mismethodology

"It is dangerous to be right in things in which those in power are wrong."  --Voltaire

"In any collection of data, the figure most obviously correct, beyond all need of checking, is the mistake." (Anonymous saying)

"Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and, where it lands, painting a target."

--Homer Adkins

"A theory is something nobody believes, except the person who made it. An experiment is something everybody believes, except the person who made it."

--Albert Einstein

The microbe is so very small
You cannot make him out at all,
But many sanguine people hope
To see him through a microscope.
His jointed tongue that lies beneath
A hundred curious rows of teeth;
His seven tufted tails with lots
Of lovely pink and purple spots,
On each of which a pattern stands,
Composed of forty separate bands;
His eyebrows of a tender green;
All these have never yet been seen--
But Scientists, who ought to know,
Assure us that they must be so...
Oh! Let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about!

--Hilaire Belloc

(from Belloc, H. (1912). More Beasts for Worse Children. New York: Duckworth.)

Bauman Moscow State Technical University: Computer science PhD student Dmitri Sklyarov wrote a computer program "as part of my dissertation work and as part of my employment"* called the Advanced eBook Processor.  He states that he developed the program "in order to demonstrate weaknesses in protection methods of PDF files."*  A complaint was filed against Sklyarov by Adobe Systems.  When Sklyarov, a Russian national, visited the United States to make a presentation about his work at the computer security conference DEF CON, he was arrested by the FBI and charged with designing a product that intentionally circumvented copyright protection technology under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  He agreed to testify against his employer in exchange for his release, and the charges against him were later dropped.  (In a trial a year later, a jury found his employer (Elcomsoft) not guilty.)  Sklyarov's dissertation and his employer's computer product were legal in Russia.  Over the course of the controversy, Sklyarov spent three weeks in jail (including Federal prison) and for five months he was confined to Northern California and prevented from returning home to Russia.

* - quotations above are from Sklyarov's public agreement with the US Department of Justice.

Princeton Computer Science Professor Edward Felten accepted a series of public challenges to break into a new computer security system intended to enforce restrictions on the use of digital music files.  The challenges were sponsored by the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), an industry group.  Felten successfully broke at least four of the six challenges, but when Felten later planned to present his research on the challenges at an academic conference (the 4th International Information Hiding Workshop), he received a letter from the SDMI with a copy sent to the head of his academic department.  The letter asked Felten to withdraw his presentation, and threatened him (and the graduate students working with him) with a lawsuit under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Felten withdrew his presentation, then sued the SDMI, requesting a judgement that the publication or presentation of their research was legal.  The Justice Department and industry spokesmen assured Felten that the legal threats made against him were invalid, and the suit was dismissed.  Felten later presented his paper at the 10th USENIX Security Symposium.

Queensland University of Technology: Filmmaker and PhD student Michael Noonan in the Creative Industries program developed a film entitled "Laughing at the Disabled" as part of his thesis.  The film included interviews with intellectually disabled young men in awkward situations, including audio of the filmmakers laughing at their answers.  Noonan stated that the project "seeks to give the disabled a voice through comedy and studies the shifting line between laughing at and laughing with."  The school's senior Lecturers Gary MacLennan and John Hookham publicly criticized the PhD thesis in a national newspaper.  In an editorial entitled "Philistines of relativism at the gates" they described it as "misanthropic and amoral trash".  MacLennan and Hookham were then suspended for six months after the university found they had engaged in misconduct by criticizing student work in an uncivil manner.  They sued the university and received an out-of-court settlement (rumored to be $200,000 each according to the Courier-Mail).  PhD student Noonan reportedly renamed the project "Laughing With the Disabled."

Oxford University:  Xu Zerong completed his M.Phil and D.Phil theses in international relations on the topic of Chinese military intervention in the Korean War.  He used archival documents as source material.  One year after completing his D.Phil thesis he was detained by Chinese authorities for photocopying secret documents -- specifically, four books about the Korean War.  (It is not clear from accounts of the case where he obtained the books, or whether they were public.)  Dr. Xu stated that he believed the secret classification of the material had expired after forty years.  The court found that Dr. Xu's photocopying of four books on the Korean War "severely endangered China's national security and national interest."  He was found guilty and sentenced to 13 years in prison.  As of this writing he remains in prison.

"If statistics continues to make the progress it has made for several years now, if the information it provides us with continues to become more perfect, faster, more regular, steadily multiplying, there might come the moment where from every social fact taking place springs - so to speak - automatically a number that would immediately take its place in the registers of the statistics continuously communicated to the public and distributed in graphic form by the daily press." -- Gabriel Tarde (1890)
[translated from French by Bernhard Rieder (2008)]