SDSS with friends

When browsing over lunch the April issue of Amstat News, I came upon this page advertising rather loudly the SDSS symposium of next month. And realised that not only it features “perhaps the most prominent statistician to have repeatedly published material written by others without attribution” (a quote from Gelman and Basbøll, 2013, in American Scientist), namely  Ed Wegman, as the guest of honor,  but also one co-author of a retracted Computational Statistics paper [still included in Wegman’s list of publications] as program chair and another co-author from the “Hockey Stick” plagiarised report as plenary speaker. A fairly friendly reunion, then, if “networking” is to be understood this way, except that this is a major conference, supported by ASA and other organisations. Rather shocking, isn’t it?! (The entry also made me realise that the three co-authors were the original editors of WIREs, before Wegman and Said withdrew in 2012.)