From: <GHC-AT-EPID.Lan.McGill.CA>
To: technology-AT-world.std.com
Date:          Tue, 3 May 1994 12:01:15 EST5EDT
Subject:       Who are we?


Sorry for the belated response -- I've been out of town.  My
name, John Bailar, is somewhat obscured by my e-mail address,
ghc-AT-epid.lan.mcgill.ca, which is in part a relic of a life long
past when computer-related names were assigned, not chosen.

I am an epidemiologist and biostatistician with strong and
interacting interests in a) how people "learn" from imperfect
data and b) how and why the process is deliberately messed up
in ways short of the common definitions of fraud in science.
(Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and "other
misconduct" of similar gravity are of little interest to me;
everyone agrees that they are wrong, even the people who do
them.)  An example of what I DO find interesting is the
investigator who repeats an experiment until he gets the
"right" answer and reports only that one result.  Or the one
who does 20 statistical tests and publishes only the one that
gives her a statistically significant result.  Or the team
that breaks up a large project into LPUs (least publishable
units) in ways calculated to both maximize everyone's list of
pubs and obscure critical inconsistencies in what was found. 
In short, all the ways that scientists deliberately mislead
without quite lying.

It seemed to me that this bb might help me to sort out my 
thoughts about some aspects of this general area of scientific 
inference, lead to sources that I would not otherwise know 
about, and uncover a kindred soul or two who would like to swap 
ideas in a strictly informal forum.
John C. Bailar III
Chair, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
Faculty of Medicine, McGill University