Just as Frank Serpico clashed with his NYPD peers - from his appearance to his political views - so is the dynamic between Jeremy and his peers. According to our inside man, some of these guys deal with dirty data for their personal gain. I'm not talking big bucks, here. We're talking about something worth way more in certain circles. It's authorship, baby.
On several occasions, Jeremy has declined offers of authorship for his participation in data analysis. His reasons have ranged from not feeling he contributed much to the project, to not wanting to be associated with shady statistical methods. This has caused more than one set of eyebrows to be raised. So far he's been able to stay under the radar. My feeling that it is only a matter of time before a couple of his teammates take him on a ride in a nondescript, dark colored sedan to have a private chat.
Friends, I bet you had no idea of the drama and corruption associated with public health statistics.
I don't want to go into too much detail here, but I did want you to be aware. If strange people from the government contact you with questions about Jeremy - no matter how legit they appear - you've heard nothing and know nothing. Got it?
2 comments:
I tried to edit some grammatical errors in my first comment and the damn thing was deleted! Here we go again....you'll just have to live with any more errors.
I feel I must elaborate to the whole story:
After a "run-in" with a co-worker--here they are called colleagues to make sure everyone knows you're not blue-collar--I get a call from Holly and tell her about my story and state that I feel like Serpico.
I see my name on an abstract that will soon be viewed by everyone who is anyone in my particular discipline. I guess the authors felt like they had to put my name there because my group (4 people) was asked a statistical question and out of curiosity, I was the only sumbitch dumb enough to answer it. Well, the results I generated ended up in this paper espoused as being gospel, which is not really what I had in mind. "Hey...can't we talk about these results? Shouldn't we go over my methods...anyone?" If I try to ask anyone, they just play dumb or scatter. I was sort of hoping that my work would be looked over by some stats whizard and I would get pointers as to where I went wrong and how to correct it. Yes, I desparately want a mentor!
Well, I tell them..."them" to take my name off of the abstract/paper (for two reasons) and you'd think I slapped the person and gave them a titty-twister. Dumstruck, the question, uttered so low that only cats and the dish at Arecibo could hear it. "Why?" I actually think she was wondering to herself rather than asking a question.
This is where Serpico comes in. Turning down authorship is a no-no at the CDC. If you breathe on a paper, your name gets added to it and by-god, you better be grateful.
I don't really care for this "authorship inflation" so I have some rules: quality over quantity and the paper must expand public-health knowledge. I think there are a lot papers written because that "proves" you are working, regardless of whether or not the paper is meaningful or shows anything useful. I've seen numerous papers that do nothing more than state the obvious. In this case, the subject matter was meaningful, but the methods were unsound way before I entered the picture and I was trying to make lemonade from lemons. Therefore, I didn't want my name on it...nobody would know it was crap...except for me, and in my opinion, that's who counts most.
Snobbery you say?? Not really. I just have rules, and if I break them, I just worry what I will devolve into. I've told my superiors on more than one occasion that if I wrote the best paper in the world that changed science as we know it, and you tried to put names of people on there who did no work, I would rip it up in front of them and not mention it again. Similarly, I don't want to be on a paper if I didn't really do anything that didn't require unique thought.
So, I'm sure this has caused some more than a little conjecture in the break room. Hopefully not...I don't really want to be noticed at work, and by my my "acting out," I'm now on "the list." "Everybody does it...just put your name on there...it will make you look good...give you some reward for your efforts." Right. Then, someone, somewhere says "Can you explain why you . . . ?" and the other authors point at me: "He did it, he said it was right...there were p-values." Then they'll take away my pocket-protector and slide-rule.
Twenty years from now when I only have two papers on my CV and wonder why I'm still at a GS-6, I can ask my nose laying on the floor. It really is tough living by rules that are important only to yourself.
Statico out......
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