Current Events
jstemwedel | February 19, 2007Yesterday, while transporting the sprogs to Science Scouts aquatic training maneuvers, I caught a few minutes of a City Arts & Lectures interview with Lewis Black. In the part of the interview I heard, Black discussed his efforts (over the course of eight years) to make it as a playwright, and he revealed a couple ways in which that career path might not be so different from that of the scientist:
1. How government grants might not work the way you want them to.
Black shared his view that the National Endowment for the Arts grants to support playwrights, while well-intentioned, probably…
jstemwedel | January 30, 2007There's been some blogospheric blowout (see here, here, and here for just a taste) about a recent PETA ad that many viewers find gratuitously sexist. To me, the ad and the reaction to it are most interesting because they raise a larger issue about how we promote our values and how we choose our allies. From Michael Specter's article on PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk in the April 14, 2003 issue of The New Yorker:
Newkirk seems openly to court the anger even of people who share her views. "I know feminists hate the naked displays," she told me. "I lose members every time I do it. But my job isn…
jstemwedel | January 25, 2007Abi at nanopolitan nudged me to have a look at Nature's recent article on what has become of targets of recent scientific fraud investigations. He notes that, interspersed with a whole bunch of poster boys for how not to do science, there are at least a couple folks who were cleared of wrongdoing (or whose investigations are still ongoing) which seems, to put it mildly, not the nicest way for Nature to package their stories.
So, I'm going to repackage them slightly and add my own comments. (All direct quotations are from the Nature article.)
Scientist: Jon Subdo, researcher at Oslo's…
jstemwedel | January 18, 2007The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the University of California is getting serious about ethics -- by requiring all of its 230,000 to take an online ethics course.
Yeah, throwing coursework at the problem will solve it.*
Indeed, I'm not sure I'd even want to count this as "coursework" given the article's description of what the employees will be getting:
The course, which takes about 30 minutes, is designed to brief UC's 230,000 employees on the university's expectations about ethics, values and standards of conduct. ...
Although the course was developed to support an ethics policy…
jstemwedel | January 9, 2007There was an interesting story today on Morning Edition about new research on potential bias in nutrition studies funded by industry. Dr. David Ludwig of Children's Hospital in Boston led a team that analyzed 206 nutritional studies published between 1999 and 2003. More than half of these studies were at least partially industry-funded (in particular, funded by purveyors of milk, fruit juices, and soft drinks).
Ludwig's analysis of this body of literature had one set of researchers look at the 206 nutritional studies just from the point of view of their scientific conclusions (with no…
jstemwedel | December 16, 2006Only a few days out from the 19 December verdict in the Tripoli 6 case, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that the Bush administration honestly couldn't be bothered that Libya shows every sign of being ready to execute foreign healthcare workers who the scientific evidence indicates did not commit the crime with which they have been charged. Otherwise, you'd figure that the State Department spokesman, once questioned about the case, would bother to do his homework and figure out at least the bare facts of the situation. He did not.
So the lives of healthcare workers who went to Libya…
jstemwedel | December 6, 2006You may remember the plight of the Tripoli Six (also known as the Benghazi Six), the physician and five nurses on trial in Libya for infecting 400 children in the hospital where they were working with HIV even though there is overwhelming evidence that the most likely route of infection was poor hospital hygeine, probably before any of these six health care workers even set foot in Libya. (Nature provides details of the scientific analysis of the evidence in this PDF.)
While the public outcry from the scientific community in support of the Tripoli Six has been great, those watching the trial…
jstemwedel | November 28, 2006My better half has been a frequent classroom volunteer leading science lessons in younger offspring's kindergarten class. This has made it fairly apparent to us that there's very little of what either of us would identify as science in these lessons.
Most recently, the science lesson centered on nocturnal animals. However, the activity the kids did was primarily a matter of drawing and coloring and cutting and affixing paper with glue. There was a wee bit of classification in here (glue the nocturnal animals on one page and the diurnal animals on the other), but significantly less…
jstemwedel | November 22, 2006Some readers have called to my attention a pair of recent stories from the New York Times that you may find interesting.
First, Audrey noted another dispatch on the eternal struggle over how math ought to be taught:
For the second time in a generation, education officials are rethinking the teaching of math in American schools.
The changes are being driven by students' lagging performance on international tests and mathematicians' warnings that more than a decade of so-called reform math -- critics call it fuzzy math -- has crippled students with its de-emphasizing of basic drills and…
jstemwedel | November 20, 2006Just a little more follow-up on the Karpova-Tonegawa dust-up at MIT:
First, the report from the Ad Hoc Committee at MIT was posted on November 2 ... but apparently has been removed:
The ad hoc committee is currently receiving comments on the report that it issued on November 2, 2006 and pending its consideration of the comments it receives, the Committee has asked that the report be taken off the website temporarily.
I have a PDF of the report as originally posted, and am curious about how whatever the committee ends up reposting will differ from what I have. However, I'm not sure if I ought…
jstemwedel | November 16, 2006The liquid in question, of course, is breastmilk.
As reported by the Burlington Free Press:
Emily Gillette of Santa Fe, N.M., was asked to leave a flight departing from Burlington after she declined to cover her baby as she breast-fed.
Gillette said she began to nurse her 22-month-old daughter as the plane prepared for takeoff after a three-hour delay. Gillette said a Freedom Airlines flight attendant approached her, directing her to cover up with a blanket. When Gillette refused, the attendant allegedly told her that she was offended, and Gillette and her husband say they were asked to…
jstemwedel | November 15, 2006On the way home, I heard a story on NPR about a study done at UC Berkeley about the "performance gap" between black kids and white kids in the public schools. I can't say much about the details of the report -- it comes out tomorrow -- but one of the people interviewed for the story, Ross Wiener of The Education Trust, noted a finding in this general area of research that screams out for an explanation.
The finding: while white students tend to lose ground during summer vacation (at least with respect to the sorts of performance easily measured with standardized tests and similar assessment…
jstemwedel | November 9, 2006Pencil ready? To mark the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, here's a brief quiz (essay format, of course) on the epistemology lesson embedded in his comments from a February 12, 2002 Department of Defense news briefing. The comments, poetically transcibed by Slate, are as follows:
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
Questions:
1. From this passage, can you draw any…
jstemwedel | November 8, 2006The 110th Congress has been elected. Whether it's the crowd you voted for or not, there's quite a lot of talk now about a new direction, a new civility, possibly even a new pony (but I might not have heard that last part right).
So, given that the Congresspersons will be looking for our votes again in another two years (along with a third of the Senators), this seems like a good time for the people (i.e., you all) to put together an agenda for these elected representatives of ours. To streamline things a bit, and in keeping with the overarching themes of this weblog, let's restrict the wish…
jstemwedel | November 7, 2006I voted. If you're registered to vote, you should, too. If you don't know your polling place, you can check here. If you think you are registered, but you don't appear on the voter rolls at your polling place, ask for a provisional ballot.
If you have trouble, don't let it slide! Make some noise:
National Campaign for Fair Elections; phone 1-866-OUR-VOTE (1-866-687-8683).
VoterStory.org
Register complaints about voting machine problems: 1-888-SAV-VOTE (1-888-728-8683).
Please don't sit this one out! It's your democracy too!
jstemwedel | October 23, 2006Adventures in Ethics and Science field operative RMD alerted me to a recent article in the New York Times (free registration required) about an ongoing debate on the use of online instruction for Advanced Placement science classes. The crux of the debate is not the value of online science classes per se, but whether such courses can accomplish the objectives of an AP science course if they don't include a traditional, hands-on laboratory component.
The debate is interesting for a few reasons. First, it gets to the question of what precisely an AP course is intended to do. Second, it…
jstemwedel | October 20, 2006Regular commenter Blair was kind enough to bring to my attention an article from The Globe and Mail, reporting research done at the University of British Columbia, that illustrates how what we think we know can have a real impact on what we can do:
Over three years, researchers gave 135 women tests similar to those used for graduate school entrance exams. Each woman was expected to perform a challenging math section, but not before reading an essay that dealt with gender difference in math.
Of the four essays, one argued there was no difference, one argued the difference was genetic and a…
jstemwedel | October 14, 2006As Revere notes, the trial of the Tripoli six is scheduled to resume on October 31. This means the time for serious action is now.
As Mike Dunford points out,
If you want to do something more than just get mad, if you want to try to change things, you will need to do more than read blog articles and post comments. You need to write people. You need to call people. You need to send faxes and emails.
Honest to goodness, a letter on paper, in an envelope, addressed and stamped to get to its destination, is going to signal that this really matters to you in a way that emails will not -- because…
jstemwedel | October 7, 2006I've been thinking about Zuska's post on the negative impacts the Nobel Prizes might be having on the practice of good science. She quotes N. David Mermin, who opines:
[T]he system [of prizes] had become a destructive force...these things are systematically sought after by organized campaigns, routinely consuming oceans of time and effort.
I feel the pull of this worry -- although I'm also sympathetic to a view Rob Knop voiced in a comment:
What I like about the Nobel Prize : once a year, there is a celebration of science that almost impinges upon the public consciousness. Yes, we are…
jstemwedel | October 4, 2006Following up on my earlier post on Roger D. Kornberg's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, I want to call your attention to this comment from the esteemed Pinko Punko:
Well, in the press conf. Dr. Kornberg stated he absolutely and first and formost views himself as a chemist, and his training (Ph.D.) was under a world famous chemist. He considers himself a physical scientist whose goal is to understand the mechanism at the molecular level of a protein machine. Now, perhaps this is somewhat simple chemistry as many of the steps boil down to hydrogen bonding and electrostatic interactions. You will…