Léo Varnet @leovarnet@qoto.org

Next week I will be presenting my work at Institut De l'Audition in Paris, at Universität Oldenburg (Germany), at Technical University of Denmark, then back home. I will travel only by train, in a desperate attempt to reduce the carbon footprint of research. This is a bit of an adventure, though: 600€ in train tickets and a total travelling time of 26h...

@Waldemar you're absolutely right, we can safely assume that other fraudsters use or will use more advanced "faking approaches". In fact, scientific fraud is much more widespread than most scientists want to believe, but at the same time there are unsuspected ways to fight against it. In a 2014 (now-retracted) Science paper, Michael LaCour faked his results by reusing the data from another survey and adding some additional jiggling. And yet two other political scientists were able to disclose the fraud by showing that the dataset showed some weird statistical anomalies.
(But of course the best solutions are systemic ones, like removing the publication pressure from the scientists' shoulders and encouraging replication studies)

@Waldemar My opinion is that "real scientists" already know themselves, in a sense: for example, experts of a given field are able to predict which studies will replicate or not. The problem is for the general public and the constitution of a common knowledge...

@Waldemar Indeed, this is worrisome. But one thing I discovered from this book is 1) how difficult it is to fake a dataset convincingly (data pulled out of thin air don't have the properties we'd expect of data collected in the real world and this kind of fraud can be revealed by data forensics) 2) in practice, fraudsters turn out to be quite "careless" when they fake their data/figures... I mean, in most of Bik's cases the authors did not bother doing better than copy-pasting with at most a splicing/resizing... Far from a deep-fake :)

It's reassuring to know that despite the perverse incentives, despite the crooked publication system, science does actually contain the tools to evaluate its own weaknesses, and maybe to heal itself. (3/3)

A particularly enlightening insight is the estimation of the prevalence of fraud (e.g. how often do biologists fake the figures in their papers?), publication bias, p-hacking, and even numerical errors in published papers... There are public records (such as Retraction Watch), very clever tools (such as statcheck http://statcheck.io/), and tests (e.g. the GRIM test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRIM_test) (2/3)

I just finished Stuart Ritchie's jaw-dropping book "Science Fictions" which exposes the deleterious effects of fraud, bias, negligence and hype on the constitution of scientific knowledge. Of course this is a a deplorable but all-too-familiar observation, however the book brings a new level of detail. (1/3)

https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/la-science-cqfd/metoo-la-science-aussi-9608803
Un épisode très dense de #scienceCQFD sur les inégalités et violences de genre dans les sciences. Parmi les nombreuses choses qui y sont dites, cette réflexion de Marianne Blanchard lorsque le débat commence à s'orienter exclusivement sur la lutte contre les biais de genre : "Il ne faut pas non plus se focaliser sur ces stéréotypes... Le risque est de diluer les responsabilités. Ils sont une conséquence de rapports de pouvoir sociaux de sexe. Il y a des fondements matériels, et des réalités sexistes et sexuelles."

@bnjmnsms if you are interested in reproductible simulations in MATLAB/octave, maybe you should have a look at the Auditory Modeling Toolbox project led by Piotr Majdak (https://amtoolbox.org/) and in particular the "meta-simulation" study by Alejandro Osses using this framework (https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03666259) and fully reproductible within the toolbox.

Hello #fediverse! As seems to be the tradition, here is my #introduction
I am a French #CNRS researcher working on #speechperception, #psychophysics, #statistics and #audiology (mostly). I write scientific articles in English (http://dbao.leo-varnet.fr/publications/) and blog posts in French (http://dbao.leo-varnet.fr/) so I'm always confused about which language I should use on social media...
Happy to start my #twittermigration by connecting with academics and people interested in science here!

@Mattcoler Thanks a lot! I will read it asap!

@MedericGC @laurencedecock1 Finalement en y réfléchissant ça semble logique que sur un célèbre réseau social symbolisé par un oiseau on communique par "gazouillis", tandis que sur celui qui a pour logo un éléphant on envoie des "pouets !"

@Mattcoler The book looks super interesting! This is the kind of manual about the various aspects of psychophysics I've been eagerly waiting for! I'd be interested to read it if you don't mind sending me a copy?