It’s bezzle time: The Dean of Engineering at the University of Nevada gets paid $372,127 a year and wrote a paper that’s so bad, you can’t believe it.

“As we look to sleep and neuroscience for answers we can study flies specifically the Drosophila melanogaster we highlight in our research.” 1. The story Someone writes: I recently read a paper of yours in the Chronicle about how academic … Continue reading

No, this paper on strip clubs and sex crimes was never gonna get retracted. Also, a reminder of the importance of data quality, and a reflection on why researchers often think it’s just fine to publish papers using bad data under the mistaken belief that these analyses are “conservative” or “attenuated” or something like that.

Brandon Del Pozo writes: Born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn in the 1970’s, I came to public health research by way of 23 years as a police officer, including 19 years in the NYPD and four as a chief of police in … Continue reading

“The qualitative conclusions of our work remain the same”: Has it ever been otherwise? Click to learn more about induced brain injuries in piglets:

From the past few weeks at Retraction Watch: University of Washington (professor in the dentistry school attempting to dismiss a scandal involving conflict of interest in a promotion of homeopathic treatment) Stanford University (professor of engineering who sued a journal … Continue reading

The real problem of that nudge meta-analysis is not that it includes 12 papers by noted fraudsters; it’s the GIGO of it all

A few days ago we discussed a meta-analysis that was published on nudge interventions. The most obvious problem of that analysis was that included 11 papers by Brian Wansink and 1 paper by Dan Ariely, and for good reasons we … Continue reading

Blogs We Read

Statistics and Machine Learning Christian Robert Error Statistics Philosophy [Deborah Mayo] Observational Epidemiology [Mark Palko and Joseph Delaney] R bloggers Sharon Lohr Statistical Thinking [Frank Harrell] The Endeavour [John Cook] Thomas Lumley Visualization The Functional Art [Alberto Cairo] Junk Charts … Continue reading

A scandal in Tedhemia: Noted study in psychology first fails to replicate (but is still promoted by NPR), then crumbles with striking evidence of data fraud

About 80 people pointed me to this post by Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Leif Nelson about a 2012 article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end.” Apparently some … Continue reading