In his year-end review of bogus research, Gary Marcus notes endemic cheating in scientific studies and lists six ways to fix the problem. Each approach makes sense – do something about publish or perish, establish an ethical code, encourage insiders to police the work in their field…

But for some reason, Marcus omits the biggest problem of all: pharma. The staggering financial incentives for colluding with corporations and their ghost writers make an incentive like tenure look paltry.

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UD thanks Dirk.

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UPDATE: And don’t forget this problem.

This thoughtful take on the Steubenville lads reminds UD of something she’s noticed about local coverage of university athletes who’ve been arrested for sexual assault or hazing or DUI or theft or gun play or whatever.

Katie Heaney wonders why reporters often devote a couple of sentences at the beginning of the article to the charges themselves, and then spend the rest of the piece talking about how the team’s defense is going to be weakened while the guy’s on trial, but there’s this other guy, a freshman, and this might be a huge break for him and he might rise to the occasion… Reporters often jump right to the win/loss implications of a sudden, er, removal of a key player from the lineup. They’re writing a sports piece with a bit of crime attached to it.

In the case of Steubenville’s multiple accused athletes – high school guys about to go to the universities that recruited them to play football – Heaney asks

[D]o we need to know how many state championships they’ve won? Do we need to know how much the suspects, if convicted, will be missed by their teammates and fans?

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This goes to the rape culture of certain towns and schools – a culture whose existence these places indignantly deny. Pathetic Penn State will insist to its dying day that Sandusky was a grotesque anomaly, that nothing in its engrossing pleasure in violent games had anything to do with current events there. Notre Dame looks the other way. Montana looks the other way…

UD isn’t sure why it’s so difficult for these places to own their violence. They produce violence all the time – on the field, off the field. Steubenville produces young men – local heroes – who film themselves being violent. Football gets more violent by the day, and these places are right there, fashioning young men fully up to the challenge of brutalizing and being brutalized at the highest levels.

Think of the post-nuclear athletic games in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach if you want a sense of where these places are headed: “They’re doing it because they like to do it, honey.”

… dominated, of course, by Penn State.

But the football-team-rape archetype isn’t raping little boys in locker rooms. It’s raping drunk coeds.

Some universities are more notorious than others in this matter; and of course many universities don’t produce groups of raping football players at all.

There’s also the rape pipeline to think about – high school football player rapists about to graduate to college football player rapists. That’s what the Steubenville Ohio case involves — guys who’ve already been accepted to various colleges, but have started raping before they get there. What’s a college to do?

You’re in China or India or whatever and you take an English-language manuscript, translate it word for word into your language, and publish the translation as your own work.

Or you do it in bits and pieces. One chapter of your dissertation turns out to be a verbatim theft/translation.

The dean of Wuhan University law school is accused of having published as his own a translation into Chinese of an article by Willamette University law professor Symeon C. Symeonides.

UD‘s guess is that Xiao Yongping didn’t even do the translation. Someone else did it for him. Someone else probably submitted the article for him. Xiao Yongping probably didn’t do anything.

This is why, if he really does get cornered (this is unlikely – it’s China), he’ll blame it on that person.

York Minster to be Coated in Fat to Keep Out Rain

It’s behind a New Yorker pay wall, but you might want to part with six bucks to enjoy Jay Martel’s brief Guide to the Top Bowl Games.

Here’s its last paragraph. The rest of the piece is along the same lines.

The E-Z-Does-It Catheter Cotton Bowl

This may be the marquee bowl game, with the undefeated Texas State College of the Pacific Homicidal Maniacs setting their sights on the No. 1-ranked Tallahassee University Khmer Rouge. These two college programs consistently rise to the top of every major statistical category including early-onset Alzheimer’s, so expect a real donnybrook. The media-day disclosure that every player on the Maniacs, except for the placekicker, sustained a concussion last week – even though no game was scheduled – sharply raised the level of anticipation for this clash.

There’s also news on coaches:

Lodi State made news last year by firing the former coach Chet Bracker after three losing seasons and paying him the remaining six million dollars on his contract to leave. This decision raised eyebrows, especially when Bracker came back and had to be paid another twenty-two million dollars to leave again.

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UD thanks Jeff.

Two decades ago I spent a year in Poland, teaching at the University of Warsaw.

One afternoon I took my three-year-old daughter to an amusement park – a thrown-together bunch of rides that had suddenly appeared at the foot of the Palace of Culture.

I chose one where you sit inside the suspended body of a plastic duck and go around. It must have been sort of like this.

We hadn’t been in Poland long; I spoke little Polish. The woman who took my money seemed to be jabbering some instructions at me.

I settled my very excited daughter (La Kid to you) next to me. Every other duck was taken by another excited kid.

The tumbledown absurdity of the setting – Stalinist icon background; suspended plastic yellow duck foreground – made me silly, buoyant.

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The ride starts up – loud music and our duck’s slow gathering of its energy until we’re moving fast and smooth around and around, maybe eight feet from the ground. I’m happy; the kid’s happy. We’re looking around. We’re giggling.

Suddenly there’s screaming and it seems to be directed toward us.

“Żółta kaczka! Żółta kaczka! Żółta kaczka!”

The woman who runs the ride is staring at me, pointing at my duck, yelling. I have no idea what she’s saying, but something’s wrong with my duck and now I’m worried. What is wrong with my duck?

Żółta kaczka. It means yellow duck. She was identifying me, trying to get my attention, trying to tell me something. People on the other ducks were staring.

For the rest of the ride, while my daughter reveled in the breeze and the ground-level views, I worried.

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As she helped us out after the ride was over, the woman gestured to me that the yellow duck featured a control column which we were supposed to be using to make our duck fly. Our duck didn’t just graze the earth and go round and round. It flew. It flew up and down at our command. We’d entirely missed that. We’d paid for a duck that flew, and we hadn’t gotten our money’s worth.

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But of course we had gotten our money’s worth – the ride as such, the ride as interpreted by happily-distracted-by-child, linguistically retarded UD, was exactly what both of us wanted. A tranquil circling of an odd world. Only someone else’s insistence that there must be more to it disturbed us.

Children were raped on a college campus, not enough was done to prevent it, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is bringing up the “market for the sale of college-related apparel.“

… is being pioneered at Hamline University, where the coach and a player are simultaneously suspended.

Oh, plus fourteen other players.

They are Huh? presidents. The things they do are so nutty, so destructive, that you simply have to sit back and wonder.

These are the university presidents with multiple ongoing national scandals to their names, the university presidents always reeling from massive sex scandals to massive money scandals, never quite catching up with anything… You can sort of see the sweat dripping off of their faces as they stonewall on this one, pass the buck on that one…

Shalala – University of Miami – is still buffeted by the rioting football players scandal and the Nevin Shapiro scandal, but now, in addition to those, she’s got the Pascal Goldschmidt scandal. Much of her medical school faculty is up in arms about Dean Goldschmidt and his, er, management techniques… But Shalala says nothing; whether it’s Goldschmidt, or her other proud med school appointment – Charles Nemeroff, she’s just going to keep on keeping on thank you very much…

Joel, of Yeshiva, is a yet stranger case, a man whose tenure has witnessed the deification and then rapid de-deification of trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, the existence of a board of trustees (all male, natch; women would be against Yeshiva’s religion) so rife with conflict of interest it became a laughingstock, and a decades-long sex scandal whose legal costs promise to set YU back even more than the $150 million or so it lost because of Bernie and Ezra.

This sex scandal, this latest thing, involving rabbis abusing boys at Yeshiva’s university-run high school, isn’t raising Joel’s game any.

[One of the abused] also said that he reported the abuse to Y.U.’s current president, Richard Joel, before and after Joel took up the post in 2003. Joel did not launch an investigation into the abuse allegations until they were published in [a newspaper].

At first, through a spokesman, he said that Y.U. had retained the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell to “assist” in the investigation. Later, he said that Sullivan & Cromwell’s investigation would be independent.

Same old same old. Denial, number one. Number two, try to control everything. Number three, pushed to the absolute effing wall, begin – tentatively, shamelessly, angrily, self-righteously – dealing with it.

This business of disgust – it’s intriguing. Filthy university football and basketball programs can go along for years – decades – and none of the sickening elements ever gather into one, fully realized, disgusting, Thing.

Each season has its gangs, its guns, its gruesome coaches and gutless trustees, its tailgate trash and post-game riots, its homicidal hazers… Each campus has adjacent streets lined with bars that choke freshmen with cheap beer until they stagger up, piss themselves, and go outside to drown … None of it is strong enough to gather to a Thing, to disgust people. Certainly the financial and academic destruction of universities for the sake of a few yearly games in half-empty stadiums fails to rise to disgust.

For disgust to happen, you need a couple of things. You need a sense, as Buzz Bissinger says, that you’re in a culture, that these things are connected, can be gathered into a full reality. You need to consider that your school may be rather like Penn State, where football was more important than the well-being of children.

But no – you’re not like that! And neither, if you talk to Penn State diehards, is Penn State. It was just a few people, a few bad men…

You need, also, to have a rudimentary sense of what a university is. If you have this sense, you know that virtually every aspect of big-time university football represents a direct attack on the institution. Mindless, greedy, booze-fueled, violent, stoking dangerous cult loyalties — we’re describing the compleat anti-university, a weapon aimed directly at calm, humane, rational, independent thought.

In its scathing editorial about the lawsuit Pennsylvania’s governor has brought against the NCAA (a disgusting organization, but there’s nowhere non-disgusting to go here), the New York Times writes:

In his complaints, the governor only confirmed the inquiry finding that the university’s obsession with football predominance helped drive the cover-up of Mr. Sandusky’s crimes. Mr. Corbett extolled football’s “economic engine” and bemoaned the “diminution in value of the Penn State educational and community experience” because it relied, he emphasized, “in part on the prominence of the Penn State football program.”

Let us have it back again! says the governor. We’re not a university; we’re a sports cult, and our bars are hurting.

… knew?

With video.

… between the author of an article about him (“Harold Bloom is God”) and a reader of the article.

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Your article states that Bloom was born in 1930 and then goes on to assert that he “voted for Norman Thomas every time he ran for president.” Thomas ran for president in 1928, 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944 and 1948, thus making it highly unlikely that Bloom ever voted for him. Had you done even the most minimal fact checking — say by following your own link to the Wikipedia article about Thomas — instead of indulging Bloom in his self mythologizing, your profile would have been much more interesting.

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Fair enough, Mr. Schwartz. The article has been updated.

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Mr. Fishbane, you have indeed updated the article. However, its new assertion that “Mr. Bloom, a lifelong man of the Left, said he voted for Norman Thomas,” fails to point out the impossibility of that claim, a not unimportant fact given the article’s characterization of its subject as God.

Yeah, people are staying away from Penn State games not because it’s hard to enjoy a football game while thinking about a storied coach who for decades raped boys in the team’s shower rooms while an even more storied coach looked the other way.

No, it’s those pesky sanctions.