Current Events

Do not claim to have earned a degree (or degrees) that you did not in fact earn. Degree-granting institutions maintain records of degree recipients. Eventually, chances are good that someone will check. And even if your talents are worth more to your position than a degree could be, your dishonesty will be held against you. Go with talent and integrity over talent and pretend credentials. Those who employ you will appreciate not being played for chumps.
Not the financial market, but the market for highly trained folks in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In particular, why do people keep talking about the need for a larger talent pool in STEM when so many Ph.D.s and postdocs are having a rough time finding permanent positions? Today, Inside Higher Ed has an article about what demographer Michael S. Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation makes of this apparently paradoxical state of affairs: Looking at whether there is a shortage of qualified STEM workers, Teitelbaum argued that such claims reappear roughly…
... but the questions that they were answering! Regular readers will know (from these posts, among others) that I think the extent to which presidential candidates have gotten right with science (or with reliable advisers on same) is important information for voters to have. Indeed, I was hoping to get some nourishing information (building an informed electorate and healthy democracy with 12 vitamins and minerals!) when I checked out Obama's and McCain's answers to the Science Debate 2008 questions. And, while it is possible to glean information about McCain's and Obama's attitudes toward…
Once again, researchers who use animals in their research have been the targets of violence at the hands of animal rights activists. As reported by the Santa Cruz Sentinel: In one incident, a faculty member's home on Village Circle off High Street was intentionally firebombed at about 5:40 a.m. [on Saturday, August 2], according to police. The residence belongs to a well-known UCSC molecular biologist who works with mice. He was one of 13 researchers listed in threatening animal rights pamphlets found Tuesday in a downtown coffee shop. In the second incident at about the same time, a Volvo…
In the July 18, 2008 issue of Science, I noticed a news item, "Old Samples Trip Up Tokyo Team": A University of Tokyo team has retracted a published research paper because it apparently failed to obtain informed consent from tissue donors or approval from an institutional review board (IRB). Other papers by the same group are under investigation by the university. Observers believe problems stem in part from guidelines that don't sufficiently explain how to handle samples collected before Japan established informed consent procedures. The samples in question were "legacy samples", samples…
You've probably already heard the news last week that a study published in Science indicates that the gender gap between girls and boys in mathematical performance may be melting faster than the polar ice caps. The study, "Gender Similarities Characterize Math Performance" by Janet S. Hyde et al., appears in the July 25, 2008 issue of Science (behind a paywall). [1] Hyde et al. revisit results of a meta-analysis published in 1990 (J. S. Hyde, E. Fennema, S. Lamon, Psychol. Bull. 107, 139 (1990).) that found negligible gender differences in math ability in the general population but…
I have misgivings about wading into Crackergate -- indeed, even about dipping my toe into the edge of the pool (which is all I'm promising here) -- but here goes. First, let me commend the thoughtful posts by Mark Chu-Carroll and John Wilkins on the issue. If you haven't read them yet, read them now. (If you've already read them, read them again.) Next, let me set forth the disclaimers that I'd hope would be obvious: Issuing death threats (or threats to do bodily harm to a person, or to his family) is wrong. It's inexcusable (and I suspect in many jurisdictions it's also illegal).…
The press covering the story of bioethicist Glenn McGee's departure from the post of director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College is hungry for an ironic twist. For example, Scientific American titles its article "An Unethical Ethicist?" What more fitting fall than some self-appointed morality cop going down on account of his own immoral dealings? Believe me, I'm familiar with the suspicions people seem to harbor that ethicists are, in fact, twice as naughty as other folks. But from the evidence laboriously assembled in the SciAm article, I'm just not buying…
Critterthink, the blog of the Center for Native Ecosystems in Denver, CO has posted a guide to the 2008 Farm Bill from a conservation perspective, highlighting what they call the good, the bad and the ugly. If you haven't had time to review the bill yourself, take advantage of the hard work these folks put into breaking it down for us. The Farm Bill is an omnibus bill passed every few years, setting a policy toolkit for agriculture in the US. It has massive implications for industry, food, foreign policy and, for our purposes, conservation and the environment. Here are a few things that stuck…
I heard a piece by David Kestenbaum on NPR's "Morning Edition" that hasn't been sitting right with me. You, dear readers, get to help me figure out what's bugging me about the story, a profile of 16-year-old climate skeptic Kristen Byrnes. Here are some details about Kristen Byrnes from the story: "I don't remember how old I was when I started getting into global warming," Kristen says. "In middle school I remember everyone was like: 'Global warming! The world is going to end!' Stuff like that ... so I never really believed in it." ... [S]he has a quality scientists try to cultivate: she is…
So Saturday was Earth Hour, and as if anyone reading this blog didn't know, lights were supposed to be cut off from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. to send a message to mysterious world power that the world was ready to cut down on energy use. Sort of. I didn't honor the Earth Hour. We rarely have more than one light on in our home at a time on a daily basis because it's wasteful and increasingly expensive. I don't have a million electronic devices running 24/7, we walk to the store when we can (Heather can walk to work) and luckily, my commute is only about 15 minutes a day. In every daily activity, even…
The black caiman is just one of the endangered species that inhabits the Guiana Shield. Back in November, the president of Guyana, one of the poorest countries in Latin America, offered the entirety of his country's rainforest to a British-led international body in return for help with development. Jagdeo was searching for alternatives to an obvious, but morally objectionable solution. "Maybe we should just cut down the trees. Then someone would recognize the problem," said Mr Jagdeo. "But I want to think we can fulfill our people's aspirations without cutting down the trees." British…
Maybe you heard the news that PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins went to a screening of the documentary Expelled! in Minneapolis, except that, because he was recognized, PZ Myers was barred from the screening (despite having signed up ahead of time like the other attendees). Here's the New York Times story, and Greg Laden has collected roughly a bajillion links to blog posts in the aftermath of the incident. The big debate seems to be whether Myers ought to have brought attention to the fact that he was barred from the screening, or whether he should have just gotten a haircut at the mall to pass…
I heard this morning on the news that Sir Arthur C. Clarke has passed. NPR did a nice piece on him, if a bit focused on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke was a big influence on me and my interest in science and science fiction, and I thought it would be nice to have a permanent memorial of sorts, celebrating some of his own words. Here's to the long, influential life of a great author and scientist. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of…
A 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…
There'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…
You've probably heard that UCLA scientist Edythe London, whose house was earlier vandalized to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars by animal rights activists, has once again been targeted. This time an incendiary device was left on her front door. Abel and Mark weighed in on this appalling use of tactics to terrorize a scientist doing work on approved protocols -- protocols that had to meet the stringent standards imposed by federal regulations. But while the NIH and the odd newspaper columnist stands up to make the case for animal use in medical research and against the violent…
Via Greg Laden, I see that there is now some research to support our primal revulsion toward double-dippers: Last year the food microbiologist's [Clemson University professor Paul L. Dawson] undergraduate students examined the effects of double dipping using volunteers, wheat crackers and several sample dips. They found that three to six double dips transferred about 10,000 bacteria from an eater's mouth to the remaining dip sample. "I was very surprised by the results," Dawson said in a telephone interview Thursday. "I thought there would be very minimal transfer. I didn't think we would…
In response to my earlier post on the allegations of ethical lapses among a group of paleontologists studying aetosaurs, a reader sent me a message posted to a public mailing list of vertebrate paleontologists. The message gives a glimpse of an attitude toward others in one's professional community that, frankly, I find appalling, so I'm going to give you my dissection of it. Please note that the quoted passages below comprise the entire post to the mailing list, save for the poster's (presumably real) name, which I'm excising because I'm not sure I want Google to link him in perpetuity with…
Revere already flagged this story, but I'm going to try to move beyond the forehead slapping to some analysis of why a journal's confidentiality rules might matter. (I'll leave it to Bill, Bora, Jean-Claude, and their posse to explain how a thoroughgoing shift to "open science" might make such situations go away.) The story, as reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, is that a peer reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine, reviewing a manuscript that reported negative findings about the safety of a diabetes drug, broke confidentiality rules and sent a copy of that soon-to-be-…