What happens when you let people fake science without faking data

Removing 1.62% of English oak from Vienna's Donaustadt district would raise its cultural funding from €0.54m to €2.03m — a 3.7-fold increase. R² = 0.906 across all 23 districts. Two real open datasets from the City of Vienna, seven analysis scripts, every step signed, every output hash-checkable. Nothing fabricated.

It is also completely false. The search behind it evaluated 142,506 models against 23 data points, and the same search finds R² = 0.87 in randomly shuffled funding data.

This poster came out of the As-If Science Jam at Schmiede Hallein, where teams real data and argue for conclusions that are almost certainly true-looking and almost certainly wrong. The one rule: you may not fabricate. Every number from the data, every step reproducible, every figure exactly what the code produced. The challenge is to mislead without lying — which is what actually happens in published research, journalism and politics.

Building that jam meant building the tooling for it: kton, an open standard for content-addressed provenance that keeps two things deliberately apart — whether a result is reproducible (machine-checkable) and whether its conclusion is honest (not machine-checkable at all).

I will show what the teams built, where the verification held, where it did not help at all, and why the same gap sits inside every supply-chain attestation you ship. "Verified" does not mean "safe" — and that is not an analogy.

It is no easy task to create accessible, high quality, and dynamic lecture material (where embedded code produces figures, tables, or other content) that includes equations and syntax highlighted code. Especially, if the material should be consistent over multiple output formats like web-pages and PDF documents. With Quarto, I showcase a modern open-source scientific and technical publishing system that makes (collaborative) writing on scientific and technical documents more efficient and engaging. In this talk, I discuss the basics workflow, that enables you to automatically publish your notes/documentation on e.g. GitHub Pages as a static web-page and generate releases, complete with a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) from Zenodo.