This is pretty funny. J. Robert Lennon reports that “Random House has decided to insert the following clause into its boilerplate contract for children’s authors:”

If you act or behave in a way which damages your reputation as a person suitable to work with or be associated with children, and consequently the market for or value of the work is seriously diminished, and we may (at our option) take any of the following actions: Delay publication / Renegotiate advance / Terminate the agreement.

I’m wondering if this could be included into contracts for statistics books. If, for example, you publish an article in a leading statistical journal in which you have an unreadable graph, or present results to 8 significant digits when 2 will do, or if you run your simulations for a million iterations without even trying to see if 1000 would’ve sufficed, then your textbook could get yanked off the shelves!

P.S. No, publishing a false theorem shouldn’t count.