tribe of science
jstemwedel | May 14, 2007When my "Ethics in Science" class was discussing scientific communication (especially via peer reviewed journals), we talked about what peer review tries to accomplish -- subjecting a report of a scientific finding to the critical scrutiny of other trained scientists, who evaluate the quality of the scientific arguments presented in the manuscript, and how well they fit with the existing knowledge or arguments in the relevant scientific field.
We also talked about the challenges of getting peer review to function ideally and the limits of what peer review can accomplish (something I also…
jstemwedel | May 11, 2007It has recently transpired that I will be teaching (and before that, designing and constructing) a brand new ethics module in the large introduction to engineering class at my university that all the freshman who are majoring in any of the multitude of engineering disciplines must take. I'm jazzed, of course, that the College of Engineering thinks that it's worth cultivating in their students the idea that ethics is an integral part of being a good engineer (and a good engineering student), so much so that they are devoting two weeks in the fifteen week term to this. And, I want to do a…
jstemwedel | May 1, 2007We just hit the point in the semester where my "Ethics in Science" class discusses the novel Cantor's Dilemma by Carl Djerassi. For those who inhabit the world of scientific research -- and for those who don't but are hungry for an insight to how human relationships and scientific activities are entwined -- it's a nice little novel. (Indeed, I've discussed it already in a couple other posts.)
What I'm going to discuss in this post is a situation that's pretty much at the end of Cantor's Dilemma, a situation where my view of what was most likely to happen after the last page (in Novel-land,…
jstemwedel | April 30, 2007Jake, Chad, and Rob have posted about a newly published study about the benefits of research experiences for undergraduates. The quick version is that involvement in research (at least in science/technology/engineering/mathematics disciplines) seems to boost the student's enthusiasm for the subject and confidence, not to mention nearly doubling the chances that the student will pursue a Ph.D.
I'm going to chime in with some observations of my own:
1. Making knowledge is different from learning knowledge.
One of the important things undergraduate research can do is give a student insight to…
jstemwedel | April 26, 2007An important part of the practice of science is not just the creation of knowledge but also the transmission of that knowledge. Knowledge that's stuck in your head or lab notebooks doesn't do anyone else any good. So, scientists are supposed to spread the knowledge through means such as peer reviewed scientific journals. And, scientists are supposed to do their level best to make sure the findings they report are honest and accurate.
Sometimes, scientists screw up. Ideally, scientists who have screwed up in a scientific communication need to set the record straight. Just what is involved…
jstemwedel | April 25, 2007Pencils ready? Here's a quick quiz; circle all that apply*:
1. You're a scientist and you've just published some research in a peer reviewed journal. You want:
a. Scientists in your field to read and discuss your work.
b. Interested non-scientists to get the important bits of what you found and why it matters, whether by powering through the article themselves or by getting a clear explanation of the article from a scientist.
c. No discussion of your article at all -- once it's on the page in the journal, there's nothing else to say about it.
d. All discussions of your findings to be based…
jstemwedel | April 18, 2007I have some posts gestating on ethical issues in science, but I have to clear a bit more grading and committee work before I can do them justice. In the meantime, I want to pose a set of questions to those of you who teach labs and/or supervise laboratory research:
Have you been asked to adapt your laboratories for students or researchers with disabilities?
If so, what kinds of adaptations have you been able to implement?
What kinds of disabilities have provided the biggest challenge from the point of view of coming up with a good adaptation?
Are there instances in which your efforts to…
jstemwedel | April 5, 2007Those who follow the political blogs more closely than I do were probably aware eons ago that some of the A-list political bloggers significantly trimmed their blogrolls (while dubbing it, strangely enough, a blogroll "amnesty"). Others, like Terrance at the Republic of T (who is as close to the Platonic form of Serious and Engaging Blogger as any blogger of whom I'm aware), took note of this just recently, with a thoughtful post about the interactions of the various "tiers" of the blogosphere and the ways hierarchies get entrenched. Chris Clarke and Pam Spaulding also wrote insightfully…
jstemwedel | March 28, 2007Steve Gimbel has a provocative post that suggests the costs of undergraduate lab classes may outweigh the benefits. Quoth Steve:
[E]verything I know about physics, I learned from my theory classes. You see, science classes come in two flavors. There are theory classes where a prof stands in front of the room and lectures and then there are lab classes where for many hours, students walk in ill-prepared and tried to figure out which one of these things we've never seen before is a potentiometer, fumble their way through procedures that yield results that are not even close to what they were…
jstemwedel | March 19, 2007One of my students raised a really good question in class today, a question to which I do not know the answer -- but maybe you do.
We were discussing some of the Very Bad Experiments* that prompted current thinking** about what it is and is not ethically permissible to do with human subjects of scientific research. We had noted that institutions like our university have an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that must approve your protocol before you can conduct research with human subjects. At this point, my student asked:
Are there cases where researchers send protocols to the IRB that are…
jstemwedel | March 1, 2007This is another piece in the discussion currently raging about the latitude members of a profession ought to have to follow conscience over the dictates of the profession.
Professions are communities of a sort. What unites them is that the members of that community are taking on a certain set of shared values.
This does not mean all members of a given profession are unanimous about all their values. A profession does not assimilate its members like the Borg. Indeed, there's something to be said for a professional community that reflects a diversity of values and perspectives -- it gives…
jstemwedel | February 26, 2007On the post in which I resorted to flowcharts to try to unpack people's claims about the process involved in building scientific knowledge, Torbjörn Larsson raised a number of concerns:
The first problem I have was with "belief". I have seen, and forgotten, that it is used in two senses in english - for trust, and for conviction. Rather like for theory, the weaker term isn't appropriate here. I would say that theories gives us trust in repeatability of predicted observations, and that kind of trust counts as knowledge. In fact, already the trust repeated observations gives count as…
jstemwedel | February 24, 2007This is another attempt to get to the bottom of what's bugging people about the case of Marcus Ross, Ph.D. in geosciences and Young Earth Creationist. Here, I've tried to distill the main hypotheticals from my last post on the issue into flowcharts*, in the hopes that this will make it easier for folks to figure out just what they want to say about the proper way to build scientific knowledge..
First, here's the process that no one thinks is a good description of how to come to a scientific conclusion:
Believing something doesn't make it so. Science is an endeavor that is not concerned…
jstemwedel | February 22, 2007Following up on my query about what it would take for a Young Earth Creationist "to write a doctoral dissertation in geosciences that is both 'impeccable' in the scientific case it presents and intellectually honest," I'm going to say something about the place of belief in the production of scientific knowledge. Indeed, this is an issue I've dealt with before (and it's at least part of the subtext of the demarcation problem), but for some reason the Marcus Ross case is one where drawing the lines seems trickier.
First, for the sake of argument, I want to set aside all questions of Marcus…
jstemwedel | February 21, 2007By now, you may have heard (via Pharyngula, or Sandwalk, or the New York Times) about Marcus Ross, who was recently granted a Ph.D. in geosciences by the University of Rhode Island. To earn that degree, he wrote a dissertation (which his dissertation advisor described as "impeccable") about the abundance and spread of marine reptiles called mosasaurs which disappeared about 65 million years ago.
Curiously, the newly-minted Dr. Ross is open about his view that the Earth is at most 10,000 years old.
There have been interesting discussions in the comments on the linked posts about what…
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 | February 10, 2007In my basic concepts post on theory testing, I set out what I take to be a fairly standard understanding of "theory" in philosophy of science discussions:
... a theory is a group of hypotheses that make claims about what kind of entities there are and how those entities change over time and interact with each other. If you like, the theory contains claims about ontology and laws. If you prefer, the theory tells you what kind of stuff there is and how that stuff behaves.
In a comment, Lab Lemming opined:
That's a really odd way to think of theories. I reckon a theory is something that is…
jstemwedel | February 8, 2007As part of my graduate coursework in chemistry, I took a biophysical chemistry course from Professor Wray Huestis -- not because my research was in biophysical chemistry, but because I was curious. Possibly my best move ever in choosing my classes, since she gave us one of the smartest and most useful writing assignments I've ever encountered.
The task was to write a proposal for a novel piece of research in biophysical chemistry.
To start, you had to read around to figure out what the outstanding problems were. You also had to read around to get a sense of what kinds of experimental…
jstemwedel | February 7, 2007I'm following up on yesterday's post on where scientists learn how to write (and please, keep those comments coming).
First, Chad Orzel has a nice post about how he learned to write like a scientist. It involves torturing drafts on the rack, and you owe it to yourself to read it.
Second, I'll be putting up a post tonight about the best scientific writing assignment ever, at least in my graduate school experience. It's one more professors teaching graduate students might consider adapting.
In the meantime, I want to throw out a set of factors that probably make a difference in the process of…
jstemwedel | February 6, 2007During my office hours today, a student asked me whether, when I was a chemistry student, the people teaching me chemistry also took steps to teach me how to write. (The student's experience, in an undergraduate major in a scientific field I won't name here, was that the writing intesive course did nothing significant to teach good writing, and the assignments did very little to improve students' writing.)
It's such a good question, I'm going to repackage it as a set of questions to the scientists, scientists-in-training, and educators of scientists:
Do scientists need to write well? If so…