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
July 31, 2007
An old friend turned up to comment on my post about juggling, and as a woman in academia she has some familiarity with the metaphor and with the reality it's supposed to capture. She writes:
The department chair when I was hired ... suggested that although we're juggling lots of balls, the ball…
July 29, 2007
Friday, my better half was preparing to cross the international dateline for a week-long business trip and my parents were getting ready to board a plane for a week-long visit at Casa Free-Ride. As I contemplated the prospect of digging out our guest room (known in these parts as "the place clean…
July 27, 2007
Chad and Rob have already noted this piece of news about soon-to-be-published research indicating that the order in which high school students are taught physics, chemistry, and biology makes very little difference to their performance in science classes at the college level, while a rigorous math…
July 27, 2007
During one of our recent visits to The Tech Museum, we ran across a fun hands-on activity. The pretty purplish circle pictured here is what the younger Free-Ride offspring produced in this activity.
The kids thought they were just doing an art project. But there's science in that art.
The art…
July 27, 2007
Dr. Free-Ride: What do you guys want to discuss this afternoon?
Younger offspring: The human body.
Elder offspring: Yeah, how the human body works.
Dr. Free-Ride: Um, you guys know that "how the human body works" is a huge subject that we will never get through before dinner, right? You're going…
July 26, 2007
Currently on Wikipedia, there's a stub that's trying to become an entry about ScienceBlogs.
And I can't help noticing that you're reading a ScienceBlogs blog. (Nice shirt, by the way -- it really suits you!)
So possibly you have some idea of what kind of information might be useful to the person…
July 26, 2007
Today, Inside Higher Ed has an article about the recent decline of peer reviewed papers authored by professors in top five economics departments in high profile economics journals. A paper by MIT economics professor Glenn Ellison, "Is Peer Review in Decline?," considers possible explanations for…
July 25, 2007
The news today from Inside Higher Ed is that the University of Colorado Board of Regents voted to fire Ward Churchill. You may recall that in May 2006, a faculty panel at the university found that the tenured ethnic studies professor had committed repeated, intentional academic misconduct in his…
July 24, 2007
I've been getting word (via carrier pigeon, mostly) that some of your favorite ScienceBloggers are just itching to provide you with fabulous new posts. However, a series of massive power outages in San Francisco Tuesday afternoon seem to have given the interwebs some hiccups.
When the series of…
July 24, 2007
Let's say you're looking at a wide-open fall semester, and you are asked to be a participant on a panel at a conference. Since your semester is wide open, you agree.
Months later, you're asked to be a participant on another panel at another conference. Except for the conference you already…
July 24, 2007
In the July 16 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (secure behind a paywall), the article "FBI Reaches Out to Campuses" [1] caught my attention. The gist of it is that academic scientists are increasingly the targets of foreign espionage, where the stakes have less to do with national…
July 24, 2007
Almost a year ago, I learned about the case of the Tripoli six, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian physician in Libya sentenced to death for infecting hundreds of children with HIV despite the fact that the best scientific evidence indicated that the children were infected due to negligence in…
July 23, 2007
The average American's lack of scientific literacy has become a common complaint, not only among scientists but also among those who see our economic prospects as a nation linked to our level of scientific know-how. Yet somehow, science has become an area of learning where it's socially…
July 23, 2007
My last post for the basic concepts series involved phases of matter and transformations from one phase to another. This post will look at how a phase change can be put to practical use in a common household appliance -- the freezer. My aim here is to give you a good thermodynamic feel for how a…
July 22, 2007
Orac's calculated value (if he shuffled off this mortal coil in his present state -- and I really hope he doesn't) piqued my curiosity and led me to calculate the value of my own potential cadaver. But the calculated value leaves me curious about the assumptions underpinning the calculation.
First…
July 21, 2007
It's John Lynch's fault. And honestly, how can you be aware of the existence of a quiz that will determine which LOLcat you are without acting on that information to determine which LOLcat you are?
Your Score
: Lion Warning Cat
55% Affectionate, 54% Excitable, 31% Hungry
You are the…
July 20, 2007
Since Sandra has posted links to sites with brainy games for kids*, and Karmen is working on her list of science education web sites for children, I thought I'd mention one of my favorite online destinations for kid-strength chemistry. Luddite that I am, what I like best is that the site isn't…
July 20, 2007
Elder offspring: Owls in zoos are kind of weird.
Dr. Free-Ride: How do you mean?
Elder offspring: Well, owls are nocturnal, but zoos are usually just open during the day.
Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm, so either the owls are sleeping, or they're awake but they're not too happy about it?
Elder offspring:…
July 19, 2007
When I was growing up in New Jersey, hurricanes were "on the radar" for us, one of many possible (if infrequent) weather patterns during summer and fall. Later, in my first semester of college in Massachusetts, the morning of my first broadcast on the college radio station was made memorable by…
July 18, 2007
One of the strengths of science is its systematic approach to getting reliable information about the world by comparing outcomes of experiments where one parameter is varied while the others are held constant. This experimental approach comes satisfyingly close to letting us compare different ways…
July 17, 2007
The July 9 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (alas, behind a paywall -- but worth checking to see if your library has an institutional subscription) has an interesting piece [1] on the recently-settled trial in which the makers of Equal (an artificial sweetener based on aspartame) sued the…
July 17, 2007
Congratulations to Rob Knop for sharing in this year's Gruber Prize in Cosmology!
The prize is sponsored by the Gruber Foundation and the International Astronomical Union (not always the favorite scientific organization in my household owing to the whole Pluto thing). Rob was a part of the…
July 16, 2007
Apparently Blake Stacey is pitching a movie about the Dover trial and featuring, as central characters, some luminaries from ScienceBlogs. There's sort of a Star Trek: The Original Series meets Star Trek: The Next Generation meets other iconic exemplars of science fiction and action genres vibe…
July 16, 2007
In my last post, I allowed as how the questions which occupy philosophers of science might be of limited interest or practical use to the working scientist.* At least one commenter was of the opinion that this is a good reason to dismantle the whole discipline:
[T]he question becomes: what are…
July 13, 2007
Prompted by my discussion of Medawar and recalling that once in the past I called him a gadfly (although obviously I meant it in the good way), Bill Hooker drops another Medawar quotation on me and asks if I'll bite:
If the purpose of scientific methodology is to prescribe or expound a system of…
July 13, 2007
So, there's some amount of Harry Potter mania out there in the world this weekend, what with a new movie and the last book in the series being released. (To show you how disconnected I am from the mania, I could not tell you without recourse to the internet whether The Order of the Phoenix is the…
July 13, 2007
The evening before the Free-Ride offspring went with their day-camp on a field trip to the Exploratorium:
Dr. Free-Ride: Do you want to look at the Exploratorium website tonight to get an idea what you might see on the field trip tomorrow?
Elder offspring: No.
Dr. Free-Ride: Why not?
Elder…
July 12, 2007
Following up on the earlier discussions of intentional unclarity and bad writing in scientific papers, I thought this might be a good opportunity to consider an oft-cited article on scientific papers, P.B. Medawar's "Is the Scientific Paper Fraudulent?" [1] He answers that question in the…
July 11, 2007
In his book A Short Guide to Writing About Science [1], David Porush suggests that the mindset useful for doing science isn't always the best mindset for communicating science. (It's more than a suggestion, actually -- the second chapter of the book is titled "Why Good Scientific Thinking Can Lead…
July 11, 2007
Regular readers know I frequently suggest the community of science would be better off if its institutional contexts favored more collaboration and less competition. (I'm not the only one.) So I wanted to mention a project, OpenWetWare that's trying to move biology in that direction.
The project…