Current Events
jstemwedel | March 10, 2009Again, at UCLA, a researcher has become the target of violence at the hands of animal rights activists.
From the Los Angeles Times:
The FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the firebombing of a vehicle owned by a UCLA neuroscientist who was targeted by an anti-animal research group for using primates in his study of psychiatric disorders.
The March 7 incident involving a homemade incendiary device took place outside the faculty member's home and caused no injuries, according to FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller. ...
Eimiller said the investigation of last Saturday's incident will…
jstemwedel | March 2, 2009Times are tough all around these days. However, at schools like mine, a large public university with a population that includes a significant number of students who are older than traditional college age, are the first in their families to go to college, and/or were in economically precarious situations before the current economic crisis, the situation feels especially dire.
When I started teaching at San José State University in August of 2002, the U.S. had not yet gone to war in Iraq. By my third semester of teaching here, I was starting to lose students mid-semester because their…
jstemwedel | February 4, 2009There's a lively discussion raging at the pad of Dr. Isis (here and here) about whether there isn't something inherently obnoxious and snooty about identifying oneself as having earned an advanced degree of any sort. Commenter Becca makes the case thusly:
"Why are people threatened by the idea that a profession ought to have professional standards, anyway?"
1) It gives the gatekeepers even more power than they already have. Given a world where professional credentials are denied to certain groups, it can get a bit ugly. I think the worst part is that people who are traditionally trodden…
jstemwedel | February 2, 2009It would seem that the Los Angeles Times is uncomfortable around people who don't hide their advanced degrees:
[Jill] Biden [who earned a doctorate in education from the University of Delaware and is currently teaching two courses at Northern Virginia Community College] is thought to be the first second lady [i.e., spouse of the Vice President] to hold a paying job while her husband is in office.
"I think she is unique," said Joel Goldstein, a professor at St. Louis University School of Law and an expert on the vice presidency. Other second ladies -- Cheney, Quayle, Tipper Gore and Joan…
jstemwedel | January 29, 2009You may recall the case of Luk Van Parijs, the promising young associate professor of biology at MIT who was fired in October of 2005 for fabrication and falsification of data. (I wrote about the case here and here.)
Making stuff up in one's communications with other scientists, whether in manuscripts submitted for publication, grant applications, scientific presentation, or even personal communications, is a very bad thing. It undermines the knowledge-building project in which the community of science is engaged. As an institution serious about its role in this knowledge-building…
jstemwedel | January 28, 2009Remember the scares around December 2007 about lead in children's toys manufactured in China? Back then, people cried out for better testing to ensure that products intended for children were actually safe for children. Partly in response to this outcry, a new law, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, was passed. The intent of the law is to protect kids from harm from lead (and other substances) in children's products. However, the effect of the law may be something else altogether.
I've been meaning to post on this for awhile, but I've finally been spurred into action by my…
jstemwedel | December 31, 2008A colleague of Super Sally's forwarded her this*:
It's funny because it's true, and the pain isn't just from laughing so hard.
This seems like a very scary time to be near retirement age, since the value of so many retirement funds (invested in the stock market) has dropped so significantly. On the other hand, to the extent that the market mess leads to a decrease in jobs, it's not such a red-hot time to be years away from retirement age, either.
We can shake our tiny fists at all this. Or, to the extent that we can, we can shake our tiny checkbooks and try to bring a bit more light to…
jstemwedel | December 30, 2008While we're speaking about revolutions and such, Hilzoy on the ongoing violence in Gaza:
I imagine what people on both sides are thinking is something more like: do you expect us to just sit here and take it? Do you expect us to do nothing? To which my answer is: no, I expect you to try to figure out what has some prospect of actually making things better. Killing people out of anger, frustration, and the sense that you have to do something is just wrong. For both sides.
I'm inclined to think there are generalizable lessons here.
And, that the same responses to bad stuff lead to more bad…
jstemwedel | December 24, 2008I was presented with this picture by the younger Free-Ride offspring.
I'm not entirely sure whether it's more accurate to describe it as a map or a process diagram. However, this being December 24th, it is timely.
Here is what I can glean from the various pieces of the diagram:
Elves' working stadium.
Of course, the elves are the backbone of Santa's work force. It's never clear to me that they are happy workers.
I hear occasional rumors that the elves have tried to organize a union, only to be thwarted by the man in red.
I'm not even sure Santa pays the elves, and they seem to live…
jstemwedel | November 26, 2008And you're really a lawyer?
The verdict came back in the Los Angeles trial of Lori Drew, the Missouri mother who facilitated cyberbullying of a former friend of her daughter, who subsequently committed suicide. Since cyberbulling isn't an easy crime to prosecute, the trial focused on whether, in setting up a fake MySpace page as a 16-year-old boy (whose online identity was used to befriend and then harass the girl who killed herself), Drew violated MySpace terms of service.
So, here's the legal point- counterpoint, as reported by the Associated Press:
Among other things, Drew was charged…
jstemwedel | November 20, 2008... and the university, in turn, fires the professor.
You've probably already seen this story. Loye Young, an adjunct professor at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, warned his students (as we all do) against plagiarism. Indeed, as reported by Inside Higher Ed, he included this statement in his fall course syllabus for his management information systems course:
No form of dishonesty is acceptable. I will promptly and publicly fail and humiliate anyone caught lying, cheating, or stealing. That includes academic dishonesty, copyright violations, software piracy, or any other…
jstemwedel | November 19, 2008There are some newspaper stories that must be pretty easy to write at this point because it seems like they're essentially the same year in and year out. California is having another budget crisis, and the Californians who are going to take it in the teeth are students -- especially students in the California State University (CSU) system, to which the university that employs me belongs.
Once again, budget shortfalls at the state level mean enrollments will be capped at the 23 campuses in the CSU system. Practically, this means 10,000 or so qualified applicants will be turned away. In…
jstemwedel | October 30, 2008Sadly, the Houston Chronicle brings us another story about an academic caught plagiarizing. The academic in question is Rambis M. Chu, a tenured associate professor of physics at Texas Southern University, who is currently under investigation for plagiarism in a grant proposal he submitted to the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.
Since the investigation is still under way, I'm open to the possibility that Chu will present some evidence to demonstrate his innocence here. However, should the facts reported in the Houston Chronicle stand up to scrutiny, this is shaping up to be one of those cases…
jstemwedel | October 22, 2008Maybe you heard about the melamine contamination issue when tainted pet food started killing pets. But, if you don't have a pet, maybe you didn't worry so much.
Or maybe you noticed when tainted infant formula started sending infants to the hospital. Stuff that harms babies (even way far away in China) is really sad. But if you're not currently caring for a baby that ingests infant formula, eventually your attention wandered.
Then the news came that melamine levels were testing high in treats like White Rabbit candies and Panda's March cookies -- treats that may have been on your shelves (…
jstemwedel | October 20, 2008Drawing on the Guardian article on the sorts of interview questions being deployed by Oxford and Cambridge to "identify intellectual potential" in prospective undergraduates:
How do you organise a successful revolution? And, given the present political climate, why don't we let the managers of Ikea run the country instead of the politicians?
As a university professor (and one paid by the people of the State of California), I'm pretty sure if I answer the first question my name will go on some list that will make me an unattractive prospect for palling around, at least for those who aspire…
jstemwedel | October 15, 2008Dear Sarah Gardner and Marketplace producers,
I listened with interest to your story on today's show about the current prospects for the solar energy sector. While the story was engaging, I have a nit to pick.
In the course of listing the elemental components of photovoltaic solar panels, you referred to them as part of "that periodic table you were supposed to have memorized" in high school chemistry.
As I've mentioned before, it is not standard practice to memorize the periodic table (or to make students memorize it). They hang it there in the classroom, for goodness sake! Why waste the…
jstemwedel | October 8, 2008Charles B. Nemeroff, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychiatrist at Emory University alleged by congressional investigators to have failed to report a third of the $2.8 million (or more) he received in consulting fees from pharmaceutical companies whose drugs he was studying.
Why would congressional investigators care? For one thing, during the period of time when Nemeroff received these consulting fees, he also received $3.9 million from NIH to study the efficacy of five GlaxoSmithKline drugs in the treatment of depression. When the government ponies up money for scientific research, it has an interest…
jstemwedel | October 6, 2008The past couple years in California have been scary ones for academic researchers who conduct research with animals (as well as for their neighbors), what with firebombs, home invasions, significant intentional damage to their properties and threats to their safety.
In response to a ratcheting up of attacks from animals rights groups, universities have lobbied for the Researcher Protection Act of 2008, which Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law on September 28.
As described in Inside Higher Ed:
The law is part of a campaign, including litigation against animal liberation groups…
jstemwedel | September 29, 2008You know how graduate students are always complaining that their stipends are small compared to the cost of living? It seems that some graduate students find ways to supplement that income ... ways that aren't always legal. For example, from this article in the September 8, 2008 issue of Chemical & Engineering News [1]:
Jason D. West, a third-year chemistry graduate student at the University of California, Merced, was arraigned last month on charges of conspiring to manufacture methamphetamine, manufacturing methamphetamine, and possessing stolen property. West allegedly stole…
jstemwedel | September 24, 2008From time to time on this blog, we discuss the obligation scientists assume by virtue of accepting public money to fund their research. These obligations may include sharing knowledge with the public (since public money helped make that knowledge). And they also include playing by the public's rules as enshrined in various federal regulations concerning scientific research.
If a scientist takes public money, she expects there will be some public oversight. That's just how it goes.
Of course, working from this mindset makes it much harder for me to fathom how someone (say a Secretary of the…