- Repository for DSC 205 - Introduction to Advanced Data Science
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First offered @Lyon: Spring 2022 (Undergrad). To be offered: every spring.
| “Getting it right is crucial when people’s lives are affected.” -Jonathan Steinhart |
“It is clear from the rising interest in statistics over calculus that ‘data wrangling’ is a growing field. But what happens when people just feed giant piles of data into fancy programs that those same people don’t intimately understand? One possibility is that they generate interesting-looking but meaningless or incorrect results. For example, a recent study […] showed that one-fifth of published genetics papers have errors due to improper spreadsheet usage. Getting it right is crucial when people’s lives are affected.”[fn:1] (Steinhart, 2019).
How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data Daniele Fanelli PLoS One. 2009; 4(5): e5738. Published online 2009 May 29. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005738
Steinhart (2019). The Secret Life of Programs. NoStarch Press. URL: nostarch.com.
“Gene Name Errors Are Widespread in the Scientific Literature” by Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren, and Assam El-Osta, Genome Biol 17, 177 (2016). doi:10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7
[fn:1]A timely comment! The problem could be systemic:
“The image of scientists as objective seekers of truth is periodically jeopardized by the discovery of a major scientific fraud. […] Scientific results can be distorted in several ways, which can often be very subtle and/or elude researchers’ conscious control. Data, for example, can be “cooked” (a process which mathematician Charles Babbage in 1830 defined as “an art of various forms, the object of which is to give to ordinary observations the appearance and character of those of the highest degree of accuracy”); it can be “mined” to find a statistically significant relationship that is then presented as the original target of the study; it can be selectively published only when it supports one’s expectations; it can conceal conflicts of interest, etc.” (Fanelli, 2009).