Schools

[StevieB]

Thanks for posting that review Andy, it's certainly opened my eyes as to how the taxpayer is being ripped off, as regards to scientists, I can't comment as I'm not one, but I have no doubt that they are ensuring that their financing is covered, I don't blame them for that, but at the end of the day, if I am funding research, then the TRUTH must be told.

How are you funding scientific research Rich? And how do you judge what the truth is? How do you decide whether you are being ripped off or not as a taxpayer? Is it as simple as whether you agree with the results of the scientific evidence produced?

There seems to be a general consensus that there is a huge pot of money just sitting in a pile waiting for scientists to dip into to fund their latest research project or explore their latest pet theory, the results of which will match the most favourable result to allow said scientist to dip into the pot again in the future. Its a sad indictment of the publics perception of science that scientists are seen in this way. I don't know whether to laugh, cry or explode to be honest. Produce a hand cut dovetail and I am a hero. Spend six months writing a detailed scientific proposal to a peer reviewed competitive funding body and get awarded £1 million and I am a self serving results fudging finance covering scientist who is playing the system.

I need to get a proper job, clearly.

Steve.

 

[MikeG.]

Steve,

PM sent

Mike

 

[wizer]

I need to get a proper job, clearly.

It's over-rated. :wink:

 

[tnimble]

It indeed seems to be the 'public' oppinion at times scientists are receiving loads of money both from taxes and from companies (also see one of my previous posts on that). This is not the case, its hard to get funding and even harder to hold that funding. Sometimes this leads to excursive and/or ill spend funds. If the granted funds where used to backup another project or subject of used for the next year with longer projects/studies, the upcoming funds will be most certainly cut.

The only things that are questionable about some scientific research done is who funds the reseach for what reason, who is given the research (not all research is done by (proper) scientists), how are the results used and mangled by the funders and media (sections might have been removed, conclusions twisted, side observation presented as full thruths, random figures presented as correlations, etcetera).

None are the fault of the scientists!

(I'm not a scientist, however I worked for a short while on the R&D department of one of the mayor scientific institutes, providing the scientists with the equipment they need to do their thing)

 

[Digit]

Correct me if I'm wrong gentlemen but are not funds apportioned by the Science Council?
The number of outright frauds that have been perpetrated in science is apparently considerable over the years, but mere money has not always been the cause.
Imagine your grant is up for review, you feel that you are THAT close to an important result, but those in control are impatient for you to come up with something concrete.
What do you do?
You fiddle the results hoping that your results will cover it for you. If you win it's a Nobel, wrong and you are a fraud!
Even Einstein fiddled his figures to fit what Whipple told him, fraud or justified by the end result?

Roy.

 

[tnimble]

Correct me if I'm wrong gentlemen but are not funds apportioned by the Science Council?
The number of outright frauds that have been perpetrated in science is apparently considerable over the years, but mere money has not always been the cause.

There is both general / fundamental scientific research on an ongoing basis with a pool of subjects to studie and an arbitrary amount of fund to assign to some of these. And also there is scientific research on a commision basis. A company or government hires an institute / group of scientists to deliver them a report or a part / ingredient for a product. The latter has little to nothing to do with any council. Examples of this are for instance the development of new semiconductor fabrication techniques, plastic sheets that emit light, is the radiation from a cellular phone antenna harmful? are we destructing the earth by buring coal and gazoline? etcetera

Imagine your grant is up for review, you feel that you are THAT close to an important result, but those in control are impatient for you to come up with something concrete.
What do you do?
You fiddle the results hoping that your results will cover it for you. If you win it's a Nobel, wrong and you are a fraud!
Even Einstein fiddled his figures to fit what Whipple told him, fraud or justified by the end result?

Roy.

 

[StevieB]

No such thing as a Science Council as a single all encompassing entity Roy, but then again 'Science' is such an all encompassing term, covering R+D for industry, through pharmaceutical research, medical research, private research and governement and state sponsored research to name but a few. Then there is charity sponsired medical research (BHF, Wellcome Trust) and small groups that give small amounts of money for things like travel grants and equipment grants. Alot of science is also tied up in education now, particurlaly anything worked on in a university environment.

Sadly the days of Nobel or bust are long gone - any scientific endeavour of the magnitude likely to earn a Nobel prize are long term, multi-centre and comprise tens if not hundreds of researchers at a minimum over a period of many years. Falsifying a grant result for the reward as you postulate is possible on an individual level for short term single grant gain I guess, but not to anything like the reward of a Nobel prize.

Most science presents a conclusion, arrived at on the basis of investigation. It is the methodology of that investigation that is really under scrutiny when examining results - is the result reported feasible or expected based on the methodology used to arrive at it. This applies to climate change, landing on the moon or cloning a sheep. Most scientific fraud is exposed when the same experiment cannot be repeated using the methodology stated to achieve that result. This in itself tends to put a limitation on scientific fraud since someone is always going to repeat/investigate further what you have reported. Reporting something and then hoping nobody questions what you have done is not going to get you very far as a scientist I am afraid.

Steve.

 

[Maia28]

Roy: Research is funded in a number of different ways. I have held grants from charities, research councils, MoD and industry. In academia, most research is funded by the research councils which have different budgets depending on the areas, e.g. Engineering and Physical Sciences Reseach Council, Natural Environment Research Council, etc. The umbrella for all these is Research Councils UK, www.rcuk.ac.uk. Most of the funds were awarded in responsive mode, i.e. you submit a costed proposal that is peer reviewed and then assessed by a panel who may or may not make an award. The success rate varies per council and the individual area but is not high, say between 15 - 20%. Quite a large chunk of the money available is through targetted calls for proposals in specific areas that aim to tackle particular problem areas. The research budget has been shrinking in recent years. A common criticism of the funding mechanisms is that they tend to encourage safe research as it is much harder to be confident of more adventurous ideas. There are very few rolling grants. EU funding is much greater, but would take too long to describe. By the very nature of research, it will often focus on such a specialist area that its worth may often not be apparent to a non-expert. I generally believe that good quality research is funded in the UK and represents good value for the tax-payer, but it is often misrepresented in the press. However ...

Steve: I was responding to the comment about pseudo-science of which I have certainly come accross quite a number of practitioners for whom the usual rigour does not seem to apply. I really do think that dishonesty is a problem and we shouldn't stick our heads in the sand about it. As an editor I make every effort to ensure it does not occur for the articles I approve. However, there are many people who are prepared to publish the same material more than once to improve their RAE rating or even misrepresent results - this is often impossible to detect. I probably have the same feelings about my work as you, but this sadly is not always the case with some of my colleagues. The RAE is a funny thing, it works very well for me. It will change with more emphasis on individual measurable performance and I worry that will increase the temptation for some people to be less rigorous as well as discouraging the adventure of research.

Andy

 

[Digit]

Reporting something and then hoping nobody questions what you have done is not going to get you very far as a scientist I am afraid.

Which is the manner in which most frauds have been caught out in recent years of course. But as far as I can ascertain nobody ever investigated Einstein's maths well enough to detect or disprove his 'fudge factor', he owned to it years later and said that it was his biggest mistake.
Mistake or fraud though?

Roy.

 

[MikeG.]

Roy,

it was neither mistake nor fraud.

His "biggest mistake" was in removing the number (I think he called it the cosmological constant) from later versions of his work, because it has since been shown that he was indeed correct to include it in the first instance. The inclusion or not of that number amounts (I think) to a decision on whether the universe will go on expanding forever, or will one day collapse back in on itself in a "big crunch".

Serendipitously, his constant was 42.......followers of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will recognise that number as the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.

Einsein's field was theoretical physics. He postulated general laws of the Universe, but didn't experiment. Essentially he said....."this is the way I think the Universe operates" and left it to others to test and prove or disprove his theories. He was so far ahead of his time that testing his theories were virtually impossible in his day, but since then he has been shown to be right in almost every area he theorised about above the size of an atom.

Mike

 

[Digit]

When I used the phrase 'fudge factor' it was because those were his words according to my readings Mike.
He was a German citizen working as a Swiss custom's officer when he had his original ideas I understand.
His maths apparently only worked if the universe was expanding, but the wisdom of that day was that the universe was static.
So here we had a lowly custom's official with little academic standing about to challenge the 'known' principles of the universe.
If he had attempted to have that published, in Nature for example, it would have gone out to peer review.
This is the problem with that system, his chances of getting his ideas past those who had probably helped to build the established view was about zero. So he changed the maths to fit.
You tell me Mike, which would have the best chance of obtaining funding today, a proposal entitled 'The effects of non gaseous aerosols as a major contributor of Polar warming', or 'Stellar radiation as the major cause of periodic climate change'.
I am not saying that the system is wrong, it does at least stop papers on 'Atlantean History, an eye witness account!' or 'Proposals for a perpetual motion machine', but it's equally true to say that Darwin's chances of funding or publication would have been pretty poor.

Roy.

 

[MikeG.]

Roy,

he wasn't a customs officer, he was a patents clerk.

His maths required a constant to work if the universe was expanding, and he worked out what that constant would be and put it in.........then because of his own uncertainty took it out again. Then years later put it back in. He wasn't fiddling figures, or doing fraudulent work..........he was postulating. He absolutely did not change the maths to fit to get published, and I am getting tired of hearing twisted "facts" used to justify bias against science. He was actually world famous by the time he had anything to do with the cosmological constant, and would have had no problem getting anything at all published anywhere.

Darwin didn't publish a paper in a peer reviewed journal, he published a book. That option is open to any scientist.

Mike

 

[big soft moose]

You tell me Mike, which would have the best chance of obtaining funding today, a proposal entitled 'The effects of non gaseous aerosols as a major contributor of Polar warming', or 'Stellar radiation as the major cause of periodic climate change'.

I would suspect that as proposals neither would get funding as both appear to have already reached a conclusion before carrying out any research - those read more like paper titles - which are traditionally published and subject to peer review after the research has been done

 

[MikeG.]

Roy,

you dismissed the "hockey stick" previously, I believe. Well, you may well be wrong......http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7592575.stm

 

[Digit]

I didn't Mike The UN did. I have no bias against science either Mike, quite the opposite in fact. I know that Darwin didn't publish in peer reviewed publications, my point was that he would almost certainly never have been accepted under peer review as he was kicking off basically a new branch of the natural sciences.

Roy.

 

[Digit]

This is what I was referring to Mike

Cosmological constant

In theoretical physics, when Einstein originally tried to produce a general theory of relativity, he found that the theory seemed to predict the gravitational collapse of the universe: it seemed that the universe should either be expanding or collapsing, and in order to produce a model in which the universe was static and stable (which seemed to Einstein at the time to be the "proper" result), he introduced an expansionist variable (called the Cosmological Constant) whose sole purpose was to cancel out the cumulative effects of gravitation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fudge_factor

In other words he altered his ideas to fit. I'm not condemning him Mike nor anybody else nor science. I was attempting to show that had he not been generally accepted he would have had that alteration thrown at him and accusations of fraud. Nothing succeeds like success.
Checking I find that I was wrong about his employment, memory being what it is.

Roy.

 

[tnimble]

Roy,

you dismissed the "hockey stick" previously, I believe. Well, you may well be wrong......http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7592575.stm

If I may:

A new study by climate scientists behind the controversial 1998 "hockey stick" graph suggests their earlier analysis was broadly correct.

The same people, saying their previous falsified work has some fault but not as a whole.

Michael Mann's team analysed data for the last 2,000 years, and concluded that Northern Hemisphere temperatures now are "anomalously warm".

As I understand English correct, this is a very special team of scientists, would he be related to Methusalem or Dracula?

Different analytical methods give the same result, they report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So different methods over the same set of data give the same result? Good for the methods but what about the data and are the two methods correct?

...

The above does not say anything about these sientists but it does on how the press reports. How the press reports about things has large influence on public and governmental view on a subject.

The same holds for educational books and other study materials. Presentation, simplyfing, ill writing, leaving out of things.

 

[Digit]

How the press reports about things has large influence on public and governmental view on a subject.

Regrettably true. A National Geographic article posted on another forum that I post to stated that the Earth's climatic changes were due to changes in its orbit. Reading on, the article was clearly referring to the changes in the Earth's inclination.
The ensuing discussion on the forum showed that many either did not appreciate the difference or simply used the two words interchangeably.
There's nothing like a good sound bite it seems.
I see the picture of the Polar Bears stranded on a melting ice flow miles from land is another instance of people bending facts for a good headline.

Roy.

 

[andycktm]

Strange that money is involved,as ultimately this will be the
thing that ends up causing the most damage.If we do infact
have any effect on mother earth.

 

[Rich]

I can quite clearly see that I am out of my depth here, no shame in that, horses for courses, as they say, but WHAT about the OP.?

Regards,

Rich.