Academia
jstemwedel | October 8, 2008Charles B. Nemeroff, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychiatrist at Emory University alleged by congressional investigators to have failed to report a third of the $2.8 million (or more) he received in consulting fees from pharmaceutical companies whose drugs he was studying.
Why would congressional investigators care? For one thing, during the period of time when Nemeroff received these consulting fees, he also received $3.9 million from NIH to study the efficacy of five GlaxoSmithKline drugs in the treatment of depression. When the government ponies up money for scientific research, it has an interest…
evolgen | October 8, 2008Inspired by the Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart, here's the Seminar Answer Flow Chart:
terrasig | October 8, 2008I am about to lead a discussion of science and medical blogs with a group of journalism students in a course entitled, Medical Journalism. While many of the students are specifically majoring in medical and science journalism in a master's program, some are undergraduates in general journalism and mass communications looking to get a flavor for medical writing for print and broadcast.
My question to the valued readers of this humble blog is:
What would you tell these young, knowledge-seeking minds about how science and medical blogs and bloggers might contribute to their future careers as "…
revere | October 8, 2008Early yesterday morning I received an email from my publisher that the journal for which I am co-editor in chief has been sold. Our journal is one of 180 published by BioMedCentral (BMC), the largest open access scientific publisher. The business model of BMC and other open access publishers is to charge the author, not the reader. BMC journals are online only (there are one or two exceptions) and hence have no page limitations. Charges are for a single article, whatever the length. Color photos, movies and supplementary files are all included in the charge (it is not a page charge,…
jstemwedel | October 7, 2008Let's wrap up our discussion on the Martinson et al. paper, "Scientists' Perceptions of Organizational Justice and Self-Reported Misbehaviors". [1] You'll recall that the research in this paper examined three hypotheses about academic scientists:
Hypothesis 1: The greater the perceived distributive injustice in science, the greater the likelihood of a scientist engaging in misbehavior. (51)
Hypothesis 2: The greater the perceived procedural injustice in science, the greater the likelihood of a scientist engaging in misbehavior. (52)
Hypothesis 3: Perceptions of injustice are more…
drorzel | October 7, 2008Paul Ginsparg, the founder of the arxiv preprint server for physics, has a very nice article at Physics World reminiscing about the rise of the Internet, particularly in physics. This also serves as a nice counterpoint to his talk at the Science21 conference (video, microblogging), which included a wealth of fascinating information about the current operation of the arxiv.
In both of these, he mentions that the arxiv grew out of a pre-existing preprint culture in high-energy theoretical physics. People in the field would make copies of their manuscripts in progress, and send them to other…
jstemwedel | October 6, 2008The past couple years in California have been scary ones for academic researchers who conduct research with animals (as well as for their neighbors), what with firebombs, home invasions, significant intentional damage to their properties and threats to their safety.
In response to a ratcheting up of attacks from animals rights groups, universities have lobbied for the Researcher Protection Act of 2008, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law on September 28.
As described in Inside Higher Ed:
The law is part of a campaign, including litigation against animal liberation groups…
clock | October 6, 2008The 2008 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine was announced this morning.
The winners are HPV and HIV (OK, OK, the people who discovered them) - the year of the virus!
I don't pay much attention to these, as biology I care about has not received the prize since 1973, but I was happy to hear about a different kind of connection I have with one of this year's winners - Francoise Barre-Sinouss recently published a paper in PLoS ONE - this one: The CD85j+ NK Cell Subset Potently Controls HIV-1 Replication in Autologous Dendritic Cells
Well, if it's good enough for a Nobel prize winner, it's…
drorzel | October 6, 2008Over at Terra Sigillata, Abel has a post on the limiting of job searches that is an excellent example of the problems with the academic mind-set:
The short summary: postdocs and other academic job candidates are disqualifying themselves from even applying for certain positions because:
1. they don't feel they meet the job description in the ad
2. the job is at a "lesser" institution or department
3. the job is in a place (they think) they'd never want to live
4. they'd feel bad about turning down a position at a place they know they'd never want to be.
First things first: in this climate,…
jstemwedel | October 5, 2008Last 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 academic scientists' perceptions of injustice (both distributive and procedural) and those scientists engaging in scientific misbehavior. In particular, the researchers were interested in whether differences would emerge between scientists with fragile social identities within the tribe of academic…
drorzel | October 4, 2008Over the past several weeks, I've written up ResearchBlogging posts on each of the papers I helped write in graduate school. Each paper write-up was accompanied by a "Making of" article, giving a bit more detail about how the experiments came to be, what my role in them was, and whatever funny anecdotes I can think of about the experiment.
If you haven't been following the series, or would just like a convenient index of the posts, here's the complete set:
Introduction and explanation of metastable xenon.
Experiment 1: Optical Control of Ultracold Collisions and the making thereof.…
terrasig | October 4, 2008DrDrA just posted on a currently 37-comment-long thread of a post by PhysioProf at DrugMonkey based on a quote from a post by Dr Brazen Hussy (opening sentence almost as long and convoluted as the title, eh?).
The short summary: postdocs and other academic job candidates are disqualifying themselves from even applying for certain positions because:
1. they don't feel they meet the job description in the ad
2. the job is at a "lesser" institution or department
3. the job is in a place (they think) they'd never want to live
4. they'd feel bad about turning down a position at a place they know…
drorzel | October 3, 2008Over at Nature Networks, Timo Hannay has posted a conference talk in which he questions the future of science blogging:
"Science blogging is growing" I confidently wrote in an essay a few months ago. Then, like any good scientist, I went in search of evidence to support my prejudice. But I couldn't find any beyond the anecdotal. For a year or more, estimates of the number of blogs by scientists about science seem to have been stuck at about 1,500 (give or take). Services such as Alexa and Compete.com (if they can be believed) show traffic to sites like ScienceBlogs.com to have been flat for…
jstemwedel | October 2, 2008Regular 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 or does not owe another individual scientist in terms of honesty and fairness.
In fact, the scientists in the situations we discuss might also conceive of themselves as responding not to other individuals so much as to "the system". Unlike a flesh and blood colleague, "the system" is faceless,…
catdynamics | October 1, 2008graphically explained
PhD Comics illustrate
h/t Chad
it is a good point actually, read the depression era literature - after the few rich who got their trust funds out, the tenured academics rode out the depression relatively well
in fact my entire neighbourhood is mostly depression era houses, built for faculty, who were pretty much the only people with an hundred miles or so who could afford to pay construction workers and architects
hmmm, it really could all be relative...
neurotopia | October 1, 2008make Evil a dull monkey.
All work and no play make Evil a dull monkey. All work and no play make Evil a dull monkey. All work and no play make Evil a dull monkey. All work and no play make Evil a dull monkey. All work and no play make Evil a dull monkey. All work and no play make Evil a dull monkey. All work and no play make Evil a dull monkey. All work and no play make Evil a dull monkey. All work and no play make Evil a dull monkey. All work and no play make Evil a dull monkey. All work and no play make Evil a dull monkey. All work and no play make Evil a dull monkey. All work…
drorzel | October 1, 2008I signed up for the Adopt-a-Physicist program run by the APS, and I've been "adopted" by three high school classes. The program pairs professional physicists with high school classes, and provides a web forum both groups can access. The students ask questions, and I answer them.
I'd love to be able to link directly to the forums, but they're password-protected, so you can't get in. The questions so far have been really good, though, and I'm enjoying providing answers.
Some of my answers have included pointers to the blog, so I thought I'd give a shout-out here to the classes that have "…
catdynamics | September 30, 2008why are grades at US higher educational institutions confidential?
a piece of paperwork, that I foresee will cause endless trouble, recently crossed my desk
without violating any confidences, the gist of it was that student grades were classified at the super-double-duper level and must never be revealed or leaked, except when we send them out randomly to strange people we've never met, on request
why is this?
I don't mean the legal reason, I mean the pedagogical, administrative and ethical rationale?
prima facie, grades at higher educational institutions ought to be a matter of public…
drorzel | September 30, 2008Via FriendFeed, I came across an article by Deepak Singh on attention and science, which spins off a long rant by Kevin Kelly on the idea that Where ever attention flows, money will follow. Deepak writes:
Attention can be driven by many mechanisms, marketing being the most effective one. The key is gaining sufficient mindshare, which is often accompanies by a flow of capital. In science, the money follows topics of research that have mindshare. Similarly people fund companies in areas that generate mindshare for whatever reason.
The question I often ask myself, both from my time as a marketer…
catdynamics | September 29, 2008The Dangeral Professor is back
and more dangeral than ever.
h/t Sean
ok, that is good news