Research? Nah.
Back in my early post-doc days, my boss used to come up with ideas for experiments which we knew wouldn't work. But we used to do them, and they wouldn't work, and we'd report back. (In fairness, he did come up with his share of good ideas too - we just got good at sorting the wheat from the obvious chaff!)

Later, we used to say "That'll never work" when he came up with a daft idea, but he'd insist it would so we would go off and do the experiment. It didn't work. We reported this back.

Eventually we got fed up, stopped saying it wouldn't work, stopped doing the experiments, but just reported back to say that we'd done it, and it didn't work.

Meanwhile we were getting on with things which did produce results, showing the boss (who was impressed that we had the foresight and time to do all of this work!), writing it up, and publishing it.

Except on one occasion, where with a submission deadline looming, we fabricated an image (actually put in an image of one thing purporting to be another) and submitted it.

The paper was accepted with no revisions, and published. Job done, we thought.

Except then it got cited by other people, which meant a lot of quick thinking and talking bollocks was required.

Got off with it though.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Fri 28 Sep 2007, 10:04, Reply)