Walking to school on a cold morning:
Elder offspring: I’m going to steal your warmth!
Dr. Free-Ride: Oh really?
Elder offspring sticks hands in Dr. Free-Ride’s coat pockets, where Dr. Free-Ride’s hands are.
Elder offspring: Brrr! Your hands are really cold!
Dr. Free-Ride: Yes, they are. Mwah ha ha!
Elder offspring: I’m still going to steal your warmth!
Dr. Free-Ride: My dear, given that in this universe heat flows from hotter objects to cooler ones, I’m pretty sure it is I who will steal your heat.
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Author Archives: admin
links for 2008-01-12
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An interesting discussion about how what we think we need to do for our readers or our connection to the blogosphere can create stress for us and impinge on our non-virtual lives.
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Why might women be less interested than men in fields like math or computer science? Someone really interested in the answer has to look at some of the crap girls put up with.
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What do ethics demand as far as community in the blogosphere? (Is it different for people blogging about science vs. those blogging about politics, I wonder?)
Research with vulnerable populations: considering the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (part 2).
In an earlier post, I looked at a research study by Nelson et al. [1] on how the cognitive development of young abandoned children in Romania was affected by being raised in institutional versus foster care conditions. Specifically, I examined the explanation the researchers gave to argue that their work was not only scientifically sound but also ethical.
In this post, I examine the accompanying policy forum article, Millum and Emmanuel, “The Ethics of International Research with Abandoned Children” [2]. Millum and Emanuel are in the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health. As such, it’s not unreasonable to assume that they are not coming to their understanding of this research — and to the question of whether it rises to the appropriate ethical level — from the point of view that good science should trump all other interests.
Friday Sprog Blogging: rainy day planetarium show.
Last Friday, the Free-Ride family was visiting friends in Santa Barbara. It was a very rainy day, so we decided that a trip to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History made more sense than a hike or a trip to the beach.
Within minutes of our arrival, there was an announcement that a planetarium show was just about to start, and that there was still room for more visitors to see it. We took advantage of the opportunity.
It was a really good decision.
Is a fake university a step up or down from a diploma mill?
Saying you’ve seen everything is just asking the universe to do you one better. So I won’t. Still, this story nearly required grubbing around the floor on my hands and knees to find the location to which my jaw had dropped:
Bogus university scam uncovered
Investigation
By Nigel Morris
BBC London Investigations Producer
An international education scam that targets foreign students who come to study in the capital has been exposed by a BBC London investigation.
The bogus Irish International University (IIU), which offers sub-standard and worthless degrees, has been allowed to flourish in the UK – virtually unchecked by the government – for the last seven years.
Let me pause here to note that these are not “sub-standard and worthless degrees” by the lights of your parents (who warned you not to major in philosophy or English or whatever discipline it was they deemed suitably flaky or disreputable) — they are actual fake degrees.
Ethical considerations in the development of a male birth control pill.
“Why don’t they make a birth control pill for men?”
There are important considerations from medical ethics that might explain why a birth control pill for men has not happened yet.
links for 2008-01-10
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Excellent discussion about responsibilities within comment threads — potentially useful for my Science Blogging Conference session.
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Monthly history of science podcasts! Cool beans!
Research with vulnerable populations: considering the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (part 1).
The Neurocritic alerted me, in a comment on an earlier post, to a pair of papers in the 21 December 2007 issue of Science that raise some difficult ethical questions about what sorts of research are permissible. Quoth the Neurocritic:
This may be a little off-topic, but I was wondering if you read this article in Science, beginning of abstract pasted below.
In a randomized controlled trial, we compared abandoned children reared in institutions to abandoned children placed in institutions but then moved to foster care. Young children living in institutions were randomly assigned to continued institutional care or to placement in foster care, and their cognitive development was tracked through 54 months of age.
Rather horrifying! Can you imagine this experiment being performed in a first- (or second-)world country in the 21st century? But the title of the paper is:
Cognitive Recovery in Socially Deprived Young Children: The Bucharest Early Intervention Project
Is it now OK to perform this experimental intervention, since it’s in Romania? …
The authors of the study, Nelson et al., do have a lengthy discussion of ethical issues within the paper (e.g., the secretary of state for child protection in Romania invited them to do the study, the IRBs at Minnesota, Tulane, and Maryland [PI home institutions] approved the study, etc.). However, to me it seems to set off alarm bells in terms of ethics. I’m definitely not a developmental psychologist, but this statement seems odd:
Clinical equipoise is the notion that there must be uncertainty in the expert community about the relative merits of experimental and control interventions such that no subject should be randomized to an intervention known to be inferior to the standard of care (27). Because of the uncertainty in the results of prior research [??], it had not been established unequivocally that foster care was superior to institutionalized care across all domains of functioning… [Is the superiority of foster care really in doubt?]
In this post, I’ll look at both Nelson et al., “Cognitive Recovery in Socially Deprived Young Children: The Bucharest Early Intervention Project”. [1] In a second post in the not-too-distant future, I’ll look at the accompanying policy forum article, Millum and Emmanuel, “The Ethics of International Research with Abandoned Children” [2]. (I’m breaking it up into two posts because otherwise it may require you a full pot of coffee, rather than a mug, to get through it all.) My aim in these two posts will be to lay out the recognized ethical guidelines for research with human subjects as they apply to the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP), and to identify the worries we might raise about this kind of research — and, by extension, with the prevailing standards.
links for 2008-01-09
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An interesting addition to the tenure dossier: a public talk on one’s research.
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I think the philosophers quoted have interestingly different ideas of what constitutes the well-being of a profession.
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How hard *was* the job market in philosophy 10 years ago? (And did they really have to walk to the APA and then back to the remote motel barefoot in the snow and uphill both ways?)
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Students ask astounding questions about their class enrollment. It’s enough to make you wonder if they understand this “college” thing the same way their professors do.
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A quick reminder that who we see doing X can shape our views on who *can* do X.
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A modest proposal to solve the postdoc problem.
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Recommended preparation for grad school.
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“These Colors Don’t Run (they grow mold, ferment, degrade, are infested with insects, turn to slime and just plain smell bad): A Long Term Study Of The Forces Of Nature On Assorted Fruits From The Western United States”. I’ve found my source of political prognostication through Presidential Election 2008
Why ethics matter to science.
Regular readers of this blog know that I teach an ethics class aimed at science majors, in which I have a whole semester to set out ethical considerations that matter when you’re doing science. There’s a lot to cover, so the pace is usually more breakneck than leisurely.
Still, it’s rather more time for detail and reflection than I get in the four 50 minute lectures of the ethics module in the introduction to engineering class. In that context, my main goal is to persuade the students that ethical considerations aren’t completely disconnected from the professional community of engineers they hope someday to join (nor from the learning community of which they’re already a part).
But even these four meetings seem like a lot of time compared to the research ethics session I have facilitated the past couple summers (and will facilitate again this summer) for undergraduates doing summer research internships at one of the local private-sector centers of science and engineering. There, I get a whopping 90 minutes with the students.
With that kind of time pressure, you start stripping off the bells and whistles to locate the core message you want to get across. The core message, as I see it, is after the jump.