By Veronica H. Paulus and Akshaya Ravi

Top Harvard Medical School neuroscientist Khalid Shah allegedly falsified data and plagiarized images across 21 papers, data manipulation expert Elisabeth M. Bik said.

In an analysis shared with The Crimson, Bik alleged that Shah, the vice chair of research in the department of neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, presented images from other scientists’ research as his own original experimental data.

Though Bik alleged 44 instances of data falsification in papers spanning 2001 to 2023, she said the “most damning” concerns appeared in a 2022 paper by Shah and 32 other authors in Nature Communications, for which Shah was the corresponding author.

Shah is the latest prominent scientist to have his research face scrutiny by Bik, who has emerged as a leading figure among scientists concerned with research integrity.

She contributed to data falsification allegationsagainst four top scientists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute — leading to the retraction of six and correction of 31 papers — and independently reviewed research misconduct allegations reported by the Stanford Daily against former Stanford president Marc T. Tessier-Lavigne, which played a part in his resignation last summer.

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Commentary.

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By Nidhi Subbaraman

“Most of the problems in this set of 28 could be explained by honest error,” Bik said, for example if a researcher mislabeled their images and pasted in the wrong ones. She added that looking at published data alone makes it difficult to distinguish an error from misconduct. “There are a couple of papers that stand out that suggest an intention to mislead.”

“The sheer number of examples justify some concern,” said Matthew Schrag, a neurologist and researcher at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who outside his work at the institution reviewed Bik’s assessment. Schrag said he agreed with Bik’s observations in almost all cases and believed the issues warranted an institutional review. 

Bik on Tuesday posted her observations on PubPeer, an online forum that scientists use to question details in published studies. On Wednesday, she emailed her allegations to Harvard Medical School’s Office for Academic and Research Integrity and Mass General Brigham’s Anderson, and several journals.

One anomaly in the group is a 2022 paper in the journal Nature Communications which has images similar to those in nearly a dozen other sources, including papers published earlier, according to Bik. “I’ve never seen this,” she said.

Cory Doctorow gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin

We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the ‘great forces of history,’ and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It’s not just a way to say ‘things are getting worse’ (though of course, it’s fine with me if you want to use it that way. It’s an English word. We don’t have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let’s examine how enshittification works.

It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Ethan Blevins:

School segregation has risen from the grave—disguised under a different name.

An increasing number of school districts are offering “affinity classes” that cater to specific racial groups. Schools have long offered racially segregated options for electives such as African American history or mentorship programs. But the idea has begun to expand to the wider K-12 curriculum: One school district in Evanston, Illinois, has drawn the media’s eyes recently for expanding affinity course options, now offering segregated courses in the core curriculum, like math and English. Technically, anyone can join, but each class is expressly designed for—and targeted at—a particular racial group.

In reality, “affinity” is just a newfangled term for “segregation.” Schools that support such racial sorting insist these classes are opt-in, benign programs that don’t violate anti-discrimination laws or the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee. They’re wrong.

The supporters of affinity groups and classes claim that they give students a comfortable, safe and inviting environment that improves learning outcomes. One Evanston school official who backs affinity classes told The Wall Street Journal that too often “Black students are expected to conform to a white standard” and that in affinity classes, “you don’t have to shed one ounce of yourself because everything about our space is rooted in Blackness.” The notion that culture and character are pinned to skin pigment undergirds the philosophy behind affinity programs—that races are so different from one another that they should not even learn together.

Ben Hunt:

I’ve never met Claudine Gay, but I know Claudine Gay. 

We both went to grad school at Harvard in the government department (what they call political science pretty much everywhere else), me from 1986-1991 and Gay from 1992-1998. We both got a masters degree and Ph.D. there. We both had the same dissertation advisor, famed statistical methodologist and all around nice guy Gary King, yet neither of us were statistical methodologists at heart. We both used regressions and econometrics as a toolkit to help us answer questions that we wanted to explore, Gay in American politics and me in international relations, and we were perfectly proficient with the tools, but we didn’t really care about the tools. We cared about the questions. I didn’t overlap with Claudine Gay chronologically at Harvard, but I overlapped 100% with the classes and the places and the people and the life.

After graduation we both did the tenure track publish-or-perish thing, but here the close similarities stop. Gay had a significantly more successful academic career than I did. I had a good start at NYU but ended up with tenure at SMU, which is pretty much a dead end in prestige academic terms. Looking back now, I can see how impatient I was with the game of academia and how poorly I played it. Gay started at Stanford and ended up with tenure at Stanford, which is anything but a dead end. Harvard brought her back with a full professorship within two years of that. Gay was patient, and she played the game extremely well.

Interestingly, we both stopped teaching a few years after getting tenure. Me to co-found a software company, which required leaving academia completely, Gay to go into university administration as a dean, which locked her into academia for life. There but for the grace of God … I am SO lucky that I got out when I did.

Dell Cameron:

United States officials fought to conceal details of arrangements between US spy agencies and private companies tracking the whereabouts of Americans via their cell phones. Obtaining location data from US phones normally requires a warrant, but police and intelligence agencies routinely pay companies instead for the data, effectively circumventing the courts.

Fortune:

“So long as you have Congress keep extending the debt limit and doing deals because they’re afraid of the consequences of doing the right thing, that’s the political structure of the political system, eventually you’re going to have a debt spiral,” he explained, per Bloomberg. “And a debt spiral is like a death spiral.”

Currently the American national debt stands at $34.14 trillion—about $100,000 for every person in the U.S.—with the debt ceiling currently suspended until 2025 courtesy of a deal passed in the summer of 2023.

ZACH RAUSCH, THOMAS POTREBNY, AND JON HAIDT

Here at After Babel, we have systematically documented substantial increases in rates of adolescent depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide since 2010. We first showed extensive increases in the U.S., and then across the Anglosphere (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). We showed similar rises in the five Nordic nations(Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland). We have also examined changes in suicide rates across nations. In the five Anglosphere countries, rates of adolescent female suicide were relatively steady before 2010.1 Afterward, their rates began to rise, reaching levels higher than those of any previous generation when they were young. Today, we look at all of Europe.

There are still researchers who are skeptical that an international youth mental health crisis broke out in the early 2010s. In a previous post, Zach showed that one reason for this disagreement lies in a widely used international database—the Global Burden of Disease—which tries to estimate rates of mental illness in all countries, including countries that do not collect mental health data. He showed that the GBD systematically underestimates rates of youth mental illness in countries that have robust national mental health data. In fact, it almost entirely misses the spike in countries where a clear spike is found in their own datasets.

William Jacobson:

DEI is a religion at Cornell. People don’t give up their religion easily.

In the least surprising development in the history of least surprising developments, the Cornell University Board of Trustees at its meeting this weekend rejected the call by Alumnus and Donor Jon Lindseth for President Martha Pollack to resign, issuing this statement:

Unanimous Vote in Support of President Martha E. Pollack

Cornell University Board of Trustees

Jan. 27, 2024

Cornell was founded on the principle that ‘any person can find instruction in any study.’ Under President Martha E. Pollack’s leadership, the university has remained faithful to this principle and to the core values that unite our institution. Today, the Board of Trustees of Cornell University met and voted unanimously in support of her leadership of the university.

We believe the pursuit of knowledge is dependent on robust discourse that acknowledges differences while exploring shared values. Cornell proudly embraced diversity in its inaugural student body over 150 years ago and will continue to do so for the next 150 years.

By Jessica Marie Otis

Steam engine entrepreneur James Watt, as responsible as anybody for upgrading the world from poor to rich, left a notebook of his work. Squiggly symbols such as “5” and “2” mark the pages. Without these little glyphs, borrowed by Europeans from medieval Arabs, Watt would not have been able to determine cylinder volumes, pressure forces, and heat-transfer rates. Isaac Newton would’ve struggled to find that gravity is inversely proportional to the square of a planet’s distance from the sun. Calculations for Antoine Lavoisier’s chemistry, Abraham de Moivre’s probability tables, and the Bank of England’s bookkeeping would have been difficult or impossible.

But before Hindu-Arabic numerals could fuel the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, society had to start to think quantitatively. Jessica Marie Otis’ By the Numbers is about scribes starting to write 7 instead of VII, parish clerks counting plague deaths rather than guessing, and gamblers calculating instead of hoping and praying.

Why did some countries become wealthy after 1800? Historians argue about the relative influences of religion, climate, geography, slavery, colonialism, legal systems, and natural resources. But the key, famously shown by economist Robert Solow, who died in December, is technological innovation enabling more and more goods and services to be produced per worker and unit of capital. Innovation needs research, development, and engineering. All those require numbers and numeracy.

By Caitlin Moscatello

For $120,000 a year, Christopher Rim promises to turn any student into Ivy bait.

Christopher Rim makes himself hard to get to. First, there’s the email to register as a guest at the Aman Club, where members pay an initiation fee of $200,000 to perch themselves above the crowds on Fifth Avenue and where Rim sometimes holds his client meetings. Then there’s the check-in at the front desk to get access to the elevator, which leads to another reception area on the 14th floor. From there, a man in a suit guides me into the main room (fireplace, lots of couches, mostly empty), then through a door that blends into a wall, past a bar (one guy drinking water; it’s only noon), and up a narrow flight of stairs. It’s there that I meet Rim in a small room decorated with bottles of Macallan 18 and coffee-table books about art.

His look is quiet luxury, though everything about this meeting appears designed to scream money. On his wrist: a $55,000 Patek Philippe watch. On his back: a Loro Piana cashmere sweater. Rim tells me that sometimes he runs into his clients here and they pretend not to know him. But he can imagine what they’re thinking: What is the tutor doing at the same club where Bill Gates lunched when he was in town?

For the past nine years, Rim, 28, has been working as an “independent education consultant,” helping the one percent navigate the increasingly competitive college-admissions process — the current round of which ends in February. He started by editing college essays from his Yale dorm room for $50 an hour but now charges the parents of his company’s 190 clients — mostly private-school kids, many of them in New York — $120,000 a year to help them create a narrative he believes will appeal to college-admissions officers. That company, Command Education, currently has 41 full-time staffers, most of whom are recent graduates of top-tier colleges and universities. The pitch is crafted to appeal to the wealthy clients Rim courts: a “personalized, white glove” service, through which Command employees do everything from curating students’ extracurriculars to helping them land summer internships, craft essays, and manage their course loads with the single goal of getting them in.