Current Events

To the young people wandering around Casa Free-Ride singing Christmas songs (not just the refrains but all of the verses): None of the canonical reindeer is named Connor. And Santa does not have a reindeer named Nixon. Love, Dr. Free-Ride P.S. The last batch of cookies will be out of the oven in one minute. But you need to let them cool before you sample them -- just like the other batches.
Possibly related to the last post. The lyrics are original. (For this, you need to imagine the younger Free-Ride offspring humming in the background as the elder sings.) O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, We're sorry that we killed ya. O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, At least we didn't grill ya. O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, Our only Christmas casualty. O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree, Be thankful we don't "nil" ya.
The new piece by Natalie Angier at the New York Times may make things a little more ticklish for people who pick their food on the basis of the characteristics it has or lacks as an organism: [B]efore we cede the entire moral penthouse to "committed vegetarians" and "strong ethical vegans," we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity…
Here in the Northern Hemisphere (of Earth), today marks the Winter Solstice. Most people have some understanding that this means today is the day of minimum sunlight, or the longest night of the year. Fewer people, I think, have a good astronomical sense of why that is the case. So, in honor of the solstice, let's do some old school astronomy. Really old school. Let's consider the two-sphere cosmos: To the ancients, it was perfectly reasonable to assume the earth is stationary. (Indeed, it wasn't until Galileo that there was a really persuasive argument that an Earth-in-motion was…
It's time for Dr. Free-Ride to have a chat with the grown-ups. If you're a kid and you're reading this, think how much the adults in your life would appreciate it if you got up from the computer and put away your stuff that needs putting away (or played with your brother or sister nicely, or folded some socks). I'll have a post with some neat-o pictures in it up in a few hours. OK, just grown-ups here? Let's chat about the man in red. Issue #1: Is opting into the Santa thing ethical? This issue was raised in a comment on the New York Times Motherlode blog: Lies. Just lies. Though the child…
Via Kate Clancy on Twitter, a news story about how one Illinois legislator wants to save his state some money. As reported in The News-Gazette State law allows employees who have worked for one of the Illinois' public universities for seven or more years to receive a 50 percent waiver of their children's tuition costs. Employees would lose that benefit if legislation (HB 4706) introduced earlier this month by state Rep. Dave Winters, R-Rockford, is eventually signed into law. "I think a lot of the universities have been using this as part of their compensation package," said state Rep.…
The better half and I were trying to decide this morning whether there was a way to follow the progress of "health care reform" in the U.S. Senate without getting really mad or really sad. (Conclusion: It seems logically possible that such a way exists, but we haven't found it yet.) The one player that seems likely to get much of what it wants in all this seems to be the insurance industry. Given that the folks working out who gets what are politicians, this does not surprise me. So it occurred to me that maybe we shouldn't be trusting politicians to achieve health care reform. Instead…
Uttered by an administrator: "It's not a curricular decision. It's a resources decision." The decision pertained to classes that were being cut. Also, instruction, it turns out, requires resources. We have not yet hit bottom here, and I am really tired of the sensation of plummeting.
It's quite likely, if you're reading anything else on the internets besides this blog for the past few weeks, that you've already gotten your fill of ClimateGate. But maybe you've been stuck in your Cave of Grading and missed the news that a bunch of emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers (or leaked by an insider, depending on who's telling the story) and widely distributed. Or maybe you're still sorting out what you think about the email messages in question and what they mean for their authors, the soundness of…
As I was driving home from work today, I was listening to Marketplace on public radio. In the middle of a story, reported by Nancy Marshall Genzer, about opponents of health care reform, there was an interesting comment that bears on the nature of economics as a scientific discipline. From the transcript of the story: The Chamber of Commerce is taking a bulldozer to the [health care reform] bill. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported the Chamber is hiring an economist to study the legislation. The goal: more ammunition to sink the bill. Ewe Reinhardt teaches economics at Princeton. He…
Steinn apparently knows how to get me riled about wrong-headed middle school fundraising initiatives, since he nearly derailed my efforts to push through my stack of grading with his recent post about one such initiative. He quotes from a Raleigh News & Observer story: Rosewood Middle School in Goldsboro... will sell 20 test points to students in exchange for a $20-dollar donation. Students can add 10 extra points to each of two tests of their choosing. The extra points could take a student from a "B" to an "A" on a test or from a failing grade to a passing grade. Rosewood's principal…
There is a story posted at ProPublica (and co-published with the Chicago Tribune) that examines a particular psychiatrist who was paid by a pharmaceutical company to travel around the U.S. to promote one of that company's antipsychotic drugs. Meanwhile, the psychiatrist was writing thousands of prescriptions for that same antipsychotic drug for his patients on Medicaid. You might think that there would be at least the appearance of a conflict of interest here. However, the psychiatrist in question seems certain that there is not: In an interview and in response to written questions, […
At Terra Sigillata, Abel notes that the Director of Duke University's Catholic Center is butting in to researchers' attempts to recruit participants for their research. As it happens, that research involves human sexuality and attitudes toward sex toys. Here's how Abel lays it out: Father Joe Vetter, director of Duke University's Catholic Center, is protesting trial participant accrual for a study being conducted on campus directed by Dr Dan Ariely, the James B Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics in the Fuqua School of Business (story and video). ... Ariely and his postdoctoral fellow, Dr…
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 time, after others working with Klessig tried to reproduce those findings on the way to extending the work, Klessig decided that the results were not sufficiently reproducible. At that point, Klessig decided that the published papers reported those findings needed to be retracted. Retracting a…
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 (Chandok v. Klessig, 5:05-cv-01076). There is a lot of interesting stuff here, and I'm working on a longer examination of the judge's reasoning in the ruling. But, in the interim, I thought you might be interested in the statements made by the defendant in the case, Dr. Daniel F. Klessig, that the…
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 article titled "Scientists Defamation Claims Over Colleagues Efforts to Discredit Her Research Are Dismissed". (The article is available to paid subscribers. This may be a good time to make a friend with access to a law library.) The legal action the article describes was brought by a scientist…
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 fair university) is now dealing with a $585 million reduction in funding. (At my own fair university, the cut is about $40 million.) None of the options for addressing the budget cuts are wonderful. They have included yet another round of student fee increases and layoffs of significant numbers of…
This week the New York Times reported on the problem of drug company-sponsored ghostwriting of articles in the scientific literature: A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation's top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies -- articles that were carefully calibrated to help the manufacturers sell more products. Experts in medical ethics condemn this practice as a breach of the public trust. Yet many universities have been slow to recognize the…
I'm not a regular reader of USA Today, but Maria tweeted this story, and I feel like I need to say something about it or else risk leaving it rattling around in my head like marbles under a hubcap: About 70% of Americans agree, either somewhat or strongly, that it's beneficial for women to take her husband's last name when they marry, while 29% say it's better for women to keep their own names, finds a study being presented today at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting in San Francisco. Researchers from Indiana University and the University of Utah asked about 815 people a…
There are days when I imagine that I'll run out of news reports of scientists caught behaving badly to blog about. Then, I check my inbox. Today, my inbox featured a news item in The Scientist about two medical researchers caught fabricating data: Two researchers conducting animal studies on immunosuppression lied about experimental methodologies and falsified data in 16 papers and several grants produced over the past 8 years, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). The scientists, Judith Thomas and Juan Contreras, formerly at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB),…