Assassinate our federal officials! Isn't that funny?

Ann Coulter, everyone's favorite widely-read neo-Nazi pundit, remarked in a public address this week that "We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee." She then said "That's just a joke, for you in the media." That's hilarious! That's even funnier than when Pat Robertson suggested someone should nuke the State Department. Bwaahahaha! That's some good humor. I've got some funny jokes of my own:

• Someone should plant land mines around Gorge W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas!
• Someone should really drive an explosive-loaded truck into Bill First's church during Sunday services! Why stop there? Let's hit all the conservative churches! Hehe!
• Someone should get together three snipers and position them strategically to catch Alito in a deadly cross-fire!
• Someone should infiltrate Dick Chaney's staff, get close to him, and then stab him in the throat! Ha!

Those were just jokes, of course, because I have a very conservative, wholesome value-driven sense of humor. In a country where medical students of middle-eastern descent can't even have a private conversation over breakfast in Georgia without creating a nation-wide terrorism panic, its nice to see that white religious conservatives can still openly call for the assassination of their political rivals. Surely this is the true meaning of Free Speech, and is precisely what the Founders envisioned when they penned the First Amendment.

Data manipulated in 25% of scientific papers at the Journal of Cell Biology

The NY Times is running a piece about detecting manipulations in digital photos. This is of particular interest for journals like Science and Nature that have had high-profile cases of manipulated data. Some formal mathematical tests are under development, but the article discusses at length a more subjective test used by the Journal of Cell Biology (JSB). They bring the images into Photoshop and adjust the brightness, contrast and other controls. Features that appear hidden to the manipulator will re-appear under different contrast settings.

The amazing thing about this test is that the JSB found evidence of manipulation in 25% of all submitted papers, and outright fraud in 1%:

At The Journal of Cell Biology, the test has revealed extensive manipulation of photos. Since 2002, when the test was put in place, 25 percent of all accepted manuscripts have had one or more illustrations that were manipulated in ways that violate the journal's guidelines, said Michael Rossner of Rockefeller University, the executive editor. The editor of the journal, Ira Mellman of Yale, said that most cases were resolved when the authors provided originals. "In 1 percent of the cases we find authors have engaged in fraud," he said.

The two editors recognized the likelihood that images were being improperly manipulated when the journal required all illustrations to be submitted in digital form. While reformatting illustrations submitted in the wrong format, Dr. Rossner realized that some authors had yielded to the temptation of Photoshop's image-changing tools to misrepresent the original data.

In some instances, he found, authors would remove bands from a gel, a test for showing what proteins are present in an experiment. Sometimes a row of bands would be duplicated and presented as the controls for a second experiment. Sometimes the background would be cleaned up, with Photoshop's rubber stamp or clone stamp tool, to make it prettier.

Some authors would change the contrast in an image to eliminate traces of a diagnostic stain that showed up in places where there shouldn't be one. Others would take images of cells from different experiments and assemble them as if all were growing on the same plate.

To prohibit such manipulations, Dr. Rossner and Dr. Mellman published guidelines saying, in effect, that nothing should be done to any part of an illustration that did not affect all other parts equally. In other words, it is all right to adjust the brightness or color balance of the whole photo, but not to obscure, move or introduce an element.

They started checking illustrations in accepted manuscripts by running them through Photoshop and adjusting the controls to see if new features appeared. This is the check that has shown a quarter of accepted manuscripts violate the journal's guidelines.

One positive outcome of recent fraud cases is that major science journals have had to make precise refinements to their peer-review processes. As the Times article puts it, "The defined role of reviewers is not to check for concocted data but to test whether a paper's conclusions follow from the data presented." If only we had such good definitions for reviewer roles in IEEE journals.

Some additional points that IEEE could use are:

• "A reviewer should only critique conclusions that fall meaningfully within the scope of the reviewer's expertise."
• "If a reviewer objects to a formal deduction, the reviewer should identify the specific logic or mathematical error in the paper."
• "Experimental results should be rejected only if they are invalid. Reviewers should not demand alternative experimental setups if the presented evidence is sufficient to support the paper's conclusions."
• "Reviewers should actually read the damn paper. If they can't understand it, they should recuse themselves from the review."
• "Before dismissing a conclusion, statement or argument, the reviewer should carefully consider whether the reviewer might be under-informed on the specific claim, and should consider following up the paper's goddamn references before making dumbass pronouncements."
• "A reviewer should consciously realize that many research topics have merit, even if they are not part of the reviewer's own primary interests."