The Questionable Authority bloggers challenge has been meet. Children in the Bronx will be getting their science on!
Four more challenges are in striking range and there are 11.5 hours left. Go the distance!
Author Archives: admin
Stranger Fruit Challenge – met!
The Stranger Fruit bloggers challenge has been completed!
Now on to the other five that are still in reach. You’re on a roll!
Last day for Sb/DonorsChoose drive: help make a difference!
ScienceBlogs readers have raised $14,913.09 to help science teachers get the materials they need for engaging explorations of magnets, marine biology, electricity, and evolution. You’ve helped fund classroom equipment and field trips. You’ve helped stack the deck toward a future where fewer people are scared by science and more people are involved in conversations about science.
But we have the rest of today to do just a bit more.
DonorsChoose is generously rewarding bloggers who meet their Bloggers Challenge goals with DonorsChoose gift certificates worth 10% of the total amount they raise. These aren’t gift certificates they can spend on CDs or fancy dinners or airplane tickets — they’re only good for funding more teachers’ proposals at DonorsChoose. Luckily, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do here.
Most of us with bloggers challenges in this drive set our goals too high. (This is not to suggest at all that we overestimated you or that you folks let us down — we just hadn’t done a drive like this before, so we were pulling numbers out of the air.) But there are a few challenges that I think we can — and should — meet. Really, they’re so close, it would be a pity not to fund them. Here’s the rundown:
Comparisons to celebrities: probably a bad idea no matter what.
First I saw it at Feministe, and then at Pandagon, so I had to try the face recognition program that matches one’s face to the faces of celebrities. I used the picture of me in the sidebar. Here’s what I discovered.
Friday Sprog Blogging: a map of the Earth.
Younger offspring: I drew this picture of the Earth!
Dr. Free-Ride: Wow, that’s quite a picture. Will you tell me what’s going on in it?
Younger offspring: Yes, but first scan it in.
Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. Is it maybe not a coincidence that you’re bringing home a picture like this on a Thursday night?
I can’t stop laughing at this result.
Coming up on a long holiday weekend, you all are ready for another internet quiz, right?
I can’t help wondering whether the “Birth Order Predictor” quiz is not well-grounded in the sociological facts, or whether there really isn’t any such coherent set of sociological facts, or whether I’m just a weirdo.
Because it’s hard to imagine this result being any more off base:
Don’t do the misconduct if you can’t do the time.
A long time ago, I blogged about Dr. Eric T. Poehlman, formerly of the University of Vermont College of Medicine. He’s no longer there because he was caught falsifying and fabricating data in the “preliminary studies” sections of numerous grant proposals submitted to federal agencies and departments.
Today comes the news that Dr. Poehlman will be doing some time for his crimes. From the Burlington Free Press:
Using “Angels” to patch leaks in the pipeline.
Interesting news from Japan: Tohoku University has decided to launch an outreach effort to encourage more girls to pursue science. Rather than relying on secondary school science classes to whip up enthusiam for science, the university is recruiting its own women graduate students in the sciences to serve as role models and mentors.
From the Yomiuri Shimbun:
Last leg of Sb/DonorsChoose drive: maximizing our impact.
It’s been two weeks since we kicked off our first ever ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose drive to raise money for math and science classrooms. In that time, 172 generous readers have donated a total of $13,685.14 and SEED has kicked in $10,000.
But there are three days left of the drive, and I know you all have some greatness left in you.
Here’s the deal: Of the 19 blogs participating in this drive, only Pharyngula reached its challenge goal. This would be no big deal if we were just concerned with interblog bragging rights. But, there’s more at stake here: the good people at DonorsChoose are kicking in another 10% of the funds raised for each compeleted challenge. The Pharynguloids raised $6257.51, so DonorsChoose is giving PZ $625.75 to fund more teachers’ proposals.
In other words, for the last three days of the drive, we need to focus on the bloggers with challenges that are closest to completion so we can get additional money from DonorsChoose and do even more good.
Details of the strategy (plus some current stats) below the fold.
A few words about Ward Churchill.
I’m not going to do this to death, partly because others will and partly because Churchill isn’t a scientist. But, given that I’m working the ethics beat at ScienceBlogs, I ought to give you the ethical crib-sheet:
- Plagiarism is bad.
- Self-plagiarism (that is, recycling stuff you’ve written and published before without indicating that you’re recycling it) is bad.
- Ghost-writing pieces for other “scholars” in what purports to be a scholarly anthology might be acceptable under some possible set of circumstances, but it’s fishy enough that it’s probably best presumed bad.
- Citing pieces you’ve ghost-written for such an anthology in other works you’ve produced without indicating that you’re actually citing yourself is bad.
- Citing pieces you’ve ghost-written using the author of record’s name as support for a point you are trying to establish (by making it look like other authors agree with your analysis of the facts) is very, very bad.
- The badness in these behaviors lies in their deceptiveness. Essentially, they are all different ways of lying to your audience and the community of scholars trying to build good knowledge in your area.
- Universities, as institutions charged with maintaining academic integrity, have a right to cut loose professors who engage in this kind of bad behavior. Indeed, if a professor habitually engages in these bad acts, the university probably has a duty to fire this bozo.
Beneath the fold, I approvingly quote Eugene Volokh. (Yeah, I’m surprised too.)