A couple of days ago, I blogged about a mistake on an American research symposium that listed the Lebanese university AUB as located in Israel.
Following the publication of that post, it got picked up by various news outlets, such as L’Orient Le Jour, Annahar, Kataeb and New TV who shed light on the matter as well.
Today, I checked the program of the symposium and it seems the mistake has been corrected: AUB is listed as in Lebanon.
I was told that such mistakes aren’t always a bad thing as they help shed light on the research they are part in. I personally believe, however, that research should be able to stand on its own merits and not employ such gimmicks in order to turn ears.
We’ll never know the details of how such a mistake remained in the program till a week before the symposium started. But I guess what matters is the bottom line: getting it fixed. Good luck to those who are presenting the research and I hope they do a good job.
A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares 
Nice!
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Dear Elie, I follow ur blog and I did forward it to the Dr. Lierman to draw his attention to this issue and he contacted the committee to corect that mistake ! Just in order to clear things
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Dear Elie, We certainly did not hope for such a mistake to shed light on our research, We believe our research does not need this kind of publicity, and we take full pride to represent this research as a fine example of robotic surgical research being conducted at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. In fact I hoped that since you took the time to do a full research on our profiles, another minute of your time to send a message to either of us could have been helpful to fix it. As you mentioned “what matters is the bottom line: getting it fixed.” My professor took it upon himself to get this fixed as soon as he was informed.
In any case thanks for helping us find this mistake but I would suggest next time contact the parties involved (while publishing your criticism freely) just to INSURE that the problem you raised and care about is being investigated.
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