Here is an article concerning the resignation of George Deutsch, who was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA's public affairs office in Washington last year after working on George II's re-election campaign and inaugural committee. This guy was helping to try to prevent people from bringing global warming issues to the public. It turns out that his resume was padded in the sense that he attended Texas A & M but didn't actually graduate from it (despite the claim on his resume). This was first reported in a blog on Monday, so I'm waiting for the Gazebo to take his shot at ending the career of someone in Washington. :)
Also, I wanted to make a brief comment on the issue of resume padding. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but I remember a discussion I had with a couple people at Georgia Tech (a Masters student who then got hired at GTRI and a couple undergrads) who apparently are not flagrantly against crap like this the way I am. Their attitude (which seems to correspond far more closely to the prevalent one than mine does) is it's ok if one can get away with it. They didn't take too kindly when I informed them how disgusting that attitude was. Their counter was to invoke a situation in which I found out that somebody who worked for me (and who I felt was doing very good work) had padded their resume that had been part of the decision-making process when I hired them. They felt I should be happy because of the quality of the work and that the other stuff didn't matter. Basically, that's utter shit because once I find out that they've done that, I can't trust them to be honest with me about their science. There's no way, for example, that I'd be able to vouch for their work again because in my head I'd always have this feeling that they might be dishonest about that too (after having seen precedent for it). This seems so obvious to me, but apparently it's not for many people.
I just posted on this myself. This guy Deutsch also supports a cosmological variant of FSMism.
ReplyDeleteClearly I need to bring down some Bush crony myself if I want to maintain my science blogger street cred. :)