Back in January, at ScienceOnline2010, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Dr. Isis, and I led a session called “Online Civility and Its (Muppethugging) Discontents”. Shortly after the session, I posted my first thoughts on how it went and on the lessons I was trying to take away from it.
Almost two months later, I’m ready to say some more about the session and the issues I think it raised.
Author Archives: admin
Question for the hivemind.
Which has a larger carbon footprint:
An office that uses a photocopier or an office that uses carbon paper?
Friday Sprog Blogging: recent drawings of animals.
It’s been awhile since the Free-Ride offspring have shared their artwork. Today, we offer some of their drawings of animals.
From the younger Free-Ride offspring:
Tigers. They may look cute, but you don’t want to get near them when they’re hungry.
Objectivity, conflicts of interest, and book reviews.
Let’s say you’re a book review editor for a large circulation science periodical. You receive books from publishers and you look for scientists with the relevant expertise to write reviews that really engage the content of the books they are reviewing.
The thing with having the relevant expertise, though, is that it may put you right in the middle of a controversy that the book you’ve been asked to review is probing or advancing.
In other words, it may be tricky to find a reviewer who is conversant in the scientific issues the book raises and simultaneously reasonably objective about those issues. If you know enough to grok the horse race, you may actually have a horse in that race.
The question, however, is whether large circulation science periodicals are offering book reviews with the tacit promise that they are objective (or as objective as an individual’s own assessment of a book can be).
To get a quick sense of your expectations on this, here’s a poll:
Grading tip: back to the drawing board.
The semester must be in full swing, because suddenly I have an abundance of papers to grade. So I’m using a brief pause (between grading one stack of papers and grading another stack of papers) to share a grading-aid I just figured out at the end of last semester.
Typically, by the time the stacks of papers come in, I have all kinds of other pieces of work-in-progress on my desk. I could put those away (and hope that I’ll remember where I put them when I’m done with the grading), or try to keep the papers I’m grading restricted to part of the desk. This never works that well, and the feeling of being cramped makes the actual grading painful enough that it’s hard to sit down and just get through it.
Also, the chances of coffee spilling on the student papers is pretty high.
My old alternative was to stick the papers to be graded on a clipboard and work away from the desk. This still involved a sense of being cramped, as I’d have to shuffle the papers I was grading and the grading rubric — your standard clipboard, after all, is just wide enough for your standard sheet of copier paper.
Well, last December, as I was hauling final exams into my office for grading, my gaze fell upon an item I’ve had in my office for a few years:
When to cancel class.
At Dot Physics, Rhett Allain discusses his philosophy about class meetings:
Here is the point I am trying to make – class is for students. Class is not for me. Students pay for classes, so they should get them.
Here is the other point. If a student chooses not to come to class, that is the student’s choice. I am ok with that. Maybe it is not a great idea, but these are adults. There can be a problem. What if the class has attendance as a grade? What if the class will give a pop-bonus-quiz if attendance is low (which is essentially the same thing as attendance for a grade)? Well, I don’t do these things nor do I encourage them.
Rhett doesn’t cancel class because it’s his job to deliver a class meeting. If students don’t avail themselves of what he’s offering (which, as it happens, they’ve already paid for), that’s their choice.
Some modest proposals for animal rights supporters looking to make their case without resorting to harassment, intimidation, or violence.
I take it that a good number of animal rights supporters feel that their position is philosophically well-grounded, intuitively appealing, and compatible with the flourishing of humans as well as of non-human animals.
As such, I would argue that animal rights supporters can, and should, advance their position without resorting to tactics that depend on harassment, intimidation, or violence. (At least some animal rights supporters agree.) Especially since the hope is to win the hearts and minds of the larger public to the cause of animal rights, supporters of this position might want to hold on to the moral high ground.
How can they do this? Here are four options that leap to mind:
Our cause is good, so our tactics don’t need to be?
Earlier this week, I related a situation I found alarming in which a scientist and his children were targeted for harassment because he dared to express the view that research with animals plays an important role in answering scientific questions that matter to scientists and to the public. I was not alone in decrying these tactics. At least one animal rights group also condemned them.
Given that the post was pretty clearly directed at the question of tactics, I am frankly puzzled by this comment from Douglas Watts:
When I see mainstream “science” commit itself to a program which phases out vivisection by date certain, this post would have credibility. Without such a pledge and plan, you are basically saying that scientists are separate from the rest of society and should not be held to the standards the rest of society must live up to. In doing so, you are making the anti-vivisectionists point for them: scientists are unwilling and unable to clean up their own house.
If I’m understanding it, the logical structure of what Douglas Watts is claiming here is something like this:
Friday Sprog Blogging: innocence about plants.
Younger offspring: Hey, look what I grew!
Dr. Free-Ride: Wow, those are tall.
Younger offspring: It’s a bean plant.
There are animal rights supporters who take a public stand against violence and intimidation.
We don’t have to agree about whether animal research is ethical or scientifically valuable to agree that some tactics for pursuing your view are harmful to civil society.
Bruins for Animals, the student organization at UCLA that was instrumental in organizing the recent dialogue about the science and ethics of animal based research, understands this, and they are not afraid to call out the people “on their side” who opt for threats and intimidation: