Eh, i don’t think asking medical students to do a light research paper is a waste of time. Maybe something comparable to a shorter masters thesis.
A lot of medical doctors don’t seem to be all that scientifically literate. This is would probably help.
I have a friend in health care who was required to do research like this and thinks it has really benefitted him in his career.
Whether medical students have time for such a paper is a different question.
The Gino stuff isn’t over yet
Harvard sued behavioral scientist Francesca Gino for defamation in August, alleging the former Harvard Business School professor sent the school a falsified dataset to prove she did not commit data fraud.
The University’s lawyers accused Gino of modifying a spreadsheet on her laptop, then manually backdating it to 2010, so it would appear that she had been sent false data by another researcher rather than altered it herself.
Sounds like she is going to get black-balled for eternity after that one.
She basically tried to throw another academic under the bus to try to avoid blame.
Maybe she’s auditioning for a spot in the Trump administration. Like revising BLS data maybe?
Being a quasi-academic, I get so much academic spam. Mostly from fake journals/publishing houses/conferences, but also real ones. A nephrology journal recently asked me to review a paper, and another one was calling me an expert in obstetrics.
I still get academic emails.
Some of them (like the math ones), I’m on the lists deliberately, so I don’t mind. One of these days, I may show up at a MAA meeting again (that’s about math education), just because I’m interested.
Not new news, but it’s in the WSJ today
(Gift link)
Aidan Toner-Rodgers, 27, sprang to the upper tiers of economics as a graduate student late last year from virtually out of nowhere.
While still taking core classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he wrote a paper on artificial intelligence’s workplace impact so rapidly influential it was cited in Congress. He appeared in the pages of The Wall Street Journal in December as the very picture of a wunderkind, in faded jeans with tousled hair, in between two of his mentors, including Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu. Toner-Rodgers’s work offered a surprising and even hopeful revelation about our high-tech future. He concluded that AI increased worker productivity and spurred innovation. Also, people didn’t like using it very much.
Within weeks, those mentors were asking an unthinkable question: Had Toner-Rodgers made it all up?
By the spring, Toner-Rodgers was no longer enrolled at MIT. The university disavowed his paper. Questions multiplied, but one seemed more elusive than the rest: How did a baby-faced novice from small-town California dupe some of academia’s brightest minds?
If you’re going to fake a reference, I recommend not faking one to the co-founder of Retraction Watch.
This is likely going to be increasingly defined as fraud.
I already recorded my presentation for Thursday for this:
I have multiple examples of AI misuse –
basically… people getting caught at it – but it’s not so much using the tech, but:
I selected only a few items for this year. There are LOADS from both academia and law.
Btw, I used AI to help me find examples of AI abuse/failure (Google Gemini) – I gave it my talk from last year and told it I wanted new examples from this year.
My talk begins with that disclosure. 
When used that way, and followed by manual confirmation, its no different than using a search engine. Similiarly, when its used for organizational type tasks.
The problem with ai is when people trust it to give them information thats new to them. They did that with search engines too but then at least the info came from a person.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/climate/glyphosate-roundup-retracted-study.html
maybe it’s not such a great idea to bathe our ready-to-harvest wheat (USA) in Roundup just to dry it out faster for processing.
the journal failed to notice in peer review that studies showing connections to cancer were simply not included. monsanto sponsored studies are golden though. this should have been caught in peer review and denied publication. instead, industry has its way for the last 25 years while relying on a review paper that is straight up fraud. monsanto ees wrote part of the paper and were not disclosed as authors.
i’m so grateful that the pharmaceutical industry, journals, researchers, and regulators are above such collusion and fraud. their doctors and scientists aren’t unduly influenced by any base motives. your pills and shots are all good, safe and effective.
“The 2000 paper, a scientific review conducted by three independent scientists, was for decades cited by other researchers as evidence of Roundup’s safety. It became the cornerstone of regulations that deemed the weedkiller safe.
But since then, emails uncovered as part of lawsuits against the weedkiller’s manufacturer, Monsanto, have shown that the company’s scientists played a significant role in conceiving and writing the study.”
“In the emails, Monsanto employees praised each other for their “hard work” on the paper, which included data collection, writing and review. One Monsanto employee expressed hope that the study would become “‘the’ reference on Roundup and glyphosate safety.” The pharmaceutical giant Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018 for $63 billion.”
“Laboratory tests first flagged potential risks posed by exposure to glyphosate as far back as the early 1980s, and soon after, studies of Midwestern farmers exposed to herbicides started to show an increase in certain cancers. A U.S.-backed effort to eradicate coca fields in Colombia by spraying glyphosate from planes onto hundreds of thousands of acres of cropland led to widespread reports of illnesses among residents.
The 2000 paper declaring glyphosate safe was published against that backdrop.”
“The retraction points to a wider problem of research secretly funded by industries like tobacco and lead, said David Rosner, co-director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University. “Shading the science to favor the corporate interest,” he said, was likely “the rule rather than the exception.” Journals needed to “press scientists more forcefully to identify conflicts of interest,” he said. “Huge financial interests are at stake.””
“What was surprising, they said, was that other researchers continued to cite the 2000 paper even after the emails were disclosed in litigation, starting in 2017. “This paper has been one of the most cited papers ever written on the topic of glyphosate safety,” Professor Oreskes said.”
If the thing that brings down Dan Ariely isn’t his association with fraudulent research about fraud, but his connection (however tenuous) with Jeffrey Epstein:
Well. That would be something.
Duke is closing one of his research centers:
More from Duke Chronicle:
https://dukechronicle.com/article/my-connection-with-jeffrey-epstein-20260202