DailyDirt: Bad Science Is Coming to Get Us

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Scientific publishing has been a lucrative industry in recent years, even though scientists have faced increasing competition over limited funding. The publish-or-perish academic model may be contributing to an increase in scientific fraud, but maybe the increased accessibility of digital journals is simply making it easier for honest mistakes to be caught. The scientific method is supposed to weed out incorrect conclusions, but there may be a lot of wasted effort as scientists try to replicate experiments that are just completely fictitious. It gets harder and harder to make decisions based on evidence -- if there is growing uncertainty that any evidence can be trusted....

• The number of retractions from scientific journals has increased tenfold over the past decade. But it's not clear how much is misconduct and how much is honest scientific mistake... [url]
• Data detective Uri Simonsohn has published his statistical methods for exposing the suspicious data of social psychologists. Lies, damn lies and statistics... but at least statistics can be used to ferret out the lies. [url]
• Apparently, the UK is notorious for its bad science journalism. We're talking "labvertisements" -- industry/product-funded science stories about (possibly fake) studies conducted by questionable scientists with dubious methods. But at least they're honest about it and take their research with a huge grain of salt. The US just re-packages many of these reports as serious news. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: academia, data, fraud, mistakes, publishing, retractions, science, statistics

Credit Where It's Due: DOJ Changes Its Tune On FISA Transparency

from the now-let's-see-what-happens dept

Earlier this week, I complained that the Department of Justice seemed to be stonewalling a Freedom of Information Act request I’d filed seeking copies of mandatory semi-annual reports to Congress on the National Security Agency’s compliance with the procedures and civil liberties safeguards of the FISA Amendments Act--which the House voted yesterday to reauthorize for another five years. After sitting on the request for two months (the statutory deadline is 20 business days), DOJ had finally replied with a letter claiming they could "neither confirm or deny the existence" of reports that were required by federal law. I thought this was a little ridiculous. Fortunately, there were officials at the Justice Department who thought so too.

Having appealed the denial of my request, I got an impressively prompt reply on Tuesday evening from the director of the Office of Information Policy at DOJ, assuring me that she recognized the agency's initial response had been "incorrect," and that a new one would be forthcoming immediately. By Wednesday morning, their stance had changed entirely: They had found the reports I sought, and were forwarding them to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) for review to determine what would need to be redacted before release--with a request that ODNI seek to expedite its analysis to compensate for their own delay.

Now, to be sure, I'd rather have had this response a month ago, and the documents before the House vote, but at this point DOJ appears to be doing exactly what they're supposed to and making a good faith effort to facilitate the redaction and release of these important assessments. So it seemed appropriate to follow up on my initial blog post to acknowledge that--and in particular Office of Information Policy director Melanie Pustay, who straightforwardly acknowledged the error and acted quickly to correct it. We'll see soon enough whether a similar spirit of transparency reigns at ODNI.

Cross-posted from Cato-at-Liberty.

Filed Under: doj, fisa, fisa amendments act, foia, freedom of information, mistakes, odni

Apple/Samsung Jurors Admit They Finished Quickly By Ignoring Prior Art & Other Key Factors

from the rushing-to-get-things-done dept

Late Friday afternoon, the jury in the Apple/Samsung patent dispute surprised just about everyone by telling the court it had reached a verdict. Given the number of complex issues it needed to go through, most experts expected it to take well into this week. According to observers in the courtroom, one of Apple's lawyers was so surprised and unprepared that he had to rush back to court without a suit, and showed up in a polo shirt. The quickness of the decision certainly resulted in some questions about just how thoroughly the jury reviewed the instructions and then considered each of the approximately 700 questions it needed to answer (initial jury form is embedded below). As we noted in an update to our post on Friday, about half an hour after the ruling was read out -- and long after most of the press stopped paying attention -- the judge announced at least two problems with the ruling, where the jury had awarded damages, despite not finding infringement.

As we said on Friday, that certainly raised significant questions about how carefully the jury actually reviewed the issues in question. While some said it could have just been a clerical error in answering all the questions, that appears not to be the case. Because after the judge instructed the jury to fix the mistakes, they didn't reassign those damages elsewhere, they just wiped them off the slate. Besides, even if you were to argue it was merely a mistake, that's no excuse. This "mistake" could have ended up costing millions of dollars. That's quite a "mistake."

Over at Groklaw, they're discussing this and other evidence of jury misconduct. The awarding of damages for things they found didn't infringe was already pretty bad, but some of the other details highlight how the jury clearly did not read the jury instructions (or bother to comprehend them).

A Reuters interview with the jury foreman demonstrates conclusively that the jury ignored the rules. Foreman Velvin Hogan told Reuters that they wanted to punish Samsung:

"We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist," Hogan said. "We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable."

That sounds nice, except... patent awards are only supposed to be about making the patent holder whole, not about punishing the infringer. And, in fact, the jury instructions clearly stated this:

The amount of those damages must be adequate to compensate the patent holder for the infringement. A damages award should put the patent holder in approximately the financial position it would have been in had the infringement not occurred, but in no event may the damages award be less than a reasonable royalty. You should keep in mind that the damages you award are meant to compensate the patent holder and not to punish an infringer.

And yet here's the jury foreman flat out admitting that they decided to use the award amounts to punish Samsung. Elsewhere, it becomes pretty clear that Hogan was hardly an impartial juror. He has his own patent, 7,352,953 on "recording and storing video information." That, by itself, does not automatically make one biased in favor of the system (I know plenty of people with patents who hate the patent system), but he admitted elsewhere that he ended up making decisions based on how he would feel if it was his patent at stake, rather than on what the law actually says -- and then said he needed to rule as if he were speaking out "for all" patent holders. In an an interview with Bloomberg, he made that bias clear:

“When I got in this case and I started looking at these patents I considered: ‘If this was my patent and I was accused, could I defend it?’” Hogan explained. On the night of Aug. 22, after closing arguments, “a light bulb went on in my head,” he said. “I thought, I need to do this for all of them.”

He then told Bloomberg that "he explained his thinking to his fellow jurors" and that seemed to drive the discussion. An interview with another juror, over at News.com, confirmed that Hogan's views focused the jury, with one juror admitting that they just started ignoring prior art, because that question was too time consuming. Seriously.

"It didn't dawn on us [that we agreed that Samsung had infringed] on the first day," Ilagan said. "We were debating heavily, especially about the patents on bounce-back and pinch-to-zoom. Apple said they owned patents, but we were debating about the prior art [about similar technology that Samsung said existed before the iPhone debuted]. [Velvin] Hogan was jury foreman. He had experience. He owned patents himself...so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier. After we debated that first patent -- what was prior art --because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art."

"In fact we skipped that one," Ilagan continued, "so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down."

Yeah. Read that sucker again. The jury instructions are again clear that the jury needs to consider the prior art, but according to this juror, Manuel Ilagan, after foreman Hogan talked about his own experience with patents, they decided that prior art was "bogging us down" and they might as well "skip" it.

In the long run, the jury verdict probably won't matter much, because this case would have been appealed no matter what. But these kinds of stories certainly give Samsung plenty of fodder to ask the judge to toss out the jury verdict already. It also raises questions, yet again, about why we allow juries on patent trials. This has been a big problem for a long time and the results here only serve to emphasize that fact.

Filed Under: jury, make whole, mistakes, patents, prior art, punishment, velvin hogan
Companies: apple, samsung

DailyDirt: Stupiditry From Job Seekers

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Some mistakes are hard to avoid completely. Typos are usually forgivable, even when they result in some terrible misunderstandings. But job applicants are told time and time again that typos are horrendous errors, and anyone applying for a job should be especially careful about eliminating spelling mistakes and typing errors. However, focusing too much on simple errors could allow some much bigger mistakes to slide by. Here are just a few examples.

• Vanessa Hojda made a spectacularly bad email mistake by attaching the wrong file and (instead of her resume) sending a crazy-looking picture of Nicolas Cage with her job application. She didn't get the job that she was applying for, but her 15 minutes of internet fame probably won't hurt her career too much, either. [url]
• CareerBuilder has published a list of some other outrageous resume mistakes. They also list examples of resumes with a "creative approach" where the candidate was hired. Warning: there may be a fine line between creativity and stupiditry for some... [url]
• This cover letter from an aspiring Wall St trader is a bit too colorful for most financial institutions. "Please explain your rationale for the rainbow" will likely be a long-remembered response for some Wall St firms. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: mistakes, nicolas cage, resume, stupidity, typos, vanessa hojda
Companies: careerbuilder

Honest Mistake: Order A TV From Amazon, Receive An Illegal Assault Rifle

from the might-have-been-a-mistake dept

With guns and violence in the news lately, you would think that everyone involved in the chain of the firearms business would be a teensy-weensy bit more careful, from manufacturers, to retailers, all the way up to those handling the shipping and distribution. As with any other business, you have to expect to deal with some human error, but one would imagine that the firearms industry would have the tightest of controls in place right now.

As it turns out, such notions are exactly that: imagination. Or, at least that appears to be the case in the Wired story of a man from Washington D.C. who ordered a television on Amazon and was shipped a Sig Sauer 716 Patrol Rifle. For anyone keeping score at home, that's a military grade weapon. Seth Horvitz, the guy who is guilty of attempted TV-buying, is not a military grade citizen.

“When I saw some metal parts inside the box, I thought, ‘Maybe this is a TV stand or mount or something,’” Horvitz said in a phone interview with Wired. “When I realized it was an assault rifle, it was pure shock and disbelief.”

The Wired interviewer chooses not to ask Horvitz if he attempted to point the weapon at his wall and pull the trigger to see if flat-panel televisions shot out, which is disappointing. In any case, Horvitz did the responsible thing and immediately called the D.C. police, who informed him that the weapon is illegal to own in the District of Columbia. There is no word yet on whether flat-panel displays are also illegal, but I'm guessing not. 

The story then details how the mistake happened, which essentially appears to boil down to a lovely bit of insight into the shipping warehouses of UPS, in which the Label Fairy made a mistake and put two shipping labels (only one of which was correct) on the box-'o-death and allowed the box to be shipped anyway. Everyone from the guy who let it leave the warehouse to the guy who delivered the rifle to Horvitz's door apparently decided to play the new hit game "Shipping Address Coin Flip", resulting in Horvitz getting his new Rambo Halloween costume accessory. Amazon, predictably, disavowed any responsibility for the mistake, which it's looking like it has every right to do. On the other hand, when Horvitz tried to post a review of his purchase, Amazon blocked it. Admittedly, the review was hillarious, and guns and funny just don't mix:

I'm not sure what pretending all this didn't happen accomplishes from Amazon's end, other than to perhaps flip open the cover to the Streisand Effect alarm, press it, and wait for the derision to ensue.

Filed Under: guns, mistakes, shipping, tv
Companies: amazon, ups

DailyDirt: Advertising Mistakes; Hilarity Ensues

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Advertising is a tricky business. Not only do you not know where half your marketing budget goes, but it's possible to waste 100% of your advertising with an innocent mistake. It's tough to try to make funny and catchy ads, and not everyone has the same sense of humor. Here are just a few examples of some ads that have backfired.

• Automatically serving ads without a human editor to judge the appropriateness of the content can be a really bad idea -- especially when placing ads on news items. Yahoo News recently inserted ads for Express clothing on a news photo -- unfortunately the photo pictured a distraught man who survived an attack by Taliban militants. [url]
• KFC ran a commercial in the UK a few years ago that set a record for complaints -- because viewers thought it encouraged bad manners and mocked people with speech impediments. This commercial has held on to its record to this day, but there probably aren't many agencies vying for the title. [url]
• Pizza Hut knows its customers love pizza, but does a love of pizza correlate with disliking math? This commercial needs to show its work on how it arrived at its conclusion. [url]
• Kenneth Cole is trying to raise "awearness" with some edgy ad campaigns. But one of its billboards generated some backlash from teachers when it suggested that teachers' rights were at odds with student interests. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: ads, advertising, awearness, backlash, commercials, marketing, mistakes
Companies: express, kenneth cole, kfc, pizza hut, yahoo

ICE Finally Admits It Totally Screwed Up; Next Time, Perhaps It'll Try Due Process

from the just-a-tip dept

While the folks at Homeland Security refused to even admit that they had totally screwed up and seized a domain with 84,000 (mostly legal) websites last week, apparently someone at Homeland Security finally realized that the press wasn't going to keep accepting them refusing to answer questions about it. So, it's finally come clean and admitted they seized all of mooo.com, despite the vast majority of it being legal.

I would think that mooo.com's operator has an incredibly strong legal case against Homeland Security if he decides to bring it.

That said, Homeland Security's statement on the matter is pretty (unintentionally) funny in that it doesn't seem to apologize for this blatant First Amendment violation, nor the lack of due process, but does say that authorities are "reviewing" what happened to avoid future mistakes. Oh really? Here's a simple suggestion:

Try some due process.

It's pretty simple, really. If, rather than just seizing domains with absolutely no notice whatsoever, Homeland Security and the kids at ICE actually had to file a lawsuit and allow for an adversarial hearing before the domain got seized, then somewhere in the process before 84,000 voices got shut up by the US government, someone might have pointed out that most of the content on mooo.com was perfectly legal, and Homeland Security could have focused on the few users who were breaking the law. But, you know, that would involve actually obeying the law, and that seems like way too much for Homeland Security these days.

Filed Under: domain seizures, due process, first amendment, homeland security, ice, mistakes, mooo.com, prior restraint

Mistakes Were Made: How Tons Of People Started Slamming EasyDNS For Actions Of EveryDNS

from the error-correction dept

There's a famous paragraph that made the rounds a few years ago purporting to show that people really look at the first and last letters of a word and then assume the rest, more or less. It was:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Of course, it turns out that this isn't quite true (and the research wasn't done at Cambridge). However, it is true that when people are reading quickly, they can sometimes sort of "guess" the word they're going for with the first and last letter. It seems that happened on a large scale last week, much to the chagrin of one particular company.

As you may recall, last week we were among those who wrote about EveryDNS killing Wikileaks.org's website, claiming a terms of service violation for getting DDoS'd. Before I did the post, I had checked EveryDNS's website, and hadn't seen any info about the takedown. Soon after I posted the story, however, the very first comment in the story said "Check EasyDNS.net's website" claiming there was an explanation. I quickly went to EasyDNS... and immediately noticed it looked entirely different than the EveryDNS site I had gone to originally, and rechecked the article. It was clearly supposed to be EveryDNS (as I had written), and the commenter was wrong (I also found the post that EveryDNS did put on their website about the issue). I pointed out that the commenter meant EveryDNS (and that I had now seen EveryDNS's explanation).

It turned out that that first commenter's mistake -- swapping EasyDNS for EveryDNS was done by a lot of people. I discovered that later, when someone from EasyDNS stopped by our comments to ask us to make the "correction" more prominent. And I was confused, because we hadn't made any error -- but had only corrected someone else in the comments. I then went and saw that EasyDNS had an entire blog post slamming journalists for repeatedly using their name in the stories about Wikileaks, including the NY Times, the Financial Times, Gawker, GigaOm... and us. Of course, we hadn't made the mistake, and I found it a bit amusing that, in a story about a lack of fact checking and publishing false information, EasyDNS had done exactly that to us. So I dashed off a quick comment on their blog post, and the EasyDNS guys were quick to correct the error and apologize both in the post and over email (thanks!). But it does highlight how easy it is to make a quick mistake when reporting on such things... even when you're reporting on mistakes!

Of course, the mistake had little impact on us... But for EasyDNS, it's apparently been a massive pain. The company has spent the past few days alerting people via Twitter that they were falsely accused, had nothing to do with Wikileaks, and did not, in fact, take the site down. Yet, it's one of those things that doesn't die (though, the company also put up a post about whether or not it would work with Wikileaks -- and also now appears to be doing some of the heavy lifting for elements of Wikileaks, these days) .

This is one of the reasons that I get a little wary of internet mob justice, of course. Lots of people are running around blaming the wrong company, because they're swapping an Every for an Easy. Of course, the IP lawyers in the house will say that this is what trademark law is supposed to be about -- that there shouldn't be two such companies since people can (and obviously do) confuse them. But it appears that both companies lived peacefully together in the world for quite some time before all of this mess.

In the end -- I'm not sure there's a good answer to all of this. The fact is mistakes happen. We make them all the time too (though, we didn't in this case -- even if we got blamed for one!). It can suck for those on the receiving end. For us, in this case, it wasn't a huge deal, but for EasyDNS, it clearly has been a major distraction. Hopefully it's active efforts on Twitter and various comment boards will help clear things up for most people. Perhaps the real lesson is that when you do make a mistake, and are informed of it, you should correct it as quickly as possible, and apologize for the mistake. And then everyone can get on with their lives.

Filed Under: dns, easydns, everydns, mistakes, wikileaks
Companies: easydns, everydns, wikileaks

When Suing A Website For Libel, It Helps To Actually Sue The Right One

from the thedirt-vs.-thedirty dept

Last week, a story caught my eye, about a website being ordered to pay $11 million for failing to respond to a lawsuit claiming libel. The story caught my attention for a few reasons: first, I'm always interested in libel lawsuits involving blogs and second... the name of the site that was sued was TheDirt.com, which... er... seemed close enough to Techdirt.com that I had to pause for a second and make sure it wasn't us. Anyway, after all that, it didn't seem like the ruling was interesting enough for a post... until some other details came out.

The lawsuit itself came from a Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader/high school English teacher named Sarah Jones, who was upset that the site in question apparently posted a picture of her and reported that she had an affair with a player and had contracted two venereal diseases. Assuming there's no truth to the rumors, it sounded like a straightforward libel case -- though from all the reporting, it's not clear if the site owners themselves wrote the content, or if it was written by a user -- in which case the site might have Section 230 protections (potentially depending on how involved they were in encouraging such content).

So why is the case suddenly interesting? Well, perhaps because it now appears that Ms. Jones' lawyers sued the wrong company. Oops. The lawsuit was filed against Los Angeles-based Dirty World Entertainment Recordings, which runs the website TheDirt.com. Problem is that the site that contained the content in question was TheDirty.com, and that's run by a Scottsdale-based company called Dirty World LLC who had no indication that there was a lawsuit going on at all. Oops indeed. At least no one sued us.

Amusingly, the folks at TheDirt.com are amusingly asking if they should sue for libel right back, considering all the press coverage claiming (falsely) that they had libeled Ms. Jones. Oh, and as for TheDirty.com, it's also asking the AP for an apology for falsely reporting that it had lost the lawsuit when it hadn't even been served. Quite a dirty mess. Separately, I have to imagine that Jones' lawyer, Eric Deters, now regrets his statement to the AP:

"If they would have just taken it down, this all would have been over," Deters said. "They just kind of mocked the whole court system."

Might have helped if you sued the right company.

Filed Under: defamation, libel, mistakes, sarah jones, thedirt.com, thedirty.com

Yes, Even Big Professional Journalism Operations Make Mistakes

from the it-happens dept

For the most part, the way this blog works is that we write stories based on what's being reported on elsewhere, and add some analysis or opinion or response to the story. Then, we let the discussion happen. We never claim to be complete, and one of the reasons why we leave the comments so wide open is we fully expect people to stop by and fill in more information. That's why we're always amused that when we respond to a story where the original source got some facts wrong, some commenters snipe in the comments about our failure to fact check, often with some snide comment about how we're what's killing journalism and/or something about how we are biased/covering up the real story, etc. I've never quite understood this, because we certainly don't hide our process. We link to all our sources, and explain our reasoning, and if a story changes, we're more than willing to post an update, always indicating what's changed.

But the fact is that all sorts of publications get stories wrong, even the big famous ones. For example, reading through my feeds, I recently saw a Reuters report claiming that the Discovery Channel had sued Amazon for patent infringement on July 14th. That struck me as odd since we had written about that identical thing... but back in March of 2009. Looking at the details, it seemed like all that happened was that Discovery set up its own patent holding subsidiary, Discovery Patents, and assigned the patents to that new organization, who took over the case in a procedural move. Big deal.

And indeed, a few hours later, I reloaded the Reuters story, and the story changed, with the new headline saying Discovery says infringement case v Amazon not new, rather than the original which said "Amazon accused of infringing patents with Kindle." I find the new headline amusing, because it's basically saying "hey, we reported on news that wasn't news." But, kudos to Reuters for not just disappearing the story, and admitting (sort of) in the story that it got the original story wrong. Of course, it doesn't fully come out and say it got the story wrong. It just changed the story to now say "Discovery said" that this was just a procedural move, rather than admitting that's exactly what happened. No need for the he said/she said. You can come out and say what actually happened.

Anyway, we're certainly not doing this to mock Reuters, which actually does a lot of good reporting. Just to highlight the fact that lots of media publications make a mistake here or there, and it's no sign of "hiding facts" or "bias." Sometimes a mistake is just a mistake.

Filed Under: journalism, mistakes
Companies: amazon, discovery, reuters