The elder Free-Ride offspring is lobbying to try an experiment this weekend. The working title of the protocol is “homemade soda*” but I suspect it may be described differently in the final report.
Dr. Free-Ride: Tell me about the experiment that you proposed to your teacher.
Elder Free-Ride offspring: I’ll mix four cups of baking soda and vinegar and put each in its own bucket to keep the bubbles from spilling over, and take what remains in the cup and add fruit juice to it, and taste it, and if it’s not sweet enough add sugar to it, and then pass it off as soda!
Author Archives: admin
In the wake of ClimateGate: findings of the misconduct inquiry against Michael Mann.
Remember “ClimateGate”, that well-publicized storm of controversy that erupted when numerous email messages from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers and widely distributed? One of the events set in motion by ClimateGate was a formal inquiry concerning allegations of research conduct against Dr. Michael E. Mann, a professor in the Department of Meteorology at The Pennsylvania State University.
The report (PDF) from that inquiry has been released, so we’re going to have a look at it here.
This report contains a lot of discussion of how the committee pursuing the inquiry was constituted, and of which university policies govern how the committee is constituted, and of how membership of the committee was updated when members left the university for other positions, etc. I’m going to gloss over those details, but they’re all there in the ten page report if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
My focus here will be on what set the inquiry in motion to begin with, on the specific allegations they considered against Dr. Mann, on how the committee gathered information relevant to the allegations, and on the findings and decisions at which they arrived. Let me state up front that committee decided that one allegation merited further consideration in an “investigation” (which is the stage of the process that follows upon an “inquiry”), and that to my eye, that investigation may end up having broader implications for the practice of science in academia.
But let’s start at the beginning. From the inquiry report:
#scio10 aftermath: some thoughts on “Talking Trash: Online Outreach from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch”.
Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session’s wiki page.)
Among other things, this panel took up the article panelist Lindsey Hoshaw wrote about the garbage patch for the New York Times and some of the reaction to it (including from panelist Miriam Goldstein).
Lindsey’s article was interesting because of the process. To get a spot on the ship going out to the North Pacific gyre, where the garbage patch is, she had to come up with funding. (We learned during the session that ship time on some of these expeditions can run to $18,000 a day.) Rather than pitching the story idea to the New York Times and hitting them with the bill, or covering the cost of the ship time herself, she “crowd-sourced” her participation — that is, she turned to readers of Spot.Us, a nonprofit web project that supports freelance journalists, for donations. The pitch she gave when asking for this money described deliverables:
Ask Dr. Free-Ride: The university and the pirate.
Recently in my inbox, I found a request for advice unlike any I’d received before. Given the detail in the request, I don’t trust myself to paraphrase it. As you’ll see, I’ve redacted the names of the people, university, and government agency involved. I have, however, kept the rest of the query (including the original punctuation) intact.
#scio10 aftermath: some thoughts on “Rebooting Science Journalism in the Age of the Web”.
Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session’s wiki page.)
The panelists made a point of stepping away from the scientists vs. bloggers frame (as well as the question of whether bloggers are or are not properly considered journalists). They said some interesting things about what defines a journalist — perhaps a set of distinctive values (like a commitment to truth and accuracy, possibly also to the importance of telling an engaging story). This, rather than having a particular paying gig as a journalist, marked the people who were “doing journalism”, whatever the medium.
Ask Dr. Free-Ride: How should I address multiple doctors?
I have, of late, received a number of emails asking advice on matters somewhere in the territory between ethics, etiquette, and effective communication with members of the tribe of science. While I’m no Ann Landers (as has been noted before), I’ll do my best to answer these questions on the blog when I can, largely so my very insightful commentariat can chime in and make the resulting advice better than what I could generate on my own.
Today we have a question from a reader struggling with the question of how to address one letter to two doctors. He writes:
#scio10 aftermath: some thoughts on “Casting a wider net: Promoting gender and ethnic diversity in STEM”.
Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session’s wiki page.)
One of the things I found interesting about this session was that the session leaders’ approach to the broad issue of promoting gender and ethnic diversity in science, engineering, technology, and M [mathematics here? I get the impression that sometimes the M in STEM is math and sometimes it’s medicine, but I’m happy to set this taxonomic issue aside] was to look at particular initiatives, activities, or responses from smaller communities within the STEM galaxy.
In which the school newspaper’s article on H1N1 vaccination angries up my blood.
This, our first week of classes of the Spring semester, also marked the return of regular publication of the daily student newspaper. Since I’m not behind on grading yet (huzzah for the first week of classes!), I picked up yesterday’s copy and read one of the front-page articles on my way to my office.
And dagnabbit if that article didn’t angry up my blood.
The trouble is, I’m having a hard time figuring out where properly to direct that anger.
Friday Sprog Blogging: ferrets.
The elder Free-Ride offspring, always a fan of mustelids, has lately taken a particular interest in ferrets.
Given that Casa Free-Ride is located in the great state of California, this interest in ferrets has also spurred an interest in state law. In California, it’s illegal to keep ferrets as pets.
According to the elder Free-Ride offspring, there is much to appreciate about ferrets:
An open letter
… to the student in my “Ethics in Science” course.
Today was our second class meeting, which is essentially the first real class meeting — the one in which, instead of just focusing on the overall arc of the course, and the assignments you’ll be doing, and the mechanics of finding the information you need on the course website, there was actual content to discuss.