wild book

Theo Baker does seem to have exploited this situation with some enthusiasm.

If you want a really bad academic try

A very surprising case - with my experience of universitites I would have expected the prof to be exonerated and the whisleblowers to be persecuted.

I was once involved in a case of a fraudlent PhD thesis where I was asked to set up a duplicate of the experimental apparatus described by the student. It had a very obvious flaw in the design and gave the erroneous results I had predicted, which weren't those described in the thesis. The student withdrew his thesis when asked to repeat the experiment under independent observation.

Then you've been exposed to a rather poor universities.

It takes a couple of years work to get a Pd.D. and nobody sane is going to risk having all that work wiped off by cheating. There's no explicit mental health check built into the selection process, but the mob I went through with were a pretty sociable bunch, and while I was labelled "gadget happy" we didn't have serious doubts about one another.

My wife supervised a lot of graduate students - some 44 - and a few did drop out, but while a few were odd - Kim Silverman does come to mind, but he went on to be a principal speech scientist at Apple - none were odd enough to risk cheating.

Very probably. I was sacked by one for refusing to distill petrol in front of the only escape door in a cellar full of post-grads.

This one was trying it on. If he had built the apparatus (which only took me a couple of days) and run a preliminary experiment, he would have immediately realised he was getting dud results. It wouldn't have taken anyone with a basic knowledge of physics more than a few minutes to see what was wrong.

Even if he hadn't known enough physics to spot the error, he could easily have asked for advice from someone with a bit more experience. Instead he blundered on and fudged his results. That isn't a mental health problem, it is an attitude problem and rules out getting a PhD.

The MTL paper cheating is really a minor feature of this book.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Being that stupid probably counts as a mental health problem. but it might just be regular psychopathic behavior. One of a girl-friend's girl friends had a boyfriend who had tried to impress by presenting a short science story had a copied out of Penguin anthology as his own work. She was impressed - as she should have been. The original author was Theodore Sturgeon. She showed it to me because she knew I was a science fiction fan, and I told her where it came from.

Amazon does puff it a bit. "Scandal in high places" sells well, even if it is a bit concocted.

You have my permission to not read the book.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Your recommendation wasn't exactly an inducement. Somebody who swallows climate change denial propaganda without gagging hasn't got well developed reading skills.

A coworker of mine said you catch a liar faster than a cripple. He was a cripple himself.

Liz Tuddenham snipped-for-privacy@PoppyRecords.invalid.invalid> wrote: |--------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"Bill Sloman snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote: | |[. . .] | |> > A very surprising case - with my experience of universities I would | |> > have expected the prof to be exonerated and the whisleblowers to be | |> > persecuted." | |--------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

This expectation of Liz Tuddenham alas is accurate as to what normally happen against whisleblowers and how criminal professors normally are not castigated. Cf.

|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"> Then you've been exposed to a rather poor universities. | | | |Very probably. I was sacked by one for refusing to distill petrol in | |front of the only escape door in a cellar full of post-grads." | |--------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

I am sorry that you were sacked against your conscientiousness. Thanks for trying to save lifes!

|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"> > I was once involved in a case of a fraudlent PhD thesis where I was | |> > asked to set up a duplicate of the experimental apparatus described by | |> > the student. It had a very obvious flaw in the design and gave the | |> > erroneous results I had predicted, which weren't those described in the | |> > thesis. The student withdrew his thesis when asked to repeat the | |> > experiment under independent observation." | |--------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Congratulations!

|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"> It takes a couple of years work to get a Pd.D. and nobody sane is going | |> to risk having all that work wiped off by cheating." | |--------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

A Ph.D. takes more than "a couple of years work". Many holders of purported Ph.D.s cheat. (S.

The process getting enrolled as a graduate student, doing the work and writing it up, is supposed to take about three years.

I took five years - my supervisor had a clear idea of how I should do the work, but the high-speed pen on paper recorder he had expected me to use turned out to be committed elsewhere, so I ended up using a very early PDP-8 to record the data. Building the electronics to give the PDP-8 the kind of signal it could digitise took a while. Writing the 800 words of assembler to get the PDP-8 to store, filter and regurgiate that data didn't take all that long.

Getting to grips with non-linear multi-parameter least squares curve fitting and writing a Fortran program to do it on the university's IBM

It's noon and 62F here. This morning it was about 56.

I wouldn't mind a little global warming.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

You'd be a lot more nervous if you had a more realistic idea of what it actually involved. Climate change denial propaganda does skip that sort of detail.

The film "The day after tomorrow" was about the gulf stream stopping for a bit, as it did (for about 1300 years) during the "Younger Dryas".

Ah, science. You got me there.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

And proceeded to snip all the science, without marking the snip

Were you born as a slimey creep, or is it a skill you've acquired over the years?

Was that film great cinema? I missed it somehow.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I doubt it. I certainly didn't try to see it.

There s a actually a cold spot in the North Atlantic produced by Greenland melt water - it got mentioned in the Sydney weather forecast tonight in the context of the general El Nino story - and it is an aspect of the current slowing down of the Gulf Stream which has been going on for a couple of decades now. Whether it will get bad enough to stop it doesn't seem to easily predictable, but it does seem to be a real risk.

The alarmist media name is the "North Atlantic Warming Hole" or "Cold Blob"[1]. For example:

"Multidecadal Atlantic "Warming Hole" Heat Content Variations Are Caused by Ocean Heat Transport, Not by Surface Fluxes."

"From a risk management perspective (Rahmstorf & Zickfeld, 2005), this risk requires urgent attention by policy makers."