I recently angered some people by saying that if I had any choice in the matter, I wouldn’t want my taxes to pay for research on the description of smell in the English literature. Some have taken that to mean that I want to defund all of academia. So let’s talk about it. Should we defund academia?
I appreciate all experts in English literature; it’s part of our cultural heritage, like many other things worth preserving. Acknowledging my own limitations, I avoid commenting on topics like English literature or dark matter, as they are beyond my expertise. So why doesn’t SH recognize hers? Continue reading The new poster girl of the technocrats→
I added some comments at the PubPeer thread above regarding scientific integrity, compression artifacts, stiching bugs, corner cloning and other paltry excuses.
Post publication peer review is a serious and apparently necessary enterprise. Forensic image analysis is a scientific discipline like molecular biology – see Sencar et al, Beck, Miura et al. for this. Following the ground breaking work of Bik, Bucci and other image analysis experts it is now an integral part of scientific integrity studies. I would therefore hesitate to dismiss identical background areas as “Dr Bik’s A.I.-powered software”. Image duplication software is not even AI powered as it uses rather conventional techniques and can even be verified by the naked eye. Low quality scanner and poor cameras are also not leading to the observation above. Text recognition (Xerox bug) as discussed by #19 is not involved here, neither is this the Thermo Fisher quantification bug nor is this a new case of corner cloning by the publisher. Funny other excuses at PP in similar cases are artefacts by sandwich impressions of other membranes, fingerprints & dirt traces, pen artefacts and explanations like “the scanner mixed up a double exposure””, “we could scan only smaller areas and made an error when pasting pieces together”.
