November 4, 2011

To good to be true?

Recently, the Dutch Professor Diederik Stapel from Tilburg University was identified to be cheating with his micro data. There is an intermediate report about the case here (dutch).

The report says that two other professors did earlier qualify the research and its underlying data as "to good to be true". So there was doubt allover. The report mentions "strange, unlikely or impossible data patterns". This is intriguing. How does data look that is to good to be true? What did the other professors see? We would like to see it and visualize it, but the committee did not publish it....

They should...... they never heard of open data.....?
Only then we would be able to see how data that is too good to be true actually looks.......