When All Else Fails, Make Up the Data

Way too much peer review and verification in aviation systems for this sort of thing to go uncaught.

One of the nice things about tightly regulated environments - less reliance on my ethics and more on process.

Shoot the messenger.

Sounds like standard government, corporate, environmentalist, and unconfirmed alternative energy research practices to me.

SO whats the problem?

That practice is known as 'Pencil Whipping'. Happens all the time, just watch a TV commercial. As noted above, in a controlled situation where someone has to verify results it is less likely that the figures will be fudged. Doing so is grounds for dismissal. I have seen (and done myself) a 'blue check' aided by a dead blow sledge hammer, to the satisfaction of all concerned. So I guess it all depends on the integrity of who you work for.

Wow. This practice is apparently alive and well; see recent thread 'Kilowatt Buster??'.

Your post unwillingly focuses on "data". Actually, in many cases, one does need to interfer with the "data". In a broader sense, you may become conscious of an obvious but not previously recognised constraint (especially if there were no real peer review). Those constraint can take an infinite number of shapes such as an alternate cheaper way of doing things, some unforeseen operating condition uncompatible with the planned use...

Oups ! meant "does NOT need to interfer"

GA marcot!

Not that engineers are immune to ethical issues, but usually there is material evidence to deal with.

Once it gets into the political sphere, the bad guys not only don't get caught, they usually get promoted!

I knew it!
Engineering is a bad choice for dishonest types. Physical consequences of a fake = failure. The career trajectory for a fraud in engineering is short and final.

The life science economy is a whole other ballgame. Test results are probabilistic, never absolute. Harder to prove if something works in a living system, and if bad outcomes have a lag time, harder to pin down the cause. In medical industry, there's freedom to withhold negative studies from publication. This is unscientific: it shouldn't be allowed. It takes years for independent studies to come around to provide real verification. By that time, damage is often already done. But heck, they have insurance to take care of that.

Imagine testing a cell phone against placebo! If people get positive results from the placebo-phone, you'd be out of a job! And we could all go back to living in caves...

I could tell you sad tales about the culture of cheating at the school where I studied biology. So many students thought nothing of copying someone else's lab results. I can't imagine that these people left school with a clue about scientific methods and standards, or that they would think twice about fudging data for industry.

Placebo phone...great concept...wonder if I can get one designed in time for the KrisDel^TM Ch******s catalogue.
Del

Very simple.
Anyone deliberately missrepresenting data should be fired.
Oh, so that's the whole government gone...
Now, where were those WMDs again?
Del

Ransack some individuals retirement account - pay them back, with body parts if need.

Doctor, I don't care how you do it, Just keep the SOB alive so we can hang him at sunrise tomorrow.

But in all seriousness, I have experienced an employee that did just that, and the SOB be walked away and left me hold the bag of S#it he created.

And your post is not off topic. Hell not to name names but a far eastern very large country (with population in the billions ) shows what can happen to people that futz's with the numbers.

And not off topic

G.A.

phoenix911

ps

futz, I believe is of german origin