Ethics 101
jstemwedel | July 19, 2010In what is surely a contender for the photo next to the "business as usual in the blogosphere" entry in the Wiktionary, a (male) blogger has posted a list of the sexiest (all-but-one female) scientists (using photos of those scientists obtained from the web without any indication that he had also obtained proper permission to use those photos in his post), and now the blogger says he wants to know what could possibly be wrong about making such a post.
Because no one has ever taken the time to explain this issues in any detail. (You'd think someone who knew how to search for images could…
jstemwedel | July 6, 2010Today ScienceBlogs launched a new sponsored blog, Food Frontiers. The sponsor is PepsiCo. Here's the description of what the blog is going to be about from its inaugural post by Sb overlord Evan Lerner:
On behalf of the team here at ScienceBlogs, I'd like to welcome you to Food Frontiers, a new project presented by PepsiCo.
As part of this partnership, we'll hear from a wide range of experts on how the company is developing products rooted in rigorous, science-based nutrition standards to offer consumers more wholesome and enjoyable foods and beverages. The focus will be on innovations in…
jstemwedel | July 6, 2010I saw a story in the San Jose Mercury News that I thought raised an interesting question about sick leave, one worth discussing here.
As it turns out, all the details of the specific case reported in the article sort of obscure the general question that it initially raised for me. But since I'm still interested in discussing the more general problem, here's a poll to tweak your intuitions.
In cash-strapped community college system, an administrator collecting paid sick leave is ...online survey
The question that the headline and first two paragraphs of the article raised for me was about…
jstemwedel | April 27, 2010As we creep toward the end of the spring semester, I noticed a story at Inside Higher Ed about a commencement address gone wrong:
Connecticut College is having a painful examination of last year's student speech.
The student newspaper, The College Voice, revealed that the student speaker's talk featured considerable material that came from a 2008 commencement address at Duke University by the author Barbara Kingsolver -- a talk that turns up on some lists of the best commencement talks ever. While the college has known about the plagiarism for months, the incident was not revealed until this…
jstemwedel | April 15, 2010Making good ethical choices in the real world is hard, in large part because it requires us to find the best balance in responding to interested parties whose legitimate interests pull in different directions. The situation is further complicated by the fact that as we are trying to make the best ethical decision we can, or evaluating the ethical decision-making of others, we can't help but notice that there is not universal agreement about who counts as a party with legitimate interests that ought to be taken into account, let alone about how to weight the competing interests in the ethical…
jstemwedel | March 31, 2010
Especially in student papers, plagiarism is an issue that it seems just won't go away. However, instructors cannot just give up and permit plagiarism without giving up most of their pedagogical goals and ideals. As tempting a behavior as this may be (at least to some students, if not to all), it is our duty to smack it down.
Is there any effective way to deliver a preemptive smackdown to student plagiarists? That's the question posed by a piece of research, "Is There an Effective Approach to Deterring Students from Plagiarizing?" by Lidija Bilic-Zulle, Josip Azman, Vedran Frkovic, and…
jstemwedel | March 16, 2010There's a recent paper on blogs as a channel of scientific communication that has been making the rounds. Other bloggers have discussed the paper and its methodology in some detail (including but not limited to Bora and DrugMonkey and Dr. Isis), so I'm not going to do that. Rather, I want to pull back and "get meta" with the blogospheric discussion of the paper, and especially the suggestion that it might be out of bounds for science bloggers (some of whom write the blogs that provided the data for the paper in question) to mount such a vigorous critique of a paper that was, as it turns…
jstemwedel | February 22, 2010By email, a reader asks for advice on a situation in which the personal and the professional seem like they might be on a collision course:
I am a junior at a small (< 2000 students) liberal arts college. I got recruited to be a TA for an upper division science class, and it's going swimmingly. I'm basically a troubleshooter during labs, which the professor supervises. The problem is that I've fallen for one of the students, also a junior. Is it possible for me to ethically date her? The university's handbooks are little help--sexual harassment is very strictly prohibited, but even faculty…
jstemwedel | February 20, 2010MommyProf wonders whether some of the goings on in her department are ethical. She presents two cases. I'm going to look at them in reverse order.
Case 2: Faculty member is tenure-track and he and I have collaborated on a paper. He was supposed to work on the literature, and sends me a literature review. It reads a little strangely to me, and I check the properties and find that it was actually written by an undergraduate in one of his classes. I write back to him and ask if that undergrad should be an author on the paper, since it would be a fairly major contribution, and he says yes, he…
jstemwedel | January 21, 2010In a comment on a post at Henry Gee's blog (I'd link the comment itself, but for the life of me I cannot figure out where the permalink is), Ed Yong offers his view on the relation between politeness and civility. Quoth Ed:
My objection comes when people mistake politeness for virtue rather than what it actually is - artifice masquerading as virtue. Politeness is what you teach children to tell them when and how to speak and behave before they are fully rational and capable of thinking through the moral consequences of their words and actions.
Adults, being (technically) able to do this…
jstemwedel | January 20, 2010Back in December (or as we academics call it, Exam-Grading Season), esteemed commenter Ewan told us about a horrifying situation that was unfolding for him:
Probably not totally relevant, but frankly I'm still in a little shock.
Graded exams Friday evening before heading out for weekend. Noted some really strong efforts (take-home exam), some really lame, nothing special. Then: two word-for-word identical, typos-and-all, answers with *many* unique characteristics compared to all other answerers of that Q, even down to the same joke-aside-to-the-professor.
Ack, really? Check. Yep, really, and…
jstemwedel | December 22, 2009The new piece by Natalie Angier at the New York Times may make things a little more ticklish for people who pick their food on the basis of the characteristics it has or lacks as an organism:
[B]efore we cede the entire moral penthouse to "committed vegetarians" and "strong ethical vegans," we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity…
jstemwedel | December 21, 2009It's time for Dr. Free-Ride to have a chat with the grown-ups. If you're a kid and you're reading this, think how much the adults in your life would appreciate it if you got up from the computer and put away your stuff that needs putting away (or played with your brother or sister nicely, or folded some socks).
I'll have a post with some neat-o pictures in it up in a few hours.
OK, just grown-ups here? Let's chat about the man in red.
Issue #1: Is opting into the Santa thing ethical?
This issue was raised in a comment on the New York Times Motherlode blog:
Lies. Just lies.
Though the child…
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 | November 12, 2009Steinn apparently knows how to get me riled about wrong-headed middle school fundraising initiatives, since he nearly derailed my efforts to push through my stack of grading with his recent post about one such initiative. He quotes from a Raleigh News & Observer story:
Rosewood Middle School in Goldsboro... will sell 20 test points to students in exchange for a $20-dollar donation.
Students can add 10 extra points to each of two tests of their choosing. The extra points could take a student from a "B" to an "A" on a test or from a failing grade to a passing grade.
Rosewood's principal…
jstemwedel | November 4, 2009At Bioephemera, Jessica Palmer notes a disturbing double standard:
[T]here's a huge double standard in the media, and in society in general, when it comes to drug abuse treatment. I spent two years as a AAAS Fellow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and it was both depressing and inspiring: I was deeply impressed with the dedication of the staff, and horrified by the immensity of the problem of addiction in this country. That's why it upsets me that while research to help smokers quit is generally portrayed as necessary and important, increasingly, I'm seeing politicians complain that…
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 | September 24, 2009I ended up spending a significant portion of the last several days down with something flu-like. (It included a fever and the attendant aches, chills, and sweats, as well as the upper respiratory drowning-in-my-own-mucus symptoms.)
I did not drag my ailing butt out of bed to go to the doctor and have my flu-like thing characterized. (In part, this is because I knew it would pass in a few days. In part, it was because I managed to tweak a muscle in my right side by sneezing hard and thus was unable to straighten up or be as mobile as I normally am. Someday, I swear, I am going to figure…
jstemwedel | September 17, 2009In a recent column at Business Week, Bruce Weinstein (aka "The Ethics Guy") argues that multitasking is unethical. He writes of his own technologically assisted slide into doing too many tasks at once:
I noticed that the more things I could do with ease on my computer, the harder it was to focus on any one activity. My natural inclination to jump from one thing to another prematurely was now aided and abetted by technology--the very thing that was supposed to be helping me. Then, after the PDA and cell phone became a part of my daily life, I found myself, like millions of others, faced with…
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…