Editor’s note, 16 September, 3:05 p.m.: Although no specific errors in this story have so far been identified, we have removed it after determining the author was impersonating the identity of an established science journalist, both with the News editors at Science and with sources in the story. Furthermore, two of the quotes provided by the author have since been found in previously published stories by other writers.
Not sure if Linkedin has a login-wall, here's the first grafs:
(author: Caroline Williams)
The person who was impersonating me managed to get an article published in Science, under my by-line. And they got paid for it!
I've seen the pitches (bad), and the email chain between editors who weren't all that impressed, but googled me and decide to take a punt. When the article came in it was dry, clunky and badly written, but after several rounds of editing they managed to get it into a publishable state. It went online in June and was up until yesterday when it became clear they (and I) had been scammed.
The whole thing makes me feel sick. I know from my work as an editor that the reputational damage is real. Had I pitched a story to them afterwards they would very understandably have said "Hell no!". Who has the time to do someone else's job? They tried "me", "I" didn't deliver, so no thank you.
I have no idea how many more editors out there have me on their 'do not commission' list because of this person's actions. There may also be several scientists who will not want to talk to me because they've had a bad experience with the fake one.
More broadly, if this is a wider scam (and based on what others have told me, I think it is), it is potentially a serious issue for science journalism and journalism in general. And I'm not sure what we can do about that.
Two San Francisco police officers thought they had spotted a stolen car one night in July 2024. After stopping the vehicle, they smashed in a window, dragged out the driver and then tackled, pepper sprayed and handcuffed him.
They had the wrong man.
The officers had typed the car’s license plate number incorrectly into their patrol car’s computer system.
A city agency that investigates complaints against the police said on Tuesday that the officers had used “excessive force” during the mistaken arrest of Matthew Ludwig, the driver. They violated multiple policies, the agency said in a report, including spraying him at close range and drawing a firearm without cause.
Despite the case of mistaken identity, prosecutors spent over a year seeking to convict Mr. Ludwig for reckless driving and resisting arrest. Fourteen months after the traffic stop, he was found dead in Kentucky, of an apparent suicide…
According to the complaint, the officers realized only after Mr. Ludwig was handcuffed that they had entered the license plate number incorrectly. But they proceeded to arrest him anyway.
The public defender’s office said that Mr. Ludwig could not afford the impound fee necessary to recover his car and that the city had sold it at auction. Prosecutors then charged him with reckless driving and resisting arrest.
SpaceXAI has huge incentives for not reneging on its commitments to the U.S. government, and those incentives do not exist for entities that lack the power of the purse and guns of the U.S. government.
Furthermore there are plenty of examples of the Trump administration contracting for millions/billions of dollars with companies that aren’t at the top of their game. Are Intel’s fabs best in class because the U.S. bought 10% equity? Are Trump hotels
and resorts the best in class because the government expenses for its employees to stay there?
That’d be nice, as a news nerd and pagemaker monkey myself. But school curriculums don’t even have the space to teach touch typing anymore. Or huge chunks of U.S. history (nevermind histories of countries far older).
Oh wow, this is perfect reading for me. One of my first college career fair questions was "Tell me how you would program an elevator". Forgot what sad attempt at an answer I gave, but I pretty much thought about that algorithm every time I've ever waited for the elevator. Which was pretty much daily when living in NY.
I don't know about just the past 6 months, but past 10-20 years, sure? I think software today has to handle much more varied and complicated I/O at a much bigger scale than it did in the past. Website UI/UX has to accommodate not only numerous browsers, but numerous devices with different viewing spaces. Think of how much broke when Python was rejiggered to not implicitly typecast unicode data. Think about all the legacy databases that can't handle spaces or various non-alphanumeric characters.
The userbase for software in the early 2000 was built for a much, much smaller audience than it is today. And I'm not sure the huge improvements in testing/debugging and general software development would totally mitigate that, in the same way modern military defense systems is still way behind modern offensive weaponry.
https://www.science.org/content/article/your-heartbeat-quiet...
Editor’s note, 16 September, 3:05 p.m.: Although no specific errors in this story have so far been identified, we have removed it after determining the author was impersonating the identity of an established science journalist, both with the News editors at Science and with sources in the story. Furthermore, two of the quotes provided by the author have since been found in previously published stories by other writers.
Not sure if Linkedin has a login-wall, here's the first grafs:
(author: Caroline Williams)
The person who was impersonating me managed to get an article published in Science, under my by-line. And they got paid for it!
I've seen the pitches (bad), and the email chain between editors who weren't all that impressed, but googled me and decide to take a punt. When the article came in it was dry, clunky and badly written, but after several rounds of editing they managed to get it into a publishable state. It went online in June and was up until yesterday when it became clear they (and I) had been scammed.
The whole thing makes me feel sick. I know from my work as an editor that the reputational damage is real. Had I pitched a story to them afterwards they would very understandably have said "Hell no!". Who has the time to do someone else's job? They tried "me", "I" didn't deliver, so no thank you.
I have no idea how many more editors out there have me on their 'do not commission' list because of this person's actions. There may also be several scientists who will not want to talk to me because they've had a bad experience with the fake one.
More broadly, if this is a wider scam (and based on what others have told me, I think it is), it is potentially a serious issue for science journalism and journalism in general. And I'm not sure what we can do about that.
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