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Americans for Medical Progress names three Hayre Fellows in Public Outreach.

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Today Americans for Medical Progress has announced three recipients for academic year 2009-2010 of the Michael D. Hayre Fellowship in Public Outreach, designed to inspire and motivate the next generation of research advocates. From the AMP press release:

The importance of animal research to medical progress will be highlighted in projects by three graduate students selected as Michael D. Hayre Fellows in Public Outreach, Americans for Medical Progress announced today.
Gillian Branden-Weiss and Breanna Caltagarone, students the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, and Megan Wyeth of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, will inform and engage the public as advocates for biomedical research.
Braden-Weiss and Caltagarone will create a “Thank a Mouse” interactive campaign for private practice veterinarians and their clients. Through the development of a website and other interactive materials, they will focus on the many contributions of animal research to veterinary treatments that help pets, livestock and wildlife.
Wyeth, a graduate student who conducts epilepsy research at UCLA, will expand the advocacy group Pro-Test for Science on the UCLA campus and create a model for similar student organizations throughout America. This April, Wyeth was a leader of an historic rally by Pro-Test that drew over 800 to stand in support of scientists targeted by animal rights extremists.

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Bastille Day sprog art.

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Not that the art has anything to do with Bastille Day, but it seemed like as good an occasion as any to share some more of their work.
And, for the record, if art classes somehow lead the Free-Ride offspring to adopt an all-black wardrobe, they are bloody well going to find themselves reading Sartre. In our house, moody black-clad young people are philosophers!
From the younger Free-Ride offspring:

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Unscientific America: Give the people what they want, or what they need?

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In the post where I reviewed it, I promised I’d have more to say about Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As it turns out, I have a lot more to say — so much that I’m breaking it up into three posts so I can keep my trains of thought from colliding. I’m going to start here with a post about the public’s end of the scientist-public communication project. Next, I’ll respond to some of the claims the book seems to be making about the new media landscape (including the blogosphere). Finally, I’ll take up the much discussed issue of the book’s treatment of the science-religion culture wars.

Never fear, I’ll intersperse these posts with some that have nothing to do with the book, or the framing wars. Also, there will be new sprog art.

One of the tensions I noticed within Unscientific America has to do with who bears responsibility for the American public’s disengagement with science. Do we blame scientists who have been so immersed in doing science that they haven’t made much conscious effort to communicate with members of society at large? Wretched science teachers? The American people themselves for being too dumb or lazy or easily distracted to “get” science and why they should care?

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Book review: Unscientific America.

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UnscientificAmerica.jpg
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.
by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
Basic Books
2009

In this book, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum set out to alert us to a problem, and they gesture in the direction of a solution to that problem. Despite the subtitle of the book, their target is not really scientific illiteracy — they are not arguing that producing generations of Americans who can do better on tests of general scientific knowledge will fully address the problem that worries them. Rather, the issue they want to tackle is the American public’s broad disengagement with scientific knowledge and with the people and processes that build it.

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Manuscript review and the limits of your expertise.

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At his lounge, the Lab Lemming poses an excellent hypothetical question about manuscript review:

Suppose you are reviewing a paper. Also assume, that like most papers these days, that it has multiple authors, each of whom applies his expertise to the problem at hand. And finally, assume that you are an expert in some, but not all of the fields used to solve the particular problem being reported in this paper.
What do you do if one of the key points in the paper that is not your area of expertise seems fishy. For example, if the paper is on your field area, what if some of the lab results seem fishy. Or if you are an analyst, what if the experimental setup seems odd.
Assuming that you are a successful researcher, you probably have long-time collaborators who are experts in these fields. So, what is the best way of accessing their expertise, given that some sort of confidence generally surrounds papers in review.

Let’s break down some of the relevant interests at work here:

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Friday Sprog Blogging: great moments in skepticism (U.S. history edition).

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For the record, this is the entry I would have posted last Friday if I hadn’t been occupied with provisioning for our Independence Day barbecue. (Indeed, regular commenter $0.01 saw me at Trader Joe’s last Friday doing that provisioning. “I haven’t checked the sprog blog yet,” said she. “I haven’t posted it yet!” I replied.)
* * * * *
In the run up to the July 4th holiday, the Free-Ride family dredged up some “common knowledge” about U.S. presidents. Of course, we started with Washington, but it wasn’t long until we got to Lincoln.
Younger offspring: Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin.
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half: That he built with his own two hands!

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Friday Sprog Blogging: warmth underground.

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Why is it that on hot days, the Free-Ride offspring take up the question of how animals stay warm on cold days? Does this kind of consideration make the heat seem more desirable?
Younger offspring: During the winter, why do some animals go underground to get warm?
Dr. Free-Ride: Why do you think?

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Newspaper’s editor exposes intern’s plagiarism.

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The Colorado Springs Gazette discovered that a summer intern in their newsroom published articles with plagiarized passages. The editor of the paper, Jeff Thomas, deemed this plagiarism a breach of the paper’s trust with the public:

[R]eporter Hailey Mac Arthur, a college student doing a summer internship in our newsroom, has been dismissed from The Gazette. The Gazette forbids plagiarism, which is the act of employing the creative work of someone else and passing it off as your own. None of the four Gazette articles attributed borrowed material to the [New York] Times, as is required when quoting the work of some other publication.
Here are selected excerpts from the four Gazette stories, paired with links to the Times news stories from which material was inappropriately borrowed. …

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I chat with Paw-talk about ethics and animal research.

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In case you’re interested, Paw-talk, a website aimed at humans with pets, invited me over to chat about philosophy, ethics, science, and the use of animals in research. You can find that interview here.
It’s also worth noting that the site features a number of interviews with science bloggers you may recognize … perhaps because the Paw-talk team has a hunch that people surfing the web for pet-related information may also have a latent curiosity about matters scientific. Good on Paw-talk for feeding that curiosity!