harassment
kkrisberg | May 24, 2016At San Jose Mercury News, Louis Hansen reports on the “hidden” workforce of foreign workers that helped expand a Fremont plant for car manufacturer Tesla. The story begins with Gregor Lesnik, an unemployed electrician from Slovenia, who, according to his visa application, was supposed to work in South Carolina. Hansen writes:
The companies that arranged his questionable visa instead sent Lesnik to a menial job in Silicon Valley. He earned the equivalent of $5 an hour to expand the plant for one of the world’s most sophisticated companies, Tesla Motors.
Lesnik’s three-month tenure ended a year…
oracknows | March 31, 2016I wish this post were an April Fools Day joke, but it is not.
Three weeks ago, Skeptical Raptor and I wrote posts describing how a particularly vicious, nasty antivaccine troll named Heather Murray had successfully gamed Facebook reporting algorithms intended to report abuse in order to silence pro-science bloggers. It is, unfortunately, a tactic that I first heard about over two years ago, when antivaccine activists affiliated with what was then called the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) used the same sort of tactics to target pro-science bloggers and activists associated with a group…
oracknows | March 10, 2016Nearly eleven years ago, back in April 2005, I opened my work e-mail (I was working at a different university back then) and saw an e-mail from someone whose name I had seen before, one Mr. William P. O'Neill. Opening the e-mail, I was shocked to find an e-mail to Orac; worse, the e-mail was cc'ed to my cancer center director, my division chief, and my chairman. In it, O'Neill outed me as Orac and was threatening to sue me over a post I did. Naturally, it was interspersed with accusations of my being a "pharma shill" and having lied about him. Now here's the odd thing. This is the post that…
oracknows | April 18, 2014For some reason, I was really beat last night, and, given that this weekend is a holiday for a large proportion of the country (if, perhaps, not for a large proportion of my readership), I don't feel too bad about slacking off a bit by mentioning a couple of short bits that I wanted to blog about but didn't get around to. And what better topic to blog about on Good Friday than the exact opposite of what this Easter season is supposed to be about, namely the behavior of antivaccinationists? I realize it's an easy target, but, hey, I'm tired. Besides, it amuses me, and, as I've said so many…
esiegel | October 23, 2013"Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing." -John Stuart Mill
No one becomes a master overnight, and practically no one does it without the outside help and support of not just a mentor, but of a number of peers, advisors and other allies along the way. At least, that was my story.
Image credit: University of Baltimore.
I remember being an undergraduate. I remember the combined struggles of rigorous academics, self-confidence crises, trying to figure myself out as a person, and trying to make friends and forge relationships all at…
oracknows | September 4, 2013Antivaccinationists, quacks, and apologists for antivaccinationists and quacks (but I repeat myself) seem to have an illusion that I'm just swimming in pharma lucre, that I sit in my underwear grinding out magnum opus-worthy after magnum opus-worthy blog posts, all so that I can rake in the cash hand over fist, lead a life of pure luxury, and enjoy ruthlessly crushing any hint of dissent regarding science-based medicine. Even if that assessment were completely true, as Lord Draconis Zeneca tells us that it is, it's not all easy being a prolific, logorrheic pharma shill servilely doing the…
gregladen | August 7, 2013Update: Never mind, Never mind! Scientific American Blogs has taken down Dr. Stollznow's post. So, I guess everything is OK now! False Alarm, everyone go home. Nothing to see here.
Say you are a woman in the Skeptics or Secular movement, professional, possibly working for one of the big organizations. If you are sexually harassed (or worse), the way you get your voice heard is, apparently, to blog your heart out, or use an anonymous tumbler.
That is wrong. Organizations such as JREF and CFI should have been places that were safe, and that would facilitate and amplify your voice as…
lborkowski | August 23, 2011As those of you who read other ScienceBlogs are probably already aware, the ScienceBlogs overlords have decided that all bloggers on this network must blog under their own names -- no more pseudonyms. I don't understand or agree with this policy. Some of my favorite ScienceBlogs are written by authors using pseudonyms, and the quality of their content is consistently high. Readers may not be able to check these authors' credentials, so the amount of trust they place in the authors' blogs is based on the content of posts. (I don't know that quality and credibility are the rationale for the no-…
tsmith | August 23, 2011Our new Scienceblogs overlords sure have great timing with their new pseudonymous blogging rules. For those who haven't run across that yet, National Geographic has decided to eliminate pseudonyms and force everyone with a blog remaining here (which is already dwindling) to blog under their real names. Meanwhile, out here in the real world, there's a new unfortunate case study (short version: "EpiGate") showing how blogging under one's real name can lead to serious threats and potential loss of employment, among other things.
I blog under my own name (obviously), but if I were starting out…