institutional ethics
jstemwedel | February 23, 2008There's another development in Aetogate, which you'll recall saw paleontologists William Parker, Jerzy Dzik, and Jeff Martz alleging that Spencer Lucas and his colleagues at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNHS) were making use of their work or fossil resources without giving them proper credit. Since I last posted on the situation, NMMNHS decided to convene an ethics panel to consider the allegations. This ought to be good news, right?
It probably depends on what one means by "consider".
On Thursday, February 21, the Albuquerque Journal reported that this ethics…
jstemwedel | January 31, 2008A recent news item by Rex Dalton in Nature [1] caught my attention. From the title ("Fossil reptiles mired in controversy") you might think that the aetosaurs were misbehaving. Rather, the issue at hand is whether senior scientists at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science were taking advantage of an in-house publishing organ (the NMMNHS Bulletin) to beat other paleontologists to the punch in announcing research findings -- and whether they did so with knowledge of the other researchers' efforts and findings.
From the article:
The disputed articles name and describe different…
jstemwedel | January 10, 2008Saying you've seen everything is just asking the universe to do you one better. So I won't. Still, this story nearly required grubbing around the floor on my hands and knees to find the location to which my jaw had dropped:
Bogus university scam uncovered
Investigation
By Nigel Morris
BBC London Investigations Producer
An international education scam that targets foreign students who come to study in the capital has been exposed by a BBC London investigation.
The bogus Irish International University (IIU), which offers sub-standard and worthless degrees, has been allowed to flourish in…
jstemwedel | January 8, 2008Regular readers of this blog know that I teach an ethics class aimed at science majors, in which I have a whole semester to set out ethical considerations that matter when you're doing science. There's a lot to cover, so the pace is usually more breakneck than leisurely.
Still, it's rather more time for detail and reflection than I get in the four 50 minute lectures of the ethics module in the introduction to engineering class. In that context, my main goal is to persuade the students that ethical considerations aren't completely disconnected from the professional community of engineers…
jstemwedel | November 15, 2007The November 5, 2007 issue of Chemical & Engineering News has an editorial by Rudy M. Baum [UPDATE: notbehind a paywall; apparently all the editorials are freely accessible online] looking at the "Google model" for disseminating information.
Baum writes:
I did a Yahoo search on "information wants to be free." The first hit returned was for Wikipedia, the free, collaborative online encyclopedia; according to it, the phrase was first pronounced by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Brand was quoted as saying: "On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because…
jstemwedel | October 3, 2007I'm pretty sure the National Collegiate Athletic Association doesn't want college athletes -- or the athletics programs supporting them -- to cheat their way through college. However, this article at Inside Higher Ed raises the question of whether some kind of cheating isn't the best strategy to give the NCAA what it's asking for.
From the article:
[M]any agree that the climate has changed in college athletics in ways that may make such misbehavior more likely. And it has happened since the NCAA unveiled its latest set of academic policies that raised the stakes on colleges to show that…
jstemwedel | September 20, 2007Tara notices that social networking site Facebook has decided, in the enforcement of their policy against "nudity, drug use, or other obscene content", that pictures of breastfeeding babies are obscene. As such, the Facebook obscenity squad had been removing them -- and has deleted the account of at least one mom who had posted such pictures.
Break out the Ouija board and get late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who famously claimed that he couldn't define obscenity, but he knew it when he saw it. As far as the legal definition goes, "obscene" seems to be roughly equivalent to "…
jstemwedel | August 1, 2007The Des Moines Register reports a bit of a to-do at the University of Iowa about whether the College of Public Health will be accepting a "naming gift" from Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Some objections have been raised on the basis that a giant of the health insurance industry might have (or be seen to have) significantly different values and goals than a college of public health:
Several faculty members whose e-mails became public Monday opposed linking the college's name with Wellmark.
"While it's good to get support, selling the name of the cph to a commercial interest and all…
jstemwedel | June 30, 2007An earlier post tried to characterize the kind of harm it might do to an academic research lab if a recent graduate were to take her lab notebooks with her rather than leaving them with the lab group. This post generated a lot of discussion, largely because a number of commenters questioned the assumption that the lab group (and particularly the principal investigator) has a claim to the notebooks that outweighs the claim of the graduate researcher who actually did the research documented in her lab notebooks.
As I mentioned in my comments to the earlier post, in many cases there is an…
jstemwedel | June 26, 2007 I recently read a book by regular Adventures in Ethics and Science commenter Solomon Rivlin. Scientific Misconduct and Its Cover-Up: Diary of a Whistleblower is an account of a university response to allegations of misconduct gone horribly wrong. I'm hesitant to describe it as the worst possible response -- there are surely folks who could concoct a scenario where administrative butt-covering maneuvers bring about the very collapse of civilization, or at least a bunch of explosions -- but the horror of the response described here is that it was real:
The events and personalities…
jstemwedel | June 25, 2007Chad got to this first (cursed time zones), but I want to say a bit about the Inside Higher Ed article on the tumult in the Philosophy Department at the College of William & Mary that concerns, at least in part, how involved junior faculty should be in major departmental decisions:
Should tenure-track faculty members who are not yet tenured vote on new hires?
Paul S. Davies, one of the professors who pressed to exclude the junior professors from voting, stressed that such a shift in the rules would protect them. "If you have junior people voting, they have tenure in the back of their…
jstemwedel | June 23, 2007Zuska reminded me that today is the one-year anniversary of the suicide of Denice Denton, an accomplished electrical engineer, tireless advocate for the inclusion and advancement of women in science and, at the time of her death, the chancellor of UC-Santa Cruz.
I never met Denton, and a year ago my feelings about her were complicated. On one side was her clear public voice against unexamined acceptance of longstanding assumptions about gender difference; from an article dated 26 June, 2006 in Inside Higher Ed:
She was in the audience when Lawrence H. Summers made the controversial comments…
jstemwedel | May 16, 2007My recent post on the feasibility (or not) of professionalizing peer review, and of trying to make replication of new results part of the process, prompted quite a discussion in the comments. Lots of people noted that replication is hard (and indeed, this is something I've noted before), and few were convinced that full-time reviewers would have the expertise or the objectivity to do a better job at reviewing scientific manuscripts than the reviewers working under the existing system.
To the extent that building a body of reliable scientific knowledge matters, though, we have to take a hard…
jstemwedel | April 27, 2007I haven't mentioned it here before, but I'm currently working on a project to launch an online dialogue at my university (using a weblog, of course) to engage different members of the campus community with the question of what they think the college experience here ought to be, and how we can make that happen. The project team has a bunch of great people on it, and we thought we had anticipated all the "stake holders" at the university from whom we ought to seek "buy-in".
As we were poised to execute the project, we discovered that we had forgotten one:
The Institutional Review Board.
Yes…
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 | October 31, 2006Yesterday, I recalled MIT's dismissal of one of its biology professors for fabrication and falsification, both "high crimes" in the world of science. Getting caught doing these is Very Bad for a scientist -- which makes the story of Luk Van Parijs all the more puzzling.
As the story unfolded a year ago, the details of the investigation suggested that at least some of Van Parijs lies may have been about details that didn't matter so much -- which means he was taking a very big risk for very little return. Here's what I wrote then:
The conduct of fired MIT biology professor Luk Van Parijs, as…
jstemwedel | October 30, 2006Just over a year ago, MIT fired an associate professor of biology for fabrication and falsification. While scientific misconduct always incurs my ire, one of the things that struck me when the sad story of Luk Van Parijs broke was how well all the other parties in the affair -- from the MIT administrators right down to the other members of the Van Parijs lab -- acquitted themselves in a difficult situation.
Here's what I wrote when the story broke last year:
Can you believe there's another story in the news about a scientist caught fabricating and falsifying data? Also, the sky is blue.…
jstemwedel | July 15, 2006After my post yesterday suggesting that women scientists may still have a harder time being accepted in academic research settings than their male counterparts, Greensmile brought my attention to a story in today's Boston Globe. It seems that almost a dozen professors at MIT believe they lost a prospective hire due to intimidation of the job candidate by another professor who happens also to be a Nobel laureate. Possibly it matters that the professor alleged to have intimidated the job candidate is male, and that the job candidate and the 11 professors who have written the letter of…
jstemwedel | July 7, 2006Just one more follow up on the matter of how research universities will make do as federal funds for research dry up. Some have suggested that the answer will come from more collaboration between university labs and researchers in private industry.
Perhaps it will. But, a recent article in the Boston Globe about conflicts within the Broad Institute is suggestive of the kinds of clashes of philosophy that might make university-industry collaborations challenging. From the article:
Just over a year ago, Cambridge's prestigious Broad Institute started an idealistic medical-research project,…
jstemwedel | June 11, 2006Wrestling overgrown rose bushes out of the ground may be harder than wrestling gators. (At the very least, it seems to take longer, while provoking less sympathy).
Anyway, while I'm recovering from that, here's a "classic" post from the old location. It was originally posted 5 January 2006, but the ethical issues are still fresh.
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Since I'm in the blessed wee period between semesters, it's time to revisit some "old news" (i.e., stuff that I had to set aside in the end-of-semester crush). Today, a story from about a month ago, wherein the Rick Weiss of the Washington Post reports…