- In 1910, Abraham Flexnor anticipated my complaint that modern health care is sick profiteering. “The overwhelming importance of preventive medicine.” Flexnor, who was not a medical doctor, had a big effect on American medical schools.
- Vitamin E supplements linked to prostate cancer.
- A website of home remedies. Apple cider vinegar = poor man’s kombucha.
- You mean a messy room doesn’t make people aggressive? Dutch academic fraud.
Thanks to Brent Pottenger, Phil Alexander, dearime, and Casey Manion.
I love Earth Clinic.
I do have a question about Kombucha. I’ve only seen it at Whole Foods even tried it a couple times. I was wondering if you think that Kombucha is good enough. When I googled it I found people making their own and was wondering if you make your own or buy it somewhere? Do you think if I just bought it at whole foods it would be just as good as making it? Also, how much should I drink a day would you suggest? The bottles from WF are pretty large.. like at least 20oz I think.
yes, Whole Foods kombucha is good enough. I prefer to make my own, partly because it tastes better and partly because it’s much cheaper (the ingredients are practically free) and more convenient. Try half a bottle per day. That might be enough to notice benefits.
Given that Stapel supposedly faked so many papers, I would like to know if the numbers in his papers pass that distribution-of-first-digit test that has been used to detect accounting fraud. If he made them up, they should fail that test, whereas the same sort of digits from a random sample of similar papers should pass that test. That would be a way to learn to detect fraud in the future. My experience with fraud detection suggests that fraudulent data is pretty easy to notice.
A good exercise would be to ask for this or that paper: How can we test whether the data in this paper are real? Perhaps now that journals are more likely to require raw data, that first-digit test can be more sensitive since it can be done on the raw data.
It would be interesting to give grad students (or someone else) five papers, one by Stapel, with names removed. Five similar papers. Then ask them which is most likely to be faked.
I also wonder what other researchers in his area thought of his research before the fraud was detected. Now too late to find out, I suppose.