TEDx speaker integrity

(via Slate) TED has published a letter to the organizers of TEDx conferences, a class of conference not run by the TED administrators but entitled to use the TED name, explaining how to detect pseudoscience, and making it very clear that TEDx conferences are obligated to vet their speakers, and weed out scammers and charlitans.

They wrote this letter in response to criticism and concern about the integrity of the TED name, including a reddit thread.  Really.  TED listens to reddit.

Here is my favorite part, a checklist for red flags that should clue TEDx organizers to look more carefully at a potential speaker's credentials:


  • Claims to have knowledge no one else has
  • Accuses you of suppressing them because TED and TEDx is biased against them and run by rich liberals ;)

This bit, also, was very good:


It's great to see the TED administrators taking seriously the community's concerns about TED's continued legitimacy.  It's especially great that they point out that Wikipedia is a good starting place for research -- and that research that can't be found on Wikipedia is probably bollocks.

The features of scientific fraud

(via Boing Boing) ArsTechnica has a post up about scientific fraud, by way of explaining how to do it.  It follows the successes and errors (mostly successes) of Dr. Yoshitaka Fujii, who was publishing papers based on fabricated data for about 20 years before he was formally caught.

The article goes on to offer 8 tips on how to defraud the scientific institution:

05.  Don't publish in journals focused on your field. In general (see point 4), it's best to avoid publishing in high-profile journals altogether, since those will draw attention to your work. At the same time, you don't want to keep seeing your stuff published in the same journals, or those editors will start feeling a personal responsibility to make sure their star researcher is on the up-and-up.

It seems to me that the biggest flaws in science revolve around the pride of individual scientists and institutions.  There's no easy solution to that -- unlike government, I don't think a ground-up deconstruction and reassembly of science would work.  But to start, the article references huge stigma around even trying to uncover fraud.  Adding a system of random investigations of scientists irrespective of reputation might help open up suspicious scientists to exposure.