[HN Gopher] The blogger who spotted problems in Dana-Farber canc...
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The blogger who spotted problems in Dana-Farber cancer papers
Author : rntn
Score : 95 points
Date : 2024-01-26 18:06 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| Wistar wrote:
| See also the 2021 New Yorker piece about Stanford researcher and
| doctored image spotter Elisabeth Bik.
|
| "How a Sharp-Eyed Scientist Became Biology's Image Detective"
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-a-sharp-eyed-...
| lelandbatey wrote:
| For a few more example images/videos of the the image
| manipulations being caught, see here:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/29/opinion/scien...
|
| Or see her mastodon with photos: https://med-
| mastodon.com/@ElisabethBik
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >design some file-organizing system that involves giving research
| images a sensible name. And then when it comes to checking your
| paper before you publish it, you need to trace back all the
| images to the raw data and check them against the metadata. For
| example, if you have a photo labelled as 'Day three', does that
| correspond to the date the photo was taken or that the experiment
| happened on?
|
| Blockchain, but with human-readable metadata? Sure sounds like it
| is do-able.
| LordShredda wrote:
| No, a notepad.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Data is taken from other papers, it cannot be centralized.
| TylerE wrote:
| Since we're talking about immutable data...sure it can. If
| you really need to prove provenance of the metadata, surely
| a checksum is enough?
| stonogo wrote:
| You just photograph the notepad and release it as an
| artifact alongside the paper, if you don't feel like typing
| it up.
| bafe wrote:
| Or you skip the notepad and use a tablet and an
| electronic lab notebook. I know of a few researcher doing
| this successfully, but for this to work at scale senior
| scientists and group leaders need to force everyone in
| their labs to do the same
| stonogo wrote:
| Absolutely a culture issue rather than a technical one!
| bafe wrote:
| Yes the technology was there already 15 years ago (minus
| a nicer UI and a slightly better UX). Researchers despite
| all the talk about innovation are surprisingly resistant
| to change
| bafe wrote:
| Or maybe just adopt the modern solution and use a electronic
| lab notebook (ELN). I'm a software engineer and we are trying
| to introduce ELN in our institution, it's not easy to convince
| researchers of the benefits of reproducibility. People really
| just use manual methods like "sensible names"
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| What is an ELN?
| bafe wrote:
| Electronic lab notebook.
| fabian2k wrote:
| No need for any blockchains here, this essentially describes an
| SDMS (scientific data management system). Which do exist, but
| are not very common outside of larger companies. And the more
| common Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELN) are in most cases only
| connected to the original data in a rather haphazard way, if at
| all.
|
| You need to make the entire process digital, from measuring the
| data to tranferring and storing it and then linking it in your
| ELN or any other place you make use of it. That's a process
| that is only just beginning in many cases, if at all.
| riedel wrote:
| How does funding this work work? Is it donation? Are there bug
| bounty programs for research out there? (I quitely wonder if this
| would not add a lot of credibility to research institutions
| again. I just wonder if we as state funded institution would be
| allowed to pay this)
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The blog does ask for donations at the end of the article, so
| it is at least partially donation-funded
| beastman82 wrote:
| > I used to write letters to the editor [at journals], but it's a
| very infuriating process.
|
| This is a shame
| lightsighter wrote:
| It feels like there should be some kind of tool analogous to
| valgrind/ASAN/TSAN/UBSAN for code that is just run on all the
| images of any kind of paper before it is published to check for
| these kinds of things. Some of them just seem to be honest
| mistakes like linking the same image in two different places and
| this would fix that so nobody needs to bother checking for it in
| the future. It would also have the byproduct of catching all the
| malicious image doctoring that some people do which is just
| horrific for science in general.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| Such tools exist, ex:
|
| https://imagetwin.ai/
| sparky_z wrote:
| Wouldn't that just give the fakers a tool that lets them easily
| tweak their fakery until it can't be easily caught?
|
| The saving grace here is that many of these scammers don't have
| the sophistication or expertise in the wide possibility space
| of fraud discovery techniques to know where they're exposing
| themselves. Every type of check that we make automatable and
| trivially repeatable by anyone will immediately cease to detect
| anything except the most lazy or incompetent scammers.
| dudus wrote:
| [delayed]
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