…and you don’t mess around with The Joy of Cooking.
Shot: Brian Wansink, a professor at Cornell University (he runs the “Food and Brand Lab”) published a paper in 2009: “The Joy of Cooking Too Much”.
…Wansink and his frequent collaborator, the New Mexico State University professor Collin R. Payne, had examined the cookbook’s recipes in multiple “Joy” editions, beginning with the 1936 version, and determined that their calorie counts had increased over time by an average of forty-four per cent.
The people currently behind Joy were a little upset by this, and a little skeptical. But they didn’t really get fed up until 2015. They started looking at Wansink’s research and found that some of his claims didn’t quite add up.
Recently, Buzzfeed came into the picture:
Academic standards call for researchers to articulate a hypothesis ahead of time, and then to conduct an experiment that produces data that will either prove or disprove the hypothesis. Lee’s article—which was based on interviews with Cornell Food and Brand Lab employees, and also private e-mails from within the lab, which were obtained through a public-records request—showed that Wansink regularly urged his staff to work the other way around: to manipulate sets of data in order to find patterns (a practice known as “p-hacking”) and then reverse-engineer hypotheses based on those conclusions. “Think of all the different ways you can cut the data,” he wrote to a researcher, in an e-mail from 2013; for other studies, he pressed his staff to “squeeze some blood out of this rock.” One of Wansink’s lab assistants told Lee, in regard to data from a weight-loss study she had been assigned to analyze, “He was trying to make the paper say something that wasn’t true.”
Here’s the Buzzfeed article.
And here’s chaser #1: Wansink’s paper has been retracted. Per “Retraction Watch”, this is retraction number 17 for Wansink.
Chaser #2: Wansink has been found guilty of academic misconduct, and has “resigned” effective June 2019.
In a statement, the university told BuzzFeed News that Wansink was found to have “committed academic misconduct in his research and scholarship, including misreporting of research data, problematic statistical techniques, failure to properly document and preserve research results, and inappropriate authorship.”
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