communication
jstemwedel | December 10, 2009For those of you who have heard me issue calls for dialogue (not debate) on the subject of research with non-human animals -- especially if you're in the Los Angeles area -- I'm pleased to announce that there's an event coming up in February that's aimed at fostering just such a dialogue, in the three-dimensional world. Here's the announcement:
Save the date!
Perspectives on the Science and Ethics of Animal-Based Research
UCLA, Covel Commons, 6pm-8:30pm, February 16th, 2010
With the goal of opening an on-going dialogue between individuals who are in favor or opposed to the use of animals in…
jstemwedel | December 9, 2009It's quite likely, if you're reading anything else on the internets besides this blog for the past few weeks, that you've already gotten your fill of ClimateGate. But maybe you've been stuck in your Cave of Grading and missed the news that a bunch of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers (or leaked by an insider, depending on who's telling the story) and widely distributed. Or maybe you're still sorting out what you think about the email messages in question and what they mean for their authors, the soundness of…
jstemwedel | November 25, 2009I received an email from reader Doug Blank (who gave me permission to share it here and to identify him by name) about a perplexing situation:
Janet,
I thought I'd solicit your advice. Recently, I found an instance of parts of my thesis appearing in a journal article, and of the paper being presented at a conference. In fact, further exploration revealed that it had won a best paper prize! Why don't I feel proud...
I've sent the following letter to the one and only email address that I found on the journal's website, almost three weeks ago, but haven't heard anything. I tried contacting the…
jstemwedel | November 2, 2009Abel and Orac and Isis have recently called attention to the flak Amy Wallace had been getting for her recent article in WIRED Magazine, "An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All". The flak Wallace has gotten, as detailed in her Twitter feed (from which Abel constructed a compilation):
I've been called stupid, greedy, a whore, a prostitute, and a "fking lib." I've been called the author of "heinous tripe."
J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, the anti-vaccine group that actress Jenny McCarthy helps promote, sent an essay title" "Paul Offit Rapes…
jstemwedel | October 28, 2009In a recent post, I issued an invitation:
I am always up for a dialogue on the issue of our moral relation to animals and on the ethical use of animals in scientific research. If folks inclined towards the animal rights stance want to engage in a dialogue right here, in the comments on this post, I am happy to host it.
(I will not, however, be hosting a debate. A dialogue is different from a debate, and a dialogue is what I'm prepared to host.)
That post has received upward of 250 comments, so there was certainly some sort of exchange going on. But, did we manage to have something…
jstemwedel | October 20, 2009Back before I was sucked into the vortex of paper-grading, an eagle-eyed Mattababy pointed me to a very interesting post by astronomer Mike Brown. Brown details his efforts to collaborate with another team of scientists who were working on the same scientific question he was working on, what became of that attempted collaboration, and the bad feelings that followed when Brown and the other scientists ended up publishing separate papers on the question.
Here's how Brown lays it out:
You would think that two papers that examine the same set of pictures from the Cassini spacecraft to map…
jstemwedel | October 19, 2009Over at Starts with a Bang, Ethan Siegel expressed exasperation that Nature and New Scientist are paying attention to (and lending too much credibility to) an astronomical theory Ethan views as a non-starter, Modified Netwonian Dynamics (or MOND):
[W]hy is Nature making a big deal out of a paper like this? Why are magazines like New Scientist declaring that there are cracks in dark matter theories?
Because someone (my guess is HongSheng Zhao, one of the authors of this paper who's fond of press releases and modifying gravity) is pimping this piece of evidence like it tells us something.…
jstemwedel | October 16, 2009This, in turn, means that members of the public who strongly disagree with your stand may decide to track you down and let you know they disagree with you.
Apparently, this may become an issue for those who signed the Pro-Test petition in support of ethical and human scientific research with animals. From an email sent to signatories:
[A] few websites hosted by animal rights activists have encouraged their readerships to visit the list of Pro-Test signatories in order to find names and to contact those persons to express their opposition to animal research. While your email addresses on the…
jstemwedel | September 30, 2009On my earlier post, "Dialogue, not debate", commenter dave c-h posed some interesting questions:
Is there an ethical point at which engagement is functionally equivalent to assent? In other words, is there a point at which dialogue should be replaced by active resistance? If so, how do you tell where that point is? I think many activists fear that dialogue is a tactic of those who support the status quo to co-opt them into a process that is unlikely to lead to any real change because the power is unevenly divided.
What the commenter says about the activists' fears sounds about right to me…
jstemwedel | September 28, 2009At the end of last week, I made a quick trip to UCLA to visit with some researchers who, despite having been targets of violence and intimidation, are looking for ways to engage with the public about research with animals. I was really struck by their seriousness about engaging folks on "the other side", rather than just hunkering down to their research and hoping to be left alone.
The big thing we talked about was the need to shift the terms of engagement.
The mode people seem most used to -- and the one that seems to make the least difference -- is the debate. In a debate, the point is…
jstemwedel | September 16, 2009As promised, I've been thinking about the details of Chandok v. Klessig. To recap, we have a case where a postdoc (Meena Chandok) generated some exciting scientific findings. She and her supervisor (Daniel F. Klessig), along with some coworkers, published those findings. Then, in the fullness of time, after others working with Klessig tried to reproduce those findings on the way to extending the work, Klessig decided that the results were not sufficiently reproducible.
At that point, Klessig decided that the published papers reported those findings needed to be retracted. Retracting a…
jstemwedel | August 21, 2009This week the New York Times reported on the problem of drug company-sponsored ghostwriting of articles in the scientific literature:
A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation's top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies -- articles that were carefully calibrated to help the manufacturers sell more products.
Experts in medical ethics condemn this practice as a breach of the public trust. Yet many universities have been slow to recognize the…
jstemwedel | August 18, 2009Recently, Steinn brought our attention to some of the difficulties involved in getting a scientific journal to publish a "Comment" on an article. He drew on a document (PDF) by Prof. Rick Trebino of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Physics detailing (in 123 numbered steps) his own difficulties in advancing what is supposed to be an ongoing conversation between practicing scientists in the peer reviewed scientific literature. Indeed, I think this chronology of exasperation raises some questions about just what interests journal editors are actually working towards, and about how…
edyong | August 17, 2009In a Swiss laboratory, a group of ten robots is competing for food. Prowling around a small arena, the machines are part of an innovative study looking at the evolution of communication, from engineers Sara Mitri and Dario Floreano and evolutionary biologist Laurent Keller.
They programmed robots with the task of finding a "food source" indicated by a light-coloured ring at one end of the arena, which they could "see" at close range with downward-facing sensors. The other end of the arena, labelled with a darker ring was "poisoned". The bots get points based on how much time they spend near…
jstemwedel | August 15, 2009Ethan Siegel at Starts with a Bang shares some thoughts about productive argumentation and a graphic to illustrate various approaches:
I find myself fascinated with the graphic itself. In particular, I'm pondering what rhetorical work the pyramid does here.
If the point is that the lower strata on the pyramid are less effective ways to engage with someone else's arguments, then I'd think that you could use a ladder here just as easily as a pyramid. Maybe you can. Maybe the person who made the graphic just likes pyramids, or doesn't care for ladders.
But, if the pyramid is meant to…
jstemwedel | August 13, 2009I'm not a regular reader of USA Today, but Maria tweeted this story, and I feel like I need to say something about it or else risk leaving it rattling around in my head like marbles under a hubcap:
About 70% of Americans agree, either somewhat or strongly, that it's beneficial for women to take her husband's last name when they marry, while 29% say it's better for women to keep their own names, finds a study being presented today at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting in San Francisco.
Researchers from Indiana University and the University of Utah asked about 815 people a…
jstemwedel | August 7, 2009For those of you who have been following the various online reviews of and reactions to Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, you may be interested in the Firedoglake Book Salon discussion of the book. The discussion takes place Saturday (tomorrow), 5-7 pm Eastern (2-4 pm Pacific; those of you in other time zones can probably calculate your local time equivalent better than I), will include author Chris Mooney, and will be hosted by yours truly.
Given that I'm pretty convinced I have the best commentariat in the…
jstemwedel | July 17, 2009As promised, in this post I consider the treatment of the science-religion culture wars in Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. If you're just tuning in, you may want to pause to read my review of the book, or to peruse my thoughts on issues the book raised about what the American public wants and about whether old or new media give the American public what it needs.
In the interests of truth in advertising, let me state at the outset that this post will not involve anything like a detailed rehash of "Crackergate", nor a…
jstemwedel | July 15, 2009In this post, I continue working through my thoughts in response to Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book, Unscientific America. In this post, I focus on their discussion of the mainstream media and of the blogosphere. You might guess, given that I'm a member of the science blogosphere, that I have some pretty strong views about what blogs might accomplish in terms of helping the public engage with science. You would be correct.
A fair portion of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future (reviewed here) explores conditions of American life that make it…
jstemwedel | July 13, 2009In the post where I reviewed it, I promised I'd have more to say about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As it turns out, I have a lot more to say -- so much that I'm breaking it up into three posts so I can keep my trains of thought from colliding. I'm going to start here with a post about the public's end of the scientist-public communication project. Next, I'll respond to some of the claims the book seems to be making about the new media landscape (including the blogosphere). Finally, I'll take up the much discussed issue of the book's treatment of…