tribe of science
jstemwedel | March 30, 2008In light of all the recent discussion about the "framing" of the Expelled! expulsion, it occurs to me that maybe part of the reason that the argument seems so unproductive is that the parties involved haven't really agreed on what, exactly, they're trying to communicate to the public at large.
Here's my suggestion for a message worth communicating clearly: science isn't politics.
The community of scientists is not like an organized political party. There isn't a Ministry of Information. When things are working as scientists think they should, all the voices are heard -- and each person…
jstemwedel | March 26, 2008For those who have been following the activities of "animal rights" activists, including their attacks of the homes of researchers -- and the reticence of the public in the face of such violent attacks -- a recent Commentary in Biological Psychiatry [1] will be of interest. In it, a number of scientists call on their scientific peers to actively engage in dialogue with the public about what scientific research with animals actually involves and why it is important.
From the commentary:
The attacks are horribly misguided. It is impossible to reconcile the willingness of these terrorists to…
jstemwedel | March 24, 2008Given that in my last post I identified myself as playing for Team Science, this seems to be as good a time as any to note that not everyone on the team agrees about every little thing. Indeed, there are some big disagreements -- but I don't think these undermine our shared commitment to scientific methodology as a really good way of understanding our world.
I'm jumping into the fray of one of the big disagreements with this repost of an essay I wrote for the dear departed WAAGNFNP blog.
There's a rumor afoot that serious scientists must abandon what, in the common parlance, is referred to…
jstemwedel | March 20, 2008Since March is Women's History Month, I thought it might be appropriate to recognize some women who were a part of my history -- namely, the women who taught me chemistry and physics. (This shouldn't be interpreted as a slight against the women who taught me biology -- I simply don't remember them as well -- nor against the men who taught me science. They made an impact on me, but this post isn't about them.)
I didn't realize it until just now, but none of my science teachers in junior high or high school were women. That strikes me as kind of weird. In contrast, during my undergraduate…
jstemwedel | March 13, 2008They're both by men, but sometimes it happens that way.
Mark Chu-Carroll ridicules Vox Day's ridiculous claim that women are too dumb to do long division, let alone program computers. While Day's claim was silly from the get-go, Mark's take-down in really nice.
A friend from the three-dimensional world (specifically math camp), Jonathan Kulick, who cannot hide from the blogosphere even in Tbilisi, examines claims that women are underrepresented in science for reasons other than bias. Will it surprise you to hear that Christina Hoff Sommers may be dismissing research she doesn't like out of…
jstemwedel | March 12, 2008A bunch of other bloggers are discussing the recent statement A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk (PDF). I thought I'd say something about the complexities of the situation, and about why non-scientists (whose tax dollars support scientific research funded by the NIH and other government agencies) should care.
The general idea behind funding scientific research with public monies is that such research is expected to produce knowledge that will benefit society. There are problems that non-scientists cannot solve on their own, so we pony up the…
jstemwedel | March 11, 2008Since Alice and Sciencewoman and DrugMonkey and Razib are discussing it (and because Zuska has discussed it before, including in real life), I wanted to say something about my reaction to the observation that science blogosphere in general, and ScienceBlogs in particular, seems pretty white:
I'd noticed that, too! And I'd like it a lot if there were more racial diversity among the science bloggers and the blogging scientists.
There would be some clear benefits to achieving more diversity -- but there might also be costs, and looking at who would bear those costs seems pretty important.
To…
jstemwedel | March 3, 2008A colleague of mine (who has time to read actual printed-on-paper newspapers in the morning) pointed me toward an essay by Andrew Vickers in the New York Times (22 January 2008) wondering why cancer researchers are so unwilling to share their data. Here's Vickers' point of entry to the issue:
[A]s a statistician who designs and analyzes cancer studies, I regularly ask other researchers to provide additional information or raw data. Sometimes I want to use the data to test out a new idea or method of statistical analysis. And knowing exactly what happened in past studies can help me design…
jstemwedel | February 25, 2008Coming on the heels of my basic concepts post about the norms of science identified by sociologist Robert K. Merton [1], and a follow-up post on values from the larger society that compete with these norms, this post will examine norms that run counter to the ones Merton identified that seem to arise from within the scientific community. Specifically, I will discuss the findings of Melissa S. Anderson [2] from her research examining how committed university faculty and Ph.D. students are to Merton's norms and to the anti-norms -- and how this commitment compares to reported behavior.
You'll…
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 | February 23, 2008A while back, I offered a basic concepts post that discussed the four norms identified by sociologist Robert K. Merton [1] as the central values defining the tribe of science. You may recall from that earlier post that the Mertonian norms of science are:
Universalism
"Communism"
Disinterestedness
Organized Skepticism
It will come as no surprise, though, that what people -- even scientists -- actually do often falls short of what we agree we ought to do. Merton himself noted such instances, and saw the criticisms scientists made of their peers who didn't live up to the norms as good…
jstemwedel | February 19, 2008Yesterday I published a post with suggestions for ways junior scientists could offer some push-back to ethical shenanigans by senior scientists in their field. While admittedly all of these were "baby-steps" kind of measures, the reactions in the comments are conveying a much grimmer picture of scientific communities than one usually gets talking to senior scientists in person. For example:
[N]one of your suggestions above would work. Those are all things that we tried. But when the people in a position to do something about it are being rewarded either by their silence or by their…
jstemwedel | February 18, 2008In the aftermath of my two posts on allegations of ethical lapses among a group of paleontologists studying aetosaurs, an email correspondent posed a really excellent question: what's a junior person to do about the misconduct of senior people in the field when the other senior people seem more inclined to circle the wagons than to do anything about the people who are misbehaving?
That's the short version. Here's the longer version from my correspondent:
I am and have been outraged by the blatant corruption in my field for a couple of decades, and one of the "stars" in my field was my first…
jstemwedel | February 16, 2008
Allegra Goodman's novel Intuition was published in 2006, and although I heard very good things about it, I was busy enough with other stuff that I didn't chase down a copy to read it. Finally, last November, my department chair lent me her copy, insistent that I had to read it when I got a chance -- not for any academic purpose, but to do something nice for myself. Between semesters, I finally got a chance to read it.
I have a really good department chair.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I think that part of why I enjoyed it so much is that I came to the book without having read…
jstemwedel | February 7, 2008In my earlier post, I described the feeling I had as I started my graduate training in chemistry that there was a huge pile of knowledge I would need to acquire to make the transition from science student to grown-up scientist. I should make it clear (in response to JSinger's comment that I seemed to be reserving the "grown-up" designation for principal investigators) that the student versus grown-up chasm was one that I thought of primarily in terms of how much I felt I'd have to learn by the time the Ph.D. hit my hand in order not to feel like a total impostor representing myself as a…
jstemwedel | February 6, 2008You may have been following the saga of intelligent design proponent Casey Luskin's use of the ResearchBlogging.org "Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research" icon in a way that didn't conform to the official guidelines for its use.
The short description on ResearchBlogging's mission says:
Research Blogging helps you locate and share academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research. Bloggers use our icon to identify their thoughtful posts about serious research, and those posts are collected here for easy reference.
The guidelines for using the spiffy icon include registering with…
jstemwedel | February 6, 2008In the latest issue of The Scientist, there's an article (free registration required) by C. Neal Stewart, Jr., and J. Lannett Edwards, two biologists at the University of Tennessee, about how they came to teach a graduate course on research ethics and what they learned from the experience:
Both of us, independently, have been "victims" of research misconduct - plagiarism as well as fabricated data. One day, while venting about these experiences, we agreed to co-teach a very practical graduate course on research ethics: "Research Ethics for the Life Sciences." The hope was that we could ward…
jstemwedel | February 5, 2008I'm writing this post (and the posts following it, so the bites are of reasonable size) at the urging of Bill Hooker, with whom I've talked about these issues in real life.
The idea of becoming a grown-up in the scientific community is a thread that runs through a lot of my posts (and also guides my thinking as I teach my "Ethics in Science" class), but it turns out I hadn't written a proper post to explain the idea. This set of posts will at least serve as a first attempt.
When I started graduate school in chemistry a hundred years ago (give or take), I was acutely aware of the chasm…
jstemwedel | February 4, 2008As I was weighing in on aetosaurs and scientist on scientist nastiness, one of the people I was talking to raised the question of whether careerist theft and backstabbing of professional colleagues was especially bad in paleontology. (Meanwhile, a commenter expressed surprise that it wasn't just biomedical researchers who felt driven to cheat.)
I don't know. So I figured I'd put it to my readers:
In your experience, which scientific discipline seems most prone to fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, and generally nasty business between its members?
Do you have any hypotheses as to why…
jstemwedel | February 3, 2008By way of Abel and DrugMonkey (among others), I see that today is Blogroll Amnesty Day. Jon Swift has the must-read post on the origins of the day and what it means now:
The idea that links are the capital of the blogosphere seems so obvious that you would think an economist like Atrios of Eschaton would have realized it long ago. And as he is a progressive who has accumulated quite a bit of link wealth, you might also think he would be in favor of redistributing some of that wealth instead of just letting it trickle down. So when he announced last year that he was declaring February 3…