“Stop,” she said. “Freeze it at iteration 7.”
“No. This is my personal research computer. Never connected to the internet except for software updates. SmartPLS 4 is the only statistical package installed.” smartpls 4
Alina felt the first cold finger of unease trace her spine. “Run the model again. I want to watch.” “Stop,” she said
“Your name is on the study. Your IRB approval. Your data collection protocol. Someone put it there.” Never connected to the internet except for software updates
“I found a ghost ID in a dataset. Pi in the log files. Path coefficients that change at iteration 7 and then revert.”
Alina pulled out her phone. Opened a secure line to a colleague at the University of Amsterdam—a computational statistician named Petra who had once debugged a factor analysis by rewriting the source code of LISREL in her spare time.
Petra answered on the second ring. “Alina. It’s midnight here.”