In response to my open letter to the ACS, Rudy Baum, the Editor in Chief of Chemical & Engineering News, emailed me some information which I am posting here with his kind permission:
Category Archives: Current events
An open letter to the ACS.
Like Revere and the folks at The Scientist, I received the series of emails from “ACS insider” questioning the way the American Chemical Society is running its many publications — and in particular, how compensation of ACS executives (and close ties to the chemical industry) might influence editorial policies at ACS publications.
The ACS disputes the details of the anonymous emails, so I won’t have much to say about those. But as an ACS member (who is, at present, participating in an ACS regional meeting), I’d like to ask the Society for some clarity.
Fifty years after Sputnik.
Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, Earth’s first artificial satellite. I don’t remember it (because I wouldn’t be born for another decade), but the “BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP” heard ’round the world left indelible traces on the fabric of life for my parents’ generation, my generation, and for the subsequent generations, too.
Memo to the FSU Athletics Department: ‘learning’ and ‘cheating’ are not synonyms.
Somehow, the Florida State University Office of Athletic Academic Support Services had in its employ a “Learning Specialist” who seemed to think it was part of his or her job to help a bunch of student athletes cheat.
As reported by the Orlando Sentinel:
Facebook needs to hire the ghost of Potter Stewart.
Tara notices that social networking site Facebook has decided, in the enforcement of their policy against “nudity, drug use, or other obscene content”, that pictures of breastfeeding babies are obscene. As such, the Facebook obscenity squad had been removing them — and has deleted the account of at least one mom who had posted such pictures.
Break out the Ouija board and get late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who famously claimed that he couldn’t define obscenity, but he knew it when he saw it. As far as the legal definition goes, “obscene” seems to be roughly equivalent to “pornographic”. And I’m pretty confident that Justice Stewart, upon seeing a picture of a breastfeeding baby, would recognize that it was not pornographic. (If you are aroused beyond “normal lust” by such pictures, that may just be you, not the pictures themselves.)
So, what’s Facebook’s problem?
Are imaginary friends a prima facie disqualification for a judge?
Via Ed Cone I found one of those stories that makes me love the Wall Street Journal: “In the Philippines, Ex-Judge Consults Three Wee Friends”:
As a trial-court judge, Florentino V. Floro Jr. acknowledged that he regularly sought the counsel of three elves only he could see. The Supreme Court deemed him unfit to serve and fired him last year. …
Helping him, he says, are his three invisible companions. “Angel” is the neutral force, he says. “Armand” is a benign influence. “Luis,” whom Mr. Floro describes as the “king of kings,” is an avenger.
Oh my.
A code of ethics for scientists.
At least, for scientists in the UK.
The BBC reports that the chief scientific advisor to the British government, Professor Sir David King, has set out an ethics code of “seven principles aimed at building trust between scientists and society”.
The seven principles:
What the scientists don’t talk about in their papers tells you something, too.
On Stranger Fruit, there’s a response by historian of science Naomi Oreskes to recent criticisms of her 2004 paper in Science discussing the consensus position regarding anthropogenic climate change. While the whole trajectory of these sorts of “engagements” is interesting in its way — attacks on claims that weren’t made, critiques of methodologies that weren’t used, and so forth — the part of Oreskes’ response that jumped out at me had to do with the kinds of issues on which scientists focus when they’re talking to each other in the peer-reviewed literature:
Doing the math: how plausible is the claim that changing what you eat makes more difference to global warming than changing what you drive?
Dave Munger pointed me to an article in the New York Times that claims “switching to a plant-based diet does more to curb global warming than switching from an S.U.V. to a Camry.”
Dave is a critical consumer of information and notes that there is little given in this particular article (which appears in the “Media & Advertising” section) as far as numbers. As I’m not an agronomist, I don’t have all the relevant numbers at my finger tips, but I’m happy to set up some equations into which reliable numbers can be plugged once they are located.
Reacting to PRISM and publishers’ concerns about ‘scientific integrity’ (the short version).
Even though I’ve been frightfully busy this week, I’ve been following the news about the launch of PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine). I first saw it discussed in this post by Peter Suber, after which numerous ScienceBloggers piled on. If you have some time (and a cup of coffee), read Bora’s comprehensive run-down of the blogosphere’s reaction.
If you’re in a hurry, here are three reasons I think PRISM’s plans to “save” scientists and the public from Open Access are a bad idea.