Janet D. Stemwedel
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.
jstemwedel
Posts by this author
October 5, 2008
Last week, we started digging into a paper by Brian C. Martinson, Melissa S. Anderson, A. Lauren Crain, and Raymond De Vries, "Scientists' Perceptions of Organizational Justice and Self-Reported Misbehaviors". [1] . The study reported in the paper was aimed at exploring the connections between…
October 3, 2008
Americans for Medical Progress has produced a new DVD titled Veterinarians - Speaking for Research. (You can get your own free copy at the Americans for Medical Progress website.)
You might consider this DVD a follow-up of their previous DVD, Physicians - Speaking for Research (reviewed here…
October 3, 2008
As I was kissing the sprogs goodnight last night:
Younger offspring: If we get boo-boos more than seven times, do we not heal any more?
Elder offspring: Huh?
Younger offspring: Well, if we have seven layers of skin*, once you get cut or scraped in the same place the seventh time, don't you use the…
October 2, 2008
We're in day 2 of our month-long drive to fund projects in public school classrooms across the U.S. As I write this post, the generous readers of ScienceBloggers have given a total of $5,589. And, since yesterday, challenges have been mounted by:
Dispatches from the Culture Wars (challenge here)…
October 2, 2008
Regular readers know that I frequently blog about cases of scientific misconduct or misbehavior. A lot of times, discussions about problematic scientific behavior are framed in terms of interactions between individual scientists -- and in particular, of what a individual scientist thinks she does…
October 2, 2008
You already know that we're working with DonorsChoose to raise some money for public school teachers who are trying to give their students the engaging educational experiences they deserve. You also know that our benevolent overlords at Seed will be randomly selecting some donors to receive nifty…
October 2, 2008
One of the reasons non-scientists see science as at all valuable is that scientific research may result in useful medical treatments. And one of the aspects of science that seems elusive to non-scientists is just how long it can take scientific research to bring those useful medical treatments…
October 2, 2008
Near the end of our 2007 DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge, I received a generous donation from a reader who asked if I could write a poem about narcolepsy.
I'm a little late in paying up, but better late than never. Here it is:
I tried to write you
a narcolepsy poem.
Pen meets paper, but --
YAWN…
October 1, 2008
See, I told you more ScienceBlogs bloggers would jump into the fray for our DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2008.
Challenges have been mounted by:
A Blog Around the Clock (challenge here)
The Quantum Pontiff (challenge here)
Watch the ScienceBlogs leaderboard to see if they catch up.
In other news,…
October 1, 2008
Paul A. Offit, M.D., Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure. Columbia University Press, 2008.
Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure examines the ways that uncertainties about autism's causes have played out in the…
September 30, 2008
It's October, which means ScienceBlogs bloggers are, once again, participating in the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge. The idea behind the drive is simple: we're appealing to you, our readers, to help public school teachers across the U.S. fund proposals for classroom supplies, activities, and…
September 30, 2008
The ScienceBlogs Book Club is back! The online fans of dead-tree books will be springing back into action tomorrow to discuss Autism's False Prophets by Paul Offit. It's worth noting that Dr. Offit himself will be participating in the discussion, so you won't want to miss it.
I'm planning in…
September 30, 2008
I suspect I'm late to the party on this one, but I just had occasion to check out The Periodic Table of Videos produced at the University of Nottingham. It's a collection of 118 short videos (ranging in length from approximately one to ten minutes each), one for each of the elements currently in…
September 30, 2008
As promised, we had a party on Friday night.
Some highlights:
The venue, Tonic, is a lovely bar, very clean, full of comfy seating and open space, and adorned with three flatscreen TVs to add visual interest. Seeing as how this is now a Bleiman bar, the screens were utilized to show Blue Planet…
September 29, 2008
You know how graduate students are always complaining that their stipends are small compared to the cost of living? It seems that some graduate students find ways to supplement that income ... ways that aren't always legal. For example, from this article in the September 8, 2008 issue of Chemical…
September 29, 2008
In the 12 September, 2008 issue of Science, there is a brief article titled "Do We Need 'Synthetic Bioethics'?" [1]. The authors, Hastings Center ethicists Erik Parens, Josephine Johnston, and Jacob Moses, answer: no.
Parens et al. note the proliferation of subdisciplines of bioethics: gen-ethics…
September 26, 2008
Yesterday, we had an urge to do some experimentation and I had a red cabbage that had overstayed its welcome in the refrigerator crisper drawer.
So of course, we made cabbage-water indicator.
An indicator is a substance that produces a color change that gives you information about whether the…
September 26, 2008
We continue discussions with the elder Free-Ride offspring about potential projects for the spring science fair.
Elder offspring: Maybe I could do an experiment with Mentos and soda.
Dr. Free-Ride: You mean that one where you use Mentos to create a fountain of soda?
Dr. Free-Ride's better half:…
September 25, 2008
One of the big things philosopher-types like to do with their students is work on extracting arguments from a piece of text and reconstructing them. This can be useful in locating sources of disagreement, whether they be specific premises or inferences.
But some chunks of text that seem like they…
September 25, 2008
Just a quick reminder that the San Francisco party to celebrate one million comments on ScienceBlogs is tomorrow, Friday, September 26, starting at 9:00 PM at Tonic, 2360 Polk Street (at the corner of Union). I'll be there, as will the brothers Bleiman, Craig McClain, Josh Rosenau, and Razib. If…
September 24, 2008
From time to time on this blog, we discuss the obligation scientists assume by virtue of accepting public money to fund their research. These obligations may include sharing knowledge with the public (since public money helped make that knowledge). And they also include playing by the public's…
September 23, 2008
Actually, this might just be a question about my typing habits.
So, I'm typing along and I notice that I've hit a bad key at the beginning of a longish word (maybe even a longish word that's a few words before the word I'm in the middle of typing).
Having seen the typo, I want to fix it before I go…
September 23, 2008
In the last post, we started looking at the results of a 2006 study by Raymond De Vries, Melissa S. Anderson, and Brian C. Martinson [1] in which they deployed focus groups to find out what issues in research ethics scientists themselves find most difficult and worrisome. That post focused on two…
September 23, 2008
In the U.S., the federal agencies that fund scientific research usually discuss scientific misconduct in terms of the big three of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism (FFP). These three are the "high crimes" against science, so far over the line as to be shocking to one's scientific…
September 22, 2008
By request, here's a reconstruction of the recipe for the lemon-chard soup we made with the rainbow chard from the garden:
Big bunch of chard (1.5-2 lbs.)
Medium onion
1 Tablespoon olive oil
1 cup red lentils
4 cups vegetable stock
2 teaspoons chopped cilantro (or more, or less, or none, to taste)…
September 22, 2008
Another installment of the ongoing saga of the raised garden beds I planted back in July, in which we get to start enjoying the fruits (and vegetables) of our labors.
Those are soybean pods. In theory, if it looks like we'll have a big enough harvest, we might take a crack at making our own…
September 21, 2008
In browsing through my photo library, I stumbled on pictures from my last trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium of a jellyfish I haven't blogged yet, the Mediterranean jelly (Cotylorhiza tuberculata). I consulted the Monterey Bay Aquarium Online Field Guide and discovered that it isn't listed.
That…
September 20, 2008
Stories about the honeybee crisis and colony collapse disorder (CCD) keep turning up in the news (at least here in California, where we grow so many big cash crops like almonds that rely on honeybees to pollinate them). But it turns out that getting to the bottom of CCD is made more difficult by…
September 20, 2008
The congresscritter in question being Sherwood Boehlert, who represented New York's 24th Congressional district (1983-2007), and chaired the House Science Committee (2001-2007). Boehlert offers this advice in a video called "Speaking for Science: Bringing Your Message to Policymakers," available…
September 19, 2008
Do not claim to have earned a degree (or degrees) that you did not in fact earn.
Degree-granting institutions maintain records of degree recipients. Eventually, chances are good that someone will check.
And even if your talents are worth more to your position than a degree could be, your…