Meredith Wadman on Sexual harassment charges against Inder Verma

From this explosive, deeply reported story in Science [which should be applauded, I think, for not paywalling the story]:

In reports stretching from 1976 to 2016, women allege, variously, that he grabbed their breasts, pinched their buttocks, forcibly kissed them, propositioned them, and repeatedly commented on their physical attributes in professional settings. The allegations come from a Salk lab technician, a postdoctoral researcher, other Salk staffers and faculty, and women outside of the institute, including a potential faculty recruit.

Five women in their 50s and 60s in secure scientific positions agreed to be named in this story. Three younger women requested anonymity, fearing repercussions to their careers. They cited Verma’s power at Salk and the reach of his influence, including his connections to Nobel laureates, National Institutes of Health (NIH) peer-review committees, and journal editorial boards.

Last Saturday, Wadman also reported that Verma was asked to go on administrative leave by the Salk Institute. Here's an extract from Salk's announcement:

We have also learned that Science is preparing a story about Dr. Verma and related allegations. Earlier this week, the reporter presented the Institute with information about her story that included claims the Institute was not previously aware of. We take these allegations very seriously and have expanded the scope of the investigation.

A student's FB post on scientific misconduct in her lab

There are several updates, which appear at the end of the post.

* * *

Read this post (on FB) by Jayita Barua from a week ago. After reading her post, keep a copy for your own record -- just in case her FB post is taken down.

The magnitude of the misconduct in Barua's post is mind-boggling, and the frank way in which she talks about the mental trauma caused by the toxic environment in her lab is truly moving.

It is very brave of Barua to have come out and said all this in an open forum. I hope she will get all the support she needs. From my distance, the least I can do is to spread the word.

I know nothing about Barua's background -- not even the college and the research group she was in, and I stay away from FB. Which means that I am not aware of any follow-up action at her college / university. If you know of any, please leave a comment.

[Thanks to a friend who forwarded it.]

* * *

Update 1 (1 May 2018): G. Mudur of The Telegraph has a story on this case, triggered by Barua's post: CU teacher under data fraud scanner. This story appears in the Metro section, implying that the editors decided that this is of interest primarily to the residents of their home ground, Kolkata.

We learn two things: (a) Calcutta University has formed a two-member inquiry committee to probe this case, and (b) Dr. Anindita Ukil, Barua's PhD adviser, denies having committed any fraud or misconduct. A key quote:

Ukil said Barua was not a regular National Eligibility Test-qualified scholar who earned her own fellowship as most others in her laboratory, but was dependent on a project-based salary.

"She was in our lab for four years and participated enthusiastically in all our activities. She has raised this issue now - after being told earlier this month that she could not be provided any new project fellowship," Ukil said. "Why she has done this is beyond my understanding."

* * *

Update 1a (A little later on 1 May 2018): Barua has an FB post in which she rubbishes Ukil's (implied) suggestion that the impending loss the scholarship might have been the reason behind Barua's allegations.

* * *

Update 2 (2 May 2018): I am a little late to post this, but Nature India too has covered this case (in fact, this story was done even earlier than the one in The Telegraph). In their story, Biplab Das and Subhra Priyadarshini report that:

Barua's PhD guide Anindita Ukil, an assistant professor in the department, denied having forged data or being involved in any kind of scientific misconduct. “All these allegations are entirely false,” Ukil told Nature India over phone. “I have already informed the authorities of the Calcutta University and the matter is under scrutiny,” she said.Barua said she had also informed Prasanta Kumar Bag, head of biochemistry department of the University, and funding authorities – the Department of Science and Technology and Department of Biotechnology – about years of wrongdoing at the lab. Contacted, Bag also refrained from commenting saying that the issue was "under scrutiny by higher authorities".

Economics Job Market

I first learned about it -- the economics job market which happens during the annual meeting of AEA, the American Economic Association -- from this post by Noah Smith, and I found the whole thing fascinating [I am always interested in disciplinary subcultures -- like the importance of conference papers in Computer Science, or the alphabetical listing of authors in certain disciplines].

But you must listen to this fantastic Planet Money (on NPR) story what this job market does, and how it goes about it -- from the point of view of one of the job applicants (a truly brave soul -- right through the podcast, I was seriously rooting for him!) and of several employers. Absolutely fabulous!

* * *

Hat tip to Econ Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth, who is also interviewed in the Planet Money story.

If lack of reproducibility is a crisis, so is lack of producibility

The accepted practice is instead to adjust the model so that it continues to agree with the lack of empirical support.

This very Zen statement is a part of a commentary by theoretical particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder-- in Nature, no less (so it must be fashionable, if not also true) -- who writes candidly about the crisis in her field (and its neighbours: astrophysics and cosmology): Science needs reason to be trusted [Caution: paywall]. She calls it a crisis of "overproduction" (i.e., abundance) of theories, but I like to think of it as a crisis of "producibility" of experimental data.

In recent years, trust in science has been severely challenged by the reproducibility crisis. This problem has predominantly fallen on the life sciences where, it turns out, many peer-reviewed findings can't be independently reproduced. Attempts to solve this have focused on improving the current measures for statistical reliability and their practical implementation. Changes like this were made to increase scientific objectivity or — more bluntly — to prevent scientists from lying to themselves and each other. They were made to re-establish trust.

The reproducibility crisis is a problem, but at least it's a problem that has been recognized and is being addressed. From where I sit, however, in a research area that can be roughly summarized as the foundations of physics — cosmology, physics beyond the standard model, the foundations of quantum mechanics — I have a front-row seat to a much bigger problem.

I work in theory development. Our task, loosely speaking, is to come up with new — somehow better — explanations for already existing observations, and then make predictions to test these ideas. We have no reproducibility crisis because we have no data to begin with ... [Bold emphasis added]

Here's something that will makes your jaw not just drop, but go into a tailspin:

In December 2015, the LHC collaborations CMS and ATLAS presented evidence for a deviation from standard-model physics at approximately 750 GeV resonant mass2, 3. The excess appeared in the two-photon decay channel and had a low statistical significance. It didn't look like anything anybody had ever predicted. By August 2016, new data had revealed that the excess was merely a statistical fluctuation. But before this happened, high-energy physicists produced more than 600 papers to explain the supposed signal. Many of these papers were published in the field's top journals. None of them describes reality.

How good are graduate admission interviews, if job interviews are "utterly useless"?

Faculty members in almost all the Indian institutions are getting ready to interview tens (if not hundreds) of students for a handful (or a few handfuls) of PhD slots in their departments. A recent NYTimes article urges us to be mindful of limitations of this format: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews by Jason Dana.

I realize there are quite a few differences between the kind of interviews Dana describes in his article and the kind we use. For example, his "experimental" interviews were (probably) unstructured, while we may be using something more structured [such as probing candidates specifically in the areas / subfields they say they are strong in]. Also, given the overwhelmingly large number of candidates compared to the number of available slots, there's usually a pre-screening exercise which relies on previous academic record, research experience, scores / ranks in entrance exams, etc.

And yet, this article reminds us some of the pitfalls of the interview process.

Editorials by Colleagues

These days, Current Science features only guest editorials by invited contributors, and it's great to see my IISc colleagues being featured in this very exalted space. Here's a quick sample:

• Prof. Rohini Godbole: Women in STEMM: involve the institutions.

• E. Arunan: Borders in science and nations are artificial. Should we have borders within India?.

• B. Ananthanarayan: Joy of discovery as a reason for pursuing a career in science.

Picture and a Thousand Words

This, from PhD Comics, is a gem.

That's all.

A 'Special' Resonance

Resonance, the "journal of science education" published by the Indian Academy of Sciences, had something 'special' in its March issue: as Guest editors Prajval Shastri and Sudeshna Mazumdar-Leighton write in their editorial, "while this issue is no different from any other in intent, it is ‘special’ because it has an all-female authorship."

***

Hat tip to Vasudevan Mukunth's article in The Wire, which also points to special issues of Current Science and Physics News, but I am not able to locate their URL.

***

Update: The original post had a link to the special issue of Current Science; a friend alerted me that this issue has not yet been published.

"Removing Morons from the Productive Flow"

This profile of Scott Adams, the genius who created the Dilbert comics, has its focus elsewhere (his rationalizations of the rise and rise of Donald Trump during the US Presidential primaries and election), but somewhere in the middle is this gem (in bold, below) [If you are wondering why it stuck a chord, you haven't seen this ... (;-)]:

Adams’s Dilbert empire has been growing for three decades. When he launched the strip in the late ’80s, long-running staples such as Dennis the Menace, Family Circus, and Blondie seemed saccharine and dated. Adams’s creation was fresh, starring a sardonic software engineer named Dilbert; his conceited and grandiose dog, Dogbert; an incompetent boss; and a host of odd co-workers. Early installments showed Dilbert at home. When Adams refocused the strip on the workplace, it caught fire among a generation of office drones who spent their days staring at spreadsheets and slide decks. While workers had long tacked comics like The Far Side and Cathy to their felt cubicle walls, to say something about themselves and their brand of humor, here was a subversive comic about cubicle culture itself. During the ’90s, amid waves of corporate downsizing and the tech boom, a zeitgeisty Dilbert graced the covers of Newsweek, Time, and Fortune. Adams churned out Dilbert-themed calendars, knickknacks, and even a TV show. He also penned op-eds and business tomes, including The Dilbert Principle, based on the theory that companies tend to promote their least competent employees to middle management, “removing morons from the productive flow.”

* * *

Update: Wikipedia has an entry on the Dilbert Principle, in case you are interested.

Links

1. What if Sociologists Had as Much Influence as Economists? | The Upshot | Neil Irwin [See also: Is ethnography the most policy-relevant sociology? | Fabio Rojas]

2. ‘Copy and paste’ content spotted in IISER Thiruvananthapuram director’s papers | Journo's Diary | R. Prasad

In other words, "Get a Life"

Very little has been written on jealousy in academic life, and yet, anecdotal evidence suggests that it is prevalent in our profession. This is unsurprising. As Chronicle readers are well aware, academe today is a place of increasingly precarious employment conditions — where the "publish or perish" mantra is more relevant than ever and the pressure to win grant money has reached fever pitch.

In such an environment, it’s little wonder that jealousy can take hold. I’ve certainly felt my share (and I herewith apologize for privately cursing those of you who got positions and/or book contracts that I wanted). Jealousy may come with the academic turf but that’s rarely a good thing. So what can we do to better manage our envy at all stages of the academic career?

That's from Jay Daniel Thompson in The Chronicle of Higher Educationn: Maybe You’re Just a Jealous Academic. Can you spot the understatement of 2017? Hint: it's in bold.

This article eventually gets to "self-help" domain of how to deal with jealousy of the academic kind, and has an advice-list that might help you cope. The last piece of advice? "Develop interests outside the academy." In other words, "Get a Life".

From the Annals of Consumer Complaints: Boring Lectures!

From The Guardian:

Graduate sues Oxford University for £1m over his failure to get a first
Faiz Siddiqui claims ‘appallingly bad’ teaching during degree course prevented him from having a successful career

An Oxford graduate is suing the university for £1m claiming the “appallingly bad” and “boring” teaching cost him a first-class degree and prevented him from having a successful career.

Faiz Siddiqui, who studied modern history at Brasenose College, told the high court he believes he would have had a career as an international commercial lawyer if he had been awarded a first rather than the 2:1 he achieved 16 years ago.

QoTD

I am not a fan [of flag burning]. I agree that the American flag should not be disrespected. It's a sacred symbol that should be honored, whether it be on paper plates, or napkins, or banana hammocks.
-- Stephen Colbert [The Late Show (30 November 2016); the clip is also embedded below -- the relevant part starts at the 7th minute.]

Whistleblowing is Hard (and Dangerous): Theranos Edition

Just drop everything and read this absolutely gripping WSJ story on Tyler Shultz, the Theranos whistleblower (who also happens to be the grandson of former Secretary of State George Shultz, who was -- and continues to be -- associated with Theranos).

This snippet is from the section where the lawyers appear:

A few weeks later, Mr. [Tyler] Shultz was confronted by his father after arriving for dinner with his parents at their home in Los Gatos, Calif. His grandfather had called to say Theranos suspected he had talked to the Journal reporter. Theranos’s lawyers wanted to meet with him the next day.

He says he called his grandfather and asked if they could meet without lawyers. The elder Mr. Shultz agreed and invited his grandson to his house. The mood was tense but cordial, Tyler Shultz recalls, and he denied talking to any reporters. He says his step-grandmother was present during the conversation.

His grandfather asked if he would sign a one-page confidentiality agreement to give Theranos peace of mind. According to Tyler Shultz, when he said yes, his grandfather revealed that two lawyers were waiting upstairs with the agreement.

Links

• Avery Thompson in Popular Mechanics: 5 Simple Math Problems No One Can Solve. "Easy to understand, supremely difficult to prove."
• Jordana Cepelewicz in Nautilus: The Social Physics of Trump Tactics. [Published a couple of weeks before the US elections, its title could very well have been "Phase Diagram of Bad Ideas"].
• Joanna Rothkopf in Jezebel: Here's What Happens to Your Body When You Die [video; 10 minutes].