tribe of science
jstemwedel | February 3, 2007In a guest-post at Asymptotia, Sabine Hossenfelder suggests some really good reasons for scientists to communicate with non-scientists -- and not just to say, "Give us more research funding and we'll give you an even smaller iPod." She really gets to the heart of what's at stake:
I find it kind of ironic that during the last decades this ancient desire of men to just understand had to be more and more justified by the prospect of material output. Nowadays, governmental funding goes primarily into applied sciences, ideally into military applications, many of which fulfill the only purpose to…
jstemwedel | February 3, 2007During the discussion after my talk at the Science Blogging Conference, the question came up (and was reported here) of whether and when tenure and promotion committees at universities will come to view the blogging activities of their faculty members with anything more positive than suspicion.
SteveG and helmut both offer some interesting thoughts on the issue.
SteveG takes up the idea that academic blogging can often be a productive way to communicate the knowledge produced in the Ivory Tower to the broader public. Arguably, public outreach is part of the larger mission of institutions…
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 24, 2007Larry Moran posts a response to my response to his earlier post on the advisability of putting ethical discussions into science classes. Careful fellow that he is, he's decided to stick to a single issue per posting, so he starts with "the relationship between science and technology and where 'ethics' fits in". Larry opines:
Part of what we need to do as science teachers is to make sure our students understand the difference between science and technology -- between the uses of science and the accumulation of scientific knowledge. ...
The goal, as far as I am concerned, is to convince…
jstemwedel | January 22, 2007In a post about curricular issues in genetics and biochemistry courses, Larry Moran raises some good questions:
It's almost a requirement these days that introductory genetics courses include a section on genetically modified crops. This invariably leads to tutorials, or labs, or essays, about whether GM-foods are a good thing or not. These discussions are usually lots of fun and the students enjoy this part of the course. Professors are convinced they are teaching ethics and that it's a good thing to show students that ethics is an important part of science.
In introductory biochemistry…
jstemwedel | January 11, 2007At the AAS meeting in Seattle, Rob Knop risked his own well-being to get the details on a poster that was, shall we say, waaaay out of the mainstream. Quoth Rob:
Now, don't get me wrong. There will be a lot of posters with data or theory that turns out to be wrong, and there are a lot of posters that disagree with each other and debate and dispute the best interpretation of the data. That's the normal process of science. The nuts here... they think they're participating in the normal process of science, but they do not understand it well enough to realize that they are just cranks, nothing…
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 15, 2006Razib tossed off a post expressing amazement that a very attractive wine bar hostess was making science fiction recommendations. The noteworthy feature, apparently, was "the intersection of science fiction & female physical hotitude."
Predictably, others have commented on this post, worrying about the casual profiling of hot chicks as not into S/F, or perhaps of women who are into S/F as closeted ugly chicks (or closeted boys).
Should I pile on? Maybe just a little.
Even if the original claim was restricted to the probability of the intersection of (people who like) science fiction and…
jstemwedel | December 7, 2006... Page 3.14 shares the transcript. Go read what we said when Ben Cohen and I shot the cyberbreeze about Karl Popper and the allure he holds for scientists.
I can't promise it will leave you ROTFLYAO, but it might make you :-)
TTFN.
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 15, 2006Like sailors we are, who must rebuild their ship upon the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry dock or to reconstruct it there from the best materials.
Otto Neurath, "Protocol Sentences"
* * * * *
The Neurath quotation above was offered to explain something about scientific theories and scientific knowledge, but today it puts me in mind of scientific communities instead. For surely, if we could bring the ship of science to dry-dock, there are lots of rotten planks that we might replace with strong new lumber, but that's not an option. We have to fix the old tub while it's still at…
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 | October 26, 2006We're just past the midpoint of National Chemistry Week, so I thought I'd share a "classic" post (from last year's National Chemistry Week) about how studying chemistry can nourish one's human yearnings.
What's so great about chemistry? Of course, if you're a kid, chemistry has the allure of magic -- something might explode! (For those averse to permanent damage, there are plenty of cool chemistry activities that are much safer than whatever my brother did with his store-bought chemistry set to scorch the hell out of our parents' card table.) But I suspect it's real charm for students, at…
jstemwedel | October 24, 2006There is a bunch of interesting stuff to read on the subject of teaching, learning, and being part of an academic department right now. Here are a few links I think deserve your attention:
Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study (PDF) whose results suggest that married grad students may do better than single grad students at completing their Ph.D.s, publishing while in school, and landing tenure-track jobs. Interestingly, the advantage is greater for married male graduate students than for married female graduate students, and domestic partnership seem to confer less advantage here than…
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 9, 2006I'm blaming the folks at Three Bulls! for the post that incited this one. Indeed, I started my descent into what is clearly a delusional plan in a comment there.
The short version: Pinko Punko was disturbed at how very little actual communication of content was involved in a presumably science-centered media frenzy. The "journalists" in question neither sought actual informative content from scientists (let alone striving to understand that content), nor passed on anything like it to their viewers. To those of us who expect journalism to communicate actual content (or at least try to),…
jstemwedel | October 9, 2006In a post months and months ago, I wrote the following*:
I've heard vague claims that there are some cultures in which "plagiarism" as defined by U.S. standards is not viewed as an ethical breach at all, and that this may explain some instances of plagiarism among scientists and science students working in the U.S. after receiving their foundational educational experiences in such cultures. To my readers oversees: Is there any truth to these claims? (I'm suspicious, at least in part because of an incident I know of at my school where a student from country X, caught plagiarising, asserted, "…
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, 2006As Bora noted, this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Roger D. Kornberg for a piece of research (the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription) that strikes lots of folks as being within the bounds of biology rather than chemistry.
I can't do an elaborate discourse on this (as I have sprog-related errands I must do this afternoon), but I want to get some initial responses to this on the table:
There is no Nobel Prize in Biology, although there is one in Medicine or Physiology. Do the biologists think Kornberg's research would be a better fit for the Medicine or Physiology…