Seb reports on the case of a top obesity researcher from the University of Vermont who was fabricating data to get millions in funding and write impressive papers.

“Some colleagues speculated that Poehlman buckled to an exaggerated perception of the pressure to publish papers and win grants to keep his laboratory going. Or perhaps he was so sure he knew the right answers that he cut corners to get to them, they said.”

The worse part is that “Many other researchers trusted and built upon the work that Poehlman had published in peer-reviewed journals. The validity of their own work is now called into question.”

Myself, I caugth one huge case of fraud last year: a Ph.D. students has been republishing papers he stole off the Web, by simply rewritting them in his own words. I reported the case and some of the papers have been pulled out.

I think that fraud will always exist, but by putting too much pressure on researchers, we will lose credibility. We have to be careful at what we reward in research.

My colleague Jean Robillard started a blog [in French]. How good is it? The blog is still a young project, but I’m sure you’ll agree that Jean is a very powerful writer, if you can read French, that is. I think he published at least one book in the recent past too. Jean is one of the most interesting colleague I have and he is not even in a related discipline… we should really be total strangers… but he has things to say and he is not scared to tell them. In short, he’s got a brain and the guts to use it.

There are many types of blogs. Some people blog about their cats, some people blog about life in general, some people blog about the news… and then you have research blogs. My blog has been described in the blogosphere as an academic or research blog so I’ve been wondering what it means exactly to have a “research blog”. Jean is quite clear that his blog is a research blog.

You have at least 3 types of research blogs (this is, of course, simplistic):

1. Blogs about the process of doing research: often written by struggling Ph.D. students;
2. Blogs about para-research issues: posts written by a researcher who doesn’t focus on his specific fields of interest, but tries to address a wide, but not entirely general, range of interests.
3. Blogs about a given narrow field (nuclear physics, geometry, history, and so on);

My dream would be to have a type 3 blog, but my blog is really a type 2. You could never really learn much about my research results from blogs. You’ve got to go read my papers (which I periodically link to). However, you can learn a lot about what goes on in my mind and what motivates my work. My blog is about the ideas I cannot put in my papers nor can I put in my courses. It is about everything I would not write about if I didn’t have a blog. My blog is also therapeutic in a way: in a class room or in a scientific paper, emotions should not dominate, yet, my blog is very much about how I feel about things. I will criticize very harshly the Semantic Web on my blog, but I would never do the same in a research paper or in a course.

I could be wrong, but it looks like Jean is going for a type 3 blog. Go check it out now!

I was chatting with Yuhong and Martin; both are among the best researchers I know. One thing leading to another, we began to wonder whether we knew how to do research… and to answer this question, you need to ask what research is…

I think research is a form of art. Or maybe art is a form of research… The point is that there is no one-true-way to do research. Research cannot be measured, it cannot be packaged, it cannot be industrialized… Not anymore than art….

Asking how do you become a good researcher is like asking how you can become
a good artist… there is no straight answer, except a few guidelines:

1. don’t be isolated… be part of a network
2. be open minded
3. don’t copy or try to be fashionable, always try to go further and
   lead

Harold has a good post on what knowledge workers want. I’m turning it into a test… see in the table below whether you an IT-empower worker or not… I score 4 out 4 as an IT-empower worker.

I would add a few of my own…

A very large fraction of my colleagues are “old school workers”. How is it that I don’t feel more productive than they are? Is there any concrete benefit to being IT-empowered? It seems to me that as with each passing year, I’ve got more and more to read and my schedule is not getting any lighter. In many ways, my blog makes me smarter, but I just can’t point to the benefits in my daily life. I’d like to.

The Web is truly amazing. I’m currently listening to Miho Hatori singing Dream Girl. This was suggested by Seb. The cool thing is that within 3 minutes of reading Seb’s post, I was listening to the music he suggested and liking it. Seb has a webjay playlist you can check out if you want more.

Important points about what I just did:

• It is free and legal. The fact that it is free is important: not everything needs to be free, but some things work much better when no direct cost is involved.
• While not perfectly instantaneous, it is fast. I didn’t have to wait 2 hours to follow Seb’s advice, otherwise I wouldn’t have.
• It is supported by a relatively fast and inexpensive network connection, free multimedia software (there is lots of free MP3 software, I use juke), very cheap storage (cost almost nothing), and social software (in this case, blogging software).

The beauty of it is that, except of the fast and inexpensive network connection, everything is available pretty much everywhere in the world. And I’m starting to think that the Internet is getting to be fast and inexpensive everywhere.

Interesting: I just read the Technological singularity entry. Firstly, it interesting because Wikipedia is a free-for-all encyclopedia, but the entry is really high quality and, secondly, the topic of a technological singularity is fascinating in itself.

In futurism, a technological singularity is a predicted point in the development of a civilization at which technological progress accelerates beyond the ability of present-day humans to fully comprehend or predict. The Singularity can more specifically refer to the advent of smarter-than-human intelligence, and the cascading technological progress assumed to follow. Whether a singularity will actually occur is a matter of debate.

Of course, I doubt anyone understands what intelligence is, despite centuries of research and billions of dollars invested in the last 30 years on AI research.So, I’m not expecting a big breakthrough in AI research soon. However, the Wikipedia entry correctly points out that the singularity could occur through other means: nanotechnology or some other technological breakthrough which allows us to greatly accelerate our rate of technological progress.

I expect the Internet to boost technological progress. To me, it feels like it does enhance my intelligence greatly. (I define intelligence as my capacity to solve problems.) However, in other to reach a singularity, you need a much more profound breakthrough: you need to enter a tight loop where a technological breakthroughs lead to faster R&D which in turns leads to more R&D-enhancing technological breakthroughs, and so on. The problem is that right now, R&D is done by humans are humans are limited: we can only adapt so fast to change. Hence, you need to either improve human beings, or create new intelligent beings.

I think that AI is currently out of reach, and probably not desirable: do we really want to create intelligence beyond our own? Books, IT, Google, Wikipedia help make us smarter, and quite a bit so, but I just don’t see the exponential growth in intelligence that we require to reach a technological singularity…? Or maybe it is simply hard to see because we are living through the last few years before the singularity?