Duplicate science: 'funding agencies may have awarded millions and possibly billions of dollars to scientists' for duplicate studies

No, No, you people don’t understand. They weren’t “duplicate studies.” They were “confirmation studies.”
[/sarc]
theduke

So “The Producers” was a template for grant applications.

Is this illegal or is it just unethical?
Because in climate science, it has to be something even the pro-AGW investigators can’t stomach for anything to happen.

As our esteemed Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton would say:
“WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE!”

Eisebhower predicted this :
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.

This Nature commentary is slander, pure and simple. Why don’t we just skip the science and fund more paperwork, like overlap declarations, and research for overlap, and committees to remove funding if your projects are too similar? This “result” is sure to be misinterpreted by the public and congress. In fact, someone should look into the funding of this study. It sounds to me like they found what they were paid to look for. And since they found what might be fraud, no doubt future funding is required. Excellent job professor Garner!

polistra says:
January 30, 2013 at 5:49 pm
“Without pork, politicians get elected solely on the basis of their ability to quote ideological slogans, which leads to evil.”
Pork – i.e. vote buying – better than ideas? (An ideology is a collection of ideas)
In fact, vote buying is an ideology on its own, the ideology of the cleptocracy.

Rhys Jaggar says:
January 30, 2013 at 11:38 pm
Look, there’s nothing wrong with duplicate studies per se….
Rhys, the problem lies with duplicate payments for the same study, this is commonly called fraud.

The editors at Nature are petulant to try to spice up the lead-in with a name that is recognizable to many of its readers, even though the specific reference is to a neuroscientist. Then again, I bet there is a back story going on. Either this Steve guy said use my name, or the rag possibly slandered him with innuendo, or the reference is made up of whole cloth. In all these scenarios, the name similarity is just plain schoolyard childishness.

Hey, VA Tech, my alma mater. At least the engineering college was mostly PC-free in the late ’70s (it cost me a mere ~$2500 a yr back then).
I really don’t want to know about the situation now…..

What is amusing really about this is what Penn State Professor Scott Armstrong wrote as advice to those publishing Peer-reviewed Papers.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, March 23, 1982.
Plain Prose: It’s Seldom Seen in Journals
Written by Dick Pothier
If you want to publish an article in some scientific or medical journal, here is some unusual advice from Scott Armstrong, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School: Choose an unimportant topic. Agree with existing beliefs. Use convoluted methods. Withhold some of your data. And write the whole thing in stilted, obtuse prose.
Armstrong, who is the editor of a new research publication called the Journal of Forecasting, offered the advice in a serious, scholarly article last month in the journal’s first issue. He said yesterday that he had studied the publication process in research journals for years.
“Although these rules clearly run counter to the goal of contributing to scientific knowledge — the professed goal of academic journals — they do increase a paper’s chance of being published,” Armstrong said….
In one study, Armstrong said, academics reading articles in scientific journals rated the authors’ competence higher when the writing was less intelligible than when it was clear.
In another study, Armstrong said, research papers were mailed to a sampling of dozens of researchers. Half the scientists received a paper that described an experiment confirming existing beliefs; the other half received a paper describing an identical experiment but with a different conclusion that challenged the consensus.
Although the methods used in the two sets of papers were identical, the scientists surveyed generally approved of the procedures used in the papers that confirmed existing beliefs and generally disapproved of the same methods when they were used to contradict what most scientists believed, Armstrong said.
“Papers with surprising results are especially important for adding significantly to what is known. Presumably, the editors of journals want to publish important papers,” Armstrong said. “On the other hand, they are concerned that the journal might look foolish — and so they reject many of the important papers.”
For young academics who wish to be published in such journals, Armstrong said, “the factors that would seem to be a deadly combination would be choosing an important problem and obtaining surprising results.”
Other studies, Armstrong said, indicate that obscure writing helps those who have little to say. And having little to say may also be an advantage, especially if the author withholds some significant data. “This will allow the researcher to continue publishing slightly different versions of the same research,” which Armstrong says is a common practice. ….

This is another great article by Scott Armstrong:

Bafflegab Pays May 1980
“If you can’t convince them, confuse them.” Simply put, this is the advice that J. Scott
Armstrong, a marketing professor at the Wharton School, coolly gives his fellow academics
these days. It is based on his studies confirming what he calls the Dr. Fox hypothesis: “An
unintelligible communication from a legitimate source in the recipient’s area of expertise will
increase the recipient’s rating of the author’s competence.”
…To test whether such bafflegab also pays in print, Armstrong asked 20 management
professors to rank the academic prestige of 10 management journals that had varying degrees of
readability according to the well-known Flesch Reading Ease Test. Sure enough, the top-rated
journal was the hardest to read; the lowest-rated one, the easiest.
But might not the more prestigious journals have addressed more complex subjects and
required more difficult language? Armstrong tested that possibility by rewriting sections from
management journals to make them more readable without changing the content—eliminating
unnecessary words, substituting easy words for difficult ones, breaking long sentences into
shorter ones…..
Armstrong gave easy or difficult versions of four such passages to another group of 32 management professors and asked them to rate, on a scale from 1 to 7, “the competence of the research that is being reported.” The professors were not told the name of the journal or the author. Once again, the professors rated the easy version lower than the more difficult one….

A more serious paper:

Research on Scientific Journals: Implications for Editors and Authors
Implications for Authors Regarding Intelligibility
Scientific contributions
Researchers who have a significant contribution can afford to write clearly. This is especially so if the researcher hopes to have an impact on decision-making or research. Furthermore, if “contributions to related fields” is used as a measure of importance, clear writing is vital. For important papers then, there is little conflict between career advancement and scientific contributions.
Career advancement
Good arguments exist for writing papers that are difficult to understand. It takes less time and it may increase the likelihood of acceptance. The writing could also be passive and use the third person to create the illusion of objectivity; Gilbert (1976) says that this gives the appearance that the researcher was not actively involved in the study. This advice on writing is especially important if the author has little to say. Unfortaunately, this advice is detrimental to scientific contributions…..
Objectivity
Objectivity can be defined as the extent to which a study is independent of the researcher’s bias….
….The goal of objectivity is one that is sought but seldom achieved because the bias of the researcher is always present. The fact that it is seldom achieved has been cited by Mitroff (1972) as an argument that objectivity is an unrealistic goal. Rather, he claims, scientists should recognize their biases openly, then be advocates for their favored hypothesis. He concluded that scientists became famous not by being objective, but by being advocates. This appears to be true. Advocacy is a good strategy for career advancement. However, I believe that it is bad advice for making scientific contributions (Armstrong, 1980a). Proponents of advocacy believe that the “marketplace for ideas” provides an efficient way to separate the good ideas from the bad. Under this system, scientists write papers to advocate their viewpoint. These papers are examined by secret peer review, then they are published and subjected to further review by readers. But numerous case histories illustrate the failure of the marketplace to provide an objective and efficient approach to science. For example, scientists tried to deny an opportunity for Immanuel Velikovsky to present his findings because they were in conflict with established scientific viewpoints in many scientific disciplines in the 1950s. These scientists boycotted the Macmillan publishing company, which had published Velikovsky’s Work….