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
June 22, 2006
No sooner do I post an answer for one "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question than another one gets posted. If you thought Summer at ScienceBlogs was going to involve lots of lounging by the pool and drinks with paper umbrellas, that's not how it's shaping up.
The question of the week: What makes a good…
June 21, 2006
Sometimes I check the spam folder just in case actual (even important) email from a human being who is not trying to sell me (and the millions of others in that valuable set of email addresses) something I don't need has been snagged by the filter. More rarely, I open the odd spam message from the…
June 21, 2006
Ben at The World's Fair asks what kind of scientist Batman is. (Of course, he does this after producing something like reliable testimony that Batman is a scientist to begin with.)
Sandra Porter makes the case that he's a geneticist, but I'm not buying it. There'd be more fruit flies in the Bat…
June 21, 2006
Given that I've weighed in on "nerd culture" and some of the social pressures that influence women's relationships to this culture, I had to pass this on:
The New York Daily News ran an article extolling the advantages of nerds as lovers. It's pretty much the dreck you'd expect. Of course, the…
June 21, 2006
How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?
Hey, that's sweet to assume we fulfill our primary objectives! Not that we don't try, but to paraphrase Grad Student Barbie…
June 20, 2006
I've always liked soccer balls -- and not just because you can play soccer with them. The arrangement of pentagons and hexagons to form a surfaces that's reasonable spherical always seemed outstandingly clever. Who was the genius who first realized you could do that?
Well, my world has been…
June 20, 2006
I think after this one, we'll be ready to move on to cow (or soy) milk and solids!
My last post on the breastfeeding issue pointed you to an academic examination of some of the claims being advanced in support of the superiority of breastfeeding. Joseph from Corpus Callosum left a detailed comment…
June 20, 2006
Because I know some people in these parts like numbers, I thought I'd give you a few stats for the Sb/DonorsChoose bloggers challenges currently underway.
At last count, we've gotten $12,325.59 (not counting the $10,000 match from SEED) from 152 generous donors -- that's an average of $81.09 per…
June 20, 2006
A few days ago I pondered the ethical dimensions of breastfeeding given a recent article trumpeting its astounding benefits for infants and mothers. Those ethical considerations took as given that the claims trumpeting in the article were more or less true.
Today, I want to point you to an…
June 20, 2006
In my last post, I mentioned that I was about to start a soccer class. It turns out "class" might not be quite the right designation for it, as there wasn't any formal instruction, discussion of techniques, etc. (Not that I didn't get schooled at various points in the evening.) Instead, we…
June 19, 2006
Lots of items kicking around in the blogosphere that deserve more attention than I have time to give them right now. (I'm off to start taking soccer classes in about an hour -- hold a good thought for my knees, please!) But I wanted to share.
At Log base 2, Nick Barrowman considers the epistemic…
June 19, 2006
I'm following up on my earlier post in the wake of the outing of dKos blogger Armando. At Majikthise, Lindsay Beyerstein had posted an interesting discussion of the issues around pseudonymous blogging, and whether it might sometimes be ethical to reveal the secret identity of a pseudonymous…
June 19, 2006
I swear I'm putting up a couple posts today that have nothing to do with the ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose drive to fund science and math classrooms. However, there have been some developments since the last update, and I thought you ought to know about them.
Although PZ Myers and his minions met the…
June 17, 2006
It's not just a science thing, it's also an ethics thing. The truth is good. Departures from it, more often than not, get you into trouble.
A couple examples:
The Guarantee of Medical Accuracy in Sex Education Act was recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. Wouldn't you think…
June 17, 2006
We kicked off the ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose drive just over 50 hours ago. Since then:
ScienceBlogs readers have made donations totaling $8498.73
SEED is matching that $8498.73, and will match up to another $1501.27.
Doing the math, your donations plus SEED matches means at least $16, 997.46 will…
June 16, 2006
Maybe this is a bad idea, but I'm unable to resist poking this particular hornets' nest. (I've poked it before, after all.)
There's a post on Slashdot reporting that GNOME got 181 applications for Google's Summer of Code from men and zero applications from women. As a result, Google has seen fit…
June 16, 2006
Younger offspring offers a way to distinguish dreaming from conscious experience:
I thought I was really awake, so I reached up to touch a cloud, but instead of feeling fuzzy like a cloud would feel, it was like touching an empty space. So that's how you can tell if you're dreaming, if you touch…
June 16, 2006
Since we kicked off the drive yesterday morning:
ScienceBlogs readers have made donations totaling $3784.30
Our beneveolent overlords at SEED have put up as much as $10,000 to match reader donations*. That means that so far, SEED is kicking in $3784.30 to match what you all have donated. And, if…
June 16, 2006
Younger offspring did not, to my knowledge, watch of listen to the State of the Union address wherein President Bush called for legislation prohibiting the creation of human-animal hybrids. Indeed, it's not even clear that this wee beastie has any human DNA in it. (With recessive traits, it can…
June 16, 2006
Dr. Free-Ride: So, I found a little café table for the back yard.
Dr. Free-Ride's better half: A good one, or one that's going to fall apart?
Dr. Free-Ride: Well, I made a point of getting a cast-iron one rather than one made of elemental sodium; those aren't so weather-proof.
Elder offspring…
June 15, 2006
Just a quick update on the progress of the ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose raise-money-to-help-science-classrooms-a-thon:
At last check (as I'm composing this post), across all the Sb blogs participating in the challenge, readers have donated more than $3000. That's a strong start, readers!
The bloggers…
June 15, 2006
From The New York Times:
A chemistry professor at Columbia University who in March retracted two papers and part of a third published in a leading journal is now retracting four additional scientific papers.
The retractions came after the experimental findings of the papers could not be reproduced…
June 15, 2006
The ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose raise-money-to-help-science-classrooms-a-thon!
Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you're reading the blogs here, chances are you feel the same way.
A lot of us fell in love with science because of…
June 14, 2006
I'm not sure I realized it while I was writing it, but my last post (on whether scientific knowledge about the benefits of breast-feeding imposes any particular obligations) has me thinking about another kind of case where scientific knowledge might -- or might not -- bring ethical consequences.…
June 13, 2006
There's an interesting article in the New York Times about efforts by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to promote breast-feeding. Proponents of breast-feeding point to quite a lot of science that supports advantages -- for child and mother -- of breast-milk over formula. But there…
June 13, 2006
Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance has a great post with some of his thoughts about Yearly Kos. In it, he describes the convention's heartening attention to matters scientific:
The good news is: science! Thanks largely to DarkSyde's efforts, there was a substantial presence of science bloggers at…
June 12, 2006
Two of the common props of the archetypal philosopher are alcohol and coffee. (Existentialism throws in berets and cigarettes.) New research from Kaiser Permanente Oakland suggests that the coffee might offset some of the alcohol's potential harm.
From the Oakland Tribune:
It seems that people…
June 12, 2006
Occasionally I get email asking for advice in matters around responsible conduct of research. Some readers have related horror stories of research supervisors who grabbed their ideas, protocols, and plans for future experiments, either to give them to another student or postdoc in the lab, or to…
June 11, 2006
This post, originally posted 8 January 2006 on the old site, responds to an email I got after the last post. Given John's recent post on Pro-Test, the questions are still timely.
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I received an email from a reader in response to my last post on PETA's exposing of problems with the…
June 11, 2006
Wrestling overgrown rose bushes out of the ground may be harder than wrestling gators. (At the very least, it seems to take longer, while provoking less sympathy).
Anyway, while I'm recovering from that, here's a "classic" post from the old location. It was originally posted 5 January 2006, but…