tribe of science
jstemwedel | September 5, 2008In a comment on another post, Blatnoi asks for my take on a recent news item in Nature:
An Italian-led research group's closely held data have been outed by paparazzi physicists, who photographed conference slides and then used the data in their own publications.
For weeks, the physics community has been buzzing with the latest results on 'dark matter' from a European satellite mission known as PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics). Team members have talked about their latest results at several recent conferences ... but beyond a quick flash of a…
jstemwedel | August 12, 2008As a follow-up to my last post, it looks like I should offer a more detailed explanation of why exactly scientific activity is a group activity -- not simply as a matter of convenience, but as a matter of necessity. Helen E. Longino has already made this case very persuasively in her book Science as Social Knowledge (specifically the chapter called "Values and Objectivity"), so I'm going to use this post to give a sketch of her argument.
The upshot of the argument is that objective knowledge requires the involvement of other people in the building. All by yourself, there is no way to move…
jstemwedel | August 12, 2008Chad Orzel takes a commenter to task for fetishizing peer review:
Saying that only peer-reviewed articles (or peer-reviewable articles) count as science only reinforces the already pervasive notion that science is something beyond the reach of "normal" people. In essence, it's saying that only scientists can do science, and that science is the exclusive province of geeks and nerds.
That attitude is, I think, actively harmful to our society. It's part of why we have a hard time getting students to study math and science, and finding people to teach math and science. We shouldn't be…
jstemwedel | July 25, 2008Go to Cosmic Variance at once to read Julianne Dalcanton's musings on why spherical jerks (not the word she uses) are preferable to the asymmetric ones:
No one is surprised when a known, calibrated asshole acts up. We all just adjust the gain on our emotional response and carry on. I've been quite fond of many assholes through the years, and when I look back, the one trait they shared was that while they may have been ornery, they were at least predictable.
Go read the whole thing to explore the topology of the muppethuggers she's been having to deal with lately.
jstemwedel | July 9, 2008Finally, here is the long awaited fourth part in my three part series examining the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology Ethics Education Committee response to the allegations of scientific misconduct against Spencer Lucas and co-workers. Part 3 was a detailed examination of the "best practices" document (PDF) issued by this committee. In this post, I make a brief foray into the conversations paleontologists have been having online about their understanding of the accepted practices in their field.
As these conversations are ongoing (and some of them are happening on listservs to which I do…
jstemwedel | July 4, 2008Blogging has been a bit light lately, in part because I was persuaded to teach half of a graduate seminar during the summer session. The first half of the seminar looked at philosophical approaches to epistemology (basically, a set of issues around what counts as knowledge and what could count as reasonable ways to build knowledge). The second half, which I am teaching, shifts the focus to what scientists seem to be doing when they build knowledge (or knowledge claims, or theories, or tentative findings).
In the course of our reading for this week, I came upon a couple passages in a chapter…
jstemwedel | June 25, 2008Over at DrugMonkey, PhysioProf delivers a mission statement:
Our purpose here at DrugMonkey is to try to help people identify and cultivate the tools required to succeed within the system of academic science as it currently exists. We did not create this system, and we are not in a position to to "take it down". We do the best we can to help the people we train in our own labs to succeed within this system, and we try to share some of our insights here at the blog.
In a winner-take-all system like this, there will always be people who do not succeed through no fault of their own. People who…
jstemwedel | June 19, 2008In a follow-up to her review of Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women scientists speak out by Emily Monosson, Alison George decided to investigate how many women who won Nobels also did the motherhood thing:
I started at the first Nobel prize awarded to a woman: Marie Curie, in 1903. To my surprise, she had 2 children (as well as 2 Nobel prizes). Her daughter, Irene, only managed one prize in 1935, but also produced two offspring. And so it went on. Gerty Cori (Nobel prize for in physiology or medicine 1947, 1 kid), Maria Geoppert-Mayer (Nobel prize for physics in 1963, 2 kids)…
jstemwedel | June 10, 2008As promised, in this post I'm examining the "best practices" document (PDF) issued by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Ethics Education Committee in the wake of the "Aetogate" allegations. Here, I'll discuss the specific recommendations made in that document. And in an upcoming post, I'll turn to some of the discussions paleontologists are now having (through the magic of the Internet) on the accepted practices in their field, in hopes of gaining some insight to the fit between actual practices and the "best practices" described by the SVP Ethics Education Committee.
The first section…
jstemwedel | June 2, 2008Following up on the post in which I examined how the SVP Ethics Education Committee responded to the allegations of unethical conduct that have come to be known as "Aetogate," this post will discuss what the committee identifies as the "lessons learned" from this investigation. Once again, I'll be drawing from the Statement from the Executive Committee (PDF). The third post will consider the "best practices" (PDF) proposed by the committee.
The Statement from the Executive Committee enumerates seven "lessons learned," couching these in terms of ways "these conflict might have been avoided…
jstemwedel | May 30, 2008A week ago, while I was busy grading and being tenured, the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology released its report on the allegations that have come to be known as "Aetogate" (about which I've posted here, here, here, and here). ReBecca was kind enough to forward the Statement from the Executive Committee (PDF) and the accompanying "Best practices" document (PDF). Also, you should read what Brian and Chris have to say about the decision.
Since I'm finding myself with a lot to say about these documents, I'm going to break it up into more digestible pieces. This post will examine how the…
jstemwedel | May 1, 2008This post is standing in for a lecture and class discussion that would be happening today if I knew how to be in two places at once. (Welcome Phil. 133 students! Make yourselves at home in the comments, and feel free to use a pseudonym if you'd rather not comment under your real name.)
The topic at hand is the way relationships in research groups influence the kind of science that comes out of those groups, as well as the understanding the members of the group have of what it means to do good science. Our jumping off point is an article by Vivian Weil and Robert Arzbaecher titled "…
jstemwedel | April 30, 2008Maria has an awesome post about her thoughts upon wrapping up her Master's thesis. It captures the kind of shifts one can have in figuring out what to do, who to be, and how schooling fits into all of that -- and how what's at stake is as much emotional as it is intellectual. She writes:
I have found that clinging too stubbornly to long-term goals is actually bad for me. Not because the goals themselves are bad, but I tend to become emotionally overinvested in them, and then I freak! out! at the slightest threat to my success. Learning to keep things in perspective has meant, for me,…
jstemwedel | April 27, 2008Via Crooked Timber, I see that philosopher Simon Blackburn would like to dispel some myths. (He does this in the inaugural article of a Times Higher Education series "in which academics range beyond their area of expertise".) Of the ten myths Blackburn identifies for busting, the one that caught my attention was "the myth of the scientist":
This claims that there is an expertise, science, and that people who are good at it deserve a lot of attention. This is almost wholly false. There is no such thing as a scientist, and it is a shame that William Whewell, a rather patchy philosopher (…
jstemwedel | April 26, 2008On April Fool's Day, our local Socrates Café had an interesting discussion around the question of what makes something funny. One observation that came up repeatedly was that most jokes seem aimed at particular audiences -- at people who share particular assumptions, experiences, and contexts with the person telling the joke. The expectation is that those "in the know" will recognize what's funny, and that those who don't see the humor are failing to find the funny because they're not in possession of the crucial knowledge or insight held by those in the in-group. Moreover, the person…
jstemwedel | April 21, 2008In the aftermath of a pretty enthusiastic pile-on to a claim that Expelled! had a successful first week of release, Chris Mooney calls for "serious introspection about the massive communication crisis we're facing in the science world".
You know I'm always up for introspection.
Indeed, regular readers have been very patient with my labored attempts to get clear on the whole "framing" thing. While I'm not prepared to advertise myself as any kind of expert on framing, I finally think I know what questions I'd like to ask of the people with framing expertise to try to sort out the ongoing slug-…
jstemwedel | April 17, 2008Janet D. Stemwedel: Hey, can we talk about pseudonymous blogging?
Dr. Free-Ride: Haven't you already written a bunch of posts about that?
Janet D. Stemwedel: Yeah, but the blogosphere seems to be discussing it again.
Dr. Free-Ride: You know I only work on Fridays, right?
Janet D. Stemwedel: Get your pseudonymous butt in gear and help me have a proper dialogue!
Dr. Free-Ride: Dude, how are we supposed to have a dialogue about this? I'm you. You have yourself a monologue.
Janet D. Stemwedel: Hey, you were a pseudonymous blogger for a whole year! That's experience you can draw on.
Dr. Free-…
jstemwedel | April 14, 2008At DrugMonkey, PhysioProf explores the rules of engagement between grad students in journal club and seminar presentations (building off of interesting explorations of this question from A Lady Scientist, Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde, and Acmegirl -- all of which you should click through to read in their entirety). I'm late to the party, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the balance here between the intellectual aspects and the human aspects of questioning within the tribe of science.
PhysioProf starts with A Lady Scientist's sense that grad students have a duty to watch each other's…
jstemwedel | April 12, 2008Brian reminds us not to mistake the lull in the action in "Aetogate" (the charges of unethical conduct by Spencer Lucas and colleagues) for a resolution to the matter. We're still waiting for the ruling from the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology ethics committee. In the meantime, here are a few thoughts on the "verdict" from the inquiry conducted by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science and by the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. (There is a 40+ page PDF of Spencer Lucas's written responses to the allegations and of the inquiry's findings here.)
1. As I've noted…
jstemwedel | April 7, 2008Over at DrugMonkey, PhysioProf has written a post on the relative merits of "correct" and "interesting", at least as far as science is concerned. Quoth PhysioProf:
It is essential that one's experiments be "correct" in the sense that performing the same experiment in the same way leads to the same result no matter when the experiment is performed or who performs it. In other words, the data need to be valid.
But it is not at all important that one's interpretation of the data--from the standpoint of posing a hypothesis that is consistent with the data--turns out to be correct or not. All…