One of the things that came out of the discussion of the ethics of blogging about science at the 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference was a clear sense that we don’t yet have general agreement about what kinds of ethics should guide science blogging — in part, because we haven’t come to an agreement about just what kind of activity science blogging is.
Category Archives: Blogospheric science
The ethics of performance enhancing drugs in academe.
In the 20/27 December 2007 issue of Nature, there’s a fascinating commentary by Cambridge University neuroscientists Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir. Entitled “Professor’s little helper,” this commentary explores, among other things, how “cognitive-enhancing drugs” are starting to find their way into the lifestyles of professors and students on university campuses, a development which raises some interesting ethical questions.
The questions are sufficiently rich here that this post will just serve as my first attempt to get some of the important issues on the table and to open it up for discussion. (There will also be an ongoing discussion of this commentary on the Nature Network website, in case you’re interested.)
Year-in-review meme.
When I partook of this last year, I thought it was a one time thing. But by golly, John Lynch seems to have established this meme as an annual tradition, and I kind of like traditions.
The rule: post the first sentence of the first post for each month.
The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme.
Taking a very brief break in the dungeon of grading to partake of this meme, with which I have been hoping to be tagged for months. (Indeed, I wasn’t really officially tagged — Julie was, but she’s busy writing papers and stuff, so I’m helping her out by pinch-hitting for her on the meme.)
No mere time-waster, this meme was started by PZ Myers at Pharyngula as a means of demonstrating evolution in cyberspace.
The rules:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.
Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
- You can leave them exactly as is.
- You can delete any one question.
- You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question.
For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”. - You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”
- You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.
Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions. Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.
My ancestry:
Does valuable information want to be free?
The November 5, 2007 issue of Chemical & Engineering News has an editorial by Rudy M. Baum [UPDATE: notbehind a paywall; apparently all the editorials are freely accessible online] looking at the “Google model” for disseminating information.
Baum writes:
The Stemwedel Index of Luddite nature.
Over at The World’s Fair, David Ng dangles another meme before us:
… this meme asks that you come up with your own scientific eponym. What’s that exactly? Well, first read this excellent primer by Samuel Arbesman, which basically provides a step by step description of how to do this effectively. Then have a go at your own blog. If all goes well, I’d like to create a page at the Science Creative Quarterly, that collects (and links to) the good ones.
Since it is well known that I am a tremendous Luddite, it will come as no surprise that my scientific eponym is a measure of how tremendous a Luddite one is. I give you the Stemwedel Index of Luddite Nature:
A plea to vote in the Weblog Awards poll
… despite the fact that I’m deeply suspicious of claims that getting the most votes is truly indicative of being the best.
Anyhow, the category in which your vote might make a real difference (here at the last minute) is Best Science Blog:
I’m a big fan of In the Pipeline, Bootstrap Analysis and Invasive Species Weblog (and I hear that “Pharyngula” guy is a good read), in terms of the maximization of quality and “electability”, I urge you to vote for Bad Astronomy.
Cast your vote now, before it’s too late!
Quick thoughts on the Writers’ Guild of America strike.
If you’re a TV watcher in the U.S., you’re probably already aware that the Writers’ Guild of America is on strike, owing largely to inability to reach agreement with the studios about residuals from DVDs and from internet distribution of TV shows and movies.
While I am a member of a faculty union that was on the verge of a strike last spring, I am not now nor have I ever been a writer for the large or small screen. I don’t have a lot to say about the details of the contract negotiation in this particular case (Lindsay does). But, as Chris points out, as a blogger — indeed, a blogger who has “gone pro” — what I’m doing is connected in some interesting ways to what the WGA members are doing. Thus, I’ll give you my two cents as of this moment:
The ethics of science blogging: help set the agenda.
At the upcoming North Carolina Science Blogging Conference on January 19, 2008, I’ll be leading a discussion on the ethics of science blogging (not about blogging about ethics in science). If you attend the conference (and if you’re not sucked in by one of the other attractive discussions scheduled for the same time-slot), you’ll be able to take part in the conversation in real time.
But even if you won’t be able to come to North Carolina for the conference, you can help set the agenda for our discussion by editing the wiki page for the session.
The “I rank number one on Google” meme (and dark mutterings about technology).
David Ng at The World’s Fair wants me to play along before I head to the airport. Here are the rules:
I’d like to suggest a meme, where the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we’ll take the other country specific ones if need be), you’ll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.
This takes a bit of effort since finding these statements takes a little trial and error, but I’m going to guess that this meme might yield some interesting insight on the blog in question.
To make it easier, we’ll let you use a search statement enclosed in quotations – this is just to increase your chances of turning up as number one, but if you happen to have a website with the awesome traffic to command the same statement without quotations, then flaunt it baby! Of course, once you find your 5 statements, pass the meme on to others.
Where I come out on top: