Springer Closes Wall of Shame

Springer Nature publishing closed the “Wall of Shame” website that recorded the retraction of medical research which failed for lack of procedural integrity. The website was pubished under the banner of Cureus, an open-access, peer-reviewed medical journal.

 

 

This is their statement:

Let’s talk about the Wall of Shame. As a peer-reviewed medical journal, we have a fundamental responsibility to ensure that potentially dangerous medical misinformation is not published. With traditional research integrity methods sometimes falling short, we decided to conduct an experiment by highlighting authors who have committed egregious ethical violations as well as the institutions that enabled them. While we will never abandon this responsibility, we have decided to remove the Wall of Shame tomorrow, May 12th, 2023.

 

Why, you may be asking? Especially when the Cureus community of authors, readers and reviewers were overwhelmingly supportive? We recognize that this is an ongoing problem, but we have determined that there are better ways of addressing academic fraud and dishonesty than by publicly sharing lists of authors. We wish to recenter the focus on correcting the academic record, as that is the ultimate goal of any correction or retraction. We will continue to vigorously investigate allegations of academic fraud and dishonesty, and we will do so objectively, without levying judgment on authors deemed to have acted unethically.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Dishonest Scientists: Who is the Guardian? 

20 Percent of Scientists are Crooks 

Science Fair Science Fraud 

Misconduct in Science and Research 

Eyewitness Testimony: Popper, Wittgenstein, and the Innocence Project 

 

Amateur Astrophotography is Baloney

“Are visual observers a dying breed?” is a topic on The Sky Searchers discussion board. It does not refer to the book The Last Stargazers by Emely Levesque but to the trend among amateurs to invest in cameras and software for capturing and processing images. The work also requires a special telescope—now very common—generally a larger objective eight to 14 inches (200 to 350 mm) with an equatorial mount with a tracking motor to keep the instrument aligned to the target for hours. Some astrophotography (AP) enthusiasts use traditional 35 mm digital single lens reflex (DSLR) cameras though charge coupled devices (CCD) and single-chip cameras are also common. Then, there is the post-processing. After the computerized (or computer controlled) camera snaps hundreds of long exposures (one to three minutes each), the images are “stacked” in software. Then the images also are manipulated with color filters to create a pleasing depiction of the object. To me, that is art, not science.

They decide in advance what they want for the product and they manipulate the data to achieve the effects they desire.

The Journal of Irreproducible Results was a humor magazine for scientists. Launched as a mimeographed samizdat in 1955, it remained popular for over 45 years. “A Drastic Cost Saving Approach to Using Your Neighbor’s Electron Microscope” by Aalbert Heine offered a photomicrograph that was captioned “Fig. 1: A eutectic mixture of quartz and plagioclase … Fig. 2: A cross section through the skin of a peripatus … Fig. 3: The surface of a root hair of a quadruploid species of crabgrass. … Fig. 4: Fragment of a hickory ax handle. …” 

And, so too, could these pretty pictures be almost any kind of target. Without spectroscopic data—or even right ascension, declination, and local time—the reader, reviewer, or following researcher has no way to gauge the validity of the data. And, more to the point, no objective way to reproduce it. These are irreproducible results. 

Interpretations of the Rosette Nebula (Caldwell 49)

I do believe that photography is a powerful tool for the science of astronomy. On the same amateur discussion boards, some observers will post a snapshot along with their narrative. The photograph is a valid record. Early in its development spectroscopy came to depend on photography to provide the primary record. Photographic records of spectra have been replaced by digitized data, but analog images of the spectral lines remain important and valuable. 

The stars are pretty at any magnification.

On that basis, I just signed up for a class in astrophotography. As an observer without AP equipment, I paid the same price as the other client learners who will be bringing their gear to the night of classroom training (virtual), the night of observing at the Austin Astronomical Society dark sky site, and the follow-up class in post-processing. The cost was $250. By comparison, I also paid $130 for a class in astrophysics in order to learn the vocabulary and concepts of astronomy for my volunteer work as an editor with the American Astronomical Society.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Emily Levesque and The Last Stargazers 

Is Physics a Science? 

Backyard Astronomy 

Turn Left at Orion 

Redshift: Six Years with Amateur Astronomy 

The Perfect Machine 

 

Cosmos: A Spacetime Travesty

Watching this on DVD with the captions on allowed me to identify an array of failures of science, reason, and fact. 

The curtain opened with a quote from Carl Sagan: “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” The rest of the series denies that and betrays Sagan’s legacy with frequent allusions to “alternate universes” and “alternate realities.” But those do not exist except as subsets of the universe: all that ever was, is, or will be. That was Carl Sagan’s worldview; and it is the metaphysics and epistemology of rational-empiricism which is the scientific method. But the scientific method is not applied in this series while vague assertions and imaginative claims are touted as “great mysteries” and even “miracles.” 

The failure to adhere to the scientific method led to a cascade of ignorant statements about evolution and the origin of species. Contrary to the narrative of how wolves and humans learned to get along (Episode 2: Some of the Things that Molecules Do), the fact is that crosses of wolves and dogs can produce fertile offspring. They are not species as Darwin defined them. Neither are polar bears. 

Discussing the life and work of Sir Isaac Newton, (Episode 3: When Knowledge Conquered Fear) Dr. Tyson never mentions the fact that Newton’s theory of gravity—powerful as it was in defining not just a branch of science, but the worldview of a civilization—cannot be extended beyond two bodies in empty space. Any 3-body or n-body problem can only be solved for specially restricted cases or by repetitive numerical methods and reliance on compiled tables of direct observations. 

If you stop to read the words and reflect on the content, you realize that there is at once more and less here than meets the eyes and ears. That is a message from the opening of Episode 6: Deeper and Deeper Still, and it is presented in a way that denies the legacy of Carl Sagan. Dr. Tyson says: “Seeing is not believing. Our senses deceive us. Even the stars are not what they appear to be. The cosmos as revealed by science is stranger than we ever could have imagined. Light, and time, and space, and gravity conspire to create realities which lie beyond human experience.” 

But discovering the cosmos is the human experience. Epistemology, psychology, and physiology all inform us that our senses are accurate and precise. Why are the senses of bees, birds, and beavers reliable for them, but ours are specially cursed?  Like them all, we, too, evolved on Earth and adapted to its changing environments. Our senses are in and of the world.  Moreover, we invent and construct transducers – telescopes, microscopes, electroscopes, spectroscopes – that extend and enhance our senses. Would you suggest that the rings of Saturn and the nucleus of a paramecium are not real?

We fail ourselves with bad ideas that deny the evidence delivered by our senses. The scientific method unites the rational and experiential, the theoretical and practical, the synthetic and analytic. Physical reality does not plot against us. We are in and of the universe. That was Carl Sagan’s message from the very beginning.

Episode 14: The Immortals includes several errors across the curriculum of general science. Attempting to explain that we are broadcasting messages into the cosmos, Dr. Tyson offers Project Diana, an effort of the US Army Signal Lab to reflect radar with the Moon as the target. However, our electrical signals were already going out for a hundred years because just closing and opening the DC circuits of telegraphs from the 1840s caused electro-magnetic pulses. And radio transmissions began in the next generation. Anyone who knows the work of Carl Sagan knows that Contact gave the honor of the first the television broadcast into outer space to the opening of the 1936 Olympics. As for Project Diana, contrary to the cartoon, the radar signals from the Earth station did not go sweeping past the Moon. They were targeted to be as close to a lunar diameter as possible in order to maximize the return signal. Most of that, about 95% of the reflection, was scattered into space. But that is not what we were shown. 

Dr. Tyson’s script had him say that the civilizations of 2200 BCE all collapsed because of a worldwide drought. It was easy to claim in 2014. By 2018 that event was arguable. (Read about the Meghalayan debate.) Even so, the script says that among the civilizations that collapsed in 2200 BCE was that of Greece, but Greece had no such civilization then. 

The main point of Episode 14 was that life on Earth could have originated with entities in meteorites. But where did those organisms come from? Cosmos says that they evolved on other planets and were hurled into space by asteroid impacts on those alien worlds. But, then where did they come from? We have an infinite chain of antecedents. The fact is that long polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) such as naphthalene (C₁₀H₈) and anthracene (C₁₄H₁₀), are known to exist in nebulae. Dr. Tyson’s script correctly identified carbon as the key to life on Earth. And carbon seems plentiful in free space. 

Dr. Tyson says that bacteria from outer space are constantly and continuously landing on Earth in meteorites. He suggests that perhaps all life on Earth evolved from such bacteria. But they are fairly complex lifeforms. How could simpler life have devolved from them? If you stop and think about it, was it those alien organisms and not their host asteroids that eradicated life on Earth in massive extinctions? That possibility suggested by their premise seems not to have occurred to Ann Druyan and Steven Soter who wrote the scripts that Neil Degrasse Tyson spoke to us.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Scientific Method 

Great Scientific Experiments 

Four Books About Bad Science 

Copernicus on the Revolution of Heavenly Bodies 

Rescuing Aristotle and the Church 

Retraction Watch

Let me tell you: 20% of scientists are crooks - and that includes me.  They lie about facts and figures. They steal from their graduate and post-graduate and post-doctoral assistants. They fail to inform subjects of consequences (because, in fact, they invented the subjects).

Retraction Watch reports the facts. (See  here: http://retractionwatch.com/)

My own sins: fewer and far between.  I publish the "same" article in multiple venues. Cognizant of the difficulty, I always make some small change and (usually) reference that fact. But I am aware of the fact. With informal writing, it is not a big deal. With Federally-funded scientific research it is a big deal. Even if the writing is new, re-using an illustration will force a retraction.

People have done to prison. Just put "researcher went to prison" in your search engine.

On my passive blog, CSI:Flint 2010, I was inspired to bring the Office of Research Integrity to middle school students who were interested in science and police work. "Don't waste your motivation on CSI," I said. "That is like the physics of Star Trek.  If you love science and want to do police work, go for the Office of Research Integrity."

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Science Fair Science Fraud
An Abundance of Talent
Monsters from the Id
Biobash: Chamber Replicates Success

THE MAP THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

William Smith (1769 – 1839) drew the first geological maps of England. He was born into a culture that was certain that the world had been created at 9:00 AM on Monday, October 23, 4004 BC.  He died twenty years before The Origin of Species was published.  Yet, he invented the predictive science of geology by marking time with fossils.  In the hour of his success, his work was stolen shamelessly by the gentlemen of the Geological Society.  He was forced into debtor’s prison and spent 20 years homeless, working as best he could in the rural countrysides and counties far from London.

William Smith’s father was a blacksmith and so his formal education was minimal. But he was determined to make something of himself; and by 1794, he worked as a surveyor for the construction of canals.  Eventually and soon he was recognized as the man who could solve practical problems in draining farm fields and predicting where profitable coal fields were to be found.  He recorded his daily work in a continuous multi-volume journal. 

Those notes let him create a series of huge colored maps showing the rocks and strata of England.  (He eventually included more of Britain.)  The keys to his work are two interlocking discoveries.  First, the rock strata are uniform.  Everywhere the strata are the same. Even if some (unknown) process or force (apparently) has displaced or tilted the layers, they can be logically reconstructed into a continuity.  Second, while sandstones and marls and limestones and all the others are to be found repetitively layer upon layer in succession they can be differentiated one from another by the fossils within them. No identical fossil forms ever appear in two different layers of the same kind of rock.  Simpler forms of the same animals are found lower down. 

We know now that cycles running millions of years repeatedly created land, drowned it, and then lifted it up, separating some plates as others collided.  Smith knew nothing of that; and neither did anyone else.  The dilettante gentlemen who robbed Smith of his creation debated whether all rocks precipitated from the ocean or whether all rocks were born of volcanoes.  Anything more complex was beyond their range.  Smith, however, was not at all a British Empiricist.  The men who stole his work were.  Their chief, George Bellas Greenough, denied the validity of theory.  But Smith’s work depended on it. The gentlemen of the Geologic Society attempted to produce their own map (from Smith’s work) without theory, and failed.  They had to admit to the correctness of Smith’s method, as well as to the value of his labors.

Simon Winchester’s biography of William Smith takes you into the fields of England.  He stops to explore and explain.  His college degree from St. Catherine’s Oxford is in geology.  However, after exploring Greenland, among other adventures, most of his career has been in journalism.  (His website here.) Winchester has several popular books to his credit. I read The Professor and the Madman about the Oxford English Dictionary over a decade ago.  His most recent book is The Men who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Great Scientific Experiments

Claude M. Watson

Seeing in the Dark: Amateurs and Astronomy

Fantastic Voyages: Teaching Science with Science Fiction

Misconduct in Science and Research

Four Books About Bad Science

When Science Goes Wrong: Twelve Tales from the Dark Side of Discovery by Simon LeVay (Plume Penguin, 2008).  LeVay lays out his facts in careful narratives.  In many cases, he interviewed the key actors, albeit some years after the events.  He marshals the pros and cons before stating his final conclusion.  The cases come from a several sciences, including volcanology, criminology, meteorology, microbiology, genetics, and nuclear physics. 

In 1993, geologists attended a conference in Columbia where the Galeras volcano had become active. They visited the calderon, climbing down into the crater. When it erupted, most of them were killed.  Among the survivors was the only scientist actually wearing the protective gear mandated by the National Science Foundation.  Some of the victims were in jeans and sneakers. 

The case from criminal forensics about Josiah Sutton of Houston, Texas, took DNA evidence past the confines of even the Innocence Project.  In this case, the so-called gold standard of physical criminalistics proved to be fool’s gold.  The police lab had committed a series of mistakes, some perhaps accidental and careless, others apparently purposefully fraudulent.  The victim wrongly identified two men as her attackers.  When the DNA samples matched neither man, the prosecutor insisted on their guilt, and posited the existence of a third unidentified attacker.  This is a common ploy with prosecutors who refuse to admit their mistake. 

Embargoed Science by Vincent Kierman (University of Illinois Press, 2006).  Major academic journals such as Nature, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, and a hundred or so others, have a policy of announcing important publications by sending press releases to major mainstream media on the condition that the reporters not publish until the journal does.  The result is loud bursts of astounding science stories breaking on our awareness ... which then fade … until the next time.  The true costs include the loss of reflection and review, as contradictory findings roll out over the years without in-depth comparison and contrast.  Another cost is the loss of independence both of the news media which will not pursue a story beyond the press release; and also among the scientists who are constrained to divulge only what they publish in peer-reviewed journals. 

Yes, We Have No Neutrons: An Eye-Opening Tour Through the Twists and Turns of Bad Science by A. K. Dewdney (John Wiley & Sons, 1997).  Dewdney took over from Martin Gardner in Scientific American, and this book is a modernization of Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.  The stories here about N-rays, intelligence quotients, Freudian psychotherapy, cold fusion, Biosphere 2, and SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) are exemplar warnings to avoid the known dangers of confirmation bias, arrogance, and ambition. 

Dewdney offers the model of the sorcerer and the apprentice for his narrative analogy.  It is the familiar story from Goethe as delivered by Disney.  We all make mistakes, even sorcerers.  It is when the apprentice presumes beyond his true abilities that disasters unfold.  In these stories, disasters come from scientists who should be sorcerers acting like mere apprentices, forgetful of the full canon of the scientific method, from the creation of testable hypotheses to publication and peer review. 

“Yes, We Have No Neutrons does not address fraudulent science, but mistaken science. The appropriate persona, therefore is not the con artist, but the bumbler: the apprentice if you will.” (Page 2) “What is bad science? To begin with, whatever it means, bad science must be distinguished from fraudulent science.  Apprentices, by definition, honestly believe that they are sorcerers. Fraudulent scientists (and would-be scientists) know that they are cheating when they fudge experiments, steal ideas, or make false claims. They are more like evil magicians than apprentices. …  Bad science happens when someone strays in a fatal way from the scientific method.” (Page 17).

Dewdney takes the reader through three doors to explore the castle of science.  First, he differentiates technology from science.  “Technology consists of objects that have specific purpose. Science consists of methods and results.”  This is important because in the mass media the equipment of science – antennae, computers, reactors, satellites, etc. – stand for science.  Dewdney points out, however, that these are not essentially different from other examples of our material culture such as bicycles, dental floss, lawn mowers, refrigerators, and telephones. 

Indeed, I add here that in the book Biopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life by Marcus Wohlsen (reviewed on Necessary Facts here), the author points out for 100 years, scientists from Pasteur to Salk worked without apparatus that we have in our kitchens. The same applies to our garage and basement workshops.  The point is that the mass media presentations of the gizmos and gadgets confuse technology with science, which Dewdney carefully delineates.  Science is a method.

However, Dewdney falls into the analytic-synthetic dichotomy. His second door delineates deductive from inductive science.  He does not unify the two, though, indeed, they must both identify the same reality.  Behind the third door is the getting and testing of ideas.  Scientists observe, ask questions, formulate hypothesis and perform experiments.  The goal of the experiment is to challenge and pass the theory.  This is where most of the fallen sorcerers reveal themselves to be mere apprentices.  Sigmund Freud built his wonderful theories from six case studies and no statistical samples or blind tests. 

Junk Science: How Politicians, Corporations, and Other Hucksters Betray Us by Dan Agin, Ph.D., (Thomas Dunne St. Martin’s Press, 2006) repeats many of the known stories of Piltdown Man, eugenics, phrenology, and Lysenko.  As a working biologist, he also offers cases that are less well known to the general public, such as Emil Abderhalden’s “defense enzymes.”  Agin also writes about the recent cases (1997-2004) of Marion Brach, Friedhelm Herrmann, and Roland Mertelsmann who conspired to publish at least 37 and perhaps 100 papers for which the experiments and data were entirely fabricated.

“There are two prevalent myths concerning scientific fraud.

The first myth states that most scientific experiments are replicated by other laboratories, that science is self-correcting because the discovery of fraud involving the fabrication of data is inevitable.

 The second myth is that scientific papers involving fabrication of data are extremely rare, with only a few fraudulent papers published in any one year." (Page 39)

In fact, given the huge body of published papers, even a small percentage of fraudulent cases – perhaps only 0.04% according to the arithmetic of published cases from the Office of Research Integrity of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services – means that from the 5,600 significant scientific journals come 400 fraudulent papers each year.  However, by the metrics of criminologist Liqun Cao, (see previous posts on this blog) the number might be closer to 200,000 given that the intentional harms might be small: rounding up or rounding down, dropping inconvenient data, etc.  The median guess might be the most accurate. “In one survey published by American Scientist in 1993, between 6 and 9 percent of scientist respondents said that they were personally aware of results that had been plagiarized or fabricated within their facilities.” (Page 40)

The downside is that Dr. Agin has his own political views which color his diagnosis and remedies.  Corporations can be evil in selling us what we demand – such as junk foods and the fad diets to counter their effects, to say nothing of cigarettes – but the government is only unresponsive when politicians give in to the “wrong” pressure groups, such as Christians who were opposed to embryonic stem cell research.  Agin accepts all of the claims of anthropogenic global warming. He agrees with its fundamental reality. He falls in with the inevitable consequence that governments must do something immediately, no matter how severe. 

Dan Agin’s politics aside, the book is nonetheless an outstanding expose of many instances of bad science, much of it going on right now.

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.

Inconvenient Questions about Global Warming

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount Classics, 2006) suggests many questions about basic facts. 

From about 20 minutes in to about 25 minutes in, the presentation faltered from confusions of color and graphics. At about 00:20:34 the former US Vice President showed a graph of “temperature” over the past 650,000 years in Red.

I assume that this is Earth’s average surface temperature, but that was not explicit, nor was it explained how he knew. How CO2 was determined is also not clear. During the middle of the Pleistocene there was no US Weather Bureau to read thermometers. So, how do they know, perhaps from fossil trees or maybe from coal or peat bogs? I agree with the apparent fossil record, but it includes huge extinct beasts like the megatherium and glyptodon and little evidence of hominids and their campfires. What caused the end of the previous ice age if not anthropogenic global warming.

The first graph shows CO2 in blue. It gives Temperature in degrees F, showing a dramatic increase. The scale is 0, 0.5, 1.0 and the line rises from 0.0 to above 0.5.

Then the legend changes. The color scheme inverts. At about 21:00 minutes, the display shows 650,000 years of CO2 in Red. Temperature is in blue.

At about 00:21:35 the uncalibrated temperature over 650,000 years is shown together with with CO2. Then from 00:22:34 to 00:22:49 the Red CO2 at our current measure or level or amount goes up and off the scale but the blue Temperature does not. Should not the temperature have increased dramatically by half a degree or more?

If CO2 is increasing at alarming rates, that can only be important to us if temperature is also increasing, melting the ice caps, bringing citrus to Michigan, and so on. Apparently that is not the case. Even if atmospheric CO2 is increasing, Earth’s nominal average surface temperature seems not to be.

CSI: FLINT 2011 - Who Guards the Guardians?

On May 6, I presented two classes to middle schoolers participating in "Super Science Friday" at the University of Michigan Flint campus. In all about 500 pupils attended two each of 25 different sessions.  Some were laboratory demonstrations, others were hands-on engagements.  Topics included website design, trauma response, the chemistry of cooking, music, and termites.  My session was titled "Who Guards the Guardians" and explained misconduct and fraud in science as it applies to junk science in the courtroom and misconduct in police laboratories. 

To support the discussion, I created a blog, here.