There are two features of science that I think a lot of people (myself included) find attractive.
One is that scientific representations of the world (theories and other theory-like things) give you powerful ways to organize lots of diverse phenomena and to find what unifies them. They get you explanatory principles that you can apply to different situations, set-ups, or critters.
The other is the empirical basis of much of our knowledge: by pointing your sense organs (and your mind) at a particular piece of the world, you can learn something about how that bit behaves, or about how it’s put together.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the way these two attractive features can pull a person in opposite directions.
Author Archives: admin
Animals in the lab, animals on the plate: trying to make sense of the muddled middle.
This week my students (the ones who you already know are so smart) and I talked in class about the ethics of research with animals. One thing that came up in these discussions is the likelihood that a lot of people hold internally inconsistent views when it comes to how we ought to treat animals.
Am I geekier than I thought?
Eszter Hargittai at Crooked Timber points out another silly online quiz: Web 2.0 or Star Wars character?
So of course, I had to take it.
Seasonal experimentation (March 17th edition).
This being St. Patrick’s Day and all, the elder offspring would like to conduct an experiment. However, we want to make sure it’s above-board, ethically speaking.
Friday Sprog Blogging: in which hermetic knowledge is revealed and a scientific disagreement is resolved.
Dr. Free-Ride: (to younger offspring) Could you teach me all the words to your song about the planets.
Younger offspring: It’s secret.
Dr. Free-Ride: Please?
Younger offspring: Oh, alright!
More thoughts on the care of animals and students.
My post a couple days ago about Laurentian University’s lock-out of researchers from their animal care facility sparked some heated discussion in the comments. Also, it sparked an email from someone close enough to the situation to give me an update on the situations since December. The issue of how, ethically, to use animals in research, and of how the interests of animals and the interests of students should be balanced, seems to have touched a nerve. So, we’re going back in.
Believe it or not, the Skeptic’s Circle is available!
Now available, the 30th Skeptic’s Circle, hosted at Paige’s Page.
I believe I’d enjoy settling in and reading all the fine skeptical posts it features, but …
…still grading!
Tangled Bank at Living the Scientific Life
Tangled Bank #49 is now up at Living the Scientific Life. GrrlScientist has lined up an impressive array of science writings from the blogosphere. Go and partake of them!
(Me, I’m grading papers …)
Institutional obligations to animals and to researchers.
Catching up on some news from Canada (yes, I’m really far behind on Canadian current events!):
At the end of last year, the administration at Laurentian University changed the locks to the research facility housing the animals used in research in the behavioural neuroscience program. The lock-out of researchers was initiated by the university’s Animal Control Committee (ACC) after that committee rejected all of the animal use protocols of one of the faculty members in the behavioural neuroscience program.
Apparently, the ACC judged the problems with the protocols siognificant enough to warrant shutting down the research altogether, since that’s what the lock-out accomplished. And now, some LU students are wondering how seriously the university takes its obligations to them.
What (not) to do when the system is broken.
When I was a kid, my mother went back to school with the intention of getting the physics training she needed to pursue her dream of a career in astronomy. Part of this journey, of course, required that she be plunged into the life of a graduate student. It wasn’t any prettier then than it is now.
While my mom was in the thick of the horrors visited upon graduate students, she was a little bit freaked out by coverage of a parole hearing for one Theodore Streleski, an erstwhile math graduate student at Stanford who killed his advisor with a ball peen hammer. Streleski actually refused parole, essentially standing by his decision to off his advisor. What freaked my mom out was that she could kind of see his point.