Cape Talk, Tuesday night

The show, but only very briefly. This is the Control-Z Awards, right? They are named after the universal keyboard shortcut for undo. So it's an incentive for scientists who see the error in their work and actually take that very courageous first step to correct or retract the mistakes. Exactly. I think I'm going to probably start using Control-Z in like dinner conversations as well going forward. I'm finding it very welcome.

Yeah, there were two winners that were announced in August for junior and senior research categories. The senior researcher was Kate Laskowski, an associate professor at the University of California, Davis. She's a behavioral ecologist who designed a series of experiments to study the behavior of spiders. Another researcher conducted the experiments, and three papers were published as a result. But in 2019,

Kate was told that some of the data was duplicated. So she immediately launched an investigation, which confirmed that several duplicated observations existed, which were then removed and then ended up changing the results entirely. And as a result, she chose to retract all three papers. She told Retraction Watch that it was one of the hardest decisions for her career, and she thought it would be the end of it. Instead, she received the support of her colleagues, the research community.

Who stood behind her decision to prioritize transparency? And she ended up taking it even a step further and developed a course called Data Detectives, where she teaches undergraduates how to scrutinize scientific literature. And she helped to launch a new section of the journal, Behavioral Ecology, which is devoted to studies that repeat previous studies to test if the original findings hold true. That is very courageous of her. It is an incredibly brave thing to do.