Old Blogger

Good Bye

14 December 2014

Same Location, Different Time

The Orchard Road Presbyterian Church

The same church view from another direction

I have stopped going to Orchard road since when the building featured
on the right was still leased to the Singapore Institute of Architects !

Same location but different time !
Gosh, just realized the Specialist Shopping Centre has been demolished ! (notice the Pavilion cinema on the right in the top photo? The Pavilion gave way to the specialist shopping centre and the latter gave way to a spanking brand new building in its place [Link]  )
I still have vivid memories of exiting from Somerset MRT station,
crossing the traffic junction just diagonally in front of it to get to centrepoint.
It seems like only yesterday ...

Have not been getting around for more than a decade ! Partly due to family and also things and places and people just don't feel familiar anymore ...

[Link] here

01 December 2014

Hobby : Navy 2040 (Air - Sea Defence)

Air - Sea Defence ( Light Aircraft Carriers - Mobile Airbase) Version 3.0

Air - Sea Defence : A Sustainable Force

Relinquishment of the Paya Lebar Airbase by 2030 reduces our fighter airbases to only two and having no strategic depth, given the reality of land mass constraint. An alternative is to envision our seas (EEZ and SLOC) as forward defensive extension inhabiting our maneuver elements from the armed forces. Bringing our defenses forward by equipping a force structure that enables a tactical maneuver doctrine from our combined arms of Air, Sea and Land services. By way of strategic defences utilizing the sea as forward extension of land. 

Unmanned / Autonomous Systems augment the reduced quantity of manned assets by way of sensor fusion and big data real time monitoring 24/7.

With the closing of the PLAB, the overall manpower head count is transferred in stages to the future mobile airbases in the form of two Light Aircraft Carrier. With a ramping up in recruitment of Navy personnel and re-training of Air Force personnel to orientate them towards naval aviation, the increase in recruitment of naval personnel with a corresponding decrease in NS full-time and reserves man power, decommissioning of units such as the soldier intensive airfield defence squadron and airfield maintenance squadron, etc. from the Air Force, net manpower numbers remain constant and sustainable.

During normal peace time, only one light aircraft carrier is operating with the Sea-Air Defence Task Force (ASDTF)

ASDTF Combat assets on rotation

The other light aircraft carrier is either in maintenance dock or operating/training in near seas well within our land base air cover. Only when there is imminent flash point will the two light aircraft carriers embark on mission(s).

The Air Sea Defence picture is not complete without including the air assets from the Air Force.

Total Air Defensive Shield

Version 3.0 [Link]
Version 2.0 [Link]
Version 1.0 [Link]

07 October 2014    

The Hong Kong we love Is Lost ( 完 了 )

HK : When to run and save your lives [Link]

It is sad, but i agree with this blogger ...

Caught between a rock and a hard place {my caption}

I saw this off my phone yesterday but it wasn't the first of many reminders that Beijing will be absolutely uncompromising. Beijing will pay any price for Hong Kong to behave because if HK doesn't China's leaders fear the whole nation would become unstable. Never mind that this will set back to square one all effort invested in wooing Taiwan to return. To Beijing that is only a question of when, the how isn't important. Beijing assumes in good time China will be irresistible. They seems intoxicated by this fallacy.

So what's the point for pointing out the obvious. The reason is the safety of the students.

Beijing will not hesitate to repeat the 1989 incident if it proves necessary. The question is how and when it might happen. I think the moment they sack CY Leung {or he resign}, those who cherish their lives should quickly run home. You have made your point, there is no point getting shot by the para military police. HK police will not fire on Hong Kong students {香港人不杀香港人} but the Chinese troops will not hesitate. {emphasis mine}

Beijing doesn't even bother to try very hard to resolve the stand off. It's laziness is appalling. Therefore you can conclude that Xi Jinping may even be able to make political capital out of his opponents in a crack down on Hong Kong.

At the very least, CY Leung should have enough tactical sense to start writing letters to the parents of these students to persuade them to bring their kids home.

The trouble with Hong Kong leaders is they are not leaders but mere managers. To Hongkongers they could never step up to the plate and lead, neither could they impress Beijing.

As for the tycoons they will not try to do their part to save the place. They are only interested in safeguarding their wealth. Some of this wealth would be lost to the mainlanders. KS Li was a canary in the coal mine for those who were watching and understanding the oracles.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I will miss the Hong Kong that we are so familiar with ... 

But the spirit of Hong Kongers must live on !

Good Bye HK.

Hong Kong You Are Not Alone

 

01 Red October 2014 !

Poland - The poison shrimp !

Poland needs nuclear arms to ward off Russia : Walesa [Link]

Polish anti-communist icon Lech Walesa said Poland should procure nuclear weapons as a safeguard against Russia, which it blames for stoking the crisis in neighboring Ukraine.

“Poland needs to stand up to Russia,” the Nobel Peace laureate, who spearheaded Poland’s democracy movement and became its first post-communist president, said in an interview published Wednesday.

EU and NATO member Poland has been rattled by Russia’s actions in Ukraine, including its March annexation of the Crimean peninsula and suspected backing of rebels in the east.

Russian President Vladimir “Putin has been trying to intimidate us with his nuclear weapons, so why shouldn’t we have our own arsenal?” Walesa told the Rzeczpospolita daily.

“We should borrow, lease nuclear weapons and show Putin that if a Russian soldier poses one foot on our land uninvited, we will attack. Just to be clear,” the 70-year-old said.

Several countries including Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey currently host shared nuclear weapons on their territory under NATO.

But there is no tradition at the moment of borrowing or leasing the weapons.

Poland should speak up and say: “Mister Putin, we won’t let you make one step forward. Try it and you’ll perish, and so will we,” added Walesa, who as leader of the Solidarity trade union negotiated a peaceful end to Communism at home in 1989.

It is under his presidency in 1993 that the last Soviet troops left Poland. Six years later the country joined the NATO defence alliance.

On Wednesday, Poland began major military exercises involving 12,500 troops, including 750 from other NATO countries, which will continue through October 3.

Poland stages the Anakonda manoeuvres every two years but this time they “take on a special significance given the events in Ukraine,” Defence Minister Tomasz Siemoniak said at the opening ceremony.

“It is important for NATO to show that we stick together,” added Torben Moller, a brigadier general from the alliance’s command centre at Brunssum in the Netherlands.

01 Red October 2014 !

Taiwan can be defended

Taiwan, Asia's Secret Air Power [Link]

When current and former world leaders, including Bill Clinton, visit Taiwan, they often stay at the Grand Hotel Taipei, an opulent Chinese architectural landmark perched atop Yuan Mountain. With spectacular views of the downtown riverfront and a palm-lined swimming pool surrounded by lush green jungle, guests at the Grand Hotel could be forgiven for thinking they had arrived at one of the most peaceful spots in East Asia.

Grand Hotel, Taipei*

In fact, just under their feet lies a vast underground command center from which Taiwan’s top leadership would direct their nation’s armed forces in the event of a war with China. This facility, like many around the high-tech island, shows that when it comes to the defense of Taiwan, there is much more than meets the eye.

Known officially as the Tri-Service Hengshan Military Command Center, the sprawling tunnel facility stretches through the mountain in a line that starts near the Grand Hotel and goes down to the giant Ferris wheel in Dazhi. Built to defend against China’s growing fleet of ballistic missiles, this hardened nerve center is designed to allow Taiwan’s government (and thousands of military personnel) to live and work for months, riding out air raids above while organizing the defense of Taiwan from below.

Linked to a large network of subterranean command posts and military bases around Taiwan and its outer islands – as well as the U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii – the Hengshan Military Command Center is the ultimate redoubt for Taiwan’s president. It is so important, in fact, that China’s strategic rocket force, the Second Artillery, has actually simulated missile attacks on the bridges that connect it to the Presidential Office.

Assuming the PLA are civilized combatants :
They will "take out" the bridge during wee hours
to reduce collateral civilian casualties ?*

On the other side of the city, buried inside a wet rocky outcropping near the campus of National Taiwan University, lies another tunnel complex, the Air Operations Center. Known affectionately as “Toad Mountain” by Taiwanese air force officers, this facility oversees one of the most robust air and missile defense networks on the planet. Fed vast quantities of information by airborne early-warning aircraft, long-range radars, listening posts, unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites, Toad Mountain stands constant watch over all of Taiwan’s airspace, ready to scramble fighters or assign surface-to-air missiles to intercept intruders. And, like every other Taiwanese military facility, it has multiple back-ups. Just in case.

One of those back-ups is located on Taiwan’s east coast inside Chiashan or “Optimal Mountain,” not far from the mouth of a gorge cut through pure white marble. Unlike the gorge, however, no tourists are allowed inside this billion dollar bunker complex. According to first-person accounts, the base is an entire military city built inside a hollowed-out mountain. Not only does it have space inside for parking, arming, and repairing over two hundred fighter aircraft, it also has its own hospital and multiple gas stations serving jet fuel. With ten blast doors that exit out to multiple runways via a long taxiway that can itself be used as an emergency runway, it may be toughest airbase ever built.

Ninety miles down the coastline, Taiwan’s air force is further bolstered by the Shihzishan or “Stone Mountain” complex at Chihhang Air Base. Though somewhat smaller than Chiashan, its labyrinthine tunnels can still shelter some eighty aircraft. Both of these facilities benefit from their strategic locations on the far side of the highest mountain range in East Asia. Missiles fired from the Chinese mainland can’t reach them – they would smash into the side of mountains before they got there.

Underground Air Base to surface runway

For this reason Taiwan regularly practices dispersing its fighter jets from vulnerable west coast bases to airfields on the east coast. Units are also moved between bases to make it difficult to predict where they might be at any given time, and dummy aircraft are parked on tarmacs and inside shelters to confuse enemy intelligence.

To further mitigate the threat of a knock-out Chinese missile strike on its airfields, Taiwan’s air force maintains five emergency highway strips where it can land, refuel, rearm, and launch fighters in the event that nearby runways are cratered. In addition, each Taiwanese airbase has large engineering units attached to it with ample stocks of equipment for rapidly repairing runways. Clocking in at four hours, Israel’s Self Defense Force used to have the world speed record in the runway repair game. No longer. Earlier this year a team of Taiwanese sappers beat that record by an hour.

Facing an existential threat from China and its much larger military, these are just a few of many examples of how Taiwan’s military is using quality to offset its quantitative shortcomings. Whether or not Taiwan can pull it off could hardly be more important for the United States and the future of the Asia-Pacific region.

Indeed, if the contest of the century is to be waged between the U.S. and China for primacy in the Pacific, Taiwan will be the center of the action. Look at any map and it should quickly become apparent why. Taiwan sits at the crossroads between the East and South China Seas, within torpedo range of the world’s most heavily trafficked sea lanes. Not only critical for bottling the Chinese navy up inside the first island chain–and thereby protecting Japan and the Philippines from the threat of naval blockade–Taiwan also plays a leading role in the air.

Fun Taiwan - 50 times bigger than the pi sai country !*

With China fielding ballistic missiles for targeting U.S. aircraft carrier groups in the Western Pacific and Andersen Air Force Base on Guam, Taiwan’s defenses matter more now than ever. Chinese missiles would have to go through Taiwan’s airspace on the way to their targets. With the right combination of high-powered ballistic missile defense radars and interceptors, Taiwan can serve as a shield to protect deployed American forces during a contingency.

This potential was inadvertently revealed in late 2012 when North Korea launched a long-range rocket into the Philippine Sea. At the time, Taiwan’s new ultra high frequency (UHF) radar system was able to track the missile and provide the U.S. and Japanese warships with 120 seconds of extra warning time, an eternity in the short life of a hypersonic missile flight.

TW Phased Array radar installation on Mount LeShan.
NB: Need to build ever more complex UHF wave-forms  in fast variable random switching mode
in order to overcome PLA EW measures ... This will be enough to buy you precious 2 to 3 minutes before this $800 million dollar installation is taken out by ballistic missile swam attack.
Suggest real-time integration with allies radar network to pick up the trail by extrapolating echo for defense and counter-strike.*

For this reason and many others, China’s Communist Party leadership in Beijing continues to see Taiwan as its most worrisome external political and diplomatic problem. Viewed by Beijing as the Chinese world’s first liberal democracy, Taiwan’s remarkable political success story casts China’s oppressive system in an unfavorable comparative light.

To combat what it thinks is a grave political threat, Beijing’s strategy has been to employ a combination of coercive and cooperative measures to isolate (and eventually subjugate) Taiwan. The most prominent aspect of China’s strategy is its missile build-up, which aims to intimidate the voters in Taiwan and policymakers in the United States.

Yet without the ability to dominate the air domain, any Chinese attempt to blockade or invade Taiwan would be disastrous. This may explain why China’s amphibious fleet has not grown by a single ship since 2007. It makes little sense for any navy to spend limited resources on ships that could be sunk at the outset of war.

However, the air and missile threat to Taiwan, and by extension the United States, is very real and growing fast. China’s Second Artillery Force has developed and tested a ballistic missile warhead for targeting airfield runways with penetrating cluster munitions. At the same time, China has been able to convince two successive U.S. administrations (and three French Presidents) to freeze the sale of new fighter jets to Taiwan, leading to a widening “fighter gap” in the Taiwan Strait.

Without new F-16 or Mirage-2000 fighters, Taiwan knows that it may soon find itself overwhelmed in the air even though its pilots are far better trained than their mainland adversaries. In an air war quality may be the most important factor, but quantity matters a lot too. Fortunately, Taiwan’s government appears to be making serious progress on developing its own indigenous means of undercutting China’s growing missile and air forces. While Taiwan will be hard pressed to ensure that it always has cross-strait air superiority, it can easily deny the same to China. By developing and fielding a number of world-class capabilities to survive missile strikes and keep enemy aircraft from freely operating in its airspace, Taiwan may have broken the code on deterring Chinese aggression.

by Ian Easton

*  not by the author
and heading down south into the South China Sea ...

Defending the Natuna - Indonesia's "Guard Post" in the South China Sea !

The tiny Riau Islands - 10 times the size of the little red dot [Link]

28 September 2014

Twenty-First Century Sportsmanship

Asian Games [Link]

Yahoo News : China Swim King Sun bashes Japan's "ugly' anthem

Chinese Swimmer Sun

Japanese rival Kosuke Hagino, who ruffled Sun’s feathers with a shock 200m victory last weekend, gave a measured response when asked for his thoughts.

“I didn’t hear what he said so it’s hard to comment,” he said. “But first and foremost we’re all athletes and we have to respect each other. We also have to show human values so hopefully we can continue to compete in that atmosphere.”

Sun is no stranger to controversy, getting himself suspended from swimming for six months after police detained him last year for colliding with a bus while driving his Porsche without a license.

China’s swimming bad boy previously had a public bust-up with his coach after he voiced disapproval of the swimmer’s dalliance with an air hostess.

Troubles brewing ahead ... somebody gonna kiss the donkey ...

26 September 2014

One United Kingdom

Add caption !

God Save The Cat

Fed It With Bacon Fat

God Save The Cat !

On this day the 19th of September in the year AD 2014

Many Fake Degrees In Singapore ? WTF !

Former NUS Professor exposed as a fraud [Link]

He seemed like the Doogie Howser of India, able to crack the country’s best medical school, and work there as a 21-year-old doctor. Anoop Shankar later claimed to add a Ph.D. in epidemiology and treat patients even as he researched population-wide diseases. He won a “genius” visa to America, shared millions in grants, and boasted of membership in the prestigious Royal College of Physicians.

In 2012 West Virginia University hand-picked this international star to help heal one of the country’s sickest states. At just 37, Shankar was nominated to the first endowed position in a new School of Public Health, backed by a million dollars in public funds. As chair of the epidemiology department, he was also poised to help the university spend tens of millions of additional tax dollars. “This is about improving healthcare and improving lives,” said university president Jim Clements, announcing a federal grant for health sciences. “We could not be more proud.”

But there was a problem: Shankar isn’t a Ph.D. He didn’t graduate from the Harvard of India. He didn’t write dozens of the scholarly publications on his resume, and as for the Royal College of Physicians, they’ve never heard of him. He does have a master’s degree in epidemiology from the University of North Carolina and an Indian medical degree, but at least two of his green card references—attesting to “world class creativity,” “genius insight,” and “a new avenue for treating hypertension”—were a forgery.

These are just some of the results of an inquiry into Shankar’s history, one that began as a standard pre-appointment review only to dilate into an ongoing, overlapping 18-month investigation. The case has captured the attention of two WVU offices, the Monongalia County courts, U.S. Immigration, and, in a lead role, Ian Rockett, chair of the promotion and tenure committee at the School of Public Health.

NBC News spoke with people familiar with all three probes and reviewed Rockett’s 91-page report on Shankar, prepared partly in support of a lawsuit against his former colleague. Those documents, and several of Shankar’s colleagues, tell a similar story, describing a charming, bright-minded impostor who built a career on a base of lies.

His case exposes some of the profound dysfunction sometimes attributed to higher education, where the sanctity of research is threatened by skyrocketing retractions, epic frauds, and a system that seems ill-equipped to police itself. “When you leave institutions in charge of an investigation,” rather than, say, an outside watchdog organization, “you are leaving the fox in charge of the henhouse,” says Ivan Oransky, a founder of the whistleblower blog Retraction Watch.

How Many More Are Out There ?

Although Shankar was forced out of WVU in December of 2012, the university has yet to address the case publicly, allowing Shankar and his work to continue unchallenged. In the last year alone, he’s published at least three papers, including one in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association. He also landed a new job on the backs of taxpayers: associate professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, a large public university in Richmond.

In response to questions from NBC News, WVU pledged to make “a complete and full public statement” when “all the facts are clear and known.” But in the meantime, Shankar—who repeatedly postponed interviews after NBC made multiple attempts to reach him over the course of several months—has both an untarnished record and his green card, and he continues self-inventing.

“I have never wittingly seen his kind before,” says Rockett, who went public to raise awareness of academic fraud. “How many more are out there?”

Campus of West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia.

In the late summer of 2012, Rockett was asked to give Shankar’s resume a standard review ahead of the young man’s appointment to a new “Chair of Excellence” in the School of Public Health.

Almost right away there was trouble, Rockett says. He noticed that Shankar was claiming an “M.D.,” which in India is a higher degree than an American M.D. It requires a dissertation, so Rockett scanned Shankar’s CV for 1996 papers—the same year he had supposedly earned a medical degree. He found one, and popped its title into the PubMed database.

His screen blinked and up came an abstract of the paper, a study of a certain hormone excreted during heart attacks. It was definitely the same paper, he says. It had the same title, same journal, same volume and issue number. The author was even a researcher named “Shankar.”

But the publication date wasn’t 1996, the year Shankar claimed to have finished his degree. It was 1976, the year after Shankar was born. Shankar was indeed a precocious researcher, Rockett thought: He was an infant.

Rockett’s first find led to more. Some of the problematic entries were dated incorrectly, he says. Some didn’t seem to exist at all. None were authored by Anoop Shankar. When Rockett had a list of 11 apparent frauds, he took them to Alan Ducatman, the interim dean of the School of Public Health. Ducatman’s first hope was that the situation could be salvaged, according to a person familiar with the deliberations.

Four years earlier, after a search committee pulled Shankar’s resume from a pile, Ducatman believed he recognized the footprints of genius. Shankar was only an associate professor at the National University of Singapore, but his academic history seemed to promise much more. Here was a past winner of India’s national academic talent scholarship, which goes to less than 1 percent of teenage test takers. Here was a top 3 graduate of the All India Institute of Medicine in New Delhi, which itself is 25 times more selective than Harvard.

Ducatman recruited Shankar with the promise of a full-time paid Ph.D.-trained assistant, and he supported Shankar’s application for an O-1 visa, reserved for foreigners with “extraordinary abilities.” In return Shankar churned out high-profile research. He linked popcorn to heart disease and the plastic chemical BPA to diabetes.

The work earned WVU national attention from the major medical journals and writers from Reuters and Fox News. That same week the National Institutes of Health had awarded Shankar a $400,000 grant, the first in a hoped-for wave of nearly $2 million dollars in government funding.

Let’s not jump to conclusions, Rockett recalls being told. Shankar may have a good explanation. Besides, the dean allegedly said, this endowed position is bigger than both of us and it would be a mistake to pile on. (Ducatman, who was also a co-author of Shankar’s, declined to comment for the record.)

Rockett was given just two days to complete his review, but it was enough to get Shankar’s appointment postponed, if not outright canceled. Following university procedure, he shared his findings with WVU’s general counsel and the Office of Research Integrity. Then he tried to push Shankar from his mind.

Shankar pushed back in on the morning of August 22, 2012. That’s when a 27-year-old Indian man named Deeban Ganesan walked into Rockett’s office, professing an interest in Rockett’s research on suicide. The man would later claim not to have any prior special relationship with Shankar, but in truth Shankar was his advisor, and the source of Ganesan’s job on campus, according to court documents submitted by Rockett.

The only witness to Ganesan's meeting with Rockett was an even closer ally to Shankar. Srivinas Teppala, a 32-year-old doctoral candidate in epidemiology, regarded Shankar as his mentor and champion, according to the same court documents. Shankar had gotten Teppala into the program, and was his dissertation adviser, in addition to serving as co-author on at least a dozen scholarly articles—the essential kindling of a young academic’s career.

Together these two gave the university’s Office of Social Justice an explosive version of that morning meeting. In their telling, Rockett’s door was closed and his mind was on sex, not suicide. As Ganesan began to talk, according to his discredited statement to the university, Rockett interrupted him.

“You Indians have nice brown skin,” Rockett allegedly said. “But you smell weird with the spices that you use for cooking.”

Right about then the grey-haired professor supposedly pulled his chair closer and snatched at the young man’s penis.

Teppala claimed that from the hallway, he could then hear Rockett rise from his chair and say loudly to Ganesan, “Here, taste my white c--k.”

Ganesan said he fled rather than reciprocate and that Rockett flew into a rage, his words echoing into the corridor: “I will destroy you!”

Rockett says he laughed out loud when he first read this account in the Office of Social Justice. The story was just so preposterous. He said the real meeting was brief. The door was open. And he was sitting the whole time. Besides, he told the school’s investigator, according to a copy of Rockett’s official reply, “I do not speak in this manner whatsoever.”

“I love Indian food, and I do not find their spices or curry offensive or ‘weird.’ I dine almost every Tuesday evening with my wife and friends at a local Indian restaurant.”

Still, Rockett was appalled and a heavy thought settled in his mind: this fight wasn’t going to end well for someone.

Rockett resolved that it wouldn’t be him. He filed a defamation suit against Shankar and the two students. It hinged in part on proving that Shankar had a motivation for threatening Rockett’s reputation. So together with his wife, Sandra Putnam, and his attorney, Bader Giggenbach, Rockett began to roll back more of Shankar’s deceptions.

Ian Rockett, Ph.D., professor of epidemiology in the West Virginia University School of Public Health.

Some of the sharpest inconsistencies regarded where Shankar went to school. He claimed to have gone to medical school at All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, but his medical license, not to mention online photos of him with friends, placed Shankar at Kottayam Medical College, more than 1,600 miles away.

He also claimed to have gotten a Ph.D. in epidemiology at Mahatma Gandhi University, where he later claimed to serve as an assistant professor of preventive medicine. But the institution doesn’t have a department of preventive medicine—or, for that matter, epidemiology. There also is no Anoop Shankar among the school’s 1,116 Ph.D. dissertations from 1988 to 2009, according to an online database accessible to the public. (Neither AIIMS nor Kottayam Medical College responded to queries. A former professor from Kottayam Medical College, however, recalls teaching Shankar there.)

As Rockett worked on his court case, WVU’s Office of Research Integrity conducted its own investigation, turning up evidence of about 30 additional false publications on Shankar’s resume, according to a person familiar with the report. Shankar had explained away Rockett’s initial discoveries as “clerical errors” made by a new assistant. But in the face of these new allegations, he abruptly resigned in December of 2012—just four months after being nominated for the school’s most prestigious position in public health.

WVU later concluded that there was “no evidence” to support the claims against Rockett, and, after he filed a formal complaint against the two students, they left the university without receiving their degrees. Earlier this year a county judge also supported Rockett, ordering the students to pay him nearly a quarter million dollars for damages.

"These are not Victimless crimes."

Neither Ganesan nor Teppala showed up in court or responded to NBC News requests for comment. The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston also declined to comment on Teppala, who, despite never getting his Ph.D., is a current postdoctoral fellow at the school.

But Circuit Judge Phillip Gaujot found that they were liable for “the intentional infliction of emotional distress,” not to mention conduct that was “so extreme and outrageous as to exceed all bounds of decency.” Although Shankar has never admitted wrongdoing, Ganesan cracked in late November 2012, apparently telling one of his mentors that Shankar had fed him the false story of sexual assault.

“I’ve made a big mistake,” Ganesan told the mentor, according to documents filed with the Office of Social Justice.

In January 2013, after Shankar resigned, Ganesan again wrestled with his conscience and returned to the mentor’s office. He said that Teppala had failed a polygraph and that “the situation was getting serious.” He said that Shankar had told him to “take a vacation and leave the area.”

Just then, as the mentor counseled Ganesan to come clean publicly, the young man’s cell phone rang. It was Shankar on the line and Ganesan walked out to take the call.

The mentor never saw or heard from him again.

Later that year Shankar paid Rockett $45,000 in an out-of-court settlement and moved out of Morgantown. He didn't admit liability or fault, but also didn't appeal the results of the university’s internal review. More than 18 months after the first sign of fraud, WVU has yet to notify the wider academic community of Shankar’s troubling history.

They also haven’t withdrawn their sponsorship of Shankar’s visa, according to a senior immigration officer who declined to be named because he is not authorized to discuss the case publicly. Under the university’s integrity code, anyone accused or suspected of a breach is protected from public allegations until the university’s investigation is completed. This one evidently is not.

"Since questions about Dr. Shankar's credentials were first raised, WVU has appropriately followed its policies, procedures and applicable law,” John Bolt, a university spokesperson, said in a statement. “WVU shared its discoveries with law enforcement. Many of the issues raised are confidential personnel matters, and the University does not discuss these publicly.”

WVU’s response is typical foot-dragging, according to Retraction Watch cofounder Adam Marcus. But every passing day means more resources could be wasted. When someone falsifies their credentials, Marcus said, the assiduous thing to do is “check their work” for fraud. The costs of inaction are hours lost, money squandered, and progress stalled. “The last thing you want to do as a Ph.D. student is to waste valuable years of your life trying to replicate or build on what proves to be falsified studies,” he said. “These are not victimless crimes.”

There’s been a well-documented rise in false scientific research, driven up by declines in resources and positions. One recent study found a ten-fold increase in retractions since 1975. And some of the most egregious examples of falsified results begin with doctored CVs.

In 2010, four years after an initial complaint, Duke University finally began investigating medical researcher Anil Potti’s cancer breakthroughs after a journalist discovered he was lying about being a Rhodes Scholar. Much of Potti’s research was discredited and in 2011 he resigned from Duke, although he never acknowledged wrongdoing.

"My jaw dop to the floor."

So far Shankar’s work itself has yet to come under scrutiny, but some anticipate a similar walk of shame, given his history of fraud. Sarah Knox, one of Shankar’s former colleagues, says that his consistently clear cut results are uncommon in large studies.

“It’s amazing,” she remembers remarking to herself as he racked up dozens of publications a year. “How come my results don’t do that?”

One day she discovered an explanation. A student of hers was trying to determine whether exposure to a certain common chemical had an effect on people. It was a new student, not yet trained in statistics, so Shankar’s personal statistician ran the analyses. And the results were perfect: the chemical was indeed showing a widespread effect.

Or so it seemed.

A closer look revealed that Shankar had instructed the statistician to control for the effect of gender and ethnicity, Knox said. She asked the student why and the answer disturbed her: without the controls the effect only registered in white males, she said. White males, Shankar suggested, weren’t enough of a population to impress the big medical journals.

“My jaw dropped to the floor,” recalled Knox.

Here was a person so comfortable with deception that he was willing to teach it to students, she thought. When Shankar left, Knox took over his role in the student’s paper and she tried to re-run the analyses. She couldn’t, the statistician told her. Shankar took everything with him, computer programs and all.

Now Shankar seems to have taken his shape-shifting to the web. He sometimes bills himself as the director of a fancy-sounding research center that doesn’t exist, and he recently created a fake site for India’s leading public health foundation. He populated it with a bogus interview with a Reuters journalist, who is quoted as saying: “Professor Shankar, your work is fascinating!”

He also boldly applied for a job at Virginia Commonwealth University. He dropped the PhD claim, kept the misleading “MD,” and apparently added new experience as a clinician and past medical resident, according to the advertised requirements for the job. But this summer, in response to questions from NBC News, VCU opened its own inquiry into Shankar’s credentials. Last month, the former star quietly left his second American university.

“We looked into his background,” Anne Buckley, a university spokesperson, said in a statement. “Shankar was employed by VCU and is no longer employed here.”

But the deceptions continue, and one of the boldest was due to land in libraries this fall. Shankar was a guest editor of the Journal of Environmental and Public Health, a global publication with board members from Yale, Cornell and the Environmental Protection Agency. Back in March the journal put out a call for papers for the August issue, listing Shankar’s affiliation with Washington University School of Medicine.

The school has never heard of him, however, and a spokesperson for the journal—which is looking into how the false affiliation came to them—said in a statement that the special issue has been canceled for a lack of submissions. Perhaps would-be contributors sensed all they really needed to know about Shankar from his email address.

Here’s a hint: it ends in Yahoo!

This investigation was supported in part by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. NBC News has retained sole editorial control over the content of the report.

Reported by : NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ

Thank you madam for your reporting. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are doing good works. Despite the sad truth that the world of academia has come to this state is no less due to the effects of globalization with enormous wealth and power resting with the oligarchy elites, feeding the driving of research KPI's with their grants and funding, which only they are capable, not even the government, having divested their "responsibilities" in the name of privatisation. What we witness in the above report is merely the symptoms of this age and times.

MR buddies talk cock sing song about our post reservist lives.

Shocking Miss Pilgrim [Link] 

 14 September 2014