Research is a fascinating thing. Only today I read on The New Scientist that after additional observations our beloved neutrinos seem to continue their quarky behaviour and might after all be able to travel faster than the speed of light (story here). If it were true (and I still think we need to be careful), it would be a jaw-dropping finding.
Just think about it. We’re able to send people to the moon, soon even to Mars. We can operate on people’s brain while they are awake. We are about to replace solar panels with a kind of ink that contains silicium nano solar cells, which means that we can print energy cells on paper! And still we do not fully understand one of the most basic things in the world: how fast stuff can move. Just imagine what we’ll be able to do once we do understand it!
And this, dear reader, is why it’s such a privilege to be part of the group of people that can contribute to our understanding of things - even if, in Fred and Fred’s case, that involves questions about stuff which might seem much more trivial than the behaviour of neutrinos. Moreover, it is also the reason why scientists and scholars should take their job as serious as they possible can. But regrettably they do not always do so. A year or two ago, I was shocked to hear that a philosophy professor, whom at one point I was very close to working with for a year, had been fired for plagiarizing on a massive scale. And lately, there seem to be more and more cases of the same deontological tomfoolery. Only recently there was the case of a sociology professor who made up his own research data (story here, on Wikipedia no less!) and yesterday I read about a cardiology professor doing something similar (story here). And it baffles me. If you truly believe in your sacred - and yes, that's the word for me - mission as a researcher, namely to discover new information about ourselves and the world we live in, how can you then knowingly spread false information? It's beyond me.
Anyway, I'm on this high horse because today I was confronted with some bad research myself. No cases of plagiarism or anything as bad as that, but still. The last week I have been working my way through pages and pages of Latin correspondence between Erasmus and one of his Frisian acquaintances, since I have been invited to speak about the topic at the end of the month. Now when doing research I like to form my own opinion about a subject before reading papers by others that involve the same or a similar topic. Just to be objective, you know. So this morning I finally started looking at some of the articles I had gathered. One of them, by a certain Mrs. Robinson, was published in 2004 in a journal that has an IT-B ranking (with IT-A being the highest possible, think Nature or Science) and discusses some of the aforementioned correspondence while tackling a different issue. Now just imagine my jaw dropping when I discovered that not one of Mrs. Robinson's statements, not one, about these documents is correct. Apparently she misunderstood them, all of them. And so the world is left with just a little bit more false information. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson!
On her online cv (where she also proudly posted an online version of the paper horribilis) I read that Mrs. Robinson (a PhD in classics by the way) is also an artist. God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson - but stick to art in the future, will you? At least that doesn't have anything to do with the truth.
Koo-koo-ka-fucking-choo, Mrs. Robinson.
Just think about it. We’re able to send people to the moon, soon even to Mars. We can operate on people’s brain while they are awake. We are about to replace solar panels with a kind of ink that contains silicium nano solar cells, which means that we can print energy cells on paper! And still we do not fully understand one of the most basic things in the world: how fast stuff can move. Just imagine what we’ll be able to do once we do understand it!
And this, dear reader, is why it’s such a privilege to be part of the group of people that can contribute to our understanding of things - even if, in Fred and Fred’s case, that involves questions about stuff which might seem much more trivial than the behaviour of neutrinos. Moreover, it is also the reason why scientists and scholars should take their job as serious as they possible can. But regrettably they do not always do so. A year or two ago, I was shocked to hear that a philosophy professor, whom at one point I was very close to working with for a year, had been fired for plagiarizing on a massive scale. And lately, there seem to be more and more cases of the same deontological tomfoolery. Only recently there was the case of a sociology professor who made up his own research data (story here, on Wikipedia no less!) and yesterday I read about a cardiology professor doing something similar (story here). And it baffles me. If you truly believe in your sacred - and yes, that's the word for me - mission as a researcher, namely to discover new information about ourselves and the world we live in, how can you then knowingly spread false information? It's beyond me.
Anyway, I'm on this high horse because today I was confronted with some bad research myself. No cases of plagiarism or anything as bad as that, but still. The last week I have been working my way through pages and pages of Latin correspondence between Erasmus and one of his Frisian acquaintances, since I have been invited to speak about the topic at the end of the month. Now when doing research I like to form my own opinion about a subject before reading papers by others that involve the same or a similar topic. Just to be objective, you know. So this morning I finally started looking at some of the articles I had gathered. One of them, by a certain Mrs. Robinson, was published in 2004 in a journal that has an IT-B ranking (with IT-A being the highest possible, think Nature or Science) and discusses some of the aforementioned correspondence while tackling a different issue. Now just imagine my jaw dropping when I discovered that not one of Mrs. Robinson's statements, not one, about these documents is correct. Apparently she misunderstood them, all of them. And so the world is left with just a little bit more false information. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson!
On her online cv (where she also proudly posted an online version of the paper horribilis) I read that Mrs. Robinson (a PhD in classics by the way) is also an artist. God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson - but stick to art in the future, will you? At least that doesn't have anything to do with the truth.
Koo-koo-ka-fucking-choo, Mrs. Robinson.
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