I really don’t know what to say about this news item, except that it had better mean that the California State University presumptively* views blogging on one’s own time and bandwidth as fully compatible with a professorial appointment, regardless of the subject matter on which the blog is focused or the views expressed by the academic doing the blogging.
Otherwise, there is a pretty messed up double-standard in place.
______
*Obviously, violating FERPA, HIPAA, or other laws or regulations would count against that presumption.
Author Archives: admin
A possibility for those recruiting postdocs and junior faculty to consider.
In recent days, there have been discussions of conditions for postdoctoral fellows, and about the ways that these conditions might make it challenging to tackle the problem of the “leaky pipeline” for women in science.
For example, in comments at DrugMonkey’s blog, bsci opines:
Earth Day 2010: change I can believe in.
First, let me refer you to Sharon Astyk’s excellent post on what has become of Earth Day. If I had the time or energy to pay much attention to Earth Day as a particular day of observance, I think I’d share Sharon’s grumpiness.
After all, paying attention to our impacts on our shared environment just one day out of 365 is not likely to make much of a difference, and buying stuff as a strategy to deal with our over-consumption of resources (and the pollution that follows upon the manufacture and transport of that stuff) seems pretty perverse.
That said, I’m going to take this Earth Day as an opportunity to notice some sustainable changes in the direction of treading more lightly that I’ve made in the past year. This isn’t quite rising to the level of Mike Dunford’s Earth Day resolutions meme, in which the sprogs and I participated last year. Resolutions are good, but sometimes when you set a goal and then fail to live up to it, you throw your hands up and kind of give up.
Giving up, I’d argue, doesn’t do much to help. On the other hand, noticing places where you imagined change would be painful and it turned out not to be might actually help motivate more change.
Here are the changes that have stuck since last Earth Day:
Pseudonymity and undisclosed conflicts of interest: online book review edition.
I’ll confess that I am not one who spends much time reading the reviews of books posted on the websites of online booksellers. By the time I’m within a click of those reviews, I pretty much know what I want. However, a lot of people find them helpful, and the ability to post your own review of a book (or a film, or a product, or a business) online seems to give consumers more of a voice rather than leaving it to “professional” reviewers or tastemakers.
Who, after all, knows whether those professional reviewers’ first loyalties are to the public?
But, unsurprisingly, it turns out that citizen-reviewers can be just as gripped by potential conflicts of interests. From the Associated Press:
CSU budgetpocalypse: what lies ahead.
I think I’ve mentioned once or twice that the California State University system (of which my fair campus is a part) has been experiencing a bit of a budget crisis.
Well, while there may be glimmers of hope for a recovery in the rest of the economy, we seem to be on the cusp of things getting much, much worse.
Old school geekery.
Dr. Free-Ride’s parents, Duke and Super Sally, have been working hard to shed some of the material goods they have accumulated in the last several years, on account of they are planning a move to smaller living quarters.
Of course, this means that they shipped several boxes of stuff from their current place to Casa Free-Ride. There’s some sort of conservation of matter principle at work here.
Not that I should complain. For one thing, half of those boxes are actually Uncle Fishy’s. For another, there’s some stuff cool stuff in the boxes that are staying with us.
Market forces, tough times, and the question of raises for postdocs.
Over at the DrugMonkey blog, PhysioProf noted that a push to increase NIH postdoctoral fellowship stipend levels by 6% may have the effect of reducing the number of postdoctoral positions available.
To this, the postdoctoral masses responded with something along the lines of, “Hey, it’s possible that there are too damn many postdocs already (and fighting for those rare tenure-track positions in a slightly less crowded field might be better),” and “Being able to pay my damn bills might significantly improve my quality of postdoctoral life.” There were also the expected mentions of the fact that, given their education and experience, the pay in a postdoctoral position is often dramatically less than in private industry.
In a number of comments, though, DrugMonkey pointed out that it is not just postdocs who are paid “less than they are worth” (with respect to education and experience) and frequently living in regions with higher-than-average cost of living. Why should postdocs be singularly worthy of a 6% bump but not PIs, technicians, and grad students, too?
Of course, such across-the-board increases would bump up the budgets required to run research projects, possibly by quite a lot. And in case you hadn’t heard, times are tough for everyone right now.
Then, in that comment thread, becca puts forth a proposal:
Basically, if you are going to argue in favor of pauperizing your lab workers, pauperize them enough so they can get on public Welfare.
Call me an idealist, but when a comparison of academic science and Walmart starts making the big-box giant look like the more humane employer, academic science may want to take a moment to examine its course.
Ask Dr. Free-Ride: Ethically, which field of science is the worst?
A reader writes:
I was in a PhD program in materials science, in a group that did biomedical research (biomaterials end of the field) and was appalled at the level of misconduct I saw. Later, I entered an MD program. I witnessed some of the ugliest effects of ambition in the lab there.
Do you think biomedical research is somehow “ethically worse” than other fields?
I’ve always wanted to compare measurable instances of unethical behavior across different fields. As an undergraduate I remember never hearing or seeing anything strange with the folks that worked with metallurgy and it never seemed to be an issue with my colleagues in these areas in graduate school. Whenever there is trouble it seems to come from the biomedical field. I’d love to see you write about that.
Thank you for doing what you do, since that time I have so many regrets, your blog keeps me sane.
First, I must thank this reader for the kind words. I am thrilled (although still a bit bewildered) that what I write here is of interest and use to others, and if I can contribute to someone’s sanity while I’m thinking out loud (or on the screen, as the case may be), then I feel like this whole “blogging” thing is worthwhile.
Next, on the question of whether biomedical research is somehow “ethically worse” than research in other areas of science, the short answer is: I don’t know.
Certainly there are some high profile fraudsters — and scientists whose misbehavior, while falling short of official definitions of misconduct, also fell well short of generally accepted ethical standards — in the biomedical sciences. I’ve blogged about the shenanigans of biologists, stem cell researchers, geneticists, cancer researchers, researchers studying the role of hormones in aging, researchers studying immunosuppression, anesthesiologists, and biochemists.
But the biomedical sciences haven’t cornered the market on ethical lapses, as we’ve seen in discussions of mechanical engineers, nuclear engineers, physicists, organic chemists, paleontologists, and government geologists.
There are, seemingly, bad actors to be found in every scientific field. Of course, it is reasonable to assume that there are also plenty of honest and careful scientists in every scientific field. Maybe the list of well-publicized bad actors in biomedical research is longer, but given the large number of biomedical researchers compared to the number of researchers in all scientific fields (and also the extent to which the public might regard biomedical research as more relevant to their lives than, say, esoteric questions in organic synthesis), is it disproportionately long?
Again, that’s hard to gauge.
However, my correspondent’s broad question strikes me as raising a number of related empirical questions that it would be useful to try to answer:
Friday Sprog Blogging: watershed field trip.
Dr. Free-Ride: So, you went on a field trip today to a lagoon.
Younger offspring: Yeah, I went to [Name redacted] Creek and [Name redacted] Lagoon.
Dr. Free-Ride: You know, I’m going to redact the names to protect your privacy. Tell me what you saw on your field trip that was interesting.
Animal research, abortion, and ethical decision making as a matter of balance, not absolutes.
Making good ethical choices in the real world is hard, in large part because it requires us to find the best balance in responding to interested parties whose legitimate interests pull in different directions. The situation is further complicated by the fact that as we are trying to make the best ethical decision we can, or evaluating the ethical decision-making of others, we can’t help but notice that there is not universal agreement about who counts as a party with legitimate interests that ought to be taken into account, let alone about how to weight the competing interests in the ethical calculus.
We’ve talked about these difficulties before, especially in the context of the ethics of research with animals. In these discussions, we’ve noticed that some folks oppose such research across the board (at least if the research includes anything beyond purely observational studies in the field) on the basis that non-human animals’ capacity to feel pain creates a situation where it is unethical for humans to use them in any manner that might cause them pain (or discomfort, or distress, or boredom), no matter what benefit such use might bring to humans. Here, at least one set of people doing the ethical calculus assert that non-human animals need to be counted as an interested party, and that their interests ought not to be sacrificed in favor of those of any other interested party.
Of course, arguments about the ethical status of animal research are not the only place such ethical claims arise. I refer you to the new law signed this week by the Governor of Nebraska. As The New York Times reports: