February 8, 2010
Category: Blogospheric science • Communication • Pop culture • Science Blogging Conference • Science in everyday life • Scientist/layperson relations • Teaching and learning
Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
This was sort of an odd session for me -- not so much because of the topics taken up by session leaders Tamara Krinsky and Jennifer Ouellette, but because of my own sense of ambivalence about a lot of "entertainment" these days.
The session itself had lots of interesting glimpses of the work scientists are doing to help support filmmakers (and television producers, and game designers, and producers of other kinds of entertainment) who want to get the science right in the stories they're trying to tell. We heard about the efforts of the Science & Entertainment Exchange to connect makers of entertainment with scientists and engineers "to help bring the reality of cutting-edge science to creative and engaging storylines". We saw the Routes website, produced in association with the Wellcome Trust, which included "a set of minigames, a documentary and a murder mystery which explore the fascinating world of genetics." (In one of those minigames, you get to be the virus and move to the next level by infecting the target proportion of potential carriers -- but you get just one sneeze per level to make that happen!) We learned that the drive to add "extras" when movies are released on DVD is creating something like a demand for real science content to complement science fiction.
In other words, it sounded like producers of entertainment were aware that a science-y angle can hold appeal for the audiences they are trying to reach, and were generally enthusiastic about (or at least open to) the idea of drawing on the expertise of actual scientists.
Of course, there were caveats.
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 4:35 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 5, 2010
Category: Academia • Current events • Environment • Ethical research • Institutional ethics • Misconduct • Professional ethics • Scientist/layperson relations • Tribe of Science
In my earlier post about the findings of the Penn State inquiry committee looking into allegations of research misconduct against Michael Mann, I mentioned that the one allegation that was found to merit further investigation may have broad implications for how the public understands what good scientific work looks like, and for how scientists themselves understand what good scientific work looks like.
Some of the commenters on that post seemed interested in discussing those implications. Others, not so much. As commenter Evan Harper notes:
It is clear that there are two discussions in parallel here; one is serious, thoughtful, and focused on the very real and very difficult questions at hand. The other is utterly inane, comprising vague ideological broadsides against nebulous AGW conspirators, many of which evince elementary misunderstandings about the underlying science.
If I wanted to read the second kind of conversation, there are a million blogs out there with which I could torture myself. But I want to read - and perhaps participate in - the first kind of conversation. Here and now, I cannot do that, because the second conversation is drowning out the first.
Were that comment moderators could crack down on these poisonous nonsense-peddlers. Their right to swing their (ham)fists ends where our noses begin
Ask and you shall receive.
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 1:37 PM • 35 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Chemistry • Food • Kids and science
The elder Free-Ride offspring is lobbying to try an experiment this weekend. The working title of the protocol is "homemade soda*" but I suspect it may be described differently in the final report.
Dr. Free-Ride: Tell me about the experiment that you proposed to your teacher.
Elder Free-Ride offspring: I'll mix four cups of baking soda and vinegar and put each in its own bucket to keep the bubbles from spilling over, and take what remains in the cup and add fruit juice to it, and taste it, and if it's not sweet enough add sugar to it, and then pass it off as soda!
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 12:50 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 4, 2010
Category: Academia • Current events • Environment • Ethical research • Institutional ethics • Misconduct • Professional ethics • Scientist/layperson relations
Remember "ClimateGate", that well-publicized storm of controversy that erupted when numerous email messages from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers and widely distributed? One of the events set in motion by ClimateGate was a formal inquiry concerning allegations of research conduct against Dr. Michael E. Mann, a professor in the Department of Meteorology at The Pennsylvania State University.
The report (PDF) from that inquiry has been released, so we're going to have a look at it here.
This report contains a lot of discussion of how the committee pursuing the inquiry was constituted, and of which university policies govern how the committee is constituted, and of how membership of the committee was updated when members left the university for other positions, etc. I'm going to gloss over those details, but they're all there in the ten page report if you're interested in that kind of thing.
My focus here will be on what set the inquiry in motion to begin with, on the specific allegations they considered against Dr. Mann, on how the committee gathered information relevant to the allegations, and on the findings and decisions at which they arrived. Let me state up front that committee decided that one allegation merited further consideration in an "investigation" (which is the stage of the process that follows upon an "inquiry"), and that to my eye, that investigation may end up having broader implications for the practice of science in academia.
But let's start at the beginning. From the inquiry report:
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 5:53 PM • 42 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 3, 2010
Category: Biology • Blogospheric science • Communication • Environment • Journalism • Professional ethics • Science Blogging Conference • Scientist/layperson relations
Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
Among other things, this panel took up the article panelist Lindsey Hoshaw wrote about the garbage patch for the New York Times and some of the reaction to it (including from panelist Miriam Goldstein).
Lindsey's article was interesting because of the process. To get a spot on the ship going out to the North Pacific gyre, where the garbage patch is, she had to come up with funding. (We learned during the session that ship time on some of these expeditions can run to $18,000 a day.) Rather than pitching the story idea to the New York Times and hitting them with the bill, or covering the cost of the ship time herself, she "crowd-sourced" her participation -- that is, she turned to readers of Spot.Us, a nonprofit web project that supports freelance journalists, for donations. The pitch she gave when asking for this money described deliverables:
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 9:26 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Academia • Doing science for the government • Institutional ethics • Reader participation
Recently in my inbox, I found a request for advice unlike any I'd received before. Given the detail in the request, I don't trust myself to paraphrase it. As you'll see, I've redacted the names of the people, university, and government agency involved. I have, however, kept the rest of the query (including the original punctuation) intact.
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 4:31 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Communication • Institutional ethics • Journalism • Professional ethics • Science Blogging Conference
Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
The panelists made a point of stepping away from the scientists vs. bloggers frame (as well as the question of whether bloggers are or are not properly considered journalists). They said some interesting things about what defines a journalist -- perhaps a set of distinctive values (like a commitment to truth and accuracy, possibly also to the importance of telling an engaging story). This, rather than having a particular paying gig as a journalist, marked the people who were "doing journalism", whatever the medium.
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 2:04 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 1, 2010
Category: Academia • Ask a ScienceBlogger • Communication • Medicine • Reader participation • Scientist/layperson relations
I have, of late, received a number of emails asking advice on matters somewhere in the territory between ethics, etiquette, and effective communication with members of the tribe of science. While I'm no Ann Landers (as has been noted before), I'll do my best to answer these questions on the blog when I can, largely so my very insightful commentariat can chime in and make the resulting advice better than what I could generate on my own.
Today we have a question from a reader struggling with the question of how to address one letter to two doctors. He writes:
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 6:39 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Blogospheric science • Diversity in science • Science Blogging Conference • Teaching and learning • Women and science
Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
One of the things I found interesting about this session was that the session leaders' approach to the broad issue of promoting gender and ethnic diversity in science, engineering, technology, and M [mathematics here? I get the impression that sometimes the M in STEM is math and sometimes it's medicine, but I'm happy to set this taxonomic issue aside] was to look at particular initiatives, activities, or responses from smaller communities within the STEM galaxy.
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Posted by Janet D. Stemwedel at 2:06 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Janet D. Stemwedel (whose nom de blog is Dr. Free-Ride) is an associate professor of philosophy at San Jose State University. Before becoming a philosopher, she earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry. Email her at dr.freeride@gmail.com.
