THE DRUNKEN ASTRONOMERS

This year’s vernal equinox brought a solar eclipse that was visible across northern Eurasia. To view totality, you had to be on the Faroe Islands, 62° north between Scotland and Iceland, or the Svalbard group between Norway and the North Pole at 74° to 81° north.  I missed it entirely, and only saw the news the next day.  But I kept my head, unlike the drunken astronomers of ancient China.

(This is expanded and revised from an article published by The Sidereal Times (April 2015) of the Austin Astronomical Society.)

The story of Hsi and Ho came to my colleague Bradford S. Wade and me while we met often at The Tower Inn Cafe in Ypsilanti, across the street from Eastern Michigan University.  We had a class together, Ethics in Physics with Dr. Patrick Koehn.  After a few meetings or maybe only after a few beers, we took up a joint publication, a review of Astronomical Symbols on Ancient and Medieval Coins by Marshall Faintich.  We placed that in the Bulletin of the Society for the History of Astronomy, Issue 21, Spring 2011. 

As for the drunken astronomers, the stories vary and are often retold, especially by sky gazers, but the teaching point is easy.  Hsi  (also given as Hi or He) and Ho were the court astronomers.  Among their duties, they were responsible for predicting eclipses so that people could beat gongs, shoot arrows, and otherwise scare off the dragon that was eating the sun.  However, they spent most of their time drinking rice wine, so they not only failed to predict an eclipse, but they also slept through it.  Fortunately for all of us, the common people rallied and chased the demon away.  Hsi and Ho were executed. 

The story comes from an ancient manuscript known as The Book of Documents, which has been variously rendered as Shu-king, Shu Ching, Shujing, and Shangshu. (Wikipedia has an entry, of course: Book of Documents.)  The story of Hsi and Ho comes from the fourth part, fifth book, thirteenth chapter.  There, the chancellor, prime minister, or “prince” Yi Ying exhorts government officials not to be derelict in their duties as were Hsi and Ho. All of that happened in legendary times.  (The earliest attested date in Chinese history is equivalent to 831 BCE.)  The most likely date for the eclipse in question is October 22, 2137 BCE.

You can find some reliable modern detail at the Astronomy Today website.  Put “ancient eclipses” in the search box and it should come up first after the Google Ads.  The story of Hsi and Ho is in Part I. The story is embellished in Totality: Eclipses of the Sun, by Mark Littmann, Fred Espenak, and Ken Willcox (Oxford 1991; also on Google Books).  A brief note about the drunken Chinese astronomers, ending with an original poem, appeared in The Journal of the Astronomical Society of India, vol. 4. No. 3, Jan. 1914.  It was cited as coming from The Observatory for December 1913.  Indeed, it did appear in Volume XXXVI, Number 468, page 478. The author was C. Thomas Edgar

The pages below are from The Chinese Classics, Volume 3: The Shoo King or Book of Historical Documents by James Legge, first published by the author at Hong Kong in 1865, then reprinted with errata and corrigenda by Clarendon Press, Oxford 1893-1895.   Below these lines are lengthy glosses on the nuances of the grammar and syntax  of the ideograms.  A modern version (with only a few notes) was edited by Clae Waltham and published by Gateway Editions from Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1971.  You will see that at first Hsi and Ho are the family names of two sets of brothers.  Then, they became individuals.  Also, Legge's translation was before even the Wade-Giles system and is far from the modern Pinyang rules.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Seeing in the Dark: Your Front Row Seat to the Universe

Teaching Science with Science Fiction

Chopmarks

Sacred Silver from the Roof of the World

Another Case of Fraud in University Research

“ ...  he was immediately fired by the university, admitted to his lengthy fraud, and handed back his PhD degree.”

On the Strategy Profs blogsite (here) Prof. Freek Vermeulen (associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the London Business School) wrote about the case of Diederik Stapel.  Stapel earned a cum laude master’s (1991) and a cum laude doctorate (1997) from University of Amsterdam.  He taught at the University of Groningen (2000-2006) and then the University of Tilburg, where he launched the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research.  He was made dean of the social and behavioral sciences faculty in 2010.  (Wikipedia here.)   Then, it all fell apart.

In Vermeulen’s words:  "For years – so we know now – Diederik Stapel made up all his data. He would carefully read literature, design all the studies (with his various co-authors), set up the experiments, print out all the questionnaires, and then, instead of actually doing the experiments and distributing the questionnaires, made it all up. Just like that."

In my response on that blog site, I pointed out that loss of your degree is the appropriate remedy for academic fraud. 

One of the highlights of my studies at Eastern Michigan University was the class in “Ethics in Physics” which I took for graduate credit as a cognate elective.  The class was first created over 25 years ago by Prof. Marshall Thomsen, and has continued to top the list of such offerings by all schools.  My professor was Patrick Koehn.  (Prof. Beth Kubitskey made this her master’s thesis and also has taught the course.)  For my term paper (Google Docs here), I set academic fraud in a criminological context because very little research has been done by criminologists on this.  I also found a deep precedent for allowing the university to deal with its own problems.  The word “universitas” refers not to the collection of colleges or their classes, but to the charter which grants the institution legal standing to deal with its own members.

Academic sanctions also avoid the useless reprisals, retaliations, and retributions of the governmental courts and prisons.  

“In responding to and resolving the criminal behavior of employees, organizations routinely choose options other than criminal prosecution, for example, suspension without pay, transfer, job reassignment, job redesign (eliminating some job duties), civil restitution, and dismissal...

While on the surface, it appears that organizations opt for less severe sanctions than would be imposed by the criminal justice system, in reality, the organizational sanctions may have greater impact...  In addition, the private systems of criminal justice are not always subject to principles of exclusionary evidence, fairness, and defendant rights which characterize the public criminal justice systems. The level of position, the amount of power, and socio-economic standing of the employee in the company may greatly influence the formality and type of company sanctions.  In general, private justice systems are characterized by informal negotiations and outcomes, and nonuniform standards and procedures among organizations and crime types.”

(Hallcrest Report cited in Introduction to Private Security, Hess and Wrobleski, West Publishing, St.Paul, 1982, 1988. The Hallcrest Report I and II, by William C. Cunningham and Todd H. Taylor, et al., Butterworth-Heinemann, Boston, 1985 and 1990.)

Criminologists point to the failure of “general deterrence.” It is famous that cutpurses worked crowds gathered to watch the hanging of a cutpurse.  However, white collar crime in general and academic fraud specifically meet all the criteria for free will and rational choice.  It is planfully competent.  Academic fraud cannot be blamed on your parents, your neighborhood, or your lack of educational opportunities.  It is not a genetic disorder or a vitamin deficiency. 

Diederik Stapel gave back his doctorate.  Jan Hendrik Schön had his rescinded by the University of Konstanz.  For defrauding the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Eric Poehlman was sentenced to a year and a day in prison; but he kept his degrees.  While prison is pain and is intended to be so, a year of incarceration is nothing more than a harsh sabbatical.  Disgrace is bad enough, but the loss of your degree – having to give it back or having it taken from you – is and should be a sword over your head.

Earlier posts on this blog:

Misconduct in Science and Research

Who Guards the Guardians? links to my other blog CSI:Flint – Who Guards the Guardians? which I created after presenting to two middle school classes for "Super Science Friday" at the University of Michigan Flint campus, May 5, 2011.