Urgent Report: Professor Emeritus Kurokawa sets straight dishonesty and misrepresentation in the “statement” by Ryugo Hayano, the author of the radiation dose study with alleged misconduct
(Translation of Hayano’s tweet itself: Today, on January 8, I posted a “position statement regarding the external dose study in Date City residents” at the MEXT press club. It describes: the serious error which undercalculated the 70-year cumulative doses by a factor of 3; the reason for the error; unintentionality of the error; and apology to the Date City people.)
“Deceptions” seen in the Hayano “statement”
Now, I am going to examine the content of the “statement.” First, Item 1 states, “I was contacted by JRP to ‘comment on Letter by S. Kurokawa with academic inquiries regarding the contents of Paper II.'” To those who might not be familiar with rules of academic journals, the expression, “Letter with academic inquiries,” might be misunderstood as if I sent a letter of inquiries to JRP. What I did was not conducting academic inquiries nor sending a letter. Rather, what I did was submitting a form of academic paper called a Letter to the Editor. When the Letter became “ready to accept” on November 16, the authors were asked by the Editorial Office to reply. In explaining such a simple fact, Hayano’s uses inappropriate and vague expressions.
Next, I am going to examine the part, “When the main author and I reviewed the data analysis program made by myself for the study, we realized for the first time that we made a serious error in miscalculating the 70-year cumulative doses, underestimating the doses by a factor of 3.” […]
The authors’ response stated, “We believe it is appropriate to publish a corrigendum rather than point-by-point replies.” Here “We” refers to the authors, Hayano and Miyazaki. The authors “believe it is appropriate to publish a corrigendum rather than point-by-point replies” to my Letter. In other words, the authors are essentially saying they have no intention to “comment on the Letter.” It is quite obvious that the Hayano “statement” contains a falsehood.
This shows what a corrigendum looks like. In this corrigendum, the year “2011” is corrected to be “2012.” The serious error of miscalculation underestimating the 70-year cumulative doses by a factor of 3 is not something that can be corrected with a corrigendum in the first place.
Also, please pay particular attention to the fact that the “statement” uses the term “revision” rather than “erratum” or “correction” in place of corrigendum. “Correction” means fixing a sentence and can be equivalent of a corrigendum, but “revision” has a broader meaning, as in the case of “revising a plan.” Hayano’s use of the word “revision” could be construed as a way to manipulate people’s perception with an arbitrary use of the broad meaning of the word.
Slickly replacing JRP’s request for a corrigendum with a rewrite
Sure enough, the “statement” was read aloud during the January 25, 2019 session of the Radiation Council of the Japanese government. The secretariat of the Radiation Council went on to explain that Paper I “is not something to be completely disapproved in terms of its academic significance.” For more details on this matter, please refer to the HBOL article by Junichiro Makino (available here only in Japanese).
Read more.
◇原文(Japanese original)はこちら。
