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One essential aspect of a democracy is the right of each citizen to vote. This also includes the right to have her vote count. One aspect of protecting this right is to ensure that voter fraud does not occur.

This is because voter suppression can unjustly rob people of their votes.

However, the sincerity of a belief has no relevance to its truth. What matters are the reasons and evidence that support the belief. As such, I will look at the available evidence and endeavor to sort out the matter.

The Hwang Woo-suk saga is illustrative of the serious deficiencies in the self-regulation of science. His fraud was uncovered because of brave Korean television reporters. Even those efforts might not have been enough, had Dr. Hwang’s team not been so sloppy in its fraud. The team’s papers included fabricated data and pairs of images that on close comparison clearly indicated duplicity.

Yet as a cautionary tale about the price of fraud, it is, unfortunately, a mixed bag. He lost his academic standing, and he was convicted of bioethical violations and embezzlement, but he never ended up serving jail time

Although his efforts at cloning human embryos, ended in failure and fraud, they provided him the opportunities and resources he needed to take on projects, such as dog cloning, that were beyond the reach of other labs. The fame he earned in academia proved an asset in a business world where there’s no such thing as bad press.

Call it a nasty side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic — the flare-up in fraud, scams and hoaxes as some people have tried to use the crisis to line their pockets illegally.

The grand total that fraudsters tried to scam from the government and the public in those cases is more than $569 million.

The department's efforts to target fraud related to COVID-19 fraud date back to last March when then-Attorney General William Barr instructed federal prosecutors across the country to investigate and prosecute scams, price gouging and other coronavirus-related crimes aggressively.

Perhaps the most damaging was his insistence that millions of Americans voted illegally in the election he narrowly won.

What once seemed like another harebrained claim by a president with little regard for the truth must now be recognized as a real threat to American democracy.

That would allow state and national lawmakers to impose even tighter voting requirements, harming minorities, the young and the elderly, who tend to vote Democratic.

He is, on the contrary, seized by the conviction that science is beset by sloppy statistical maneuvering and, in some cases, outright fraud. He has therefore been moonlighting as a fraud-buster, developing techniques to help detect doctored data in other people’s research. Already, in the space of less than a year, he has blown up two colleagues’ careers.

In a paper called “False-Positive Psychology,” published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science, he and two colleagues—Leif Nelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Wharton’s Joseph Simmons—showed that psychologists could all but guarantee an interesting research finding if they were creative enough with their statistics and procedures.

By going on what amounted to a fishing expedition (that is, by recording many, many variables but reporting only the results that came out to their liking); by failing to establish in advance the number of human subjects in an experiment; and by analyzing the data as they went, so they could end the experiment when the results suited them, they produced a howler of a result, a truly absurd finding. They then ran a series of computer simulations using other experimental data to show that these methods could increase the odds of a false-positive result—a statistical fluke, basically—to nearly two-thirds.

Over and over, Daniel Yuan, a medical doctor and statistician, couldn’t understand the results coming out of the lab, a prestigious facility at Johns Hopkins Medical School funded by millions from the National Institutes of Health.He raised questions with the lab’s director. He reran the calculations on his own. He looked askance at the articles arising from the research, which were published in distinguished journals. He told his colleagues: This doesn’t make sense.“At first, it was like, ‘Okay — but I don’t really see it,’ ” Yuan recalled. “Then it started to smell bad.”

The passions of scientific debate are probably not much different from those that drive achievement in other fields, so a tragic, even deadly dispute might not be surprising.But science, creeping ahead experiment by experiment, paper by paper, depends also on institutions investigating errors and correcting them if need be, especially if they are made in its most respected journals.If the apparent suicide and Yuan’s detailed complaints provoked second thoughts about the Nature paper, though, there were scant signs of it.The journal initially showed interest in publishing Yuan’s criticism and told him that a correction was “probably” going to be written, according to e-mail rec­ords. That was almost six months ago. The paper has not been corrected.The university had already fired Yuan in December 2011, after 10 years at the lab. He had been raising questions about the research for years. He was escorted from his desk by two security guards.

Last year, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud had increased tenfold since 1975. The same analysis reviewed more than 2,000 retracted biomedical papers and found that 67 percent of the retractions were attributable to misconduct, mainly fraud or suspected fraud.

A well-known psychologist in the Netherlands whose work has been published widely in professional journals falsified data and made up entire experiments, an investigating committee has found

Experts say the case exposes deep flaws in the way science is done in a field, psychology, that has only recently earned a fragile respectability.

In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny. Outright fraud may be rare, these experts say, but they contend that Dr. Stapel took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged.

scientific fraud sound a lot like Madoff-style financial deception: both include social networking, stonewalling disclosure, indignation when questioned. The Ponzi Schemer and data fabricator  share with other forms of confidence artists a gift for recognizing the stories that people would like to hear,

The now-discredited study got headlines because it offered hope. It seemed to prove that our sense of empathy, our basic humanity, could overcome prejudice and bridge seemingly irreconcilable differences. It was heartwarming, and it was utter bunkum. The good news is that this particular case of scientific fraud isn't going to do much damage to anyone but the people who concocted and published the study. The bad news is that the alleged deception is a symptom of a weakness at the heart of the scientific establishment.

When it was published in Science magazine last December, the research attracted academic as well as media attention; it seemed to provide solid evidence that increasing contact between minority and majority groups could reduce prejudice.

But in May, other researchers tried to reproduce the study using the same methods, and failed. Upon closer examination, they uncovered a number of devastating "irregularities" - statistical quirks and troubling patterns - that strongly implied that the whole LaCour/Green study was based upon made-up data.

474 charged with crimes related to theft of Covid relief funds

Federal investigators identified more than half a billion dollars in fraud and charged 474 people with crimes related to theft of money from US Covid relief programs, the Justice Department announced Friday.

The announcement came one year after the passage of the $2 trillion economic aid legislation known as the CARES Act, which aimed to help people and businesses suffering financial losses in the coronavirus pandemic.

Had the doctoring been done by someone from the insurer, as Ariely implied? There didn’t seem to be a way to dispute that contention, and the company itself wasn’t saying much. Then, last week, NPR’s Planet Money delivered a scoop: The company, called The Hartford, informed the show that it had finally tracked down the raw numbers that were provided to Ariely—and that the data had been “manipulated inappropriately” in the published study.

The analysis of insurance data from The Hartford appeared as “Experiment 3” in the paper. On the preceding page, an analysis of a different dataset—the one linked to Gino—was written up as “Experiment 1.” The scientists who say they discovered issues with both experiments—Leif Nelson, Uri Simonsohn, and Joe Simmons—dubbed the apparent double fraud a “clusterfake.” When I spoke with the scientific-misconduct investigator and Atlantic contributor James Heathers, he had his own way of describing it: “This is some kind of mad, fraudulent unicorn.”

When they set about reviewing Ariely’s work on the 2012 paper, a few quirks in the car-insurance data tipped them off that something might be amiss. Some entries were in one font, some in another. Some were rounded to the nearest 500 or 1,000; some were not. But the detail that really caught their attention was the distribution of recorded values. With such a dataset, you’d expect to see the numbers fall in a bell curve—most entries bunched up near the mean, and the rest dispersed along the tapering extremes. But the data that Ariely said he’d gotten from the insurance company did not form a bell curve; the distribution was completely flat. Clients were just as likely to have claimed that they’d driven 1,000 miles as 10,000 or 50,000 miles. It’s “hard to know what the distribution of miles driven should look like in those data,” the scientists wrote. “It is not hard, however, to know what it should not look like.”

Last year the journal Nature reported an alarming increase in the number of retractions of scientific papers — a tenfold rise in the previous decade, to more than 300 a year across the scientific literature.

two scientists and a medical communications consultant analyzed 2,047 retracted papers in the biomedical and life sciences. They found that misconduct was the reason for three-quarters of the retractions for which they could determine the cause. “We found that the problem was a lot worse than we thought,”

the rising rate of retractions reflects perverse incentives that drive scientists to make sloppy mistakes or even knowingly publish false data.

it’s time to cross another bridge — into a world without facts. Or, more precisely, where facts do not matter a whit.

“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts,” she declared on “The Diane Rehm Show”

Hughes, a frequent surrogate for President-elect Donald Trump and a paid commentator for CNN during the campaign, kept on defending that assertion at length

Academics need to publish in order to advance professionally, get better jobs or secure tenure.

Dmitry Kuznetsov, a Russian biochemist whose published work has been repeatedly alleged to be fraudulent, is now the chief editor of two science journals. The appointments are raising questions about the scientific integrity of the publications.

one of the worst fraud records in the history of science,” said Dan Larhammar, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden who has written about problems in Kuznetsov's work. “That should be a major concern to” the publisher that recruited Kuznetsov as editor-in-chief, he said.

“As a result of these claims [by Kuznetsov and colleagues] a couple of students have spent several years of their life on a wild goose chase,” Coey told The Scientist.

a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events.

the dark side of open access,” the movement to make scholarly publications freely available.

The number of these journals and conferences has exploded in recent years as scientific publishing has shifted from a traditional business model for professional societies and organizations built almost entirely on subscription revenues to open access, which relies on authors or their backers to pay for the publication of papers online, where anyone can read them.

Why aren't the students who use these services crafting their own essays to begin with?

Here is where the real problem lies. The idea of paying someone else to do your work for you has become increasingly commonplace in our broader culture, even in the realm of writing. It is well known that many actors, athletes, politicians, and businesspeople have contracted with uncredited ghostwriters to produce their memoirs for them. There is no law against it.

At the same time, higher education has been transformed into an industry, another sphere of economic activity where goods and services are bought and sold. By this logic, a student who pays a fair market price for it has earned whatever grade it brings. In fact, many institutions of higher education market not the challenges provided by their course of study, but the ease with which busy students can complete it in the midst of other daily responsibilities.

The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.

This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.

Everything we do and see is real. It’s all experiential. Nobody has a dream and wakes up feeling like a victim of fraud. It really happened in the sense that we had a genuine dream. So when we talk about virtual reality, what is real and what is virtually real?

Suspension of disbelief, what we experienced essential in all mediums before, is not necessary in VR anymore. It’s what all prior mediums require and what VR, when done right, completely circumvents

Each and every facet of VR production relies on craft to properly convey an experience to the user and make it enjoyable and believable.