Enhancing Scientific Integrity in the Social and Behavioral Sciences--Nominate an Expert for an NAS workshop

 The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are soliciting nominations for a workshop on

 Enhancing Scientific Integrity: Progress and Opportunities in the Social and Behavioral Sciences - A Workshop

"This workshop will bring together researchers, journal editors, publishers, funders, and scientific association leaders to identify practical, forward-looking strategies for strengthening data integrity and transparency in the social and behavioral sciences. Participants will explore innovative tools and frameworks to detect and prevent errors, promote accountability, and reinforce public trust in research. Discussions will also consider how journals, institutions, and professional societies can adopt fair, sustainable practices that support scientific rigor while ensuring accessibility for researchers across many contexts and settings.

Deadline: November 7, 2025

Call for Experts

We invite you to submit suggestions for experts to participate in this activity. The call for experts closes on November 7, 2025 at 11:59 PM PST.

 "The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine proposes to convene a workshop to bring together diverse stakeholders, including journal editors, publishers, scientists, funding agencies, and scientific association leaders, to advance research and data integrity. The workshop will focus on identifying proactive, constructive strategies to enhance transparency and accountability in research practices. Key questions to be addressed include:

• How can the social and behavioral sciences continue to lead the way in advancing data integrity? What successful methods or frameworks from other disciplines might be adapted to strengthen these efforts?

• Could systematic, random audits of published data help detect and correct honest mistakes while discouraging malfeasance? What governance structures would ensure such efforts are fair, sustainable, and constructive? What new tools might facilitate this process?

• How can scientific journals refine their policies (e.g., review processes, data validation) to support transparency and integrity while maintaining accessibility for researchers across diverse contexts?

• What strategies can be employed to ensure potential solutions avoid placing undue burdens on researchers, especially those at institutions with limited resources?"

Fake science at scale, via organized paper mills (in PNAS and the NYT)

 Here's a recent paper from PNAS, analyzing the organized activity of paper mills producing fraudulent papers.

The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly  by Reese A. K. Richardson, Jennifer A. Byrne, and Luís A. Nunes Amaral
Edited by Daniel Acuña, University of Colorado Boulder, accepted by Editorial Board Member Mark Granovetter August 4, 2025  https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.242009212

Abstract
Science is characterized by collaboration and cooperation, but also by uncertainty, competition, and inequality. While there has always been some concern that these pressures may compel some to defect from the scientific research ethos—i.e., fail to make genuine contributions to the production of knowledge or to the training of an expert workforce—the focus has largely been on the actions of lone individuals. Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased. Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities—paper mills (i.e., sellers of mass-produced low quality and fabricated research), brokers (i.e., conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research), predatory journals, who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions—that facilitate systematic scientific fraud. Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud. Our results reveal some of the strategies that enable the entities promoting scientific fraud to evade interventions. Our final analysis suggests that this ability to evade interventions is enabling the number of fraudulent publications to grow at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science.

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And here's the story in the NYT:

Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds
A statistical analysis found that the number of fake journal articles being churned out by “paper mills” is doubling every year and a half. by Carl Zimmer

 

Doping in the Tour de France: new dimensions

 There was a time when only riders had to be tested for doping, but advances in electric motors and batteries mean that bikes too can be suspect.  However it's the riders who get the most, increasingly sophisticated scrutiny.

Here's the story from Cycling News:

Tour de France judges to study video for 'suspicious behaviour' in continued fight against motor doping
By Laura Weislo  

"For the Tour de France, the ITA has increased its traditional urine and blood doping controls and analysis to detect performance-enhancing drugs directly. They will also be emphasizing longitudinal analysis (changes over time) by expanding the blood biological passport to include steroid and hormone levels to detect markers of abuse of difficult-to-detect substances such as human Growth Hormone (hGH).

...

"During the Tour de France, ITA expects to collect upwards of 600 urine and blood samples, with 350 coming as out-of-competition tests before the Grand Depart in Lille on Saturday. They will also use data and intelligence to select samples to be retained for long-term storage and re-analysis during the allowed 10-year window. The ITA re-analysed 490 samples collected in 2015 and all came back negative."

Internet advertising: affiliate marketing scams, evolving

 Ben Edelman announces a return to his roots, detecting advertising fraud on the internet. (Remember when malware would flash unwanted pages on your browser?)

From his blog:

June 12, 2025

Advertising Fraud Detection at VPT Digital

Today I announced joining the security startup VPT Digital as Chief Scientist.  VPT operates in a space I feel I pioneered: Automated testing to find misconduct in affiliate marketing.  As early as summer 2004 (not a typo!), I was catching affiliates using adware to claim commission they hadn’t earned.  I later built automation to scale up my efforts.

Think affiliate fraud is no big deal?  I was proud to recover large amounts for my clients.  For one large client, I once proved that nine of its top ten biggest affiliates were breaking its rules – which might sound like a disaster, and in some sense it was, but ejecting the rule-breakers yielded ample funds to pay more to those who genuinely drove incremental value.  Affiliate marketing experts may also remember Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning, who faced both criminal and civil litigation for affiliate fraud – allegations that the FBI said stemmed from reports from me.  Litigation reported that defendants collected more than $20 million in 18 months.  “No big deal,” indeed.

The web is a lot messier than when I started down this path, and tricksters use a remarkable range of methods.  Reviewing VPT’s automation, I’ve been suitably impressed.  They test a range of adware, but also cookie-stuffing, typosquatting, and more.  Of course they test Windows adware and browser plug-ins, but they and have Mac and mobile capabilities too.  They test from multiple geographies, at all times of day.  Their testing is fully automated, yielding spiffy reports in a modern dashboard – plus email alerts and API integration.  It’s all the features I used to dream of building, and then some.

I’ll be working with VPT part-time in the coming months and years to continue to hone their offerings, including making their reports even more accessible to those who don’t want to be experts at affiliate fraud.  I’ll also blog about highlights from their findings.

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Earlier:

Saturday, February 15, 2014 Ben Edelman, Internet Sheriff

and (still earlier), I may have helped secure that nickname in this post:

Friday, October 10, 2008 Online advertising--Ben Edelman

 
 

 

2024 Shkreli Awards, for profiteering and dysfunction in healthcare

 Here are the 2024 Shkreli Awards, the Lown Institute’s top ten list of the worst examples of profiteering and dysfunction in healthcare, named for the infamous “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli.

"Nominees for the Shkreli Awards are compiled by Lown Institute staff with input from readers of Lown Weekly. An esteemed panel of patient activists, clinicians, health policy experts, and journalists help determine the winners. (press release | previous winners)"

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At least some of the 'prizes' they award are subject to dispute, including their choice for #1"

The labor market for OnlyFans chatters

 Here's a story by a professional writer and journalist, who appears to be a middle-aged dad, about his efforts to find and then master a job impersonating a 20-something female sex performer chatting with her fans on the website OnlyFans.

Wired has the story:

.I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn’t Pretty. Your online influencer girlfriend is actually a rotating cast of low-wage workers. I became one of them. by BRENDAN I. KOERNER

"Like many of OnlyFans’ top earners, she had hired a management agency to help keep up with her customers’ demands for personal attention. “The chat specialists they give you, that was a huge deal for me,” she said. The agency provided a team of contractors whose sole job is to masquerade as the creator while swapping DMs with her subscribers. These textual conversations are meant to be the main way that OnlyFans users can interact with the models they adore.

"The existence of professional OnlyFans chatters wouldn’t have surprised me so much if I’d given just a few moments’ thought to the mathematical realities of the platform. OnlyFans has thrived by promising its reported 190 million users that they can have direct access to an estimated 2.1 million creators. It’s impossible for even a modestly popular creator to cope with the avalanche of messages they receive each day. The $5.6 billion industry has solved this logistical conundrum by entrusting its chat duties to a hidden proletariat, a mass of freelancers who sustain the illusion that OnlyFans’ creators are always eager to engage—sexually and otherwise—with paying customers.

...

"Gradually I realized that my best shot at understanding how chatters operate would be to join their ranks. As an English major who’s been fortunate enough to make a living with words for more than 20 years, I naively assumed I was qualified to land a gig. And as a writer, I was curious to learn what kind of artistry the job would require—what it takes to ensure that OnlyFans users never doubt they’re really interacting with the objects of their desire.

"AS I EMBARKED on my job hunt, I asked the owner of a top-tier OnlyFans agency for tips on how to make myself an appealing candidate. He was pessimistic about my odds of getting hired, mainly because I’m American. He said agencies tend to favor contractors who reside in lower-wage countries. That insight was borne out as I poked around the online communities where chatters find help-wanted ads; though the vast majority of OnlyFans users live in the US, the bulk of my competitors were based in places like the Philippines and Venezuela. Judging by their posts on the r/OnlyFansChatter subreddit and in an invite-only Facebook group, these workers are relatively well-educated, with university-level English and ace typing skills that some developed in high-pressure call centers. They also put up with all manner of abuses: OnlyFans agencies are notorious for stiffing their freelancers, forcing them to work 70-hour weeks, and summarily firing them if they miss a shift due to a power outage."

Fraud in physics? Room temp superconductors, again

 It should come as no surprise that it's not only social sciences that can be roiled by accusations of research misconduct.

Here's a story in Nature about a scientist who had a paper retracted from Nature, and then had another accepted, and then also retracted, both about room temperature superconductors.  It's a long, detailed story, but it says something about both science and about peer review.

Superconductivity scandal: the inside story of deception in a rising star’s physics lab. Ranga Dias claimed to have discovered the first room-temperature superconductors, but the work was later retracted. An investigation by Nature’s news team reveals new details about what happened — and how institutions missed red flags.   By Dan Garisto

"A researcher at the University of Rochester in New York, Dias achieved widespread recognition for his claim to have discovered the first room-temperature superconductor, a material that conducts electricity without resistance at ambient temperatures. Dias published that finding in a landmark Nature paper1.

"Nearly two years later, that paper was retracted. But not long after, Dias announced an even bigger result, also published in Nature: another room-temperature superconductor2.

...

" Nature has since retracted his second paper2 and many other research groups have tried and failed to replicate Dias’s superconductivity results. ...The scandal “has damaged careers of young scientists...

...

"Three previous investigations ... by the University of Rochester did not find evidence of misconduct. But last summer, the university launched a fourth investigation,... That fourth investigation is now complete and, according to a university spokesperson, the external experts confirmed that there were “data reliability concerns” 

...

"Nature retracted the CSH paper on 26 September 2022, with a notice that states “issues undermine confidence in the published magnetic susceptibility data as a whole, and we are accordingly retracting the paper”.

...

"Felicitas Heβelmann, a specialist in retractions at the Humboldt University of Berlin, says misconduct is difficult to prove, so journals often avoid laying blame on authors in retractions. “A lot of retractions use very vague language,” she says.

...

"The lack of industry-wide standards for investigating misconduct leaves it unclear whether the responsibility to investigate lands more on journals or on institutions.

...

"After Nature published the LuH paper in March 2023, many scientists were critical of the journal’s decision, given the rumours of misconduct surrounding the retracted CSH paper.

...

"All four referees agreed that the findings, if true, were highly significant. But they emphasized caution in accepting the manuscript, because of the extraordinary nature of the claims. Referee 4 wrote that the journal should be careful with such extraordinary claims to avoid another “Schön affair”, referring to the extensive data fabrication by German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, which has become a cautionary tale in physics and led to dozens of papers being retracted, seven of them in Nature. Referees 2 and 3 also expressed concern about the results because of the CSH paper, which at the time bore an editor’s note of concern but had not yet been retracted. 

...

"When asked why Nature considered Dias’s LuH paper after being warned of potential misconduct on the previous paper, Magdalena Skipper, Nature’s editor-in-chief, said: “Our editorial policy considers every submission in its own right.” The rationale, Skipper explains, is that decisions should be made on the basis of the scientific quality, not who the authors are."

Incentives and mis-incentives in science (Freakonomics part II)

 Freakonomics has a second post on fraud in science, and you can listen or read the transcript here:

Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped?

Two quotes stood out for me:

1. VAZIRE: Oh, I don’t mind being wrong. I think journals should publish things that turn out to be wrong. It would be a bad thing to approach journal editing by saying we’re only going to publish true things or things that we’re 100 percent sure are true. The important thing is that the things that are more likely to be wrong are presented in a more uncertain way. And sometimes we’ll make mistakes even there. Sometimes we’ll present things with certainty that we shouldn’t have. What I would like to be involved in and what I plan to do is to encourage more post-publication critique and correction, reward the whistleblowers who identify errors that are valid and that need to be acted upon, and create more incentives for people to do that, and do that well.

...

2. BAZERMAN: Undoubtedly, I was naive. You know, not only did I trust my colleagues on the signing-first paper, but I think I’ve trusted my colleagues for decades, and hopefully with a good basis for trusting them. I do want to highlight that there are so many benefits of trust. So, the world has done a lot better because we trust science. And the fact that there’s an occasional scientist who we shouldn’t trust should not keep us from gaining the benefit that science creates. And so one of the harms created by the fraudsters is that they give credibility to the science-deniers who are so often keeping us from making progress in society.

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Earlier:

Sunday, January 14, 2024

"Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia?" Freakonomics interviews Max Bazerman and others

"Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia?" Freakonomics interviews Max Bazerman and others

Below is the latest Freakonomics podcast (and transcript), on fraud in academia.  Those most in the headlines weren't available to be interviewed, but their coauthor (and my longtime HBS colleague) Max Bazerman gives his perspective.

Also interviewed are the Data Colada authors/data sleuths Leif Nelson,  Uri Simonsohn, and Joe Simmons (with some clues about the name of their blog), and Brian Nosek, who founded the prizewinning Center for Open Science (https://www.cos.io/ 

Here it is:

Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia?  Some of the biggest names in behavioral science stand accused of faking their results. Freakonomics EPISODE 572.

######

And here are two paragraphs from Max's HBS web page (linked above), suggesting more to come:

"I have been connected to one of the most salient episodes of data fabrication in the history of social science – involving the signing first effect alluded to above. I am working on understanding all known social science frauds in this millennium. Social science also struggles with a broader problem, namely the fact that many studies fail to replicate due to faulty research practices that have become common in social science. Most replication failures can be traced back to the original researchers twisting their data to conform to their predictions, rather than from outright fraud. Trying to produce “significant” results, they may run a study multiple times, in a variety of ways, then selectively report the tests that worked and fail to report those that didn’t. The result is the publication of conclusions that do not hold up as accurate. Both problems – outright data fabrication and this reporting bias that shapes results – need to be tackled, so all of us in academia can publish results that are replicable and can help create value in society.

         "The last dozen years have witnessed multiple efforts to reform social science research to make it more credible, reproducible, and trusted. I am writing a book on reforming social science, which will provide an account of recent data fabrications, and highlight strategies to move forward to create more credible and impactful scientific research."

Regulating research and research misconduct

 Peer review is a clunky process that often misfires, but it helps to keep up the quality of published research. Much the same can be said about procedures for investigating allegations of research misconduct: they help clean up the research record, but they can also harm the innocent (particularly when accusations may be weaponized against competitors).*

Nature has the story of an investigator whose research was put on hold for four years before the accusations against him were dismissed after a lengthy investigtion:

‘Gagged and blindsided’: how an allegation of research misconduct affected our lab. Bioengineer Ram Sasisekharan describes the impact of a four-year investigation by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which ultimately cleared him.  by Anne Gulland

"In May 2019, a phone call to Ram Sasisekharan from a reporter at The Wall Street Journal triggered a chain of events that stalled the bioengineer’s research, decimated his laboratory group and, he says, left him unable to help find treatments for emerging infectious diseases during a global pandemic.

"The journalist had rung Sasisekharan, who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, for his comment on an article in the journal mAbs that had been published a few days previously1. The article alleged that Sasisekharan and his co-authors had “an intent to mislead as to the level of originality and significance of the published work”.

...

"At first, Sasisekharan assumed this was a storm he could weather by providing scientific evidence to refute the allegation, which related to two papers he had published with collaborators, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)2 and Cell Host & Microbe3. But then, MIT received a formal complaint of research misconduct against Sasisekharan, triggering an internal investigation that took more than three years and only concluded this March, when he was exonerated.

...

"Although the accusation had a huge impact on him in terms of his reputation, it was even harder for his staff, he says. “A lab is like a family — you have undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdocs. The culture of a group and how we communicate is what makes it vibrant, and it was terrible to see how the lab suffered as a consequence of these very public allegations.” He adds: “You get really isolated, you stop being invited to things. There was this dark cloud hanging over us because we just couldn’t talk about it openly or defend ourselves.”

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*the postscript of this previous post comes to mind.

Symposium on Research Integrity: Replicability and outright malfeasance. November 24 in Berlin

 Research integrity has been in the news lately, concerning low levels of replicability in some kinds of research, together with more intentional (but probably/hopefully less widespread) problems.  Here's a forthcoming symposium:

Symposium on Integrity in Research

Place and time: hybrid event on November 24, 2021.

"Symposium topic: Research Integrity is a controversial topic within academia, but also in public discourse. Prominent cases of scientific misconduct capture the limelight, but recently a multitude of issues beyond the classical triad of plagiarism, falsification, and fabrication have taken center stage, many of which concern the quality and rigor of research and further challenge the trustworthiness of science. These include selective publication and file-drawer problems, various biases, as well as the general reproducibility or robustness of research results. At the same time, open, inclusive, and creative cultures of research in teams and organizations have been threatened by practices that prioritize outputs, as demonstrated by numerous examples of insufficient mentoring, unfair authorship practices, or intransparency about career progress for younger researchers. All these issues have long histories of discussions about improving scientific methods, however, views differ on how important these issues are, and whether all disciplines are affected equally. While some argue that there is only one scientific method, requiring universal standards for robust evidence, others emphasize the diversity of research cultures and the mutual criticism and learning that can result from this diversity.

"As scientific expertise becomes more important in and for the public, it becomes apparent that scientific findings are often provisional, subject to correction, and scientific experts may disagree. There are no simple either-or answers. While it seems indisputable that scientific evidence should be subject to the highest possible standards and be appropriate to the context, it is nevertheless necessary that these standards evolve as scientific methods and research questions progress. For urgent societal problems - such as pandemics - we may even be willing to lower these standards. For new problems, appropriate standards will only emerge after much experimentation and debate. The need for such constant debate is familiar to scientists, but can be disconcerting to the public. Standardization - both in the sense of setting standards and in the sense of homogenization - of research can therefore run the risk of undermining, rather than securing, the progress of knowledge. As a result, the integrity of research must remain a topic for debate, as it is expected to ensure both the robustness and innovation of research while meeting the expectations of different research cultures and the public.

"As a contested topic, research integrity encompasses a wide range of actors, platforms and organizations, policies and measures. The symposium will bring together participants from research, practice and policy to map this heterogeneous field, provide evidence of its effectiveness and analyze its (future) development.

"Keynotes and formats

"The symposium is organized as a hybrid event and will include keynotes by Professor Lorraine Daston (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin / University of Chicago) and Professor Dava J. Newman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology / MIT Media Lab).

"Other international and national experts will be invited together with the event's guests to discuss and reflect on the current state of research integrity and its future development. Interactive and inclusive formats connecting on-site participants and digital guests worldwide will ensure a sustained exchange on a topic of central importance for the future of science.

The symposium is organized in concurrence with the Einstein Foundation Berlin’s “Einstein Award for Promoting Quality in Research” that will take place later the same evening.

Registration, access and program

Participation in the symposium is free of charge. Further details on registration, access and the program of the event will be published on this page soon.

Contact  Nele Albrecht, Scientific Coordinator for Research Quality  Email: core@berlin-university-alliance.de 

Fake rhino horn

When is it ok to fight one repugnant transaction with another?  The New York Times has a story of fighting the (repugnant) sales of rhinoceros  horn by flooding the market with fake rhinoceros horn, i.e. fighting the species-endangering trafficking of rhino horn by selling fakes.  Of course the success of such a strategy for reducing poaching depends on whether fakes are a substitute or a complement for the real thing--e.g. it will fail if the fakes increase the size of the market in ways that increases poaching, rather than satisfying the demand more cheaply (or if fear of convincing fakes reduces demand...)

Scientists Created Fake Rhino Horn. But Should We Use It?
Experts are divided over whether flooding the Asian market with convincing artificial rhino horn would help or hurt rhinos’ survival.  By Rachel Nuwer

"In Africa, 892 rhinos were poached for their horns in 2018, down from a high of 1,349 killed in 2015. The decline in deaths is encouraging, but conservationists agree that poaching still poses a dire threat to Africa’s rhino population, which hovers around 24,500 animals.

Now, in the hopes of driving down the value of rhino horn and reducing poaching even more, scientists have created a convincing artificial rhino horn made from horsehair.

... 

Dr. Vollrath believes his artificial horn could be used to covertly flood the market with a cheap, convincing replacement, reducing the demand that leads to rhinos being slaughtered. He also hopes it might provide an educational tool for “demystifying that rhino horn’s something very special,” he said.

...

"Critics say that fake rhino horn risks stimulating demand for real horn, and that it would complicate policing. “There’s already scarce resources for wildlife crime and we don’t want to make it even more difficult for law enforcement,” said Ms. Swaak-Goldman, who works with governments and law enforcement agencies.

Peter Knights, chief executive officer of WildAid, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending illegal wildlife trade, added that the market in Vietnam is already flooded with convincing fakes, like water buffalo horn, which accounts for up to 90 percent of what’s sold as rhino horn. “It’s widely known that there is a lot of fake product out there, so this experiment is already running,” Mr. Knights said."

*************

See also

The Economics of Synthetic Rhino Horns

Chen, Frederick. "The Economics of Synthetic Rhino Horns." Ecological Economics 141 (2017): 180-189.

32 Pages Posted: 24 Aug 2016 Last revised: 10 Aug 2017

Frederick Chen

Wake Forest University

Date Written: June 1, 2017

Abstract

To examine the potential impact of synthetic horns to reduce rhino poaching, a formal model of the rhino horn market in which there exist firms with the capability to produce high quality synthetic horns is presented and studied. The analysis shows that whether the availability of synthetic horns would decrease the equilibrium supply of wild horns -- and how much the reduction would be -- depends on market structure -- i.e., how competitive the synthetic horn production sector is -- and on how substitutable the synthetic horns are for wild horns. The implications of these results for conservation policies are derived and discussed. Synthetic horn producers would benefit more by promoting their products as being superior to wild horns, but this could increase horn prices and lead to more rhino poaching. For conservation purposes, it may be beneficial to incentivize firms to produce inferior fakes -- synthetic horns that are engineered to be undesirable in some respect but difficult for buyers to distinguish from wild horns. The analysis also shows that promoting competition in the production of synthetic horns in general is desirable from a conservation standpoint as synthetic horn producers may prefer to keep prices at a high enough level that could still encourage significant amount of poaching.

Someone is impersonating me on LinkedIn

An alert MIT grad student received a LinkedIn request that appeared to be from me, except not quite, and was kind enough to let me know. (In fact I don't have a LinkedIn account...)

There is someone on LinkedIn, it turns out, pretending to be me--same name, same jobs at Harvard and Stanford, same 2012 Nobel prize. Here's his profile:
 https://www.linkedin.com/in/alvin-roth-a37995186/

If you have a LinkedIn account, you can go to that profile, click on the three dot link, and get to a link called Report, one of whose options is to 'report an impersonator'.  (You can't send any explanatory text, so maybe getting many such reports will prompt LinkedIn to do something, where one or two haven't yet done the trick...)

thanks,
al

p.s. Here's the LinkedIn help page for reporting fake profiles (if you have a LinkedIn account).
***************
Update: LinkedIn followed up pretty quickly, and apparently nuked the fake account:

Response (06/06/2019 23:02 CST)

Hi Alvin,

I hope this email finds you well and that you are having a fantastic day, I'm Heisenberg from the Safety Operations Team and I'll be happy to assist you!

Thanks for informing us of this situation.

It is against the terms of LinkedIn's User Agreement and Professional Community Policies to impersonate another person on the website. We'll take the appropriate action based on the results of our investigation.

Thanks for your assistance in making LinkedIn a professional and trustworthy site.

Regards,

Heisenberg
LinkedIn Safety Operations Support Specialist 

Conference housing pirates--the (criminal) market for hotel rooms

Here's a scam I hadn't encountered before.

I will be speaking at a transplant conference in February, and last week my phone rang and someone asked me if I had already made my hotel reservations, and offered to make them for me. I declined, and emailed the conference organizer asking if this was how housing was being arranged. In reply I got the following (slightly redacted) email, addressed to all the speakers....

"Dear ... Faculty,

I have received word from two speakers who advised me that they were contacted by a company called Expo Housing. (They can go by other names too) xxx told me she was contacted by a xxx who left an 866 call back number.

This company ...has NOT been contracted to organize, sell or arrange housing for anyone attending or speaking at the [conference] taking place in February 2016 ....

Please DO NOT BOOK housing with anyone. As a speaker you will receive a travel and housing survey from me or another member of the  staff located in the ... National Office. Please contact me immediately if you are contacted by anyone trying to book your housing. 

Our housing website is under construction at this time but again, as a speaker your housing will be arranged by  staff.

Housing pirates or hijackers are illegal entities who "sell" hotel rooms. These rooms can exist or not exist. Often times your money is lost. Typically these people target large meetings like the American Transplant Congress, but no meeting is safe. Any rooms booked through a pirate are not guaranteed by the group nor will they be included in the [conference] block of rooms. "

  

Cheating in China on (American) college admissions

Inside Higher Ed has the story: In China, No Choice But to Cheat?

July 9, 2015 By

Elizabeth Redden

"EUGENE, Ore. -- Is the admission process broken for Chinese applicants to American colleges?

Variations of that question came up again and again during sessions on Wednesday at the Overseas Association for College Admission Counseling [OACAC] conference. Persistent concerns about standardized test fraud, doctored transcripts and fake admission letters -- and the role of agents in helping to "pollute" the application process (as one session description put it) -- are causing some to worry that Chinese students might think cheating is their only choice.

"We need to make it [the application process] safe for honest applicants," said Terry Crawford, the chief executive officer and co-founder of InitialView, a video interviewing company based in Beijing.

"There's a perception in China that the system is rigged, that if you pay enough money you're going to get the results that you want," Crawford said. He cited a recent China Newsweek article laying out the process and prices for cheating on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) as just one example of the type of story that feeds into this perception (the reporter received test answers during the exam via a small, wireless-enabled watch)."

**************

Interestingly, Initial View, the company that Terry Crawford and Gloria Chyou founded in China, was initially founded to address the problem of fraud in English language tests, by offering applicants the opportunity to make a video of an unscripted interview that they conduct, to be sent to colleges, who can then confirm the fluency of the speaker, and later verify that the student who enrolls is the one who took the interview.

Citation collaboration

"Impact factors" have become important to journals, and efforts to manipulate them come to light from time to time. Here's a Brazilian story from the journal Nature: Brazilian citation scheme outed
Thomson Reuters suspends journals from its rankings for ‘citation stacking’.

"Mauricio Rocha-e-Silva thought that he had spotted an easy way to raise the profiles of Brazilian journals. From 2009, he and several other editors published articles containing hundreds of references to papers in each others’ journals — in order, he says, to elevate the journals’ impact factors.

"Because each article avoided citing papers published by its own journal, the agreement flew under the radar of analyses that spot extremes in self-citation — until 19 June, when the pattern was discovered. Thomson Reuters, the firm that calculates and publishes the impact factor, revealed that it had designed a program to spot concentrated bursts of citations from one journal to another, a practice that it has dubbed ‘citation stacking’. Four Brazilian journals were among 14 to have their impact factors suspended for a year for such stacking. And in July, Rocha-e-Silva was fired from his position as editor of one of them, the journal Clinics, based in São Paulo."

Are behavioral results more likely to be exaggerated than biological results?

That's the claim (reported in the blog Retraction Watch) of

"a new paper in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that it’s behavioral science researchers in the U.S. who are more likely to exaggerate or cherry-pick their findings.

For the new paper, Daniele Fanelli — whose 2009 paper in PLoS ONE contains some of the best data on the prevalence of misconduct — teamed up with John Ioannidis, well known for his work on “why most published research findings are false.” They looked at

1,174 primary outcomes appearing in 82 metaanalyses published in health-related biological and behavioral research sampled from the Web of Science categories Genetics & Heredity and Psychiatry and measured how individual results deviated from the overall summary effect size within their respective meta-analysis.

And while studies

whose outcome included behavioral parameters were generally more likely to report extreme effects, and those with a corresponding author based in the US were more likely to deviate in the direction predicted by their experimental hypotheses, particularly when their outcome did not include additional biological parameters.

But they didn’t find the same to be true for non-behavioral studies.

Although this latter finding could be interpreted as a publication bias against non-US authors, the US effect observed in behavioral research is unlikely to be generated by editorial biases. Behavioral studies have lower methodological consensus and higher noise, making US researchers potentially more likely to express an underlying propensity to report strong and significant findings.

So where might this predisposition come from, ask the authors?

A complete explanation would probably invoke a combination of cultural, economic, psychological, and historical factors, which at this stage are largely speculative. Our preferred hypothesis is derived from the fact that researchers in the United States have been exposed for a longer time than those in other countries to an unfortunate combination of pressures to publish and winner-takes-all system of rewards (20, 22). This condition is believed to push researchers into either producing many results and then only publishing the most impressive ones, or to make the best of what they got by making them seem as important as possible, through post hoc analyses, rehypothesizing, and other more or less questionable practices (e.g., 10, 13, 22, 26). Such a pattern of modulating forces may gradually become more prevalent also in other countries currently and in the near future (18, 20, 21)."

...
"And Fanelli was also quick to point out that this kind of exaggeration doesn’t seem to be exclusive to the U.S.

The US are an ideal subject because they are relatively homogeneous and yet very big and scientifically productive, so it was easy for us to compare the US to the rest of the world. And of course the US-effect was especially interesting, since it helped us exclude classic explanations, such as editorial biases and simple file-drawer effects. But we suspect that with higher statistical power we would observe specific biases in other countries, in Europe and elsewhere, possibly limited to specific fields and periods in time.

Before opening the floor to what we hope will be a robust discussion, we’ll close with lovely description of science that opens the paper:

Science is a struggle for truth against methodological, psychological, and sociological obstacles."

Someone was pretending to be me on Google+ (a story with a happy ending)

The internet is home to a variety of scams, and some of them involve trying to manipulate Google search results. So I was surprised and dismayed, but not entirely shocked, when I noticed that someone was pretending to be me, by establishing a Google+ page for a company called Market Design, whose web page was....this blog.

What could be in it for them?  Well, maybe they were really trying to pretend that by hiring them you were hiring me. But maybe they just were moving up in Google searches through the links that this blog gets.  Here's what you saw if you searched for "market design" on Google:

The first result, on the left, is my blog. But there's an item under it called "Google+ page" and an address, which both link to the spoofer, who is also on the right, with a phone number and a map, and a picture that if you click on it gets you to one of my blog posts.

If you clicked on the link that says Google+ page under the link to my blog, you got to this page, on which my blog URL was clearly displayed as the company web page:

On 4/7/13 I filled out a problem report on the Google+ profile page, and I wrote a review disclaiming any connection between their site and me or my blog...

Apparently Google pays attention to this kind of complaint. When I checked back on 4/9/13 the spoofer was already nowhere to be found.

A recent email confirmed this:

From: Google Maps [mailto:noreply-local-issues@google.com]

Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 1:09 PM

To: Roth, Alvin

Subject: Google Maps Problem Report - Action taken