I sympathize with this. I wonder if the author might find it helpful to reimagine the thinking they do as coming up with good questions, rather than good answers. I was inspired to try to do so myself after reading this essay: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-019-1902-1
"[I]f a scientist proposes an important question and provides an answer to it that is later deemed wrong, the scientist will still be credited with posing the question. This is because the framing of a fundamentally new question lies, by definition, beyond what we can expect within our frame of knowledge: while answering a question relies upon logic, coming up with a new question often rests on an illogical leap into the unknown."
If you've ever taken a depression screener at a wellness visit, that's a consequence of this work. This paper describes how unreliable psychiatric diagnosis used to be. There were standards, but they ultimately came down to physician judgment. This created demand for more objective standards, which resulted in the "checklist" approach that we have now.
It's true. You wouldn't believe how many people I've SIGECAPS'd during my medical training. I didn't realize this article was the beginning of this approach, but it certainly helped get care to people who previously wouldn't have received it. Though I'm sure there are also many who may require intervention that aren't captured by a SIGECAPS exam. The double edged sword of the checklist manifesto, though I overall think it has been beneficial.
SIGECAPS is an acronym taught in US medicine for the diagnosis of major depressive disorder: Sleep disturbance, Interest loss, Guilt, Energy loss, Concentration loss, Appetite changes, Psychomotor agitation, Suicidality. And must have Depressed mood or Anhedonia (inability to enjoy things previously enjoyable).
The history of the SIG E CAPS acronym is also interesting, I've heard it was short for SIG (old shorthand for "to be prescribed") Energy CAPsules.
I thought about defining it up front but decided to move it to the second paragraph.
I would say it's worth talking to a doctor about how you feel. There are many things that can help. If you are in the USA, if is likely that they will use the PHQ-9 form, so consider looking at that questionaire to see how it aligns with your mood. medcalc is a common site that many of the residents at my institution use for these questionaires and other various scoring systems.
I was taught that it was more a memory device for recognizing major depressive disorder as a state of sadness and low energy. The treatment, I presume was still SSRIs first line.
The awful thing is that with at least some of those screeners you can still get people on the other side who make whatever you're self-reporting worse. When my spouse answered honestly on a postpartum survey about how she was feeling the social worker they sent in picked at my infant son's mismatching socks and suggested that she was so old she was "set in her ways" and that having a child might be too big of an adjustment for her. It set her back in a huge way and knowing what I know now I'd go to all of those appointments with her and never answer any of that stuff honestly.
It doesn't really matter how "objective" your standard is if you're still relying on individuals to try to "address" whatever the patient is reporting. People still form a negative opinion and label you really quickly no matter how hard the profession fights that perception.
Related but unrelated, but we had issue with breastfeeding and the only help that was valid was being informed to go to WIC as they could provide guidance. All medical adjacent people treated it like it was a lack of effort, when it was breaking her down and making her feel worthless. I think the WIC people helped more just in their lack of judgement made it less stressful, or it was just timing.
Our child also got stuck in the canal during birth and there was a good 30 seconds where the midwife from the hospital was trying to encourage to doctor who was to step in to let here keep trying, my kid came out white and took the longest 30-60 seconds to take their first breath. Never experienced so much dunning-kurger all at once. I had read a few week before that about medical professionals talking about how ominous a quiet birth it and was just zoned out as that was exactly what happened and I could sense all the tension. Then people from children services start demanding umbilical cord because my fiance had failed for MJ on her first prenatal vist, she quit smoking as soon as we knew and never failed a test after wards. But it all felt like an extreme lack of compassion. Then I was ostracised because I didnt want to cut the cord while I just thought my kid was dead and these social workers are trying to insert themselves in the process and its all chaos for no reason. The only good thing was a nurse pretty much told them to fuck off and wait in a nice but check yourself kinda way.
But multiple times people cared about their own ego, or their perceived power than actually attempt to do a compassionate job.
I shared this with my partner who works in palliative care. He said that it’s rare to hear people expressing deathbed regrets like this. What he hears more of is people saying that their illness is God’s punishment for a behavior pretty universally accepted as bad, especially when there’s substance abuse involved.
Does anyone know how are these patterns were intended to be applied? It seems like they might be block printed, but the fact that they're called "dyeing patterns" makes me think of some kind of resist or shibori.
I was curious myself, so I'd think resist printing such as [0] Katazome or [1] Rōketsuzome, using wax wheels. I feel like shibori would be tough for pattern accuracy but considering the craftsmanship I wouldn't be surprised to be wrong.
International students often end up subsidizing US students. Restricting student visas might end up actually increasing tuition.
Also, I disagree that $1m/year for the president of Harvard is ridiculous. That's less than the CEOs of many regional hospital systems are paid, and I think the impact of Harvard is much greater.
With you on restricting student loans for non-STEM programs, though.
What does not make sense is we let foreigners invest $500k to buy a green card and ability to live in the US.
But a young, potentially productive and educated student who would ostensibly be looking to start a family and make more productive and more patriotic Americans, who has sunk a couple hundred thousand dollars into our higher education institutions still has to go through the gauntlet to earn the right to live in the US.
I would’ve preferred a less editorialized article about this. In particular, this article has left me wondering who’s actually written fraudulent articles and whose biggest mistake was trusting the wrong collaborators.
>biggest mistake was trusting the wrong collaborators.
This is no excuse, and allowing it to be an excuse is at the root of why things are going so wrong in Science. If your name is on the paper you 100% must own every word.
There should be some agreed sanctions for this kind of thing. I would recommend that if any paper is withdrawn all the authors should be prohibited from receiving government funding for 3 years, and they should be banned from publication & citation for 5 years.
I am thinking this would change the culture quite radically.
If researchers were unable to trust their collaborators, it would mean that they would have to master and oversee every step of every process. This would stop interdisciplinary research completely and massively reduce output.
In software, this would be the equivalent of not importing a package unless you first checked the code line by line.
The system works okay now, but there's a lot of room for improvement. I generally think the best way to improve it is to require more open data so that consumers of research can validate the findings of papers.
I think that you have to trust your collaborators, but that trust is being given far too easily at the moment because there is no consequence of it being betrayed.
In the old days a single dodgy paper meant ostracism. Literally - no meeting invites, no more grants, no promotion, no moves to another department. Nothing. You sat where you were in shame until you retired. You had to do a lot of teaching and admin as well.
I do not think that this is the case now, and folks know it and are acting that way.
Even the collaborators who did not engage in fraud show a shockingly low level of concern for correcting or retracting fraudulent papers their names are attached to. At this point, I think it is best to assume all involved are guilty and they should have to demonstrate their integrity by how proactively they work to correct the errors.
Not my field, but my understanding of how these things work in big medical research factories: first few authors tend to be young researchers (maybe med students or even undergrads) trying to match residency or get into grad school. They do much of the work actually assembling the submission. The later names on the author list (who this article is taking to task) run labs or oversee research groups. Should they correct the record when it's pointed out? Yes. (But the snark and tenor of the post doesn't exactly convince someone they can admit an oversight in good faith.)
Should they be vigilant enough to check and notice these things? Of course. Some of the fakes are not subtle. Others, like the copy-paste of empty space in the lane to cover some undesirable result? Way harder to spot with the naked eye. I don't think there was great automated tech to detect image duplication in the 00's when these were published.
So your med student fudges data on a paper. The ethical answer is to expel them—"the world needs plenty of bartenders." But it appears big institutions these days are pretty invested in the sunk costs of prestige, dislike admitting error in admission or hiring, and prioritize go-along-get-along environments. It could be career limiting if students don't get any/enough pubs working in your lab. It'd a lot of hearings and paperwork to report him, plus I heard his uncle's a donor. If she got kicked out she'd lose her visa. And if I reported them, I'd be obliged to report everyone, and I'd be sunk in discipline hearings three times a year. So much easier to just... not look very hard.
It's bad science and bad ethics, but if you want better, reform the incentives. "Public" shaming by a niche newsletter... might be better than nothing, but doesn't qualify as an incentive.
They won't correct the record because they "can't admit an oversight" due to the snark in a niche newsletter...a newsletter which you then say isn't important enough to serve as an incentive? So which is it, important or not?
I would think they can't admit an oversight due to the institutional incentives you mention; the snark is irrelevant. If anything, it encourages publicity for the oversight, which is the only thing that might change the incentive.
Different things. The snark plays to individual psychology in the moment. When someone comes at you in a way that's demeaning and clearly states that they think you shouldn't have the position you have, that's a bad way to start a conversation where you're supposed to admit error. More likely, you avoid them.
To the real brass tacks incentives: yeah, it's "someone is angry on the internet" vs, "I will have to deal with a discipline process with documentation and meetings and maybe depositions and adversarial lawyers. That's not my bag, I'm a scientist. There will be volatile young people and bad feelings communicated in person, plus gossip among my close coworkers. Also undesirable. If this becomes a repeated pattern, learners might start avoiding my lab, and deans/my superiors might start asking very awkward questions." Yeah, stacked against that, angry person on the internet is a weak incentive. Even if they're right.
And the snark does matter. Because this guy writes like a YouTube comments section, and that's not how you talk to adults or solve problems in elite institutions. So the contrast in styles draws lines of "us" vs "them." And it's natural to care more about the opinions and esteem of your in-group (who talk like you) than the out-group (who deride you).
I think the snark comes from having screamed about the situation for years and years and no one listening.
Let's all remember what we are talking about here: every single one of us will know someone who will die several years early because of scientific fraud. It is reasonable to be angry as hell.
> Because this guy writes like a YouTube comments section, and that's not how you talk to adults or solve problems in elite institutions
Indeed, we've seen how the polite approach is so hard to ignore/avoid that the adults in elite institutions solve problems before snarky folks wake up!
There’s no individual psychology at play here. It’s not a conversation between peers. This person is already in the out-group by bringing this subject up at all. They have no institutional power. It’s not as if they just have to act like an adult and file some paperwork to get this fixed. They need to make a lot of noise to embarrass people who do have power into asking those awkward questions. Being tweetable (X-able?) also makes it more likely those volatile young people will hear about it before they join the lab.
In medical research no, last authors usually know little about what's going on. There are entire departments where the head puts his/her name on everything that comes out. We're talking tens of papers a year...
I tried to learn Shavian and struggled with it because of its phonetic nature. Every time I wanted to spell something, I had to think about how I pronounce the word.
"[I]f a scientist proposes an important question and provides an answer to it that is later deemed wrong, the scientist will still be credited with posing the question. This is because the framing of a fundamentally new question lies, by definition, beyond what we can expect within our frame of knowledge: while answering a question relies upon logic, coming up with a new question often rests on an illogical leap into the unknown."
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