Friday Sprog Blogging: meet the silkworms (part 2).

Here’s some more video footage of the Free-Ride silkworms, with color commentary from the Free-Ride offspring.
Let me note here that as “pets” acquired as the elementary science classroom winds down for summer, silkworms are pretty agreeable. As long as you have a stable source of mulberry leaves and keep feeding them, they seem pretty content. Another animal in our science classroom that is looking for a summer home is a Madagascar hissing cockroach. The handout from the science teacher says he eats romaine lettuce and cat food. Talk about a hard sell!

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Friday Sprog Blogging: meet the silkworms (part 1).

This week, our first-ever video sprog blog. (Yeah, I know, I’m going to have to turn in my Luddite card now.) Because it’s hard to do silkworms justice unless you can watch them squirm!
Recall that these silkworms (who you’ve already seen in pictures) hatched from eggs that came home last June and stayed in the refrigerator until spring (when mulberry trees are nice and leafy).
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half warns that the silkworms are slightly out of focus in this video. I remind you that here at Friday Sprog Blogging, we make a point of protecting the identities of the very young. Yeah, that’s right, I meant them to be blurry! I don’t want these wee caterpillars to have to deal with creepy internet stalkers!

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Evaluating an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics.

At White Coat Underground, PalMD considers an article from the Journal of Medical Ethics. The article (L. Johnson, R. B. Stricker, “Attorney General forces Infectious Diseases Society of America to redo Lyme guidelines due to flawed development process,” Journal of Medical Ethics 2009; 35: 283-288. doi:10.1136/jme.2008.026526) is behind a paywall, but Pal was kind enough to send me a copy.
Pal writes:

I have a strong interest in medical ethics, although I’m not an ethicist myself. Still, I’m generally familiar with the jargon and the writing styles. This piece reads like no ethics article I’ve ever seen. It is basically an advocacy piece for the concept of chronic Lyme disease, and starts from an entire set of problematic assumptions.

I know very little about Lyme disease, and I have no horse in the race in the controversy about whether chronic Lyme disease exists, if so what it is, and how it might be treated.
I am, however, an ethicist with a strong interest in ethical issues connected to the building and use of scientific knowledge. So I told Pal I’d have a look at the article.
Here’s the abstract:

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Maybe she misses her old glasses.

I’ve been poky about getting my eyes checked regularly.
I got my first pair of reading glasses in the last year or so of my time as a chemistry graduate student. About nine years later, shortly before the eldest Free-Ride offspring was born and in the midst of an intensive stretch of writing, I managed to go in for another exam and got my prescription updated. Last month, after a stretch of about ten years, I got my eyes checked again and got another pair of reading glasses.

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Fake journals versus bad journals.

By email, following on the heels of my post about the Merck-commissioned, Elsevier-published fake journal Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, a reader asked whether the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPandS) also counts as a fake journal.
I have the distinct impression that folks around these parts do not hold JPandS in high esteem. However, it seems like there’s an important distinction between a fake journal and a bad one.

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Meet Susan the Scientist.

You know and I know that science is cool, but for some reason kids can be suspicious of our declarations to this effect. (Maybe it has to do with our enthusiasm for vegetables that they don’t like, not to mention naps.)
However, Susan the Scientist is on a mission to let kids know that science rocks! Here’s a taste:

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What to do when the boss says, ‘Keep your head down.’

One of the interesting developments within the tribe of science is the way that blogs, email lists, and things of that ilk have made public (or at least, more public) conversations within a field that used to happen only in private.
The discussions of Aetogate on the VRTPALEO list are just one notable example, but email lists and blogs also host discussions in the wake of retractions of journal papers, investigations of allegations of scientific misconduct, and other sorts of professional shenanigans. While some of the people in these conversations cloak their identities in pseudonyms, others use their real names.
How identifiable one is while participating in these discussions becomes an issue sometimes because there is pushback. We saw some examples of pushback in Aetogate. In one case, an “independent” member of an inquiry panel characterized the people who had raised the concerns which the inquiry was supposed to investigate as “mainly young, un- or under-employed workers (including both Park and Martz)” with an axe to grind. In another, a scientist posted to the VRTPALEO list (under his own name) to do some heavy-duty victim blaming, as well as to put some fear into the young upstarts raising a ruckus:

Will these actions result in outrage in the paleontological community, ruination of careers, civil proceedings, etc.? I hope not.
You better hope that the harm done doesn’t also include your own career.
Graduate student(s), do you honestly think that raising a lot of hell when you are looking for employment is really going to help your career? You must not work in the same niche of academia that I inhabit.

Some advisors, as you might well imagine, are concerned when their trainees get involved in highly visible discussions of controversial conduct. One of my correspondents received a cautionary email along these lines:

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