Nope. Not the way I meant it at all. I meant “just be yourself and people will like you” is only true if you are actually likable. And to expand on what you are saying, being likable often means caring about others, so if being oneself means not thinking about others or what they think, that actually makes one pretty unlikable.
But all of that is really explaining myself too much, when it was really just meant as a joke. Kinda.
My problem is not lack of scientific originality and transparency in sixth grade projects as such, but you should do your best to keep the hype in proportion to the real value.
The very least they could have done is to acknowledge the prior work once the “discovery” narrative took off. That as far as I can tell they did nothing of that sort makes it very hard to believe that they were acting in good faith.
It is likely that the girl was mostly or wholly the victim in this, but even then she has to understand that it doesn’t work like this and that at best she has been manipulated and betrayed by her own father.
Why are science journalists are gleefully attacking a 12-year-old for claiming credit? Shouldn’t they be attacking themselves for being too lazy and stupid to google “lionfish salinity,” which immediately brings up the original research?
The internet was wrong?
One sad thing about this mess is that, while her dad clearly knew about the prior work, she might have honestly believed it was her own original discovery. She might have had the idea independently, or her dad might have nudged her in that direction without spelling it out for her explicitly.
Take that you little dipshit kid! Learn to peer review! BOOM! IN YO FACE!!!
I’d “like” this comment if it was from anyone but you.
If only my parents had the power to delete their comments before I heard them.
That is the link for the original article (today). We all, one hopes, read that before commenting ensued.
Nope – it looked like it linked to his original 2010 research, so I skipped over it and because internets.
See this photo of her display at the science fair. Notice on the 3rd line of the 2nd paragraph on the right panel that she clearly cites Jud’s previous research. I’m wondering why people are making false accusations about her not citing his research when she clearly did. Perhaps BoingBoing could provide us a better reproduction of her science fair poster so that we can examine what she wrote more closely. But this is certainly coming across as poor journalistic research in failing to examine the fact that she clearly cited previous research.
Exactly, how could the research of a grade school student “surprise leading biologists”? Jud did field research showing how far up river the lionfish were swimming and measuring the salinity of the water at those locations. That was published in 2011.
Lauren Arrington did laboratory research testing lionfish in water of varying salinity and this was presented at a school science fair in 2012. As shown on her display at the fair, she clearly cited the 2011 paper by Jud which her father was a co-author of. (He was possibly even the senior researcher on that paper since his name was listed last. Jud was just a grad student at the time).
Then in 2013, Dr Jud submitted this paper in which he credits Lauren Arrington for her research (see page 8).
Now in the past couple of weeks the media falls all over itself with a “look! a little girl does science!” type of story and omit the fact that she had cited Jud’s work in her presentation. Now the media comes back and covers up their OWN FAILURE by claiming her research was plagiarized when clearly it was not.
So, what we would like to know is, why didn’t BoingBoing report on the fact that her science fair project cited Jud’s research? Why did you make it look like it was her own original work when her own display made it clear that previous research had occurred?
This happens more often than you might think, and by people who aren’t 12 years old.
Some of my work was plagiarized just a couple of years ago, by some fairly prominent people.
It looks like she’s misrepresented his research. If you go to the io9 story on this subject, you’ll see that Jud found (in 2011) that Lionfish could survive in 8 ppt which is lower than what she posted on her poster (15ppt) and only slightly higher than her study (at 6ppt). It gets worse.
Her dad most likely knew that Jud completed a second study in 2012, where he already demonstrated that lionfish could live in salinities as low as 6ppt (just like her), 5ppt, and even 1ppt for short periods of time.
Her Discussion concludes with:
My results are important because it shows the lowest salinity that lionfish can tolerate, which shows estuaries are in danger of being invaded by lionfish. If I did another research on lionfish, I would keep lowering the salinity until they died.
I don’t see any credit for the work done by Jud in 2012.
That’s the way it is supposed to work, but having had two kids go through the Science Fair thing, often it’s a lot less than that (at least in our school district, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is wide-spread).
The grades and accolades tend not to come from any demonstration of the real scientific method (i.e., forming a hypothesis, conducting an experiment…) but from the polish of the project, and in fact the vast majority of submissions are not science experiments at all, but science demonstrations. In other words, some kid can do real science, but if someone else has a better looking entry they get better marks, even if the only thing they learned was how to follow instructions out of some book.
As far as I can tell the judges actually don’t understand the difference, and think that as long as you write up the instructions that you followed in “Hypotheses → Experiment → …” form, they actually think the kid is doing science.
Oh man, I meant to say Mister44… buuuut thanks for being nice about it!
This happens more often than you might think, and by people who aren’t 12 years old.
Some of my work was plagiarized just a couple of years ago, by some fairly prominent people.
I think the real question that needs to be answered here is “why does it take a PhD 19 months to do research that could be done by a 12 year-old in a semester?” Just who are we giving these PhDs to and why? For swimming in the Gulf for a year and a half? That’s not doctoral research, that’s an extended sabbatical in Magaritaville!
I was plagiarized by a prof once - it resulted in her being fired (not at my request).
