Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Science Research- Dr. Hauser of Harvard - fraud or errors of judgment


New York Times

The still unresolved case of Marc Hauser, the researcher accused by Harvard of scientific misconduct, points to the painful slowness of the government-university procedure for resolving such charges. It also underscores the difficulty of defining error in a field like animal cognition where inconsistent results are common.

The case is unusual because Dr. Hauser is such a prominent researcher in his field, and is known to a wider audience through his writings on morality. There seemed little doubt of the seriousness of the case when Harvard announced on Aug. 20 that he had been found solely responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct.

But last month two former colleagues, Bert Vaux and Jeffrey Watumull, both now at the University of Cambridge in England, wrote in the Harvard Crimson of Dr. Hauser’s “unimpeachable scientific integrity” and charged that his critics were “scholars known to be virulently opposed to his research program.” [...]

4 comments:

  1. 'Observation' does not science makeOctober 26, 2010 at 5:59 PM

    HE's the fraud? Try his whole field, passing itself off as science.

    I admire Jane Goodall's work as much as the next reader. But science it certainly is not.

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  2. 'Observation' does not science makeOctober 26, 2010 at 6:09 PM

    Animal psychology is a joke

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  3. Sounds like a complicated situation, but something there wasn't right - it does not happen often that students are reporting their pi for ethical violations, so it leads one to believe that there was indeed something fishy that prompted that. He also seems to admit guilt in a way by saying he made mistakes. It could come down to lack of objective consistency and standards in the type of measures he was conducting however. I never realized how subjective was the experience of observing monkeys. I also never knew that only two other types of primates besides humans can recognize their faces. Pretty interesting.

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  4. http://theorthodoxjew.blogspot.com/2010/10/torah-umadah-and-slifkin-affair-and.html

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