Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Wegman's Next Move?

Via Drug Monkey comes news that one Mark W. Miller, after falling from the good graces of the NIH Office of Research Integrity as noted by Retraction Watch (John Mashey checks there every day to see if someone has left him another pony), has hired Reputation Changer to salt the web with nice things about his tattered scientific reputation.

ReputationChanger.com specializes in helping people make their mistakes vanish from the eyes of potential clients and employers. Embarrassing arrests and unseemly articles can be pushed off of the front page of Google searches, where they are unlikely to be viewed by the majority of Google users. Because people tend to only look at the first page of results,
 As DM points out
How do they do it? By building a fawning self-web-presence that says crapola like:
Michael W. Miller Presents Astounding Findings or perhaps Michael W. Miller Publishes Scientific Gold. This latter conveniently omits to mention the two retracted papers that were, of course, not "Gold" but more like "made up crap".
As far as I can tell, every link in the site points to somewhere else on the site. I'm sure this is hot stuff in repairing your Google ranks.
 Now on the one hand, Ed Wegman has Wiley on his side, but on the other hand Ed Wegman has Deep Climate and John on the other side

  1. Edward Wegman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_WegmanCached - Similar
    Edward Wegman is a statistician, a statistics professor at George Mason University, and past chair of the National Research Council's Committee on Applied ...
  2. Edward Wegman | Deep Climate

    deepclimate.org/tag/edward-wegman/Cached
    16 Mar 2012 – I had thought the saga of climate science critic Edward Wegman and the various allegations of misconduct in his recent work could not possibly ...
  3. Edward Wegman - DeSmogBlog

    www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/3361Cached - Similar
    15 Mar 2012 – Edward Wegman and Yasmin Said published two largely-plagiarized papers in a “peer-reviewed” Wiley journal they edit with David Scott.
  4. Edward Wegman - DeSmogBlog

    www.desmogblog.com/edward-wegmanCached
    Edward Wegman is a statistics professor at George Mason University, and past chair of the National Research Council's Committee on Applied and Theoretical ...

3 comments:

cRR Kampen said...

Wow. Just wow.
It is dawning on me Cyber World Guerrilla One has erupted and erupted again and again some time ago and this is de damned whole world today!

And it's killing real people too, like 55.000 by the Russian Inferno and so on.

John Mashey said...

Nah, maybe every other day, although this is well worth a read, indeed more like a unicorn than a pony. This might be reminiscent of Sokal.

Hank Roberts said...

Wiley? This Wiley?
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.18/full

"Cycles and trends in solar irradiance and climate†
Judith L. Lean*
DOI: 10.1002/wcc.18

†This article is a U.S. Government work and, as such, is in the public domain in the Unites [sic] States of America....

Options for accessing this content:
... through a society membership....
... purchase online access ... (price varies by title) ..."
___________________________

Can't I just show them proof of US citizenship?