After claims of high-temp superconductivity were retracted, Ranga Dias lost his university job.
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Scientist behind superconductivity claims ousted
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It's been thirty years since I was engaged in any misconduct at UR, though that was mostly trying to break into the bomb shelter under the library, jamming up the soda can redemption machines with fake can labels, swearing over the radio during my weekly 3-6am Wednesday morning show, and crashing the university's main undergrad server with my poorly programmed pong game. I don't recall any scientific misconduct, but I can't be sure, it was a long time ago.
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Can scientific misconduct be achieved with incompetence alone, or does this necessitate some level of fraud or deception?
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I think you need to up your standards for douchenozzles a fair bit. That was all pretty tepid.
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I bet they didn't even startle the horse in his office, let alone scare it to death.
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Incompetence sometimes leads researchers to commit fraud for fear otherwise they aren't getting recognition, and thus a job. On its own it's not nearly sufficient, but that's what the various gates in the apprenticeship process are for -- you'll get flushed at grad school admissions, during grad school, before getting a job, or at tenure time. After that you're free to suck, just don't lie about it.
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The whole fiasco doesn’t speak well of the editorial board at Nature; you’d hope that having been burned by him once, they’d be more cautious in round two, but the lure of publishing The Great Breakthrough is too strong.
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Dang, this is straight out of the cold fusion playbook, all the way down to "magic things happens when applying localized high pressure". Its almost like he saw BobbyBroccolis three part YouTube essay on cold fusion and said "let me go back in time, do exactly that but on the other holy grail of the future of energy "
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Grade A, huh? Those aren’t even serious crimes, mostly. What’s a Grade C douchnozzle? Looking at you in Target? Existing annoyingly? Also - that bingo card formulation is exhausting and beat fully to death. Let it go.
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Probably not coincidentally, there was a preprint sent to Arxiv last night with the title ‘Hydride superconductivity: here to stay’, coauthored by a bunch of people with long and extensive experience in both the experimental and theoretical aspects of superconductivity. Seems like an effort to distinguish the original (and valid) work on pure hydrides from Dias’s frauds.
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Probably thought that with a bit more time and money he'd actually perfect the method. While also needing the publication out now, to make it easier to get more funding to continue the work.
Or maybe he had just really convinced himself that the data was fine and any concerns people raised where people not understanding his work.
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araczynski
Ars Scholae Palatinae
someone was hoping to be signed for an exclusive multimillion yearly contract to continue the 'project' .... silly kids, lying is only allowed in politics.
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Exactly. Wouldn't even warrant probation, let alone double secret probation.
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I don't run into many fellow UR grads anywhere...
My primary misconduct at UR was sneaking up onto the roof of the library late at night.
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No. He was personally confident that it was true and that he just hadn't quite been able to pull it off this time. Publishing it now would ensure he got the credit when someone else made it go.
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Yeah that seems a little more logical than a snidely whiplash type thing where you know you're trying to lie.
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Grade A douchenozzle I'll accept, I was a young college kid. Incompetent? Nah, I graduated with high honors in the fledgling cognitive science department while dual majoring in psychology, and was the highest paid undergrad student, working for the university computing center's Unix Group administrating many of the school's workstations.
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We are UR!
Glad to see some fellow alumni lurking here
The only scientific misconduct I participated in was eating a garbage plate the next morning.
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I suppose it's potentially possible to be so spectacularly bad at record keeping that you can't keep track of which experiment a given piece of data came from, and end up misleading both yourself and others about what you'd discovered. As someone else said, that should be caught early in someone's career by people more senior, but the research world is full of senior researchers who are too busy writing grants and giving talks to give the sort of low-level mentorship that would necessarily catch this.
So yes, possible, but not especially likely.
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While it wasn't initially public, it is now, since it was an exhibit the university entered in its defense against the lawsuit Dias filed.
https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-024-00976-y/26947600
It's quite a sordid (and sad) read.
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Reviews with reservations are a dime a dozen. Publishers will decide yay or nay based on how many good submissions they have.
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Steam tunnel excursion to the hospital for me. The tunnels under the school tunnels, accessible via a ladder behind the steam pipes.
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This is unfortunate but necessary house cleaning. You can't trust the science if the scientist is lying. Retracting papers immediately and disciplining fraud keeps everyone honest.
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Astonishing that it was so difficult to fire him. So many other professors and researchers have been fired instantly just for getting the attention of Fox News and Libs of Tiktok.
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Are you sure you are UR? Perhaps the incompetence goes all the way up to the university's labelleing department...We are UR!
Glad to see some fellow alumni lurking here
The only scientific misconduct I participated in was eating a garbage plate the next morning.
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I know why Walmart...but why do you hate Starbucks, for sure their coffee is overroasted, but does it really deserve this level of animosity?.
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