"She was Joan of Arc, Madame Curie, and Florence Nightingale--all wrapped up in one."
One long, hot afternoon on Capitol Hill, in the summer of 1991, the most powerful man in Congress took on the most powerful person in American science. Science won. What does it take to end a reign of terror? The science fraud panic of the 1990s, part two of two.
Category: Science
🎧 The Imaginary Crimes of Margit Hamosh, Season 3 Episode 8 | Revisionist History
"Epidemics of fear repeat themselves. The first time as tragedy. The second time as farce. Margit Hamosh? Definitely farce."
What was it that Margit Hamosh did? What was her alleged fraud? I have been going on and on about this case for a good 20 minutes now, and I haven’t told you. Do you know why? Because we didn’t know.
It pains me to think of all these wasted hours over minutiae.
🔖 [1703.04184v2] A Theory for Gender Differences in Variability by Theodore P. Hill and Sergei Tabachnikov
A selectivity theory is proposed to help explain how one gender of a species might tend to evolve with greater variability than the other gender. Briefly, the theory says that if one sex is relatively selective, then more variable subpopulations of the opposite sex will tend to prevail over those with lesser variability; and conversely, if one sex is relatively non-selective, then less variable subpopulations of the opposite sex will tend to prevail over those with greater variability. This theory makes no assumptions about differences in means between the sexes, nor does it presume that one sex is selective and the other non-selective. Two mathematical models are presented: a statistical analysis using normally distributed fitness values, and a deterministic analysis using a standard system of coupled ordinary differential equations with exponentially distributed fitness levels. The theory is applied to the classical greater male variability hypothesis.
🔖 Updated Appendix of Supporting Documents Sep14, 2018 | RetractionWatch
41 pages of supporting emails relating to Ted Hill's retracted paper
👓 Hill Statement | Ted Hill
Comments on Wilkinson's and Farb's Official Statements About Hill's 9/7/18 Quillette Article: https://math.uchicago.edu/~wilkinso/Statement.html (accessed 9/13/18) https://www.math.uchicago.edu/~farb/statement (accessed 9/13/18) Allegations that Wilkinson does not deny in her statement: 1. Wilkinson asked her father to write to the Intelligencer criticizing the paper. 2. Wilkinson falsely blamed divulgence of her name on the Intelligencer. 3. Hill wrote a polite email (copied below) to Wilkinson that she never answered even though she claims she had "scientific criticisms" of the article. 4. Hill wrote a longer rebuttal to Wilkinson's father asking for more discussion. He also did not reply to Hill. 5. Even after the Intelligencer article was rescinded, Wilkinson "continued to trash both the journal and the editor-in-chief on social media". 6. Wilkinson falsely announced on Facebook that a substantially different paper had been accepted.. 7. Even after the NYJM article was deleted, Wilkinson "was threatening Facebook friends with 'unfriending' unless they severed social media ties with" [Igor Rivin, the editor who had solicited the paper].
👓 Echo Chamber Incites Online Mob to Attack Math Profs | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science | Andrew Gelman
Trying to make sense of the story With this in mind, there were a few aspects of Hill’s blog entry that didn’t completely make sense to me. First, the research article did not seem politically objectionable to me. I could see how people with strong views on the topic of sex differences would find things to criticize in his paper, and he could well be missing some important points of the biology, and if you really tried to apply his model to data I don’t think it would work at all, so, sure, the paper’s not perfect. But as a math paper that touches on an interesting topic, it is what it is, and I was surprised there’d be a campaign to suppress it.
Not as influential in the debate as one of the referring articles led me to have believed.
📖 Read pages 146-167 of 288 of Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási
📖 Read pages 146-167 of 288 of Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási
👓 Additional thoughts on the Ted Hill paper | Timothy Gowers
First, I’d like to thank the large number of commenters on my previous post for keeping the discussion surprisingly calm and respectful given the topic discussed. In that spirit, and to try t…
The analysis here makes me think there might be some useful tidbits hiding in the 300+ comments of his prior article. I wish I had the time to dig back into it.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
Our prehistoric ancestors were not doing higher mathematics, so we would need to think of some way that being on the spectrum could have caused a man at that time to become highly attractive to women. ❧
One needs to remember that it isn’t always the men that themselves need to propagate the genes directly (ie, they don’t mate with someone to hand their genes down to their progeny directly). Perhaps a man on the autism spectrum, while not necessarily attractive himself, has traits which improve the lives and fitness of the offspring of his sister’s children? Then it’s not his specific genes which are passed on as a result, but those of his sister’s which have a proportion of his genes since they both share their parent’s genes in common.
September 19, 2018 at 03:35PM
variability amongst males ❧
Does it need to be a mate-related thing? Why not an environmental one. I seem to recall that external temperature had a marked effect on the sexual selection within alligator populations such that a several degree change during gestation would swing the sex proportion one way or another. Could these effects of environment have caused a greater variability?
Further, what other factors may be at play? What about in sea horse populations where males carry the young? Does this make a difference?
September 19, 2018 at 03:41PM
👓 Has an uncomfortable truth been suppressed? | Timothy Gowers
Update to post, added 11th September. As expected, there is another side to the story discussed below. See this statement about the decision by the Mathematical Intelligencer and this one about the…
I agree in large part with his assessment, and do so in part based on Ted Hill’s Quillette article and not having read the actual paper yet.
I will say that far more people have now either heard about or read Hill’s paper than would have ever otherwise been aware of it had it actually gone ahead and actually been published and kept up. This is definitely an academic case of the Barbara Streisand effect, though done somewhat in reverse.
👓 Statement by Benson Farb in response to Ted Hill’s unfounded allegations. | Benson Farb
This statement is meant to set the record straight on the unfounded accusations of Ted Hill regarding his submission to the New York Journal of Mathematics (NYJM), where I was one of 24 editors serving under an editor-in-chief. Hill's paper raised several red flags to me and other editors, giving concern not just about the quality of the paper, but also the question of whether it underwent the usual rigorous review process. Hill's paper also looked totally inappropriate for this theoretical math journal: in addition to the paucity of math in the paper, its subject classification (given by the authors themselves) appeared in no other paper in NYJM's 24 year history, and did not fall into any of the areas of expertise of the editors of NYJM, as listed on the NYJM website.
At the request of several editors, the editor-in-chief pulled the paper temporarily on 11/9/17 so that the entire editorial board could discuss these concerns. A crucial component of such a discussion are the reports by experts judging the novelty and quality of the mathematics in Hill's paper. The editor who handled the paper was asked to share these reports with the entire board. My doubts about the paper - and the process - grew when repeated requests for the reports went unanswered. Nearly 3 months passed until the two reports were finally shared with the entire board on 2/7/18. The reports themselves were not from experts on the topic of the paper. They did not address our concerns about the substantive merit of the paper.
After these reports were shared, the entire board discussed what do. For many of us, there was no compelling evidence that Hill's paper was appropriate for NYJM. Further, the evidence that the paper had undergone rigorous scrutiny before being accepted was scant. In light of this, the board voted (by a 2-to-1 ratio) to rescind the paper. I believe that the editor-in-chief should have added a statement about why this was done, but he did not. Amie Wilkinson played no role in any deliberation of Hill's or any paper at NYJM.
I appreciate those who have taken the time to examine the record, including the University of Chicago.
Benson Farb Professor of Mathematics University of Chicago
📖 Read pages 123-146 of 288 of Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási
📖 Read pages 123-146 of 288 of Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási
AIDs and epidemiology related research
👓 What really happened when two mathematicians tried to publish a paper on gender differences? The tale of the emails | Retraction Watch
Retraction Watch readers may be familiar with the story of a paper about gender differences by two mathematicians. Last month, in Weekend Reads, we highlighted an account of that story, which appea…
This article and the related links cover a lot of the questions I had when I read the original in Quillette the other day and only wish I’d had the time to follow up on as a result. Now to go on and read all the associated links and emails….
🎧 “General Chapman's Last Stand” Season 3 Episode 5 | Revisionist History
"Good fences make good neighbors. Or maybe not."
General Leonard Chapman guided the Marines Corp through some of the most difficult years in its history. He was brilliant, organized, decisive and indefatigable. Then he turned his attention to the America’s immigration crisis. You think you want effective leadership? Be careful what you wish for.
A piece of history I was surprised to not have heard about with relation to current immigration policy. Also a great example of how policy makers need to be able to think 20 steps into the potential futures to realize the ramifications of what they’re doing an the effects it will have on future generations.
👓 MIT Students Solve the Spaghetti Breaking Mystery That Stumped Richard Feynman | Open Culture
Even thirty years after his death, Richard Feynman remains one of the most beloved minds in physics in part because of how much attention he paid to things other than physics: drawing and painting, cracking safes, playing the bongos, breaking spaghetti.
👓 Using Medieval DNA to track the barbarian spread into Italy | Ars Technica
Cemeteries from the Longobard spread into Italy tell tales of migration and mixing.