Business
Bad Research Still Costs Good Money
By I have my opinions about which academic research is worth funding with public money and which isn’t. I also understand if you couldn’t care less about what I think. But I expect we’ll all share similar feelings about research that’s actually been retracted by the academic journals where it was published.
Globally, millions of academic papers are published each year. Many – perhaps most – were funded by universities, charitable organizations, or governments. It’s estimated that hundreds of thousands of those papers contain serious errors, irreproducible results, or straight-up plagiarized or false content.
Not only are those papers useless, but they clog up the system and slow down the real business of science. Keeping up with the serious literature coming out in your field is hard enough, but when genuine breakthroughs are buried under thick layers of trash, there’s no hope.
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Society doesn’t need those papers and taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for their creation. The trick, however, is figuring out how to identify likely trash before we approve a grant proposal.
I just discovered a fantastic tool that can help. The good people behind the Retraction Watch site also provide a large dataset currently containing full descriptions and metadata for more than 60,000 retracted papers. The records include publication authors, titles, and subjects; reasons for the retractions; and any institutions with which the papers were associated.
Using that information, I can tell you that 798 of those 60,000 papers have an obvious Canadian connection. Around half of those papers were retracted in the last five years – so the dataset is still timely.
There’s no single Canadian institution that’s responsible for a disproportionate number of clunkers. The data contains papers associated with 168 Canadian university faculties and 400 hospital departments. University of Toronto overall has 26 references, University of British Columbia has 18, and McMaster and University of Ottawa both have nine. Research associated with various departments of Toronto’s Sick Children’s Hospital combined account for 27 retractions.
To be sure, just because your paper shows up on the list doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. For example, while 20 of the retractions were from the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada, those were all pulled because they were out of date. That’s perfectly reasonable.
I focused on Canadian retractions identified by designations like Falsification (38 papers), Plagiarism (41), Results Not Reproducible (21), and Unreliable (130). It’s worth noting that some of those papers could have been flagged for more than one issue.
Of the 798 Canadian retractions, 218 were flagged for issues of serious concern. Here are the subjects that have been the heaviest targets for concerns about quality:
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You many have noticed that the total of those counts comes to far more than 218. That’s because many papers touch on multiple topics.
For those of you keeping track at home, there were 1,263 individual authors involved in those 218 questionable papers. None of them had more than five such papers and only a very small handful showed up in four or five cases. Although there would likely be value in looking a bit more closely at their publishing histories.
This is just about as deep as I’m going to dig into this data right now. But the papers I’ve identified are probably just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to lousy (and expensive) research. So we’ve got an interest in identifying potentially problematic disciplines or institutions. And, thanks to Retraction Watch, we now have the tools.
Kyle Briggs over at CanInnovate has been thinking and writing about these issues for years. He suggests that stemming the crippling flow of bad research will require a serious realigning of the incentives that currently power the academic world.
That, according to Briggs, is most likely to happen by forcing funding agencies to enforce open data requirements – and that includes providing access to the programming code used by the original researchers. It’ll also be critical to truly open up access to research to allow meaningful crowd-sourced review.
Those would be excellent first steps.
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From LifeSiteNews
Elon Musk said that ‘the sheer amount of waste and fraud’ in federal agencies, is ‘astonishing’ and that DOGE is cutting ‘$4 billion a day’ in misused taxpayer funds.
In a remarkable Fox News interview, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) founder Elon Musk and top officials of the DOGE team offered stunning, often infuriating, insights into how the federal government functions.
The interview, which has garnered well over 10 million online views on X in less than 24 hours, provided one extreme example after another of government mismanagement, excess, waste, and fraud while simultaneously promising a future where the D.C. Leviathan is tamed and restored to its proper, efficient role.
The new Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), former U.S. House Rep. Dan Bishop, averred that the DOGE A-Team interview was the “most amazing and significant half-hour in TV history.”
Musk was joined by DOGE team members Steve Davis, Joe Gebbia, Aram Moghaddassi, Brad Smith, Anthony Armstrong, Tom Krause, and Tyler Hassen – all successful businessmen and entrepreneurs in their own rights – to describe the widespread systemic weaknesses and failures at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Social Security Administration (SSA), and more.
Fox host Bret Baier described the group as “Silicon Valley colliding with government.”
“This is a revolution. And I think it might be the biggest revolution in government since the original revolution,” said Musk during the discussion.
“But at the end of the day, America’s going to be in much better shape,” he promised.
“America will be solvent. The critical programs that people depend upon will work, and it’s going to be a fantastic future.”
My interview with the @elonmusk and the @DOGE team tonight on #SpecialReport pic.twitter.com/KKpxEPtu1Z
— Bret Baier (@BretBaier) March 27, 2025
“The government is not efficient, and there’s a lot of waste and fraud. So we feel confident that a 15% reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services,” began Musk, founder and CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X.
Musk said that the most stunning thing he’s discovered during the early phases of DOGE is “the sheer amount of waste and fraud in government. It is astonishing. It’s mind-blowing.”
Musk cited the example of a simple 10-question National Park online survey for which the government was charged nearly $1 billion and which in the end served no purpose.
“I think we will accomplish most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within [130 days],” he predicted. “Our goal is to reduce the waste and fraud by $4 billion a day, every day, seven days a week. And so far, we are succeeding.”
Billionaire Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, is working to digitize the retirement process for government employees, which is currently stuck using 1950s technology, housed in a Pennsylvania cave.
“It’s an injustice to civil servants who are subjected to these processes that are older than the age of half the people watching the show tonight,” said Gebbia. “We really believe that the government can have an Apple store-like experience, beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems.”
“The retirement process is all by paper, literally, with people carrying paper and manila envelopes into this gigantic mine,” added Musk, limiting the number of federal employees who can retire to no more than 8,000 per month.
Gebbia expects to have the antiquated system updated and overhauled in a matter of months.
“The two improvements that we’re trying to make to Social Security are helping people that legitimately get benefits protect them from fraud that they experience every day on a routine basis and also make the experience better,” said DOGE software engineer Aram Moghaddassi.
He offered an amazing statistic: “When you want to change your (direct deposit) bank account, you can call Social Security. We learned 40% of the phone calls that they get are from fraudsters” who are attempting to commandeer retired seniors’ benefit payments.
“What we’re doing will help their benefits,” assured Musk. “As a result of the work of DOGE, legitimate recipients of social security will receive more money, not less money.”
“There are over 15 million people that are over the age of 120 that are marked as alive in the Social Security system,” said Steve Davis, who has previously worked alongside Musk at SpaceX, the Boring Company, and X
He explained that despite this being discovered by hardworking personnel at the SSA back in 2008, nothing was done. As a result, 15-20 million social security numbers that were clearly fraudulent were just floating around, susceptible to being used for “bad intentions.”
Health care entrepreneur Brad Smith, who has taken charge of auditing HHS and NIH, also cited stunning, troubling statistics displaying the extreme inefficiencies of the nation’s top federal health organizations.
Smith said that at NIH, “Today they have 27 different centers” created by Congress over the years and there are “700 different IT systems,” each using their own IT software.
“They have 27 different CIOs (Chief Information Officers),” added Smith, “so when you think about making great medical discoveries, you have to connect the data.”
Those discoveries are likely severely hampered by NIH’s communications disconnect.
Anthony Armstrong, a Morgan Stanley banker now working for DOGE at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) talked about “duplicative functions” and “overstaffing” at government agencies. He said that money is “sloshing out the door.”
As an example, he cited the IRS, which has 1,400 employees whose only job is to provision laptops and cell phones to IRS workers.
“As an ex-CFO of a big public tech company, really what we’re doing is, we’re applying public company standards to the federal government, and it is alarming how the financial operations and financial management is set up today,” said Tom Krause, CEO of Cloud Software Group.
He explained that there is virtually no accountability or verification protections when it comes to the Treasury Department disbursing funds to various government agencies.
A 94-year-old grandmother is no longer “going to be robbed by forces like she’s getting robbed today, and the solvency of the federal government will ensure that she continues to receive those social security checks,” added Musk.
“The reason we’re doing this is because if we don’t do it, America is going to go insolvent and go bankrupt, and nobody’s going to get anything,” said Musk.
Tyler Hassen, a former oil executive working at the Interior Department for DOGE alleged that there was no departmental oversight at the Interior Department “whatsoever” under the Biden administration.
Steve Davis talked about the out-of-control issuance and use of federal credit cards.
“There are in the federal government around 4.6 million credit cards for around 2.3 to 2.4 million employees. This doesn’t make sense. So, one of the things all of the teams have worked on is we’ve worked for the agencies and said, ‘Do you need all of these credit cards? Are they being used? Can you tell us physically where they are?’” recounted Davis.
“Clearly there should not be more credit cards than there are people,” interjected Musk.
Musk later described how the Small Business Administration (SBA) has given out $300 million in loans to people “under the age of 11.” An additional $300 million in loans has been handed out to people “over the age of 120.”
Musk said that these government loans are clearly “fraudulent.”
“Terrible things are being done,” he exclaimed. “We’re stopping it.”
The Trump administration’s new tariffs are working:
The European Union will delay tariffs on U.S. exports into the trading bloc in response to the imposition of tariffs on European aluminum and steal, a measure announced in February by the White House as a part of an overhaul of the U.S. trade policies.
Instead of taking effect March 12, these tariffs will not apply until “mid-April”, according to a European official interviewed by The Hill.
This is not the first time the EU has responded this way to U.S. tariff measures. It happened already last time Trump was in office. One of the reasons why Brussels is so accommodative is that the European Parliament emphasized negotiations already back in February. Furthermore, as Forbes notes,
The U.S. economy is the largest in the world, and many countries rely on American consumers to buy their goods. By import tariffs, the U.S. can pressure trading partners into more favorable deals and protect domestic industries from unfair competition.
More on unfair competition in a moment. First, it is important to note that Trump did not start this trade skirmish. Please note what IndustryWeek reported back in 2018:
Trump points to U.S. auto exports to Europe, saying they are taxed at a higher rate than European exports to the United States. Here, facts do offer Trump some support: U.S. autos face duties of 10% while European cars are subject to dugies of only 2.5% in the United States.
They also noted some nuances, e.g., that the United States applies a higher tariff on light trucks, presumably to defend the most profitable vehicles rolling out of U.S. based manufacturing plants. Nevertheless, the story that most media outlets do not tell is that Europe has a history of putting tariffs on U.S. exports to a greater extent than tariffs are applied in the opposite direction.
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Facts notwithstanding, this trade war has caught media attention and is reaching ridiculous proportions. According to CNBC,
Auto stocks are digesting President Donald Trump’s annoncement that he would place 25% tariffs on “all cars that are not made in the United Sates,” as well as certain automobile parts. … Shares of the “Detroit Three” all fell.
They also explain that GM took a particularly hard beating, and that Ferrari is going to use the tariffs as a reason to raise prices by ten percent. This sounds dramatic, but keep in mind that stocks fly up and down with impressive amplitude; what was lost yesterday can come back with a bonus tomorrow. As for Ferrari, a ten-percent price hike is basically meaningless since these cars are often sold in highly customized, individual negotiations before they are even produced.
Despite the media hype, these tariffs will not last the year. One reason is the retaliatory nature in President Trump’s tariffs, which—again—has already caught the attention of the Europeans and brought them to the negotiation table. We can debate whether or not his tactics are the best in order to create more fair trade terms between the United States and our trading partners, but there is no question that Trump’s methods have caught the attention of the powers that be (which include Mexico and Canada).
There is another reason why I do not see this tariffs tit-for-tat continuing for much longer. The European economy is in bad shape, especially compared to the U.S. economy. With European corporations already signaling increased direct investment in the U.S. economy, Europe is holding the short end of this stick.
But the bad news for the Europeans does not stop there. They are at an intrinsic disadvantage going into a tariffs-based trade war. The EU has a “tariff” of sorts that we do not have, namely the value-added tax, VAT. Shiphub.co has a succinct summary of how the VAT affects trade:
When importing (into the European Union), VAT should be taken into account. … VAT is calculated based on the customs value (the good’s value and transport costs … ) plus the due duty amount.
The term “duty” here, of course, refers to trade tariffs. This means that when tariffs go up, the VAT surcharge goes up as well. Aside from creating a tax-on-tax problem, this also means that the inflationary effect from U.S. imports is significantly stronger than it is on EU imports to the United States—even when tariffs are equal.
If the U.S. government wanted to, they could include the tax-on-tax effect of the VAT when assessing the effective EU tariffs on imports from the United States. This would quickly expand the tit-for-tat tariff war, with Europe at an escalating disadvantage.
For these reasons, I do not see how this “trade war” will continue beyond the summer, but even that is a pessimistic outlook.
Before I close this tariff topic and declare it a weekend, let me also mention that the use of tariffs in trade war is neither a new nor an unusual tactic. Check out this little brochure from the Directorate-General for Trade under the European Commission’:
Trade defence instruments, such as anti-dumping or anti-subsidy duties, are ways of protecting European production against international trade distortions.
What they refer to as “defence instruments” are primarily tariffs on imports. In a separate report the Directorate lists no fewer than 63 trade-war cases where the EU imposes tariffs to punish a country for unfair trade tactics.
Trade what, and what countries, you wonder? Sweet corn from Thailand, fused alumina from China, biodiesel from Argentina and Indonesia, malleable tube fittings from China and Thailand, epoxy resins from China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand… and lots and lots of tableware from China.
Like most people, I would prefer a world without taxes and tariffs, and the closer we can get to zero on either of those, the better. But until we get there, we should take a deep breath in the face of the media hype and trust our president on this one.
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