Category Archives: Academia

Balance is a nice idea, but my reality is closer to juggling.

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Friday, my better half was preparing to cross the international dateline for a week-long business trip and my parents were getting ready to board a plane for a week-long visit at Casa Free-Ride. As I contemplated the prospect of digging out our guest room (known in these parts as “the place clean clothes go to wrinkle”) it became clear to me that the chances of my finishing writing (and preparing overheads for) the two presentations I will be giving at the conference that starts the day after my parents depart before my parents’ arrival were nil. Of course, this means that I will not be kicking back for a relaxing week with my parents and my children, but will instead be trying to cram Scholarly Work into the interstices.

So, when Zuska said, “Hey, you should write a post about balance for the upcoming Scientiae Carnival!” how could I refuse?

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Is a shift away from peer review cause for concern?

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Today, Inside Higher Ed has an article about the recent decline of peer reviewed papers authored by professors in top five economics departments in high profile economics journals. A paper by MIT economics professor Glenn Ellison, “Is Peer Review in Decline?,” considers possible explanations for this decline, and the Inside Higher ed article looks at the possible impacts of this shift.
The alternative threatening the peer reviewed journals here is the web, since scholars can post their papers directly to their websites (or blogs) rather than letting them languish with pokey referees. But I think the issues here go beyond the tug-of-war between old media and new media and bring us to the larger question of just what is involved in building new scientific* knowledge.

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Murphy’s law of conferences?

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Let’s say you’re looking at a wide-open fall semester, and you are asked to be a participant on a panel at a conference. Since your semester is wide open, you agree.
Months later, you’re asked to be a participant on another panel at another conference. Except for the conference you already committed to, your semester is still wide open.
What do you suppose the chances are that the two conferences overlap in time? And meet in different cities? Was this predictable, or am I just lucky?
(It looks like the two panels will meet on different days. Assuming no plane-grounding weather events, it should be do-able.)

Opening lines of communication between universities and the FBI.

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In the July 16 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (secure behind a paywall), the article “FBI Reaches Out to Campuses” [1] caught my attention. The gist of it is that academic scientists are increasingly the targets of foreign espionage, where the stakes have less to do with national security than potentially huge economic losses. The FBI would like to help academic scientists avoid being dupes and giving scientists in other countries an unfair advantage.

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Lab notebooks and graduate research: what should the policy be?

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An earlier post tried to characterize the kind of harm it might do to an academic research lab if a recent graduate were to take her lab notebooks with her rather than leaving them with the lab group. This post generated a lot of discussion, largely because a number of commenters questioned the assumption that the lab group (and particularly the principal investigator) has a claim to the notebooks that outweighs the claim of the graduate researcher who actually did the research documented in her lab notebooks.

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Fine-tuning an analogy.

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Yesterday, I helped give an ethics seminar for mostly undergraduate summer research interns at a large local center of scientific research. To prepare for this, I watched the video of the ethics seminar we led for the same program last year. One of the things that jumped out at me was the attempt I and my co-presenter made to come up with an apt analogy to explain the injury involved in taking your lab notebooks with you when you leave your graduate advisor’s research group.
I’m not sure we actually landed on an apt analogy, and I’m hoping you can help.

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Book review: Scientific Misconduct and Its Cover-Up – Diary of a Whistleblower.

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I recently read a book by regular Adventures in Ethics and Science commenter Solomon Rivlin. Scientific Misconduct and Its Cover-Up: Diary of a Whistleblower is an account of a university response to allegations of misconduct gone horribly wrong. I’m hesitant to describe it as the worst possible response — there are surely folks who could concoct a scenario where administrative butt-covering maneuvers bring about the very collapse of civilization, or at least a bunch of explosions — but the horror of the response described here is that it was real:

The events and personalities described in the following account are real. Names and places were changed to protect the identity of the people who took part in this ugly drama …

I wish I could say that the events described in this book came across as unrealistic. However, paying any attention at all to the world of academic science suggests that misconduct, and cover-ups of misconduct, are happening. Given the opacity of administrative decision making, it’s impossible to know the prevalence of the problem — whether this is just a case of a few extraordinarily well-connected bad actors, or whether the bad actors have come to dominate the ecosystem. In any case, an inside look at how one university responded to concerns about scientific integrity gives us some useful information about features of the academic culture that can constrain and impede efforts to hold scientists accountable for their conduct.

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Stuff worth reading.

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I want to share some of the items I’ve been reading elsewhere. Some of them strike me as having a very “summertime” feel to them, while others are just about the non-seasonal issues that are part of life.

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