- Yale cancels China year-abroad program. One reason is that students in Beijing (at Peking University, one of the best universities in the country) learned less Chinese than students at Yale.
- European plagiarism epidemic. “More than a third of a new book for law students on how to write papers properly was plagiarised . . . The authors vowed to find the culprits.”
- Penkowa for Dummies. Complicated scientific fraud.
- Self-tracking difficulties: a fickle and too-demanding exercise tracker. I try to walk 60 minutes/day. It’s easy to track.
Thanks to Anne Weiss.
The Yale item is so disappointing. My wife does research on study abroad, and one of her key findings/points of emphasis is that program design plays a huge role in how much “immersion” students get during the study abroad process. It sounds like they just expected the students to automatically immerse themselves, whereas studies have shown that without tons of incentives, and effort on the part of the study abroad program, students will often self-segregate and mostly hang out with other foreigners.
Seth: Interesting. In this case, it goes beyond what you say. Not only did the Yale students in Beijing not learn Chinese from being in Beijing, apparently the time they spent in Chinese class — in Beijing — was less helpful than the same time in Chinese class in New Haven.
posted for Ethesis:
NPR, yesterday morning, had people on the Peoples Pharmacy (whatever that is) in the last 15 minutes of the show talking about how to teach people to self track and how it improved compliance and effort with diabetics. Neat stuff, especially as it supports many things you’ve said.
BTW:
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2192186541955038172&postID=7651199277746247337
The article that got me thinking about all of this was about a Japanese anesthesiologist who was caught having simply made up the data in 172 papers published in scientific journals. If you can have made up your data 172 times before anyone notices and, according to the journals, it had no impact because no one paid attention to those articles anyway – how much talent do you really have?
Google apparently has a database with 20 million scanned books. You’d think that someone at Google could write a script to search for instances of plagiarism. I suppose it might be difficult to distinguish true plagiarism from cases where an author is quoting another source.
Seth: Good idea. It shouldn’t be hard to separate quotations from non-quotations with very high accuracy. I think the problem is that this doesn’t support anyone’s research agenda.
Thank you for continuing to post on academic fraud.
That Penkowa case is hard to figure out. She looks like someone with real talent who also cuts corners and considers academic research a contact sport.