tribe of science
jstemwedel | July 11, 2007In his book A Short Guide to Writing About Science [1], David Porush suggests that the mindset useful for doing science isn't always the best mindset for communicating science. (It's more than a suggestion, actually -- the second chapter of the book is titled "Why Good Scientific Thinking Can Lead to Bad Science Writing.") Since it's connected to our prior discussion of ambiguous scientific writing, let's have a look at Porush's diagnosis of bad science writing and the ways he thinks it could be better.
Porush notes that most people learn to write scientific papers by reading a whole mess of…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2007Regular readers know I frequently suggest the community of science would be better off if its institutional contexts favored more collaboration and less competition. (I'm not the only one.) So I wanted to mention a project, OpenWetWare that's trying to move biology in that direction.
The project "is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering." Its website is a wiki where members can contribute information about crucial experimental materials (and how to make them), experimental…
jstemwedel | July 10, 2007Those of you who have ever brought a piece of scientific research to completion -- a process which almost always includes publishing your results -- have probably run into lists like this one that spell out the meanings of phrases commonly used in scientific papers. Included are such classics as:
"It has long been known"
I don't know the original reference.
and
"Typical results are shown"
Either means the only results are shown or the best results are shown.
and
"A trend is evident"
Okay, a trend does seem apparent to me, but no statistical analysis in the world will support it.
I'm…
jstemwedel | July 2, 2007In the discussion on the earlier post about what policies should govern lab notebooks kept by graduate researchers, the commentariat identified a number of important considerations. At least a few of the commenters were sure that a one-size-fits-all policy wouldn't work, and collectively the comments identified some central questions that go to the heart of how, precisely, lab notebooks are supposed to function:
The permanent record of what was done and what was observed.
To the extent that research is a matter of setting up particular conditions and recording careful observations of what…
jstemwedel | June 30, 2007An earlier post tried to characterize the kind of harm it might do to an academic research lab if a recent graduate were to take her lab notebooks with her rather than leaving them with the lab group. This post generated a lot of discussion, largely because a number of commenters questioned the assumption that the lab group (and particularly the principal investigator) has a claim to the notebooks that outweighs the claim of the graduate researcher who actually did the research documented in her lab notebooks.
As I mentioned in my comments to the earlier post, in many cases there is an…
jstemwedel | June 28, 2007Yesterday, I helped give an ethics seminar for mostly undergraduate summer research interns at a large local center of scientific research. To prepare for this, I watched the video of the ethics seminar we led for the same program last year. One of the things that jumped out at me was the attempt I and my co-presenter made to come up with an apt analogy to explain the injury involved in taking your lab notebooks with you when you leave your graduate advisor's research group.
I'm not sure we actually landed on an apt analogy, and I'm hoping you can help.
First, before critiquing the…
jstemwedel | June 26, 2007 I recently read a book by regular Adventures in Ethics and Science commenter Solomon Rivlin. Scientific Misconduct and Its Cover-Up: Diary of a Whistleblower is an account of a university response to allegations of misconduct gone horribly wrong. I'm hesitant to describe it as the worst possible response -- there are surely folks who could concoct a scenario where administrative butt-covering maneuvers bring about the very collapse of civilization, or at least a bunch of explosions -- but the horror of the response described here is that it was real:
The events and personalities…
jstemwedel | June 22, 2007Another article from Inside Higher Ed that caught my eye:
The chancellor of the City University of New York [Matthew Goldstein] floated a unique approach this week to dealing with the long lamented problem of low enrollments in the sciences: Offer promising students conditional acceptances to top Ph.D. programs in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) as they start college. ...
In a speech Monday, Goldstein envisioned a national effort in which students identified for their aptitude in middle school would subsequently benefit from academic enrichment programs…
jstemwedel | June 21, 2007Zuska sent me an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education (behind a paywall, I'm afraid) that's more than a little connected to the thought experiment I posed earlier in the week.
The article was written (under a pseudonym) by an assistant professor whose nomination for a university award was torpedoed. By a member of his own department. Who was blocking the nomination of the author not out of any particular animus toward the author, but as a way to attack the department chair who had made the nomination.
What fun things must be in that department!
Anyhow, someone on the committee…
jstemwedel | June 21, 2007I'm late to this round of the discussion about scientists and journalists (for which, as usually, Bora compiles a comprehensive list of links). The question that seems to have kicked off this round is why scientists are sometimes reluctant to agree to interviews, especially given how often they express their concern that the larger public seems uninterested in and uninformed about matters scientific.
As I have some interest in this topic, I'm going to add a few thoughts to the pile:
Does reporting on science have a tendency to misrepresent science?
This is a long-standing concern -- that, in…
jstemwedel | June 20, 2007You've probably seen the posts (here, here, here, here, here, and here.) responding to the University of Florida study claiming that women's names affect the social support or discouragement they'll get for pursuing technical subjects. (Those with the more "feminine" names will tend to be discouraged from "manly" activities like math, although apparently a frilly name won't hurt their performance in those activities.) Since the above-linked posts give the reasonable critiques of the research, I'm going to veer immediately to personal anecdata:
Is "Janet" a feminine name? It's not one of…
jstemwedel | June 12, 2007I haven't abandoned you, dear readers, I've just been attending to some tasks in the three-dimensional world. In the meantime, I want to recommend some great posts on other blogs. While some may leave you feeling reasonably good about doings in the world of science, I'm afraid others may break your heart. That doesn't mean you shouldn't read them.
At ChemBark, Paul Bracher muses on the ethics of doing science on someone else's dime. He notes that when the context in which you're doing the science is academic, your obligations extend to students as well as the entity funding your research…
jstemwedel | June 7, 2007In the June 4, 2007 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (which is behind a paywall accessible only to ACS members and those with institutional subscriptions, I'm afraid) there's an article on how college and university labs may be impacted by the interim final regulation on chemical security issued recently by the Department of Homeland Security.
In a nutshell, that impact looks like it could involve thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single university to comply with the rules, even if the chemicals they use fall into those specified by DHS as being at the…
jstemwedel | June 6, 2007In my last post, I examined the efforts of Elizabeth Goodwin's genetics graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to deal responsibly with their worries that their advisor was falsifying data. I also reported that, even though they did everything you'd want responsible whistleblowers to do, it exacted a serious price from them. As the Science article on the case [1] noted,
Although the university handled the case by the book, the graduate students caught in the middle have found that for all the talk about honesty's place in science, little good has come to them. Three of…
jstemwedel | June 5, 2007One of the big ideas behind this blog is that honest conduct and communication are essential to the project of building scientific knowledge. An upshot of this is that people seriously engaged in the project of building scientific knowledge ought to view those who engage in falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, and other departures from honest conduct and communication as enemies of the endeavor. In other words, to the extent that scientists are really committed to doing good science, they also have a duty to call out the bad behavior of other scientists.
Sometimes you can exert the…
jstemwedel | June 1, 2007I'm recycling another post from the ancestor of this blog, but I'm adding value by adding some newish links to good stuff on other blogs.
* * * * *
How much does it matter that certain groups (like women) are under-represented in the tribe of science?
I'm not, at the moment, taking up the causes (nor am I looking for any piss-poor "Barry Winters"-style theories as to the causes). At present, the bee in my bonnet is the effects.
And this is not a hypothetical situation. This post at Thanks for Not Being a Zombie links to an article from the New York Times with some sobering statistics:
Even…
jstemwedel | June 1, 2007I've been flailing lately (most recently in this post) with the question of how to reconcile how science ought to be done with what actually happens. Amidst my flailing, regular commenter DrugMonkey has been doing what some might characterize as getting up in my grill. I'm inclined to view DrugMonkey's comments as pushing me to be clearer and more focused in setting out and attacking the problem.
For instance, in this post on the pros and cons of an ethics class aimed at science majors but taught by a philosopher (me), DrugMonkey comments:
The messenger is irrelevant. This is not the…
jstemwedel | May 23, 2007Because I am engaged in a struggle with mass quantities of grading, I'm reviving a post from the vault to tide you over. I have added some new details in square brackets, and as always, I welcome your insight here.
I just got back [in Octiber of 2005] from talking with an outside evaluator about the federally funded training grant project at my university that tries to get more of our students to graduate school in science. The evaluator is here not at the behest of the funding agency, but rather at the request of the science professor here who oversees the program. Because, you know, he…
jstemwedel | May 19, 2007In the comments on a number of recent posts, I've been sensing a certain level of cynicism about the realities of scientific practice, and it's been bumming me out. (In fairness, as I reread those comment threads today, the comments aren't as jaded as I remember them being; it's probably that the ones with a cynical edge are staying with me a bit longer.)
I am not bummed because I think people ought to have a picture of the scientific community as one where everyone is happy and smiling, holding hands and singing and wanting to buy the world a Coke. What's sticking in my craw a little is…
jstemwedel | May 16, 2007My recent post on the feasibility (or not) of professionalizing peer review, and of trying to make replication of new results part of the process, prompted quite a discussion in the comments. Lots of people noted that replication is hard (and indeed, this is something I've noted before), and few were convinced that full-time reviewers would have the expertise or the objectivity to do a better job at reviewing scientific manuscripts than the reviewers working under the existing system.
To the extent that building a body of reliable scientific knowledge matters, though, we have to take a hard…