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A Cornell professor whose buzzy and accessible food studies made him a media darling has submitted his resignation, the school said Thursday, a dramatic fall for a scholar whose work increasingly came under question in recent years. The university said in a statement that a year-long review found that Brian Wansink "committed academic misconduct in his research and scholarship, including misreporting of research data, problematic statistical techniques, failure to properly document and preserve research results, and inappropriate authorship."
Wansink, a marketing professor at Cornell's business college who was the director of the university's Food and Brand Lab, will retire at the end of the academic year, the school said. The move follows the recent retraction of six of Wansink's papers by the American Medical Association's JAMA Network, including those about how serving bowl size affected food consumption, how fasting changed people's food preferences and how action-packed television programs increased food intake.
Wansink emailed The Washington Post on Thursday a news release of his retirement, which included statements attributed to a university trustee saying that "Cornell and Professor Wansink mutually have decided that Professor Wansink's research approach and goals differ from the academic expectations of Cornell University, and they have decided to part ways accordingly." Wansink said he is leaving his position June 30, 2019.
For years, Wansink enjoyed a level of prominence that many academics would strive for, his work spawning countless news stories. He published a study showing that people who ate from "bottomless" bowls of soup continue to eat as their bowls are refilled, as a parable about the potential health effects of large portion sizes. Another, with the title "Bad popcorn in big buckets," similarly warned about the perils of presenting food in big quantities, according to Vox.
Also at Science Magazine, Ars Technica, CNN, and Retraction Watch.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 24 2018, @03:44PM (8 children)
Does anything more need to be said? If the media loves it, there is SOMETHING wrong with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @04:03PM
This has been a long time coming. The guy basically treated fraud as the scientific method and wrote blog posts advising his students to do it. Then there are all sorts of numbers than don't add up, inconsistent descriptions of the methods, etc in his publications.
Theres been a lot about it on this blog: https://andrewgelman.com/2018/09/23/tweeking-big-problem-not-think/ [andrewgelman.com]
BTW, the comments/comment feed seem desynced for that blog.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @04:15PM
Please. The media flip-flops on issues every other Tuesday. Generalizing conclusions or opinions based on their preference is pure folly.
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 24 2018, @04:56PM
#FakeStews!
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday September 24 2018, @06:17PM (2 children)
"a marketing professor "
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @08:12PM (1 child)
"A marketing professor". That could even be worse than psychology. How did he get papers into AMA journals at all?
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 24 2018, @08:50PM
What part of "marketing" do you not understand? His chosen field of expertise is how to manipulate people into buying things for more than they're worth.
(Score: 1) by easyTree on Monday September 24 2018, @08:09PM (1 child)
Yes:
What the hell? What next, professor of drinking a glass of water?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Tuesday September 25 2018, @12:20AM
He would point you towards drinking a glass of Evian!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Monday September 24 2018, @04:22PM (6 children)
I predict he will become the Dr Phil of nutrition.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Touché) by curunir_wolf on Monday September 24 2018, @04:34PM (5 children)
That's already owned by Dr. Oz.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 3, Funny) by nitehawk214 on Monday September 24 2018, @05:10PM (4 children)
That's true. Maybe he can make up some quantum bullshit and become the Deepak Chopra of nutrition?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Funny) by Farmer Tim on Monday September 24 2018, @08:03PM (3 children)
Came for the news, stayed for the soap opera.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday September 24 2018, @08:22PM (2 children)
Cooking with your own LHC
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday September 25 2018, @01:24AM
No neutron star was harmed in the process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Tuesday September 25 2018, @05:44PM
Instead of THC.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: -1, Redundant) by oldmac31310 on Monday September 24 2018, @04:35PM (2 children)
Read about this last week elsewhere.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday September 24 2018, @04:37PM (1 child)
His resignation happened 4 days ago. Does that count as "last week"?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday September 24 2018, @04:57PM
Yup, the week starts on Sunday as far as our servers are concerned.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday September 24 2018, @05:04PM (6 children)
Frauds in science get caught this way all the time. If you make a big claim, you'd better not have knowingly cheated, and you need to be careful you didn't make too many mistakes. No mistakes at all would be nice, but that's very hard to do and a few honest and minor mistakes are livable, and won't kill a career in science. But being slipshod will. Not checking and double checking things can be as bad as outright falsification of data. Double checking can be tedious, hard work, but it should not be blown off, lest you embarrass yourself.
When a clown or a fraud with some claim to respectability such as a PhD makes an extraordinary claim, it's going to get publicity, and it's going to be checked. A little bitty finding might fly under the radar, but a big one, no way. And if it's wrong, it will be found out. All kinds of further advances and uses would end up depending upon those findings, and if they are wrong, people are going to notice they're having problems going further, and things aren't working the way the fraudulent results say they should. They may then try to replicate the original findings, and learn that it is impossible. You just can't get away with a Big Lie, not in science. See Cold Fusion, and the practically magical claims of Hwang Woo-suk around stem cells.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday September 24 2018, @05:14PM (2 children)
But, you can get away with a Big Lie if you get media, celebrities and other morons to defend you by telling them exactly what they want to hear, like Andrew Wakefield.
Maybe we are more cautious now, and will no longer let a dickhole like that get a foothold. I somehow doubt it.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Touché) by suburbanitemediocrity on Monday September 24 2018, @06:29PM
I've read the exact same things by many people on the internets about how corporations control us. Eg., plate sizes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @07:45PM
Or if you just keep lying so fast that the media can't follow one lie up before 5 more have been made.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @05:27PM (2 children)
No, the institutionalized peer review did nothing, it was 100% worthless and this guy was allowed to run rampant.
It was all that people outside his field started looking closer at his work. It was because this blog post went viral making him look like a manifestion of all that is wrong modern academia. He was proud of getting 5 papers out of noise by cherry-picking, p-hacking, etc. He then praises the immigrant PhD student who did this for him while criticizing another one who refused to:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170312041524/http:/www.brianwansink.com/phd-advice/the-grad-student-who-never-said-no [archive.org]
Then, of course, all his papers were found to be riddled with errors of every kind (numbers not adding up, etc).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @05:36PM
And to be sure, the reason he wrote this blog post is because such behaviour is standard in many areas of research. Tens of billions of dollars is being pissed away every year on stuff like this, and in fact the people who do it are rewarded with publications while those who refuse to are ostracized and punished. Exactly like he describes. He only got caught due to how apt his inadvertent description was of the "publication mill" academia has become.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Tuesday September 25 2018, @03:29AM
Ah, yes...What was the old saw about "Lies, damn lies and statistics"?
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday September 24 2018, @05:34PM (1 child)
Can't he transfer to a different department instead of resigning?
Don't most ivy league institutions have useful departments such as:
* business school
* communications
* marketing
* philosophy
* gender studies
* masturbation studies
* special snowflake reinforcement studies
* basket weaving studies
etc
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @05:47PM
Ivy League: institutions where getting an MS in Applied Underwater Basket Weaving Theory leads to a life of wealth.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pTamok on Monday September 24 2018, @05:53PM (8 children)
If you read this chap's blog articles, but start first with the paper he published with two others:
Statistical heartburn: an attempt to digest four pizza publications from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab [biomedcentral.com]
Nick Brown's Blog: A different set of problems in an article from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab [blogspot.com]
Cornell salutes America's teenage female combat heroes of WW2 [blogspot.com]
Nick Brown's Blog: More apparent duplication from the Food and Brand Lab [blogspot.com]
Nick Brown's Blog: Strange patterns in some results from the Food and Brand Lab [blogspot.com]
Nick Brown's Blog: More problematic articles from the Food and Brand Lab [blogspot.com]
Nick Brown's Blog: The final (maybe?) two articles from the Food and Brand Lab [blogspot.com]
Nick Brown's Blog: Problems in Cornell Food and Brand Lab's replacement "Can Branding Improve School Lunches?" article [blogspot.com]
Nick Brown's Blog: The latest Cornell Food and Brand Lab correction: Some inconsistencies and strange data patterns [blogspot.com]
Nick Brown's Blog: The Cornell Food and Brand Lab story goes full circle, possibly scooping up much of social science research on the way, and keeps turning [blogspot.com]
It took a long time, and a lot of patient work to challenge Wansink's published articles.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday September 24 2018, @06:20PM (7 children)
Publish everything somewhere (arXiv, university sites, etc.) and let other scientists "peer review" it (publicly or anonymously, but with all such comments printed somewhere).
If a journal is taking money to publish papers, and reviewers aren't sufficiently motivated, you have a recipe for false peer review.
Scientists who disagree with a paper's conclusions will attack it in order to disprove it. Scientists who agree can try to replicate the results.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by quietus on Tuesday September 25 2018, @07:04AM (5 children)
Thoroughly checking a paper takes time, and effort.
You're gonna end up with the open-source conundrum [securityledger.com]: lots and lots of people assuming someone else already has done the proper vetting, especially when there's a reputation involved.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday September 26 2018, @12:30AM (4 children)
If most papers are ineffectively reviewed bullshit about obscure topics, then they don't matter much anyway. A certain percentage of content could be ignored. Maybe over 90%?
Controversial topics, like Planet Nine, EmDrive, dark matter, etc. will have no shortage of scientists looking to disprove what others have put forward.
Government agencies like the FDA and NIH will mandate the replication of medical studies. Replication of the results can act as a review (previous studies can be critiqued within the text of a new study). Governments can mandate peer review [wikipedia.org] for science that is used for policymaking. Apparently, the State of California already does this.
If academic scholars are already peer reviewing papers as part of their job, they can continue to do so even under a new system. They weren't paid directly by the journals anyway.
The scientific method predates the scientific journal. Just share your ideas, and they will either stand the test of time and scrutiny or not. The peer review can still happen, just not as part of the opaque and corrupt science journal process. Comments can be published anonymously. That might not defeat style analysis, but it's on the reviewer to manage that risk if they want to participate in a transparent peer review process.
Even if you do nothing to change how journals and peer review work, the lack of replication of studies is already a recognized problem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis [wikipedia.org]
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778 [bbc.com]
https://blog.frontiersin.org/2017/05/01/are-replication-studies-unwelcome/ [frontiersin.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26 2018, @09:00PM
Is this a joke?
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday September 27 2018, @11:35AM (2 children)
You will still need some kind of authority to distinguish between the quality, or insights* if you like, of different papers; even if something comparable to soylentnews.
* Acknowledging ofcourse, that new insights tend to be disputed at first, i.e. if you do not define strict quality criteria, you'll likely end up with as many upmods as downmods.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday September 27 2018, @01:39PM (1 child)
Wind the clock back to the early days of science. Most sharing of results was in letters to other scientists, or presentations. There wasn't any formalized peer review, authoritative gatekeeper, or electronic voting.
Today, it would be simple to just produce a Stack Overflow clone for discussion and voting. Or you could design a platform from scratch.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by quietus on Sunday September 30 2018, @10:06AM
It might be better to start from a platform akin to PLOS One and/or Scientific Reports. Just looking at PLOS One, I think there might be three areas of improvement.
A further improvement could consist of adding tools, dedicated to making reviews easier -- automated statistical checks, extracting and (dis)aggregating experimental data, and so on.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26 2018, @02:51PM
Yes, in the limit of infinite time and resources, but in practice, no. Claim to break the laws of physics? Yes, there is a lot of motivation there. Claim that bigger bowls cause you to eat more? Well, I don't know if I believe that, but I'm not dropping what I'm doing to try and replicate that (unless some funding source wants to give me money to do that).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday September 24 2018, @08:53PM
Whenever you hear or read that phrase from any mainstream news outlet, what you are about to receive is a marketing spend from somebody, basically BS dressed up in a lab coat. If you actually listened to any of it or took it seriously, then practically everything in your nearest grocery store or sold OTC in your nearest drug store would simultaneously give you cancer and cure cancer.
My rule: Eat reasonably healthy stuff, get a regular physical and listen to what your doctor tells you to do, and something else will kill you before your food does.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.