The Times: Tech column - An academic mystery/Search priorities/Smiley history
By David Rowan
It is not often that the arcane field of nanotechnology produces a superstar, but for 31-year-old Jan Hendrik Schon, the prospects this time last year were gilded. Schon, a physicist at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in New Jersey, was being celebrated by his peers for some remarkable experiments that promised "a new era of molecular-scale electronics". By building the world's tiniest transistor, a million times smaller than a grain of sand, he offered the hope of cheaper and more powerful computer chips - prompting breathless international press coverage, job offers, even talk of a Nobel Prize.
When the respected journals Science and Nature peerreviewed Schon's experiments last autumn, the recent German PhD student was being feted at conferences: his findings meant the end of the silicon-chip era, and could lead to computers tiny enough to put into clothes and credit-cards. Schon also published more than 60 academic papers in more than two years, which only added to his mystique.
And then the doubts surfaced. This spring, fellow academics began questioning some of Schon's data: identical graphs that he used in a variety of unrelated papers to illustrate the results of widely differing experiments. The discrepancies led one former supporter to rebuke himself publicly for his "gullibility", and caused deep soul-searching at the journals. Schon told Nature that he remained "confident" of his findings, and insisted to Science that he had done nothing wrong, but no other scientist has yet achieved the same results. Concerned to protect its reputation, Lucent Technologies appointed an independent committee, under Malcolm Beasley, of Stanford University, to discover "whether scientific misconduct has occurred".
In the scientific community, the stakes could not be higher - especially for the learned journals whose peer-review processes are now under scrutiny. As Physics World magazine put it, any evidence that emerges of fabricated data will be a devastating blow not just to Lucent and to the scientists involved. "The reputations of leading journals," it added, "the burgeoning field of single-molecule nanoelectronics and the physics community will also suffer."
Perhaps there is an innocent explanation for the remarkable similarities in Schon's graphs; he himself is refusing to comment. But if Professor Beasley's findings, expected shortly, suggest anything more than human error, then the journals will need to rethink how they validate such specialist but potentially revolutionary research. And the rest of us ought to be a bit more sceptical.
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We are a land of cheapskate pop fans who are desperate to move home, if Google's most popular search queries are an accurate barometer of the national Zeitgeist. The search site's analysis of last month's Top 10 UK requests - excluding the rude ones - are, in declining order: cheap flights; BBC; holidays; easyJet; Britney Spears; Ryanair; car insurance; estate agents; exchange rates; and Gareth Gates. The Italians were keener on Padre Pio, and the French on Harry Potter - comparisons sure to prompt a rash of undergraduate courses at the new universities. But what's really worrying is that the world's most searched-for newsmaker was not Saddam or Bush, but ... Anna Nicole Smith. Time, surely, to log off and go on a long holiday.
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So now we know what they get up to at Microsoft's research labs: studying the origins of that vital communications tool known as the smiley. Seven months ago Mike Jones, a Microsoft researcher, launched a search for the earliest occurrence of the :-) symbol on the internet. After a study of old bulletin-board posts, Jones concludes that the emoticon (to give it its proper name) was first used at Carnegie Mellon University 20 years ago tomorrow. Its originator, one Scott E. Fahlman, was looking for a way to indicate humour, and coined the :-) to signal a smile. Predictably, this has created a huge debate, prompting other techies to date the symbol to the Sixties, with some even crediting it to Vladimir Nabokov.
(The Times, September 18 2002)
It is not often that the arcane field of nanotechnology produces a superstar, but for 31-year-old Jan Hendrik Schon, the prospects this time last year were gilded. Schon, a physicist at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in New Jersey, was being celebrated by his peers for some remarkable experiments that promised "a new era of molecular-scale electronics". By building the world's tiniest transistor, a million times smaller than a grain of sand, he offered the hope of cheaper and more powerful computer chips - prompting breathless international press coverage, job offers, even talk of a Nobel Prize.
When the respected journals Science and Nature peerreviewed Schon's experiments last autumn, the recent German PhD student was being feted at conferences: his findings meant the end of the silicon-chip era, and could lead to computers tiny enough to put into clothes and credit-cards. Schon also published more than 60 academic papers in more than two years, which only added to his mystique.
And then the doubts surfaced. This spring, fellow academics began questioning some of Schon's data: identical graphs that he used in a variety of unrelated papers to illustrate the results of widely differing experiments. The discrepancies led one former supporter to rebuke himself publicly for his "gullibility", and caused deep soul-searching at the journals. Schon told Nature that he remained "confident" of his findings, and insisted to Science that he had done nothing wrong, but no other scientist has yet achieved the same results. Concerned to protect its reputation, Lucent Technologies appointed an independent committee, under Malcolm Beasley, of Stanford University, to discover "whether scientific misconduct has occurred".
In the scientific community, the stakes could not be higher - especially for the learned journals whose peer-review processes are now under scrutiny. As Physics World magazine put it, any evidence that emerges of fabricated data will be a devastating blow not just to Lucent and to the scientists involved. "The reputations of leading journals," it added, "the burgeoning field of single-molecule nanoelectronics and the physics community will also suffer."
Perhaps there is an innocent explanation for the remarkable similarities in Schon's graphs; he himself is refusing to comment. But if Professor Beasley's findings, expected shortly, suggest anything more than human error, then the journals will need to rethink how they validate such specialist but potentially revolutionary research. And the rest of us ought to be a bit more sceptical.
++++
We are a land of cheapskate pop fans who are desperate to move home, if Google's most popular search queries are an accurate barometer of the national Zeitgeist. The search site's analysis of last month's Top 10 UK requests - excluding the rude ones - are, in declining order: cheap flights; BBC; holidays; easyJet; Britney Spears; Ryanair; car insurance; estate agents; exchange rates; and Gareth Gates. The Italians were keener on Padre Pio, and the French on Harry Potter - comparisons sure to prompt a rash of undergraduate courses at the new universities. But what's really worrying is that the world's most searched-for newsmaker was not Saddam or Bush, but ... Anna Nicole Smith. Time, surely, to log off and go on a long holiday.
++++
So now we know what they get up to at Microsoft's research labs: studying the origins of that vital communications tool known as the smiley. Seven months ago Mike Jones, a Microsoft researcher, launched a search for the earliest occurrence of the :-) symbol on the internet. After a study of old bulletin-board posts, Jones concludes that the emoticon (to give it its proper name) was first used at Carnegie Mellon University 20 years ago tomorrow. Its originator, one Scott E. Fahlman, was looking for a way to indicate humour, and coined the :-) to signal a smile. Predictably, this has created a huge debate, prompting other techies to date the symbol to the Sixties, with some even crediting it to Vladimir Nabokov.
(The Times, September 18 2002)
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