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 11, 2007
People sometimes worry that throwing ethics coursework at scientists-in-training is not such a great strategy for training them to be ethical scientists. (I've explored worries of this sort myself.)
For one thing, at many schools the existing coursework may be a fairly broad "moral issues" course…
July 10, 2007
Those of you who have ever brought a piece of scientific research to completion -- a process which almost always includes publishing your results -- have probably run into lists like this one that spell out the meanings of phrases commonly used in scientific papers. Included are such classics as…
July 9, 2007
David Ng at the World's Fair has some questions:
1. What's your current scientific specialty?
2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course? If so, what was it?
3. Do you happen to wish you were involved in another scientific field? If so, what one?
I'll play:
1. Currently I'm not…
July 9, 2007
Some months ago I made a (seemingly idle) threat to follow up my basic concepts posts on polar and non-polar molecules and intermolecular forces with a post on phase changes. Finally it's here!
Since the discussion here will be leaning on a number of the concepts discusses in the earlier posts,…
July 6, 2007
I'll be offline until Sunday evening (California time). This means comments you submit between now in then will dangle in the aether until I'm back online, but please don't let that put you off from commenting if you have something to say.
Hope your weekend is a good one!
July 6, 2007
Are our friends growing paper bags? (If so, could some clever grafting set them up so they could grow the lunches right in the bags?)
Probably not.
Dr. Free-Ride: Ooh, I wish these snails would stop munching my delicate plants! I'd really have no problem with them if they ate the weeds instead.…
July 5, 2007
In his book Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (reviewed in the last post), Greg Critser includes a quotation from a physician (in a self-help book [1]) that I found really striking:
In your search ... you are going to come across physicians who…
July 5, 2007
I recently finished reading Greg Critser's Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies.
Frankly, I don't feel so well.
Critser starts off by dropping us into the regulatory environment in the U.S. in the early 1970s, walking us through the multifarious…
July 4, 2007
It's the 4th of July, and here in the U.S., that usually means fireworks.*
What could be better than explosions in pretty colors? Maybe a few details of how firework makers get those colors into the fireworks.
If you've taken a chemistry course with a lab, you may remember having done "flame tests…
July 3, 2007
Planting incendiary devices, whether under vehicles or on doorsteps, even if you think the people you're targeting are doing something very, very bad.
Kant grounds ethical considerations in the imperative to respect the rational capacity in yourself and in others. Among other things, I take this…
July 3, 2007
A bunch of my SiBlings have been considering which science gets the rawest deal from makers of science fiction movies (and writers of science fiction stories).
I've been reflecting about it a bit, and I think maybe my needs when it comes to science fiction are pretty simple.
When I consume science…
July 2, 2007
In the discussion on the earlier post about what policies should govern lab notebooks kept by graduate researchers, the commentariat identified a number of important considerations. At least a few of the commenters were sure that a one-size-fits-all policy wouldn't work, and collectively the…
June 30, 2007
A recycled post from the ancestor of this blog, before anyone read it.
In my "Ethics in Science" class, we regularly use case studies as a way to practice reasoning about ethics. There's a case I've used a few times involving research with animals where the protagonist airs some of her concerns (…
June 30, 2007
An earlier post tried to characterize the kind of harm it might do to an academic research lab if a recent graduate were to take her lab notebooks with her rather than leaving them with the lab group. This post generated a lot of discussion, largely because a number of commenters questioned the…
June 29, 2007
Another episode in the continuing saga, "Janet is a tremendous Luddite."
Back when I was "between Ph.D.s" one of the things I did so I could pay rent was work as an SAT-prep tutor. The company I worked for didn't do classroom presentations to a group of students, but rather sent us out on "house…
June 29, 2007
The June 25th issue of Chemical & Engineering News has two pieces that talk about ways people are using features of the "new internet" (or Web 2.0) to disseminate and explore chemistry online.
Celia Henry Arnaud's article "A New Science Channel" looks at efforts scientists and scientific…
June 29, 2007
While claims of the Free-Ride offspring's telepathy are in doubt, there is no question of the younger offspring's telephonic prowess (which is to say, the younger offspring can remember all the digits necessary and sufficient to place a call to either parents or grandparents with no adult…
June 28, 2007
Last night my better half and I had dinner with JM -- at a restaurant with both excellent sushi and excellent service! Figures JM finds it right before she's about to flee the state to start her Ph.D. program.
Because my posts are often (as she put it) "long-winded, but in a good way," she has…
June 28, 2007
Yesterday, I helped give an ethics seminar for mostly undergraduate summer research interns at a large local center of scientific research. To prepare for this, I watched the video of the ethics seminar we led for the same program last year. One of the things that jumped out at me was the attempt…
June 26, 2007
45%
In case you were worried, in case of zombies my chances are almost 50-50.
Via
June 26, 2007
Do you touch-type, or (like me) do you kind of know where the keys are but "freestyle" type, looking at the keyboard on a semi-regular basis?*
Are any of the letters wearing off on your keys?**
In answer to #2, I've completely lost L and N, and A and S are fading fast. Which, given my answer to #1…
June 26, 2007
I recently read a book by regular Adventures in Ethics and Science commenter Solomon Rivlin. Scientific Misconduct and Its Cover-Up: Diary of a Whistleblower is an account of a university response to allegations of misconduct gone horribly wrong. I'm hesitant to describe it as the worst…
June 26, 2007
I want to share some of the items I've been reading elsewhere. Some of them strike me as having a very "summertime" feel to them, while others are just about the non-seasonal issues that are part of life.
At Cocktail Party Physics, there's a truly excellent post on rollercoasters, including some…
June 25, 2007
Chad got to this first (cursed time zones), but I want to say a bit about the Inside Higher Ed article on the tumult in the Philosophy Department at the College of William & Mary that concerns, at least in part, how involved junior faculty should be in major departmental decisions:
Should…
June 25, 2007
There's an article in today's Inside Higher Ed on the building momentum in college chemistry courses to make the labs greener -- that is, to reduce the amount of hazardous materials necessary in the required student experiments. What grabbed me about the article is that it looks like the greening…
June 25, 2007
There's another piece in the New York Times today about how birth order and family dynamics might play a role in "intelligence" (as measured by IQ -- an imperfect measure at best). This is a follow up to their earlier story about research reported in Science and Intelligence that claims, based on…
June 24, 2007
Since it has come up in the comments on my review of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go, I'm going to go ahead and discuss some of the issues around cutting-edge biomedical technologies in the book that might, or might not, be plausible when pondered. (As Bill points out, the scientific…
June 23, 2007
Last May, on my way back from a mini-conference in Stockholm, I had a long layover in Munich. Since major airports are now essentially shopping malls with parking for commercial jets, I used a little bit of that time to wander through a pretty impressive airport book store, where I picked up a…
June 23, 2007
Zuska reminded me that today is the one-year anniversary of the suicide of Denice Denton, an accomplished electrical engineer, tireless advocate for the inclusion and advancement of women in science and, at the time of her death, the chancellor of UC-Santa Cruz.
I never met Denton, and a year ago…
June 22, 2007
If you had to give this blog a movie rating, what would it be and why?
Apparently, I earned that rating due to the occurrence of the word "death" and the B-word.
I'd have guessed that the "adult themes" (of bad actors in academic and scientific communities) would be more of a worry as far as…