"A Non-Expert’s Introduction to Data Ethics for Mathematicians"

My chapter in our new book is also out. Here are some details about it.

Title: A Non-Expert’s Introduction to Data Ethics for Mathematicians

Author: Mason A. Porter

Abstract: I give a short introduction to data ethics. I begin with some background information and societal context for data ethics. I then discuss data ethics in mathematical-science education and indicate some available course material. I briefly highlight a few efforts—at my home institution and elsewhere—on data ethics, society, and social good. I then discuss open data in research, research replicability and some other ethical issues in research, the tension between privacy and open data and code, and a few controversial studies and reactions to studies. I also discuss ethical principles, institutional review boards, and a few other considerations in the scientific use of human data. I then briefly survey a variety of research and lay articles that are relevant to data ethics and data privacy. I conclude with a brief summary and some closing remarks.

My focal audience is mathematicians, but I hope that this chapter will also be useful to others. I am not an expert about data ethics, and this chapter provides only a starting point on this wide-ranging topic. I encourage you to examine the resources that I discuss and to reflect carefully on data ethics, its role in mathematics education, and the societal implications of data and data analysis. As data and technology continue to evolve, I hope that such careful reflection will continue throughout your life.

My Slides on Data Ethics for Mathematicians (and Others)

I have made some slides on data ethics for mathematicians (and others). I'll be presenting them later this term to my graduate course in network science.

My slides on "Data Ethics for Mathematicians" (n the era of Big Data) #appliedmathematics #bigdata https://t.co/JBqOcMyf6f via @SlideShare

— Mason Porter (@masonporter) February 19, 2017

Networked Systems Ethics

Ben Zevenbergen of the Oxford Internet Institute has released a set of guidelines on networked systems ethics.

"Who's Afraid of Peer Review"

The magazine Science conducted a fascinating experiment on peer review in open-access journals. They were able to get a bogus paper accepted (often without peer review and even more often without rigorous peer review) more often than not. Interestingly, they did not comment on whether or not they got the IRB approval that is necessary for studies that involve human subjects. (IRB is "Internal Review Board" and is a board for US-based studies. Other countries have analogous bodies.) As discussed in the first link, although this experiment was done with open-access journals, I'm sure one would find the same crap in journals that are published using more conventional pricing models.

(Tip of the cap to someone named Gary King, who appears to be a professor at Harvard University. I found this article via a Facebook link on which my collaborator James Fowler wrote a comment.)

If You Didn't Communicate It, Then You Didn't Do it.

If you didn't write it down or tell anybody or communicate it in some other way, then you didn't do it. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I proved cold fusion. I just didn't bother to tell anybody or show it to anybody or ever even mention it really, but I still deserve credit and a citation if you do it later (because that's when I'll bring it up). And a Nobel Prize. Give me one of those beauties, too. You're just going to have to take my word about my notes that I never showed to anybody.

That is now twice this summer that I have run into so-called "scholars" who apparently believe crap like this --- not cold fusion, but the notion that their idea that has never been communicated in public means that they don't have to give proper credit or (in the more extreme case) that of course they did it but they didn't bother to mention it at all in their paper, so you can't get credit for doing it and don't insult them by stating that those calculations hadn't been done in the literature. And these people are ok with stepping on other people in the process. And one of these people seemed to be ok with screwing over their own student! WTF?

Peer Review Fail

Well, this incident sure is a beauty.

To quote a line the supplementary information of this paper, Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis.... (And also an ethics fail.) Way to proofread! This is an instant classic. (By the way, there is already an update.)

(Tip of cap to Katie Siek.)

Update (8/10/13): Petter Holme has pointed me to this link, which updates the story further. The Editor in Chief is handling the aftermath very well, in my opinion. Of course, things shouldn't ever have gotten to this point, but the situation is what it is.

Cell Phone Networks and Privacy Issues

Here is a new networks paper that just came out in Nature. It is by one of the usual suspects (Barabasi), an up-and-coming postdoc (Marta Gonzalez), and somebody else (of whom I've never heard). One of my networks buddies at Oxford has done some related work in the past and is in fact involved on the follow-up work to this paper. (One of the new postdocs here was hired for this project as well.) There are some pretty dicey ethical issues involved in this one, and the author with the unfamiliar name has seemingly shot himself in the foot with one of his comments in which he mentioned basically that there are nefarious things one could do with that data so that it's a good thing that it's scientists who are using it and not someone else---that was really not a smart thing to say. (Unsurprisingly, by the way, this paper is getting a ton of press.) Here are the title and abstract:

Title: Understanding individual human mobility patterns

Authors: Marta C. González, César A. Hidalgo, & Albert-László Barabási

Abstract: Despite their importance for urban planning1, traffic forecasting2 and the spread of biological3, 4, 5 and mobile viruses6, our understanding of the basic laws governing human motion remains limited owing to the lack of tools to monitor the time-resolved location of individuals. Here we study the trajectory of 100,000 anonymized mobile phone users whose position is tracked for a six-month period. We find that, in contrast with the random trajectories predicted by the prevailing Lévy flight and random walk models7, human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity, each individual being characterized by a time-independent characteristic travel distance and a significant probability to return to a few highly frequented locations. After correcting for differences in travel distances and the inherent anisotropy of each trajectory, the individual travel patterns collapse into a single spatial probability distribution, indicating that, despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns. This inherent similarity in travel patterns could impact all phenomena driven by human mobility, from epidemic prevention to emergency response, urban planning and agent-based modelling.


The overall result (about how predictable we are) isn't surprising at all, but what is really nice is more specific quantitative information about such regularity--probability distributions, etc.--that could be really helpful for things like designing vaccination strategies.

I'm not planning to give my thoughts on the ethics of the study in the entry itself (though I'll consider doing so in the comments if an interesting discussion arises (as I hope it will). This is certainly one of those studies that ought to provoke such a discussion.

Tales from the ArXiv

Here is the abstract of a paper that just got posted to the arXiv:

arXiv:0803.4058
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:11:02 GMT (20kb)

Title: Crime and punishment in scientific research
Authors: Mathieu Bouville
Categories: physics.soc-ph physics.hist-ph
Comments: 10 pages, 2 tables
License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
\\
Arguments against scientific misconduct one finds in the literature generally
fail to support current policies on research fraud: they may not prove wrong
what is typically considered research misconduct and they tend to make wrong
things that are not usually seen as scientific fraud, in particular honest
errors. I argue that society cannot set a rule enjoining scientists to be
honest, so any such rule can only be internal to science. Therefore society
cannot legitimately enforce it. Moreover, until an argument is provided to
prove that lack of honesty is far worse than lack of technical competence,
intentional deceit should not be punished much more harshly than technical
errors.
Keywords: cheating; ethics; fabrication; falsification; integrity;
plagiarism; research fraud; scientific misconduct.
\\ ( http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.4058 , 20kb)


Let me repeat the abstract's last sentence: Moreover, until an argument is provided to
prove that lack of honesty is far worse than lack of technical competence,
intentional deceit should not be punished much more harshly than technical
errors.


Comment: That is just utter bullshit. I understand that technical incompetence can cause at least as much damage as dishonesty, but there shouldn't be "punishment" for honest mistakes! What kind of society does this guy want to live in? In my ideal world, there is a big difference in how people react to dishonesty versus honest mistakes. Sheesh...