She says her work has led to 938 papers being retracted.
One of the interesting parts to me is that most of her work seems to be completely manual. She seems to have an eye for seeing photoshop on microscopy images or images of gels. The biggest method of fraud that she seems to find is researchers cutting and pasting from one image to another, for example, the scientist runs a gel but the results don't work out the way they hoped, so they paste in a line from another gel to make the experiment look like it worked.
The uncomfortable part is that this is just one of many ways that you could fabricate or alter research results, and Dr. Bik is only one person finding it in her spare time. Probably a whole lot of fraud goes undetected.
"Since childhood, I’ve been “blessed” with what I’m told is a better-than-average ability to spot repeating patterns. It’s a questionable blessing when you’re focused more on the floor tiles than on the person you’re supposed to talk to. However, this ability, combined with my — what some might call obsessive — personality, helped me when hunting duplications in scientific images by eye." - Elisabeth Bik
Thanks for the link and wow! A very worthwile read. And this paragraph raised the alarm level even more for me:
> Things could be about to get even worse. Artificial intelligence might help detect duplicated data in research, but it can also be used to generate fake data. It is easy nowadays to produce fabricated photos or videos of events that never happened, and A.I.-generated images might have already started to poison the scientific literature. As A.I. technology develops, it will become significantly harder to distinguish fake from real.
This is actually one of the reasons I believe some foreign web commerce sites tend to do so well. There's a culture of filming everything. Film the product being made. Film the completed product in packaging. Film the completed product interacting with its environment and humans. Really adds to the "this product is real, and not a scam." Much larger barrier for falsification.
One of the things that surprised me was that she was identifying manipulated and duplicated images using her own eyes.
This could be done via software, and might catch more papers than the ~6k out of 100k that she did.
In the software world, there are tools for this, "software composition analysis". I worked at a company that got busted for violating GPL, and as part of settling the suit, all software had to be run through BlackDuck and all warning/issues found by the tool had to be resolved before the software could be released.
(NOTE: the software that violated GPL was from an acquisition)
The image where she found the duplications in the microscopy image demonstrates an absolutely unreal pattern recognition ability. I knew of her, but I hadn’t previously seen this essay
I recommend you put up convincing evidence that this is all that the NYT log about visitors because I don't believe that and it sounds a bit, well, glib to be honest. I don't read the nyt fwiw.
Moreover I recommend you have a slightly closer look if you are really holding up the nyt as a bastion of ethical behavior. But at least they stand up for Assange and journalism not being criminalised while doing stenography for the powerful (amongst some decent real reporting, some now being criminalized, away from the front page), right? I'm sure they'll balance their reporting about wikileaks by quoting someone who doesn't actively hate them any day now.
Anyway it should be noted that saying what you believe as you've done is the right thing and I endorse it even when defending the revenue a company that had $2.31 Billion on the books last year and has been a marker of inter-generational wealth and power for 170+ years to the family that owns it. I agree that what that looks like genuinely doesn't matter with regard to what you think is right in any ethical analysis. That goes unsaid too often imho.
>The NYT needs to make money to pay its Journalists.
Don't threaten me with a good time.
If j*urnos want money, they should choose to start acting in a way that deserves it at some point. In this case, if "The Paper of Record" needs to be regularly recorded from outside to be held to account for shoddy jobs and stitch-ups, exactly what service is it actually providing?
