tribe of science
jstemwedel | April 7, 2006Lately, I've been blogging a bit about science teaching. Most of my focus has been on teaching at the secondary level, but it turns out that there are issues to be tackled with science teaching at all levels, including the college level. You'd think, then, that when a scientist who has proven himself in the research arena (and even picked up a Nobel Prize) wants to direct his formidable talents toward improving undergraduate science instruction, he'd be in a good position to get things done.
Sadly, you'd be mistaken.
From Inside Higher Ed comes the story of Carl Wieman, a physicist at the…
jstemwedel | April 4, 2006Last week Kevin Vranes wrote an interesting post about "skeptics". One of the things he brought out is that, depending on the context, "skeptic" can be an approving label (here's someone who won't be fooled by flim-flam) or a term of abuse (there's someone who stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the facts of the matter). As well, Kevin notes that, especially when scientists are dealing with folks from outside the scientific community (e.g., journalists or politicians), terms like "skeptics" and "the mainstream" can be used to designate something like tribal memberships: here are the people…
jstemwedel | April 2, 2006In a post last week, I was trying to work out whether science journalism can do something more for us than just delivering press releases from the scientists. Specifically, I suggested that journalists with a reasonable understanding of scientific methodology could do some work to assess the credibility of the research described in the press releases, as well as the credibility of the scientists issuing those press releases.
Although the post was concerned with the general question of whether science journalism can do this bit of evaluative work for a lay audience that, by and large, is both…
jstemwedel | March 29, 2006As promised, here are some more thoughts on Steve Fuller's contribution to the Crooked Timber seminar on Chris Mooney's book, The Republican War on Science. My last post on Fuller's essay took up his picture of the workings of science, where it seemed to me he was gesturing toward the influence of democratic politics as an antidote to the influence of an elite scientific oligarchy in steering the course of science. In this post, I examine Fuller's comments on democracy, science education, and the fortunes of Intelligent Design in the scientific community.
In his response to The Republican…
jstemwedel | March 28, 2006By now you have seen the excellent Crooked Timber seminar on Chris Mooney's book, The Republican War on Science. In addition to the CT regulars, sociologist of science (and Kitzmiller vs. Dover expert witness) Steve Fuller contributed an essay to the seminar. While some in these parts have dismissed it rather quickly, I want to give it a slightly less hasty response.
At the outset, let me say that I'm not going to respond to all of Fuller's claims in the essay. For one thing, it's long; the printout (yes, I'm a Luddite), not counting comments, is seven pages of very small type. For…
jstemwedel | March 21, 2006Alex Palazzo at The Daily Transcript has posted his lighthearted take on the disciplines within the life sciences. Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers notes some important omissions while pointing out that the categories are more porous in real life. Meanwhile, Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles sets out a taxonomy of physics specialties.
If you think I'm going to give you the geek chart for chemistry or philosophy of science, you must be daft.
There are good reasons for this. Even though chemists are generally pretty good at sorting themselves and others into the broad categories (organic…
jstemwedel | March 20, 2006There are two features of science that I think a lot of people (myself included) find attractive.
One is that scientific representations of the world (theories and other theory-like things) give you powerful ways to organize lots of diverse phenomena and to find what unifies them. They get you explanatory principles that you can apply to different situations, set-ups, or critters.
The other is the empirical basis of much of our knowledge: by pointing your sense organs (and your mind) at a particular piece of the world, you can learn something about how that bit behaves, or about how it's…
jstemwedel | March 13, 2006When I was a kid, my mother went back to school with the intention of getting the physics training she needed to pursue her dream of a career in astronomy. Part of this journey, of course, required that she be plunged into the life of a graduate student. It wasn't any prettier then than it is now.
While my mom was in the thick of the horrors visited upon graduate students, she was a little bit freaked out by coverage of a parole hearing for one Theodore Streleski, an erstwhile math graduate student at Stanford who killed his advisor with a ball peen hammer. Streleski actually refused…
jstemwedel | March 2, 2006(Apologies to John Hodgman for swiping his nifty title.)
There has been some discussion in these parts about just who ought to be allowed to talk about scientific issues of various sorts, and just what kind of authority we ought to grant such talk. It's well and good to say that a journalism major who never quite finished his degree is less of an authority on matters cosmological than a NASA scientist, but what should we say about engineers or medical doctors with "concerns" about evolutionary theory? What about the property manager who has done a lot of reading? How important is all that…
jstemwedel | February 6, 2006The other day I was chatting with a colleague about teaching ethics to science majors. This colleague teaches ethics to business majors and was, I think, surprised at my general optimism. Teaching ethics to business majors*, it seems, can be discouraging.
As my colleague described it, the business majors seem to have a picture of the business world as a series of opportunities to savage, or be savaged by, one's competitors (and while there are temporary alliances to gain advantage over others, in the end everyone is your competitor). Selling business majors on the idea of not doing things…
jstemwedel | January 29, 2006Being identified as "pro-science" is pretty cool, given that some people get the idea (from my kvetching about ethics) that I'm against science. (I'm against sloppy or dishonest methodology masquerading as science, but that doesn't make me an enemy of science.) But that was about the only part of the widely distributed ID survey that gave me the warm fuzzies.
What bugs me the most about the survey is that it isn't looking for actual information -- or, if it is, it's very badly designed -- so much as it is looking to force a certain response from the targeted respondants. Really, we're…
jstemwedel | January 26, 2006Today I had my first (non-virtual) class meetings of the spring semester. There's nothing like having every available seat filled and then having folks stream in to sit on the floor to make an academic feel popular. (Of course, in the past, a significant portion of those who have gotten add-codes have then disappeared until the midterm, after which most of those disappeared for good. But right now I'm popular!)
When it came time to give "the talk" about academic integrity, I was less dispassionate than I have been in years past. It's no secret that I think plagiarism is lame. But, in the…
jstemwedel | January 18, 2006The commenters here at ScienceBlogs are da bomb! Just look at the insight they contributed to my previous post on fakery in science. Indeed, let's use some of that insight to see if we can get a little bit further on the matter of how to discourage scientists from making it up rather than, you know, actually doing good science.
Three main strategies emerged from the comments so far:
Make the potential payoff of cheating very low compared to the work involved in getting away with it and the penalty you'll face if caught (thus, making just doing good science the most cost-effective strategy…
jstemwedel | January 17, 2006Well, the new digs here at ScienceBlogs have thin walls (GrrlScientist, will you please turn down that stereo!), which means that sometimes we get sucked into the conversations our neighbors are having. And, almost as if this were the complex at Melrose Place (shut up!), a lot of us have been chattering about the same people, notably Hwang Woo Suk.
So, for example, I've been hearing Chris Mooney telling his guests that, peer review or no peer review, the community of scientists will always include some fakers. Through the air-vent, I've got PZ Myers musing on how detection (or not) of the…
jstemwedel | January 12, 2006While folks are often attentive to the harms scientists might do to other people (through unethical treatment of human subjects, or toxic dumping, or whatever), they seem not to worry so much about scientist-on-scientist cruelty. I'm not talking about having your boss in the lab force you to donate ova or anything. In fact, the kind of cruelty I have in mind today is much harder to pin on individual actors. Rather, it's a sort of cruelty that seems to be built into the institutional structures of science.
Which, for the scientist, kind of sucks.
What started me thinking about…