Category: academic fraud

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  • Kombucha news: new scientific studies. Plus an expert says: ““When diets are fads, they never seem to last long.”
  • University of Pennsylvania clears medical school professors of ghost-writing. “‘It’s important to note,” [said the Penn report,] ‘that the results of the study were negative to the sponsor’s product [and] were so characterized in the publication’ . . . But Lisa Lehmann, the director of the Center for Bioethics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, notes that the study’s findings were not unequivocally negative. ‘Penn noted that the study was negative and seems to imply that diminishes concerns about bias, but this is not entirely true. There is a segment of the population, those with low serum lithium levels, for whom the study recommends the medication.’ “
  • Jeffrey Sachs apparently believes in AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming). He also believes, according to Felix Salmon, “that development is easy, we know how to do it, and that given enough money, it’s relatively trivial to spend that money in an effective way to reduce poverty around the world.” Results from the Millennium Project do not support his beliefs.
  • 5 years of success with the Shangri-La Diet

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.

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Thanks to Allen Carl Jackson, Phil Alexander and Navanit Arakeri.

Law Schools Sued For Lying About Post-Grad Employment

Seth Roberts15 Comments

If it isn’t clear for whom law schools exist, now it is clearer:

The saga began last year, when Strauss and Anziska, both veterans of corporate legal work, filed lawsuits against New York Law School and Thomas M. Cooley Law School, in Michigan. The allegation: That Cooley and NYLS, by allegedly inflating post-graduate employment numbers, had committed fraud and violated local consumer protection acts. . . . The job market for lawyers has been contracting for years; hiring is down across the board. At the same time, law schools have continued to crank out young lawyers at an alarming rate.

This is the legal version of the joke that people go to law school because they aren’t good at math. So far twelve schools have been sued. I look forward to learning how the teachers at those schools react. Which side will they take? .

More about the lawsuits. I blogged about the deception a year ago. The California Culinary Academy in San Francisco was successfully sued for similar deception a few years ago. Inside the Law School Scam, a blog.

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  • Edward Jay Epstein on The Lessons of Le Carre (the spy novelist)
  • Gary Taubes recommends five excellent books, including Weston Price.
  • This article about the Marc Hauser case tells a brief story about a Harvard coverup in the 1960s. “In the late 1960s I was eating lunch in William James Hall with a few fellow assistant professors in the Harvard psychology department when a woman named Patricia Woolf sat down at our table. . . . She asked whether we had heard anything about the fabrication of data by one of our colleagues.”
  • This sad and fascinating post tells how pediatricians encourage Vitamin D deficiency by warning parents to keep children out of the sun. Then, making things even worse, children with broken bones due to Vitamin D deficiency are assumed by pediatricians to be victims of child abuse. “Dr. Carole Jenny, head of the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Child Abuse, implies such tragic miscarriages of justice simply don’t happen. She then claims, “We have been checking every child with multiple fractures for metabolic bone diseases for several years and have not identified a single child with vitamin D deficiency.” How can that statement be true if every other researcher is reporting infantile and early childhood vitamin D deficiency to be rampant in normal children? Furthermore, how can an infant beaten severely enough to cause multiple fractures not be bruised or in distress? Dr. Jenny cleverly avoids the question.”

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Thanks to Tim Beneke.

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Thanks to Alex Chernavsky and Casey Manion.

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  • Harvard professors behaving badly: Alan Dershowitz. “In a phone interview Dershowitz denied writing to the Governor [of California], declaring, “My letter to the Governor doesn’t exist.” But when pressed on the issue, he said, “It was not a letter. It was a polite note.”” Dershowitz wrote the Governor of California to try to keep the University of California Press from publishing Beyond Chutzpah by Norman Finkelstein, which calls The Case for Israel by Dershowitz “among the most spectacular academic frauds ever published on the Israel-Palestine conflict”. Finkelstein’s book says nothing about whether Dershowitz actually wrote it. According to a statement from the UC Press, “[Finkelstein] wondered why Alan Dershowitz, in recorded appearances after [The Case For Israel] was published, seemed to know so little about the contents of his own book.”
  • Umami Burger takes Manhattan.
  • The trouble with measuring students on only one dimension: South Korea
  • Why do twins differ? Both twins have autism spectrum disorder, but one has the disorder much more than the other. Guess which one was “given powerful drugs to battle an infection”?

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  • Tale of two workers. “Worker A is in the bottom quintile of income. . . .Worker B is in the upper quintile of income. . . .Worker A is a college drop-out. . . . .Worker B has a Bachelor of Arts, a Masters, and a doctorate.”
  • Citizen scientists. “More than a decade ago, in hopes of advancing research on the rare genetic disease that afflicts her children, Sharon Terry let two different researchers draw their blood for study. But when she asked for the results of the investigations, the scientists gave her a startling response. Information generated from her own children’s DNA, they said, didn’t belong to her.”
  • Ten academic frauds.

Thanks to Tucker Max, Dave Lull and Chuck Currie.

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Thanks to Bryan Castañeda, Lemniscate, Dave Lull and Reihan Salam.

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Thanks to Brent Pottenger, Phil Alexander, dearime, and Casey Manion.