Category Archives: Bad Science

How Bayh-Dole dammed, and then damned, the commons

Posted on October 2, 2015 by Gerald Barnett

This is the third article in a series. The first is here. The second, here. The motivating driver of the Bayh-Dole Act, if we can be blunt, was to put the affiliated research foundations in a position to keep with impunity any … Continue reading →

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Embracing Bad Science in Technology Transfer

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Gerald Barnett

Julia Belluz and Steven Hoffman at Vox have published a new account of how screwed up academic science is. Belluz and Hoffman report on a string of studies and exposed forgeries that suggest that the published scientific literature is anything … Continue reading →

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Replication: The Technology Transfer Problem

Posted on March 9, 2014 by Gerald Barnett

Steve Fiori on the SCISP listserv called the list’s attention to a blog post by David Funder, a research psychologist at UC Riverside.  Funder’s post discusses a recent NSF workshop that took up the issue of replication of research results. … Continue reading →

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The Paradise of University Rhetoric About Science and Innovation

Posted on February 28, 2014 by Gerald Barnett

Ian Sample, writing for The Guardian’s ShortcutsBlog, describes how MIT grad students in 2005 created a “fake science report” generator that produced bogus scientific articles for presentation at conferences. Now anyone can download the generator: But this is the hoax … Continue reading →

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Moose Turd Pie, and No Good

Posted on October 28, 2013 by Gerald Barnett

The Economist ran a cover story last week on “how science goes wrong”: An argument of the piece is that journals like splashy claims but don’t have room for studies that announce validation of prior reports. The article goes on … Continue reading →

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Where have you gone, Curt Flood?

Posted on October 25, 2013 by Gerald Barnett

It should be clear by now:  universities have no basis to compel assignment of faculty intellectual property.  The basis for faculty assignment of IP is voluntary agreement–either at employment because a faculty member is expressly hired to invent something, or … Continue reading →

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Getting Closer to the Heart

Posted on October 19, 2013 by Gerald Barnett

What is the purpose of university intellectual property policy?  This question is not idle.  For decades, Archie Palmer worked to get universities to adopt formal patent and research policies, publishing accounts of various university policy statements, together with commentary on … Continue reading →

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The Alt Narrative that Refreshes

Posted on August 23, 2013 by Gerald Barnett

In Ash:  A Secret History, we get a slant narrative of a history that is almost our received view, but not quite.  The narrative takes place on lands we recognize, with place names that are almost the ones we expect, … Continue reading →

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Neophilia

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

Alok Jha, writing in The Guardian, has an extended article on the growing problem of bad science, with particular attention to psychology and medicine. One bit of worrisome news: There are indications that bad practice – particularly at the less … Continue reading →

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Bad Science and University Technology Transfer

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

Today we see yet another story on the emerging epidemic of bad science, this one from the former head of Amgen’s global cancer research.    Of 53 “landmark” publications in top journals, Amgen could not replicate 47 of the claimed … Continue reading →

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