only discovered that his co-author was a siamese cat several years later when Dr. Hetherington started handing out copies of the paper signed with a paw print.

In the same spirit, Shalosh B. Ekhad at Rutgers University so far has published 32 peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals with his co-author Doron Zeilberger. It turns out that Shalosh B. Ekhad is Hebrew for the model number of a personal computer used by Dr. Zeilberger. “The computer helps so much and so often,” Dr. Zeilberger said.

Not everyone takes such pranks lightly.

Immunologist Polly Matzinger at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases named her dog, Galadriel Mirkwood, as a co-author on a paper she submitted to the Journal of Experimental Medicine. “What amazed me was that the paper went through the entire editorial process and nobody noticed,” Dr. Matzinger said. When the journal editor realized he had published work crediting an Afghan hound, he was furious, she recalled.

Physicists may be more open-minded. Sir Andre Geim, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics, credited H.A.M.S. ter Tisha as his co-author of a 2001 paper published in the journal Physica B. Those journal editors didn’t bat an eye when his co-author was unmasked as a pet hamster. “Not a harmful joke,” said Physica editor Reyer Jochemsen at the Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Vedic Planes

Siddhartha Deb has a great piece on Those mythological men and their sacred, supersonic flying temples in The New Republic. Subtitle: "What tales of ancient Vedic aircraft tell us about India’s place in the modern world."

Excerpts won't do any justice to the piece. So, go read the whole thing!

On the Indian Science Congress Agenda Today ...

... is a session on Ancient Sciences through Sanskrit -- see page 20 of the program. Some of the talks in the session have attracted media commentary (justifiably) filled with ridicule and scorn.

For many, this is like a bad dream that just won't go away -- Vedic astrology, Vedic nanotech, and now this. All trying to gain public legitimacy by being seen in the company of real science.

Here's just a sample of news reports on this session:

1. Stop Scientific Distortion (Mumbai Mirror). "NASA scientist Ram Prasad Gandhiraman, who started an online petition against an ISC lecture on ancient aviation, on why we must fight pseudo-science. [...] He has launched an online petition demanding that Capt Bodas's lecture scheduled for January 4 be cancelled as it brings into question the 'integrity of the scientific process'."

2. Hindu scientific temper: Elephant and cow urine to fuel aeroplanes? (Dinesh Sharma, Daily O). "Hindu organisations are on a mission to portray mythological and Sanskrit texts as the origins of modern science."

3. At Science Congress, Vedic aeroplanes and virus-proof suits - See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/at-science-congress-vedic-aeroplanes-and-virus-proof-suits/99/#sthash.sUaAtlHU.dpuf (Mithika Basu, The Indian Express).

4. Science meet to discuss ancient Indian aviation (Kalyan Ray, Deccan Herald).

Navin Kabra's SCIGen Hoax

Consider this: http://iraj.in/Conference/2013/Pune/ICRIEST/

Seems like an impressive conference, and getting a paper published in this conference should be a big achievement on any student’s resume, right?

Wrong.

We submitted to two fake papers to this conference – one was complete gibberish auto-generated by using the online fake paper generator at SCIGen, while the other was auto-generated gibberish interspersed with completely ridiculous statements, movie dialogues, and other random things. Both these papers where accepted by this conference.

More on the saga at his blog post: How I published a fake paper, and why it is the fault of our education system. Mid-day also has a story on Kabra's sting operation. [links via Retraction Watch, and Santosh Sali's comment].

* * *

I have seen far too many cases of poor quality journals and conferences (including at least one scamference) that are ripe for this sort of "sting operation", and I am glad that Kabra has taken to trouble to out someone savvy enough to exploit the demand for such conferences, but hapless enough to get caught in his net.

Sting operations that target conference organizers are entertaining, all right. But, the real curse, which Kabra has written about in the original as well as follow-up posts, is on the demand side -- more specifically, institutional rules that put a gun to people's heads and say "Publish! Or else .."

In the past, these rules put a lot of pressure on faculty members in universities and colleges (irrespective of whether they had access to decent research facilities); the Kabra episode tells us that they have unleashed their corrosive effect on masters and bachelors students as well.

So, basically, there's this huge army of people with a "paper" to submit and/or present; when they are unable to find respectable venues for their papers, someone or the other sets up shop to exploit them. There's a lot of money to be made, after all. And, thanks to our shitty institutional rules, a lot of people become "willing victims" of such scams.

And this is what we are seeing all over the map in India, especially in certain engineering disciplines.

How to Nail a Diploma Mill

The BBC method involves a dog and its CV:

However, Newsnight found that getting the [American University of London] to provide a qualification without any study at all was easy. [...]

The real "Pete" is a dog living at Battersea Dogs' Home The programme drew up a one-page fake CV for a management consultant Peter Smith, known as Pete, living in South London, which included 15 years of made-up work experience and a fictitious undergraduate degree from a UK university.

The real Pete was actually a dog living in Battersea Dogs' Home.

* * *

Hat tip: Inside Higher Ed.

CMJ University "issued" 430+ PhDs in one year

And this private university was established just four years ago!

The story has been unraveling over the last month or so. A quick chronology:

1. May 15: Meghalaya may ask CBI to probe CMJ University scam.

2. May 25: CMJ University in Meghalaya warned of dissolution.

3. May 28: CMJ varsity director surrenders -- Of ‘wanted’ trio, only university chancellor remains at large

4. June 9: Government tells universities to cancel promotions based on CMJ degrees.

* * *

Update: See this report in The Telegraph about similar instances from Andhra Pradesh [I thank L for the comment-alert].

Scamferences and Scam Journals ...

... have become so numerous that even the king of the MSM jungle -- I mean, NYTimes -- has an article about it [I thank Prof. Dheeraj Sanghi for the e-mail alert]. The bottomline is that since their numbers have become large, and they have become better at deceiving their audience, even the smart and the savvy have fallen prey to them. In other words, the list of victims goes beyond the clueless and/or the greedy.

The article does a good job of identifying the problem and its variants (both conferences and journals) with plenty of illustrative examples. Where it goes horribly wrong is when it indulges in a bit of drive-by shooting by conflating the problem (scam journals and conferences) with open access models of scientific publishing.

I mean, while it is true that there has been a huge increase in the number of journals and conferences that take money from authors and publish their papers with little or no peer review scrutiny, it is also something that would have happened irrespective of whether these papers are placed in the public domain. The drivers for this trend are easy to enumerate, and include:

1. the huge expansion in scientific research (especially in the non-OECD countries) in recent years.

2. the ever-increasing pressure on researchers to publish, publish, publish.

3. the global university ranking business that puts a premium on research publications (and now, citations and other scientometric indicators), which in turn adds to (2).

Since the number of papers has grown (but the number of journals has not), someone is just going to come along and provide an outlet for all these new papers. And since a growing fraction of these extra papers is junk, the said someone is just going to take money to publish them. Insert your favorite cliche here -- Win-Win, the Invisible Hand, Magic of the Market, Nature abhors unpublished papers, whatever.

And none of this has anything to do with open access.

It is a fact that almost all of these "journals" are online-only operations. But open access has nothing to do with this business model, except perhaps as an unintended consequence.

* * *

I became aware of this problem quite sometime ago -- in November of 2009 -- when someone perpetrated a scam by "organizing" a scamference in an auditorium in the IISc campus! See this, this, and this (and see this as well!).

Since then I have also been alerted about all kinds of online journals. At least one of them used Google Sites (a free website builder) for its operations; that is, it didn't even bother to have, and pay for, its own domain name!

Expertise of Wine Experts

The title of the Vox EU article says it all: "Wine tasting: Is 'terroir' a joke and/or are wine experts incompetent?". The article describes research that debunks the alleged expertise of wine experts; one of the conclusions is this:

... [A]lleged experts repeatedly cannot tell a superstar wine from a cheaper bottle. Like many cultural commodities, it seems that the quality of wine is not an objective trait. Rather, these commodities become whatever we want them to become.

More interestingly, this sort of study has a pretty rich history. Here's a short description of a study from the 1970s:

The story started in 1976: Steven Spurrier, a well-known English wine trader and owner of the Caves de la Madeleine in Paris, and US-born Patricia Gallagher, from the French Académie du Vin, turned things upside-down by organising a blind tasting of four white Burgundies, four red Bordeaux1 and 12 California wines (six whites and six reds) in Paris; the last were virtually unknown in Europe. The nine judges were judged to be extremely competent wine connoisseurs – sommeliers, producers of famous wines, a wine journalist, and owners of Michelin-starred restaurants. The tasting ended up ranking a California wine as winner, both for whites and reds.

Neurohype

1. This hilarious piece of pop science "news" deserves its place right at the top because it sets the right tone for what comes next: Brain Region Found that Does Absolutely Nothing at Collectively Unconscious.

   Dr. Ahlquist was rather surprised at the finding. “During a pilot study we noticed that this small section of the cortex did not show differential activity in any of our manipulations. Out of curiosity, we wanted to see whether it actually did anything at all. Over the months that followed we tried every we knew, with over 20 different participants. IQ tests, memory tasks, flashing lights, talking, listening, imagining juggling, but there was no response. Nothing. We got more desperate, so we tried pictures of faces, TMS, pictures of cats, pictures of sex, pictures of violence and even sexy violence, but nothing happened! Not even a decrease. No connectivity to anywhere else, not even a voodoo correlation. 46 voxels of wasted space. I know dead salmons that are more responsive. It’s an evolutionary disgrace, that’s what it is.”

   The stuff about "dead salmons that are more responsive" doesn't provide a link, but I guess it's about the work [pdf] that won an IgNobel this year.

2. Gary Marcus in New Yorker: Neuroscience Fiction: What Neuroscience Really Teaches Us, and What It Doesn't. A good overview of the limitations of fMRI:

   ... [O]ur early-twenty-first-century world truly is filled with brain porn, with sloppy reductionist thinking and an unseemly lust for neuroscientific explanations. But the right solution is not to abandon neuroscience altogether, it’s to better understand what neuroscience can and cannot tell us, and why.

   The first and foremost reason why we shouldn’t simply disown neuroscience altogether is an obvious one: if we want to understand our minds, from which all of human nature springs, we must come to grips with the brain’s biology. The second is that neuroscience has already told us lot, just not the sort of things we may think it has. What gets play in the daily newspaper is usually a study that shows some modest correlation between a sexy aspect of human behavior, with headlines like “FEMALE BRAIN MAPPED IN 3D DURING ORGASM” and “THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON POKER”

   But a lot of those reports are based on a false premise: that neural tissue that lights up most in the brain is the only tissue involved in some cognitive function. The brain, though, rarely works that way. Most of the interesting things that the brain does involve many different pieces of tissue working together. Saying that emotion is in the amygdala, or that decision-making is the prefrontal cortex, is at best a shorthand, and a misleading one at that. [...]

   The sort of short, simple explanations of complex brain functions that often make for good headlines rarely turn out to be true. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t explanations to be had, it just means that evolution didn’t evolve our brains to be easily understood.

IIT-M Platform for Pseudoscience?

Check out this blog post at Nirmukta about a recent talk on Vedic Science in which the speaker makes all kinds of wild claims about the scientific content in vedic and other texts from ancient India. [Don't forget to read the comments section, where quite a few IIT-M faculty, students and alumni have been posting their views.]

Pretty amazing, especially since this talk appears to be a part of a series of lectures hosted by IIT-M; in other words, it's not like this other talk organized by a cultural group/club at IIT-M.

Here's something that redeemed the event: The speaker faced a strong challenge from the great folks at IIT-M. You can find YouTube links to these snippets at the end of the post at Nirmukta. [IIT-M has a great tradition of gutsy protests.]

* * *

The speaker runs a research institute of vedic technology. See especially his boast about how "a pioneer institute like Indian Institute of Technology Madras has recognized a vedic research institute as its external centre for pursuing MS/PhD."

* * *

If you have the stomach for it, you can watch the fiasco unfold over a period of an hour or so. Since it's too painful (not to mention cringe-inducing) to watch, you are probably better off with the snippets from the Q&A after the talk.

Snake Oil of the Second Decade of the 21st Century

Satish Jha makes a play for his candidate, the OLPC:

Schools require buildings, teachers, equipment and electricity. OLPC becomes a school in a box, removing all these needs. To create this infrastructure would require $2,000 per child (Rs. 1.1 lakh), OLPC costs a fraction of that. In 65 years, we haven’t been able to build a learning infrastructure in the country. [...]

Polywater

Since I've been seeing this term in various forums lately [sorry, no links!], it was good to see Ross McKenzie's post: Polywater: lest we forget. McKenzie mentions a 1981 book -- Polywater by Felix Franks -- on this fiasco, and excerpts a section from the Science review of the book wherein David Eisenbert, the reviewer, lists some of the factors that fed the polywater frenzy, factors that have an enduring relevance (e.g., I remember some of these from another iconic fiasco from a decade later: Cold Fusion):

[Franks] is interested in the factors, partly nonscientific, that created the gold rush atmosphere and distorted the normal scientific process. Among the factors blamed by Franks are:

• the willingness of some scientists to submit for publication incomplete or even shoddy work in order to achieve priority;

• a breakdown in normal standards of reviewing, particularly in journals such as Nature and Science that publish short notes on matters perceived to be of wide current interest;

• a concern among administrators in defense-sponsored research agencies that in the post-Sputnik era it would be unfortunate to allow the Soviets the lead in another field;

• a fascination on the part of the public, created in part by exaggerated and inaccurate reports in the popular press, with a new form of water;

a tendency of investigators to leak results to the press before publication;

Research Cloning

That's a far lovelier phrase than 'self-plagiarism,' 'duplicate publication', or 'concurrent publications.' And I got it from this post by Debora Weber-Wulff.

The latest to get caught for research cloning is Bruno Frey.

Read this whiplash he (and his coauthors) received from an editor at one of the four -- yes, four -- journals that published his work. Immediately following it is a pretty abject apology from Frey.

Weber-Wulff also sends us to the iceberg that sank this Titanic. Don't forget to read the comments!

Tales from Academic Netherworld: After Tri-Valley, it's now Northern Virginia

... a Chronicle investigation suggests that Tri-Valley is only the beginning. Other colleges—most of them unaccredited—exploit byzantine federal regulations, enrolling almost exclusively foreign students and charging them upward of $3,000 for a chance to work legally in the United States. They flourish in California and Virginia, where regulations are lax, and many of their practices—for instance, holding some classes on only three weekends per semester—are unconventional, to say the least. These colleges usher in thousands of foreign students and generate millions of dollars in profits because they have the power, bestowed by the U.S. government, to help students get visas.

While these institutions are well-known among Indian students looking to work full time, they have managed to go mostly unnoticed in the United States. That anonymity is just fine with Daniel Ho, the owner of the University of Northern Virginia, an unaccredited college that has called itself the most popular American university for Indian students. Says Mr. Ho: "We don't want people to know us."

From this Chronicle story by Tom Bartlett, Karin Fischer, and Josh Keller. [It comes with a chart and a slideshow -- grim stuff.]

See also Indira Kannan in The Business Standard: That risky rush for a US degree.

Some or several of the students may not be blameless victims. They had enrolled at these universities precisely as a way of getting into the US on student visas to work immediately – some at grocery stores or a McDonald’s, in cities hundreds of miles away from campus – while ostensibly taking classes online. But for those who joined these schools in pursuit of their dream of a US education, it’s a grim awakening.

The Telugu Association of North America, or Tana, which has been counselling the affected students, fears the Tri-Valley and UNVA cases are just the tip of the iceberg. “There are another 15,000-20,000 Indian students minimum” at similar universities of dubious repute, says Ashok Kolla, the Chair for NRI Student Services at Tana.

What else can Dhoni do?

Here are some possibilities brought to us from the corporate and B-school jungles by a gutsy team of ET reporters. [Thanks for the comment-alert, Dilip!]

Highlights:

1. Dhoni should become a guest lecturer at the IIMs (this idea is from Bringi Dev, an adjunct professor at IIM-B).

2. I would bat for Dhoni as the CFO of a company (from LK Gupta, LG Electronics).

3. I would make Dhoni an executive director in our company (from Venugopal Dhoot, Videocon)

4. [Dhoni] would be a perfect fit for the job of Congress president Sonia Gandhi (from Savita Prasad, Sabre Travel Tech).

At this rate, Dhoni's appearance in a Bo Knows type ad is imminent -- maybe with a slogan like "Dhoni Does!"

Ram Mohan's fears come true!

In to-day's post, he says:

I wrote yesterday that I lived in fear of management experts wanting to derive mileage from Dhoni's success. Alas, my fears have come true. TOI today carries a story on Management lessons from Dhoni. All of it is just hindsight. Here is a selection:

Adi Godrej: "He sets stretch goals and works determinedly to achieve them by getting the best out of his team." By "stretch goals", Godrej presumably means winning the World Cup. Is he implying that other captains did not have such "stretch goals", that they took part in the World Cup in order to lose?

This and other such gems (and he probably has not even seen this) drive Ram Mohan [who, remember, is a professor at IIM-A] to despair:

What is it about management theory that it reduces so quickly to the level of drivel?

I know his question is purely rhetorical, but I think Management Myth by Matthew Stewart is worth another link! [Bonus link: Johann Hari on a related topic: The management consultancy scam].

* * *

[Thanks to Raj for the Rediff link via this comment].

T.T. Ram Mohan is afraid

Very afraid:

The thing I now dread is the management experts jumping in with 'Lessons in leadership from Dhoni'.

Budget WTF

Alternate title: UPA Government's Mixed Signals --Part II: The Curious Case of Rajiv Gandhi National Institute of Youth Development

Back in 2009, a review committee set up by MHRD classified RGNIYD as one of the institutions which, "neither on past performance, nor on their promise for the future, have the attributes ... to retain their status as universities." [Source; 18MB pdf].

In Budget 2011-12 presented yesterday, the same institution has been lavished with a largess of Rs. 20 crores, as "special grants to recognise excellence in universities and academic institutions." [Paragraph 101 of the Budget Speech; 867 KB pdf].

* * *

This case is much worse than the WTF-inducing episode involving SRM University (see Part I) for at least two reasons.

1. The Tandon Committee saw SRM as "merely" deficient, but blacklisted RGNIYD as, shall we say, irredeemable.

2. Moreover, with SRM, it was only a case of a couple of high functionaries in the government "merely" participating in its convocation; but with RGNIYD, what we have is a blacklisted institution being recognized for its excellence and lavished with lots of money.

* * *

Thanks to Subrahmanya Katte for the Buzz.