Adventures in Ethics and Science

Very busy. I plan to resurface soon. In the meantime, a few items:

• Help a blogger out: Coturnix (aka Bora Zivkovic) is a science blogger extraordinaire, keeping not one but three excellent blogs (Science and Politics, Circadiana, and The Magic School Bus). He's also a graduate student and a parent, which means the money's tight. Tight enough that keeping the electricity (and the internet) turned on is a challenge. If you have a few bucks to spare and enjoy Coturnix's writing as I do, you might help him out.
• Wood chippers are for chipping wood, not (10,000) hens: Via Pharyngula, part of a Salon interview with Peter Singer that boggles the mind:
  

  This was in San Diego County, in California. Neighbors noticed that a local chicken farm was getting rid of hens at the end of their laying period by throwing them by the bucketload down a wood chipper. They complained to the Animal Welfare Department, which investigated, and the chicken farmer told them that this was a recommendation that had been made by their vet, a vet who happens to sit on the Animal Welfare Committee of the American Veterinary Medical Association. The American Veterinary Medical Association, I should say, does not condone throwing hens down a wood chipper, but it is apparently done. We've also had examples of hens being taken off the conveyor belt and simply dumped into a bin, where by piling more hens on top, the hens on the bottom were suffocated. These old hens have no value, that's the problem, and so people have been killing them by whatever means is cheapest and most convenient.

  
  I imagine the meat industry is not under the same kind of pressure to treat animals humanely as scientists using animals in research, but this is rather more extreme than I expected.


• Someday we'll be able to talk about ethics in science without so many horror stories, right? At Thus Spake Zuska, a nice roundup on some of the work that still needs doing from the point of view of making the scientific community less of a snake pit. Especially interesting: An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) called "Sense of Injustice Can Lead Scientists to Act Unethically, Study Finds". Would that be a good enough reason to strive to treat each other more justly?


• Let's debate the proper conclusion to draw from data that are probably pretty biased: Inside Higher Ed has the obligatory end-of-term story about RateMyProfessors.com, musing on the optimal professorial balance (from the student's point of view) of being "easy" and "hot". The comments after the story are floating many potential explanations for the reported trends and doing the whole correlation vs. causation dance. But, as one of the commenters notes, it's a little silly to try to draw many robust conclusions about What Students Want from the self-selected (and sparingly accurate) reports collected at RMP. For example, I am "rated" there for classes I've never taught. And, it is clear from some of the comments in my other ratings that at least some of the students rating me were not actually in class most of the time. This data probably tell us something -- but what?


• More on that nest in my back yard: The nest with eggs on the tree we want to destroy, remember? Because our contractor got delayed on another job, he's scheduled to start work on the yard today; the tree removal has been moved to the very bottom of his to-do list, and if necessary, that will be delayed and dealt with at a later date. Meanwhile, one of the three eggs has hatched. The hatchling is cute, in a totally helpless sort of way. (No picture at this point because I didn't want to flash the newborn -- maybe in a couple days.)


• Teaching Carnival submissions still sought: The next Teaching Carnival will go up, here, on Friday, so get me your tales from the higher education trenches by Thursday evening. Details on submission here.

Hope your chaos is proceeding smoothly. More soon!