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Friday, September 5th, 2014
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| 12:00a |
Should scientists handle retractions differently? It is one of the highest-profile cases of scientific fraud in memory: In 2005, South Korean researcher Woo-Suk Hwang and colleagues made international news by claiming that they had produced embryonic stem cells from a cloned human embryo using nuclear transfer. But within a year, the work had been debunked, soon followed by findings of fraud. South Korea put a moratorium on stem-cell research funding. Some scientists abandoned or reduced their work in the field.
But the case is not so simple: By 2007, other stem-cell researchers had found that the debunked research contained a few solid findings amid the false claims. While prior stem-cell findings remained intact, it took time to rebuild support for the field.
Now a study by MIT scholars quantifies the fallout for scientists whose fields suffer high-profile retractions, with a twist: Even valid older research, when intellectually related to a retracted study, loses credibility — especially if the retracted paper involves malfeasance. The fallout from a retraction does not land solely on the scientists who are at fault, but on people in the field more broadly.
As the new paper contends, “scientific misconduct and mistakes, as signaled to the scientific community through retractions, cause a relative decline in the vitality of neighboring intellectual fields.” This spillover effect, which includes a 6 percent decline in citations relative to similar, unaffected papers, suggests that scientists would benefit by trying to describe the nature of each retraction in more detail.
“A well-functioning, transparent retraction process is actually part and parcel of the scientific system,” says Pierre Azoulay, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a co-author of the new study. “We need a system where … journals help the readers spell out the reasons for the retractions, and help the scientific community parse the implications for the forward movement of science.”
Identifying the “stigma story”
The paper, “Retractions,” is published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, a peer-reviewed economics journal. The authors are Azoulay, the Sloan Distinguished Associate Professor of Management; Fiona Murray, the Alvin J. Siteman Professor of Entrepreneurship, associate dean for innovation at MIT Sloan, and co-director of MIT’s Innovation Initiative; Joshua Krieger, a doctoral student at MIT Sloan; and Jeffrey Furman PhD '02, an economist at Boston University.
Murray and Furman were co-authors of an influential 2012 paper that studied the circumstances in which retractions occur. The new paper, Azoulay notes, is different in that it spotlights “the consequences of retractions, not their antecedents.”
The current study focuses on the life sciences. The researchers examined the effects of more than 1,000 retractions of papers published between 1973 and 2007, and retracted by 2009. They also used the PubMed Related Citations Algorithm to help define the research fields relevant to those retracted papers.
Given those definitions of research fields, the researchers then examined the effect of retractions on intellectually related work. One group of 60,000 papers that they examined experienced the 6 percent decline in citation rates after retractions occurred in the same fields. To establish that fact, the researchers compared the citation trajectories of those papers with a control group of 110,000 papers that were published in the same journals. The data and method draw on work Azoulay has compiled and refined while developing numerous other analyses of citation rates in scientific literature.
But within these numbers lie another story: The citation rates for related papers that are still valid drop more precipitously when papers citing them are retracted for reasons of fraud or other misconduct, as opposed to, say, a laboratory mistake.
“Most of the declines in citations and funding we see are driven by fraud cases,” Krieger notes. “When an honest mistake happens, the related field doesn’t experience this big decline.”
Conversely, this means that, given two equally valid sets of past research, legitimate research cited in a paper later retracted for fraud will be more harshly punished.
Further evidence for the “stigma story,” as Krieger calls it, is that academic papers and nonacademic papers from firms tend to shun retracted papers at similar rates — but papers from commercial firms do not avoid citing older, still-valid related papers to the same extent as academic researchers. This could mean there is an unfounded flight away from those related papers in academic research.
“Our evidence pointing to the stigma story implies that funding agencies and investigators should be more cautious when deciding to abandon a field after a case of research misconduct,” Krieger adds. “We need to be careful in separating what we’ve learned about the field’s scientific status from our strong reactions to the disgrace of misconduct and fraud.”
Limits to knowledge
Other scholars in the field find the study valuable. Ben Jones, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, says the study “uses rigorous empirical methods to establish an important fact: Retractions matter for the ensuing progress of a field.” He adds: “There are good reasons to think that stigma effects may help explain these results.”
Jones, who was not involved in this research, was co-author of a 2013 paper indicating that authors of retracted papers avoid relatively larger citation losses when they self-report problems.
As Azoulay and his colleagues acknowledge, there are limits to their study. It’s possible that citations in fields affected by fraud logically should decline more than those marred by honest mistakes, because scientists may rightfully conclude that research areas containing outright fraud are further away from yielding productive results.
“Maybe … fraud retractions and error retractions are different in ways that are correlated for the potential for follow-on research,” Azoulay says.
The researchers tried to account for that in their study, by looking at the number of citations garnered by retracted articles prior to the discovery of problems, then correlating that with the impact on related papers. But the numbers do not show an underlying structural reason why retractions for fraud, as opposed to unintentional mistakes, should generate a larger impact on related prior research.
The researchers have a couple of specific policy suggestions to limit unwarranted damage to the accretion of scientific knowledge. For instance, journals that retract articles should offer detailed explanations of why those papers are no longer valid. It would not be hard, they suggest, to develop a basic system of categories of retractions.
“By lumping together honest mistakes and misconduct, we’re undermining the smooth functioning of the retraction system,” Azoulay says. | | 12:00a |
A lifelong relationship with the Institute While Evelyn Wang ’00, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, attended MIT as an undergraduate, her connection to the Institute goes back much further than that: This is where her parents met, as graduate students from Taiwan, and married, in the MIT Chapel.
So ending up on the mechanical engineering faculty here at the Institute, where Wang earned tenure this year, felt like “coming full circle,” she says. “Growing up, we always heard a lot about MIT.”
Wang grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., near the campus of the University of California at Los Angeles, where her father, Kang Wang SM ’66, PhD ’70, is still a professor of electrical engineering. “He’s inspired me into academics in many ways,” she says. Her parents “focused a lot on our education, but they also wanted us to be well-rounded,” Wang recalls. “We traveled a lot, and they always felt that we should play music.”
Wang says that her two older brothers were also “role models to me … who always excelled. Music was a way for me to differentiate myself from my brothers, who were really good academically.” (Both of Wang’s brothers also attended MIT, she points out: one for his undergraduate and master’s degrees and the other for his PhD.)
Growing up, the siblings attended a public school with “a strong music program.” Wang took up the piano at age 4, and the violin at 5, and played both instruments through high school, participating in an orchestra that performed widely. “The orchestra was pretty good, and we traveled a lot,” she says. “We performed in Spain and Finland. That helped me develop my identity in some ways.”
Ultimately, Wang ended up pursuing engineering, even though “a lot of people felt I should go into music.” As an undergraduate, she found great pleasure in working on teams to develop engineering projects in her classes. “People think so differently, and being able to work together became such an enjoyable time for me,” she recalls.
“I started taking classes in mechanical engineering, and it really helped me gain my confidence. I loved it,” Wang says. When it came time for graduate school, she was inclined to stay at MIT, but also felt a desire to experience something new, and ended up choosing to attend Stanford University. While there, she says, the experience helped her “figure out how to balance my life with research.” As part of that, she took up a variety of outdoor activities, including cycling, climbing, and hiking.
As a postdoc, she spent a year at Bell Labs, where she began to work with superhydrophobic surfaces — something that has remained a focus of her research ever since. Before her postdoc year was over, Wang had been invited to join the MIT faculty, and decided to accept. “I’m from the West Coast,” she says, “and the only possible way for me to want to go back to the East Coast was if I got [an offer] from MIT.”
Since joining the MIT faculty in 2007, Wang has focused her research on various aspects of heat transfer, including ways of making superhydrophobic surfaces to improve the efficiency of heat transfer. That work could help improve the energy efficiency of everything from power plants to microchips.
Wang’s work has also involved research on photovoltaic systems, solar thermal systems, and nanostructured materials to advance the performance of these systems, she says.
These topics are a natural outgrowth of things she learned by watching and helping her father with projects around the house as she was growing up, Wang says. “He would tutor me,” she says. “He would show us little projects he was working on around the house — measuring voltages, fixing circuits, and so on. … He never imposed it on us, but he exposed us to computers when we were really young, and to old equipment from his lab that he kept in our garage. That definitely builds curiosity.”
Wang describes her mother, Edith Wang PhD ’68, as a “superstar” chemist who completed her doctorate at MIT at 23, and studied under a Nobel laureate at Harvard University before deciding to devote herself to raising her three children. “That’s been her career,” Wang says.
Although Wang has given up her musical performing for now, she swims “a lot” and runs regularly, including occasional competitive races. She enjoys teaching the same classes she took as an undergraduate in mechanical engineering: “It’s great for me to be teaching those classes, and knowing the things they are struggling with,” she says. “I know how difficult it is, and we speak the same language, have the same culture. I understand it because I’ve been through that.”
Wang plans to continue studying heat transfer, with applications in solar energy and solar-thermal systems, and the heating and cooling of buildings, and how those could become more efficient. She’s also doing research on water, including minimizing water use in steam power plants and improving the performance of desalination processes.
Making energy and water systems more efficient, she says, has become a major goal: “We need to do more,” she says. “That’s where the real impact is for the world.” | | 10:15a |
Manual control When you imagine the future of gesture-control interfaces, you might think of the popular science-fiction films “Minority Report” (2002) or “Iron Man” (2008). In those films, the protagonists use their hands or wireless gloves to seamlessly scroll through and manipulate visual data on a wall-sized, panoramic screen.
We’re not quite there yet. But the brain behind those Hollywood interfaces, MIT alumnus John Underkoffler ’88, SM ’91, PhD ’99 — who served as scientific advisor for both films — has been bringing a more practical version of that technology to conference rooms of Fortune 500 and other companies for the past year.
Underkoffler’s company, Oblong Industries, has developed a platform called g-speak, based on MIT research, and a collaborative-conferencing system called Mezzanine that allows multiple users to simultaneously share and control digital content across multiple screens, from any device, using gesture control.
Overall, the major benefit in such a system lies in boosting productivity during meetings, says Underkoffler, Oblong’s CEO. This is especially true for clients who tend to pool resources into brainstorming and whose meeting rooms may remain open all day, every day.
“If you can make those meetings synthetically productive — not just times for people to check in, produce status reports, or check email surreptitiously under the table — that can be electrifying force for the enterprise,” he says.
Mezzanine surrounds a conference room with multiple screens, as well as the “brains” of the system (a small server) that controls and syncs everything. Several Wii-like wands, with six degrees of freedom, allow users to manipulate content — such as text, photos, videos, maps, charts, spreadsheets, and PDFs — depending on certain gestures they make with the wand.
That system is built on g-speak, a type of operating system — or a so-called “spatial operating environment” — used by developers to create their own programs that run like Mezzanine.
“G-speak programs run in a distributed way across multiple machines and allow concurrent interactions for multiple people,” Underkoffler says. “This shift in thinking — as if from single sequential notes to chords and harmonies — is powerful."
Oblong’s clients include Boeing, Saudi Aramco, SAP, General Electric, and IBM, as well as government agencies and academic institutions, such as Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Architects and real estate firms are also using the system for structural designing.
Putting pixels in the room
G-speak has its roots in a 1999 MIT Media Lab project — co-invented by Underkoffler in Professor Hiroshi Ishii’s Tangible Media Group — called “Luminous Room,” which enabled all surfaces to hold data that could be manipulated with gestures. “It literally put pixels in the room with you,” Underkoffler says.
The group designed light bulbs, called “1/0 Bulbs,” that not only projected information, but also collected the information from a surface it projected onto. That meant the team could make any projected surface a veritable computer screen, and the data could interact with, and be controlled by, physical objects.
They also assigned pixels three-dimensional coordinates. Imagine, for example, if you sat down in a chair at a table, and tried to describe where the front, left corner of that table was located in physical space. “You’d say that corner is this far off the floor, this far to the right of my chair, and this much in front of me, among other things,” Underkoffler explains. “We started doing that with pixels.”
One application for urban planners involved placing small building models onto a 1/0 Bulb projected table, “and the pixels surrounded the model,” Underkoffler says. This provided three-dimensional spatial information, from which the program casted accurate, digital shadows from the models onto the table. (Changing the time on a digital clock changed the direction of the shadows.)
In another application, the researchers used a glass vase to manipulate digital text and image boxes that were projected onto a whiteboard. The digital boxes were linked to the vase in a circle via digital “springs.” When the vase moved, all the graphics followed. When the vase rotated, the graphics bunched together and “self-stored” into the vase; when the vase rotated again, the graphics reappeared in their first form.
These initial concepts — using the whole room as a digital workplace — became the foundation for g-speak. “I really wanted to get the ideas out into the world in a form that everyone could use,” Underkoffler says. “Generally, that means commercial form, but the world of movies came calling first.”
“The world’s largest focus group”
Underkoffler was recruited as scientific advisor for Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” after meeting the film’s crew, who were searching for novel technology ideas at the Media Lab. Later, in 2003, Underkoffler reprised his behind-the-scenes gig for Ang Lee’s “Hulk,” and, in 2008, for Jon Favreau’s “Iron Man,” which both depicted similar technologies.
Seeing this technology on the big screen inspired Underkoffler to refine his MIT technology, launch Oblong in 2006, and build early g-speak prototypes — glove-based systems that eventually ended up with the company’s first customer, Boeing.
Having tens of millions of viewers seeing the technology on the big screen, however, offered a couple of surprising perks for Oblong, which today is headquartered in Los Angeles, with nine other offices and demo rooms in cities including Boston, New York, and London. “It might have been the world’s largest focus group,” Underkoffler says.
Those enthused by the technology, for instance, started getting in touch with Underkoffler to see if the technology was real. Additionally, being part of a big-screen production helped Underkoffler and Oblong better explain their own technology to clients, Underkoffler says. In such spectacular science-fiction films, technology competes for viewer attention and, yet, it needs to be simplified so viewers can understand it clearly.
“When you take technology from a lab like at MIT, and you need to show it in a film, the process of refining and simplifying those ideas so they’re instantly legible on screen is really close to the refinement you need to undertake if you’re turning that lab work into a product,” he says. “It was enormously valuable to us to strip away everything in the system that wasn’t necessary and leave a really compact core of user-interface ideas we have today.”
After years of writing custom projects for clients on g-speak, Oblong turned the most-requested features of these jobs — such as having cross-platform and multiple-user capabilities — into Mezzanine. “It was the first killer application we could write on top of g-speak,” he says. “Building a universal, shared-pixel workspace has enormous value no matter what your business is.”
Today, Oblong is shooting for greater ubiquity of its technology. But how far away are we from a consumer model of Mezzanine? It could take years, Underkoffler admits: “But we really hope to radically tilt the whole landscape of how we think about computers and user interface.” |
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