jstemwedel

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Janet D. Stemwedel

Janet D. Stemwedel (whose nom de blog is Dr. Free-Ride) is an associate professor of philosophy at San Jose State University. Before becoming a philosopher, she earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry.

Posts by this author

September 30, 2009
On my earlier post, "Dialogue, not debate", commenter dave c-h posed some interesting questions: Is there an ethical point at which engagement is functionally equivalent to assent? In other words, is there a point at which dialogue should be replaced by active resistance? If so, how do you tell…
September 28, 2009
GrrlScientist is in a contest to become Quark Expedition's official blogger from Antarctica. (So is DN Lee from Urban Science Adventures.) Grrl has been doing pretty well getting votes in this contest, despite the fact that her competition includes a radio personality from Portugal and a member…
September 28, 2009
At the end of last week, I made a quick trip to UCLA to visit with some researchers who, despite having been targets of violence and intimidation, are looking for ways to engage with the public about research with animals. I was really struck by their seriousness about engaging folks on "the…
September 25, 2009
Owing to the fact that I had to focus my attention on getting healthy in a hurry so I could catch a plane yesterday evening, I asked the elder Free-Ride offspring to write something for this week's Friday Sprog Blogging entry. Owing, I think, to my apparent fragility, the elder Free-Ride…
September 24, 2009
I ended up spending a significant portion of the last several days down with something flu-like. (It included a fever and the attendant aches, chills, and sweats, as well as the upper respiratory drowning-in-my-own-mucus symptoms.) I did not drag my ailing butt out of bed to go to the doctor and…
September 22, 2009
Imagine you are looking ahead to a furlough day and taking seriously the piece of the agreement that specifies that you won't actually do any work on that furlough day. To prevent yourself from backsliding by doing work to pass the time, do you: A. Schedule a spa-day at a local salon (thus also…
September 19, 2009
The other day, while surfing the web, my better half came upon this semi-official looking symbol for psychohazards: The verbiage underneath the symbol seem to indicate conditions that might have serious consequences for one's picture of the world and its contents, or for one's ability to come to…
September 18, 2009
Yesterday Dr. Isis put up a post that seems to have bugged many of the people who subsequently posted comments on it. I have no idea whether the commenters on the post intended to convey it, but here's what's coming across to me as a reader of the exchange: Dr. Isis notes something that makes her…
September 18, 2009
The Free-Ride family got its copy of the new CD/DVD set Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants this week. The sprogs, who have been listening and watching, offer something kind of like a review. The first thing to note is that, on the DVD, you have a choice of going through the whole set of…
September 17, 2009
And really, why wouldn't you? What could have prepared you for the possibility that reading one would make the other vanish, as if there were some kind of blogular wavefunction collapse? The ScienceBlogs powers that be have been alerted that there's an issue with disappearing comments (if you're…
September 17, 2009
In a recent column at Business Week, Bruce Weinstein (aka "The Ethics Guy") argues that multitasking is unethical. He writes of his own technologically assisted slide into doing too many tasks at once: I noticed that the more things I could do with ease on my computer, the harder it was to focus…
September 16, 2009
Dr. Free-Ride's better half went to the Free-Ride offspring's school for Back to School Night earlier this week. (I stayed at home with the sprogs to oversee dinner and baths.) Dr. Free-Ride's better half reported back that the younger Free-Ride offspring's third grade teacher "doesn't believe in…
September 16, 2009
As promised, I've been thinking about the details of Chandok v. Klessig. To recap, we have a case where a postdoc (Meena Chandok) generated some exciting scientific findings. She and her supervisor (Daniel F. Klessig), along with some coworkers, published those findings. Then, in the fullness of…
September 15, 2009
First off, I moderate all my comments. Mostly it's to eliminate comment spam, but it also means the rare death threat is not going to post without me approving it. Second of all, why would you think you have the evidential basis to discern the religious convictions (or lack thereof) of either this…
September 11, 2009
This school year, the elder Free-Ride offspring has a classroom teacher who used to be one of the elementary school's science teachers. (Owing to budget cuts, both the science teachers have "retreated" to be general purpose classroom teachers, and all the classroom teachers have to teach their own…
September 10, 2009
You may remember my post from last week involving a case where a postdoc sued her former boss for defamation when he retracted a couple of papers they coauthored together. After that post went up, a reader helpfully hooked me up with a PDF of District Judge Joseph M. Hood's ruling on the case (…
September 10, 2009
Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad ponders faculty "service" in higher education. For those outside the ivy-covered bubble of academe, "service" usually means "committee work" or something like it. The usual concern is that, although committees are necessary to accomplish significant bits of the…
September 9, 2009
In my philosophy of science class yesterday, we talked about Semmelweis and his efforts to figure out how to cut the rates of childbed fever in Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s. Before we dug into the details, I mentioned that Semmelweis is a historical figure who easily makes the Top Ten list…
September 5, 2009
Like a good nerd, I love me some Star Trek. I will confess to having a strong preference for the original series (TOS), on account of that was what my parents watched with us when we were wee young nerds growing up. (My dad had a freakish ability to tell within the first few words of Kirk's "…
September 4, 2009
(From here.) Not that we won't make plenty of other mistakes, but they'll run more to Nietzsche than Rand. Come to think of it, the eternal recurrence test is probably just right for bedtime stories, isn't it?
September 4, 2009
The Free-Ride offspring just kicked off a new school year. The start of school in these parts means a long list of supplies to find -- stuff you'd expect, like crayons, pencils, binders and binder paper, scissors, and glue sticks, plus stuff for general classroom use like tissues, had sanitizer,…
September 3, 2009
To whom it may concern, I can deal with the third story classrooms, really I can. Running up and down stairs to get to and from class helps give me the exercise I wouldn't get otherwise because I'm grading papers instead of hitting the gym. And, I can live with the back-to-back class meetings in…
September 2, 2009
I'm used to reading about cases of alleged scientific misconduct in science-focused publications and in major media outlets like the New York Times and the Boston Globe. I've had less occasion to read about them in law journals. But today, on the front page of the New York Law Journal, there's an…
September 2, 2009
In my university mailbox yesterday I received a memo detailing measures to help prevent the spread of flu (whether seasonal or novel H1N1). The memo had the usual good advice: recognize flu symptoms, stay home if you have them so as not to spread it to everyone else, cover your coughs and sneezes,…
September 1, 2009
I guess I suspected that this might be a problem, but it really sank in when a close colleague told me the other day that he was freaked out by it. And I'd hate to have you hear it from anyone else but me. I'm a decaf drinker. Yeah, I know. Nowadays you can't count on a philosopher to smoke like…
September 1, 2009
Eugenie Samuel Reich is a reporter whose work in the Boston Globe, Nature, and New Scientist will be well-known to those with an interest in scientific conduct (and misconduct). In Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World, she turns her skills as an…
August 31, 2009
Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World by Eugenie Samuel Reich New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2009 The scientific enterprise is built on trust and accountability. Scientists are accountable both to the world they are trying to describe and to their fellow…
August 28, 2009
This week, while I hunkered down for the start of classes, Dr. Free-Ride's better half took the Free-Ride offspring camping. They camped near Big Sur, which provided ample opportunities to hike near the ocean (and to swim in it). Indeed, on one of these hikes the first day out, they spotted some…
August 27, 2009
Regular commenter S. Rivlin emailed me to describe a distressing situation in academia and to ask for advice: Dear Janet,   I write to you to solicit your opinion on a recent grievance case I am privy to at my university. I hope you'll find the time to respond, considering that you are back from…
August 25, 2009
In case you hadn't heard, the State of California is broke. (Actually, probably worse than broke. This is one of those times where we find ourselves glad that our state does not have kneecaps.) As a consequence of this, the California State University system (one of whose 23 campuses is my own…