While claims of the Free-Ride offspring’s telepathy are in doubt, there is no question of the younger offspring’s telephonic prowess (which is to say, the younger offspring can remember all the digits necessary and sufficient to place a call to either parents or grandparents with no adult assistance; the long distance carrier is thrilled). This telephonic prowess was lately deployed while the sprogs were staying with the Grandparents Who Lurk But Seldom Comment.
Dr. Free-Ride: (answering the phone) Hello?
Younger offspring: Hello!
Dr. Free-Ride: Hey, what are you guys up to?
Younger offspring: I wanted to tell you that we went to the Wild Animal Park.
Dr. Free-Ride: Cool! Did you see any wild animals?
Younger offspring: Of course we did! It was a wild animal park!
Author Archives: admin
Real-life encounters with online persons.
Last night my better half and I had dinner with JM — at a restaurant with both excellent sushi and excellent service! Figures JM finds it right before she’s about to flee the state to start her Ph.D. program.
Because my posts are often (as she put it) “long-winded, but in a good way,” she has recommended a coffee mug rating system at the top of each post. You know, to indicate how many mug of coffee you should expect to need to get all the way to the end of the post. Should I pester our developer for this functionality?
Then, today another ScienceBlogger and I had a top-secret meeting:
Fine-tuning an analogy.
Yesterday, I helped give an ethics seminar for mostly undergraduate summer research interns at a large local center of scientific research. To prepare for this, I watched the video of the ethics seminar we led for the same program last year. One of the things that jumped out at me was the attempt I and my co-presenter made to come up with an apt analogy to explain the injury involved in taking your lab notebooks with you when you leave your graduate advisor’s research group.
I’m not sure we actually landed on an apt analogy, and I’m hoping you can help.
A pair of keyboard related questions.
- Do you touch-type, or (like me) do you kind of know where the keys are but “freestyle” type, looking at the keyboard on a semi-regular basis?*
- Are any of the letters wearing off on your keys?**
In answer to #2, I’ve completely lost L and N, and A and S are fading fast. Which, given my answer to #1, suggests that there will come a point where I’ll be in real trouble.
Book review: Scientific Misconduct and Its Cover-Up – Diary of a Whistleblower.
I recently read a book by regular Adventures in Ethics and Science commenter Solomon Rivlin. Scientific Misconduct and Its Cover-Up: Diary of a Whistleblower is an account of a university response to allegations of misconduct gone horribly wrong. I’m hesitant to describe it as the worst possible response — there are surely folks who could concoct a scenario where administrative butt-covering maneuvers bring about the very collapse of civilization, or at least a bunch of explosions — but the horror of the response described here is that it was real:
The events and personalities described in the following account are real. Names and places were changed to protect the identity of the people who took part in this ugly drama …
I wish I could say that the events described in this book came across as unrealistic. However, paying any attention at all to the world of academic science suggests that misconduct, and cover-ups of misconduct, are happening. Given the opacity of administrative decision making, it’s impossible to know the prevalence of the problem — whether this is just a case of a few extraordinarily well-connected bad actors, or whether the bad actors have come to dominate the ecosystem. In any case, an inside look at how one university responded to concerns about scientific integrity gives us some useful information about features of the academic culture that can constrain and impede efforts to hold scientists accountable for their conduct.
Stuff worth reading.
I want to share some of the items I’ve been reading elsewhere. Some of them strike me as having a very “summertime” feel to them, while others are just about the non-seasonal issues that are part of life.
Tenure-track faculty and departmental decision making.
Chad got to this first (cursed time zones), but I want to say a bit about the Inside Higher Ed article on the tumult in the Philosophy Department at the College of William & Mary that concerns, at least in part, how involved junior faculty should be in major departmental decisions:
Should tenure-track faculty members who are not yet tenured vote on new hires?
Paul S. Davies, one of the professors who pressed to exclude the junior professors from voting, stressed that such a shift in the rules would protect them. “If you have junior people voting, they have tenure in the back of their minds, and that would be a motivation to hire someone less impressive than yourself,” he said. In any department with disagreements, Davies added, junior faculty members would also have to worry about offending (or would seek to please) the people who would soon vote on their tenure.
Davies also linked his views to a concern about “standards.” Davies and George W. Harris, the other philosopher who raised the issue of junior faculty members voting, have charged that the department as a whole is reluctant to push nice people to work harder. The two have also raised questions about whether politics and gender enter in some hiring choices, although they have not restricted those concerns to junior faculty members.
“There has to be a check on conflicts of interest between those doing the hiring and the future of the institution in terms of maintaining or even raising standards when standards are at stake,” said Harris. “Here there is no oversight, nor is there in many other places.”
I am tenure-track but still untenured (although I hope to be tenured by this time next year), and I would like to offer some reasons for letting junior faculty vote on new tenure-track hires in their department.
Extra benefit of the growing ‘green chemistry’ movement.
There’s an article in today’s Inside Higher Ed on the building momentum in college chemistry courses to make the labs greener — that is, to reduce the amount of hazardous materials necessary in the required student experiments. What grabbed me about the article is that it looks like the greening of the chem labs may not just be good for the environment — it could be better for student learning, too.
First, consider a chemist’s description of how to revamp laboratory experiments to make them greener. The article quotes Ken Doxsee, a chemistry professor at University of Oregon:
Birth order, familial environment, and ‘intelligence’.
There’s another piece in the New York Times today about how birth order and family dynamics might play a role in “intelligence” (as measured by IQ — an imperfect measure at best). This is a follow up to their earlier story about research reported in Science and Intelligence that claims, based on research on male Norwegian conscripts, that “social rank” in a family accounts for a “small but significant” difference in IQ scores. (Zuska reminds us of the dangers of drawing too strong conclusions from limited data.)
Today’s Times piece seems to be a round-up of anecdata of the sort that readers would find engaging as they quaff their coffee. However, I think the anecdata suggest ways that the system under study is complicated.