YMMV when it comes to bikes. About 3 years ago I bought a cheap bike from Canadian Tire, and on the first day riding it to work, both pedals broke off.
It's like most things, buy the literal cheapest item you can and it'll probably be shit. Buy something in the lower middle of the price range and it'll probably serve you well for most uses. With bikes, that's probably $300-600.
One pedal broke off, then I tried riding with one foot on the crank arm, and the other on the pedal. A couple seconds later, the other pedal broke off.
Apparently it was a pretty common issue with the series of bikes.
I was once told a story by a professor at my undergrad about a new sessional instructor that just arrived at the school. Apparently a couple of years before, this sessional instructor was one of the top PHD students the country. He was going to grad school at one of the most prestigious universities, and his supervisors were the leading authors in their field. He published regularly since undergrad, and was teaching a couple of classes. One day, he found out that his supervisors were faking their results. These results were crucial to a couple massive papers for his supervisors. So he blew the whistle on his supervisors, and the papers got redacted. There were a couple of disciplinary measures for his supervisors, but within a few months they were back at work. This sessional instructor, however, was now blacklisted in his field. His advisors were editors for the top journals, and they had many connections to other researchers. I don't think he ever managed to finish his PHD, but they hired him as a sessional instructor for a couple classes at my school anyway. I think he now sells cars on the side to pay his bills.
I know an ex-postdoc who's promising career was cut short by also identifying and exposing fraud. I suspect it's more common than we think, and it's thoroughly wrong that being honest and professional can ruin your career in a moment. If you find all your research was based on fabricated data, what choice do you have? Expose it, or knowingly continue the fraud and be equally culpable. You're ruined either way.
The deeper problem is the environment which drives people to commit fraud in the first place. These whistleblowers are victims of that.
As someone who left after my PhD due to not having a good publication record, I've seen the nature of the pressure to suceed at all costs to advance in your career. It's brutal. I doubt most start out with bad intentions, but fraud is the ticket to success for a significant minority.
'The Academic'. You know, gritty, rugged. Like 'Godsford Park' but more about the politics of the fields of research. Through in a little bit of nuanced/amgiguous sex scandal as well. Get Ryan Gosling to play the bad guy for once.
There's a reason hearsay isn't accepted in courts because of its unreliability. But this doesn't strike me as potentially true at all. No university I know of would not take intentional academic fraud seriously. Even the mere mention of it would result in a serious investigation at minimum. It is the most alarming of accusations, and if it were found to be true, would utterly and permanently destroy a career.
>At this point it's pretty much impossible to read such articles and figure out whether there is an actual institutional problem.
I don't think that the question of whether there is an institutional problem necessitates large numbers of incidence. For example, you could say that 99.99% of people don't get murdered, so if the police don't investigate murders, it's no big deal, after all it's just 0.01% of the population.
I think the main question is: can the system adequately deal with incidences if they do happen. This is where I think the academic system is failing. Unlike the corporate world, PHD students are intrinsically tied to their supervisors. In an abusive corporate relationship, workers have the option to quit. However, that is often a much much harder option in academia. "Quitting" often means taking a serious hit to your reputation, and if you manage to find a new supervisor, it's likely that it will be hard to publish in the same field as your old supervisor. If you can't find a new supervisor, and have to fail out of the program, it's unlikely that you'll get the chance to work in that field again. For programs like Clinical Psychology, if you do not achieve a PHD, then the previous ~6 years of schooling will not count for anything.
As someone who works in academia, but outside of the Grad School track, the power disparity between PHD's and their supervisors has always surprised me. In undergrad, I worked under a professor whose grad students took an absurdly long time to graduate. By absurdly long, for a Masters and PHD one student took 12+ years, and another took 10+ years. At first I thought it was personal issues that caused the delay. However, after working with him for a while, I could see how that would happen. Projects were started without any foresight. He knew close to nothing about any of the methods his students were using, so couldn't understand any of the requirements. Progress on any project would be sluggish, and if you didn't find results, excuses were made so you'd have to run analyses again with different parameters. It was fine for me, because it was just a part time job, and I got paid decently. If I were a grad student, however, this would have been a complete nightmare.
There should be some sort of oversight over researchers and academics. Although we like to think scientists are stoic and noble in their search for knowledge, many are petty, vindictive and sometimes just clueless. Good grant writers/paper publishers don't necessarily make good managers.
>I don't think that the question of whether there is an institutional problem necessitates large numbers of incidence.
If an institution has lower number of incidents than population average than it's rather ridiculous to claim that it has an "institutional problem" with those incidents.
And I assure you, HR people in any big corporation would laugh at those numbers.
Now, if your argument is that Ph.D. serfdom magnifies the consequences of every incident, than I fully agree. Read my comment below. Rather than instituting "oversight", however, it would be much more rational to end Ph.D. serfdom. It has other negative consequences, which wouldn't be solved by some "supervisor police".
Marvin Minsky and Alan Kay spoke at length about how US academic system today stiffles creativity and long-term research. Seems it wasn't always like that, and the different wasn't in more oversight. Quite the opposite, actually.
>For example, you could say that 99.99% of people don't get murdered, so if the police don't investigate murders, it's no big deal, after all it's just 0.01% of the population.
Beyond certain point adding more police does nothing to curb murder rates. It's not a linear relationship.
>If an institution has lower number of incidents than population average than it's rather ridiculous to claim that it has an "institutional problem" with those incidents.
You can't draw any conclusions from the data presented in this article. It does not offer a per capita number of events.
> If an institution has lower number of incidents than population average than it's rather ridiculous to claim that it has an "institutional problem" with those incidents.
"If an institution has lower number of incidents than population average than it's rather ridiculous to claim that it has an "institutional problem" with those incidents.
And I assure you, HR people in any big corporation would laugh at those numbers."
That might only suggest that other institutions have larger problems.
edit:
TLDR - Imagine if you could negotiate a contract for 4 years and get paid $x, but your employer could arbitrarily decide to keep you for 8 years and still pay you $x. Even if the majority of employers are good and don't choose to do this, what kind of relationship does that create between you and your employer?
