Category Archives: Current events

Marc Hauser makes an excuse for cheating. What he could have done instead.

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DrugMonkey notes that Marc Hauser has offered an explanation for faking data (as reported on the Chronicle of Higher Education Percolator blog). His explanation amounts to:

  • being busy with teaching and directing the Mind, Brain & Behavior Program at Harvard
  • being busy serving on lots of fancy editorial boards
  • being busy writing stuff explaining science to an audience of non-scientists
  • being busy working with lots of scientific collaborators
  • being busy running a large research lab with lots of students

DrugMonkey responds that busy is part of the job description, especially if you’re rolling in the prestige of a faculty post at Harvard, and of being a recognized leader in your field. I would add that “I was really busy and I made a bad decision (but just this one time)” is an excuse we professors frequently hear from students we catch cheating. It’s also one that doesn’t work — we expect our students to do honest work and figure out their time management issues. And, we’re expected to work out our own time management issues — even if it means saying “No” to invitations that are sometimes tempting.

By the way, Marc Hauser didn’t actually admit that he faked data, or committed research misconduct of any kind, so much as he “accepts the findings” of the Office of Research Integrity. Moreover, his comments seem to be leaning on that last bullet point (the rigors of supervising a big lab) to deflect what responsibility he does take. From the CHE Percolator:

He also implies that some of the blame may actually belong to others in his lab. Writes Hauser: “I let important details get away from my control, and as head of the lab, I take responsibility for all errors made within the lab, whether or not I was directly involved.”

But that take—the idea that the problems were caused mainly by Hauser’s inattention—doesn’t square with the story told by those in his laboratory. A former research assistant, who was among those who blew the whistle on Hauser, writes in an e-mail that while the report “does a pretty good job of summing up what is known,” it nevertheless “leaves off how hard his co-authors, who were his at-will employees and graduate students, had to fight to get him to agree not to publish the tainted data.”

The former research assistant points out that the report takes into account only the research that was flagged by whistle-blowers. “He betrayed the trust of everyone that worked with him, and especially those of us who were under him and who should have been able to trust him,” the research assistant writes.

So, Hauser is kind of claiming that there were too many students, postdocs, and technicians to supervise properly, and some of them got away from him and falsified methodology and coding and fabricated data. The underlings challenge this account.

In the comments at DrugMonkey’s, hypotheses are being floated as to what might have spurred Hauser’s bad actions. (A perception that he needed to come up with sexy findings to stay a star in his field is one of the frontrunners.) I’m more inclined to come up with a list of options Hauser might have fruitfully pursued instead of faking or allowing fakery to happen on his watch:

  1. He could have agreed not to send out manuscripts with questionable data when his underlings asked him.
  2. He could have asked to be released from some of his teaching and/or administrative duties at Harvard so he could spend the needed time on his research and on properly mentoring the members of his lab.
  3. He could have taken on fewer students in order to better supervise and mentor the students in his charge.
  4. He could have sought the advice of a colleague or a collaborator on ways he might deal with his workload (or with the temptations that workload might be awakening in him).
  5. He could have communicated to his department, his professional societies, and the funding agencies his considered view that the demands on researchers, and operative definitions of productivity, make it unreasonable hard to do the careful research needed to come up with reliable answers to scientific questions.

And those are just off the top of my head.

I’m guessing that the pressure Marc Hauser felt to get results was real enough. What I’m not buying is the same thing that I don’t buy when I get this excuse from student plagiarists: that there was no other choice. Absent a gun to Hauser’s head, there surely were other things he could have done.

Feel free to add to the list of other options someone facing Hauser-like temptations could productively pursue instead of cheating.

Super Happy Fun Semester: It Begins!

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The Fall semester is now upon us, in much the same way you might imagine a ton of bricks or a locomotive would be upon us.

And honestly, it’s much worse for the students than it is for me.

We are still in the land of The State Budget That Just Can’t Give Higher Education A Break. Millions of dollars are being cut from our campus budget and millions more will need to be cut if a ballot measure to raise sales taxes and income taxes on the highest earners goes down in November.

One response has been to cut lots of classes from the Fall schedule, since classes eat up money for faculty salaries, as well as classrooms (excepting the online classes). In particular, this response was made manifest in the elimination of nearly every class that did not have an enrollment of at least 15 students by some arbitrary date (a couple of weeks ago, I think) before the start of the semester.

This was not great news for the up to 14 students enrolled in these course offerings that were vaporized. Some of these may have been crucial courses for their majors, while others may have filled general education requirements that students need to satisfy to graduate. In any event, these students whose classes up and vanished have joined the already crowded throngs of students trying like mad to find spaces in the courses that still exist, where often it is the case that there are five or more students trying to get an add code for every available seat.

Those are not odds that would make me cheerful. Despite this, the students asking me for add codes have shown a remarkable amount of forbearance.

Meanwhile, as I’ve mentioned before, despite the elimination of many (perhaps hundreds of) classes, officially we are supposed to maintain the same level of full time enrolled students … because student fees now amount to more than the chunk of money the state puts up for each student. Logically, this means class sizes need to get bigger, but the seating capacity of the classrooms seems not to have magically increased over the summer.

Of course, the administration has put out feelers to gauge the willingness of our department, and others, to increase class size for one of our courses to 700. (Our willingness: non-existent.)

Buckle up, folks. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Is it time to go Lysistrata?

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In the ancient (written circa 411 BCE) Greek comedy Lysistrata, the character of the title attempts to end the Peloponnesian War by getting the women of Greece to leverage what power they have to influence the men in charge of that society. These women agree that until the war is over, there will be no sex.*

It strikes me that in the year 2012 we are seeing in the U.S. a political war waged against women’s personhood and bodily autonomy.** As part of this war, lawmakers have required women to endure waiting periods (in the span of days) to obtain a legal medical procedure which becomes progressively less safe the longer it is delayed. As part of this war, lawmakers will require that women who seek a legal medical procedure be subjected to a medically unnecessary procedure that, when conducted without consent, amounts to rape. As part of this war, other lawmakers are seeking to remove the legal right to this medical procedure altogether (and to treat doctors who perform it as criminals). The warriors rolling back bodily autonomy elide termination of pregnancy with prevention of pregnancy, and frame as a matter of religious freedom the desire of members of certain religions to restrict the bodily autonomy of people who do not even adhere to those religions.

This is a war in which, in the year 2012, the very availability of contraceptives (which, by the way, have reasonable medical uses besides preventing pregnancy) is now up for grabs.

I don’t know about you, but my plans for 2012 ran more to jet-packs than The Handmaid’s Tale. And I’m starting to wonder if it might not be time to go Lysistrata to end this damn war.

You see, the fact that in the U.S. women make up more than half of the voting age population doesn’t mean that women make up a proportional share of elected lawmakers (or judges, or presidents of the United States). And members of the U.S. House of Representatives apparently think it’s just fine to convene hearings on contraception coverage featuring 10 expert witnesses, eight of whom are male, and none of whom testify in support of contraceptive coverage. And politicians from the party that’s supposedly carrying the progressive banner think it’s politically smart to use our bodily autonomy as a bargaining chip — to get stuff that’s more important, apparently.

What’s more important to you than autonomy over your own body? If you can make a list here, I’m guessing it’s not very long.

What if we declared a sex-strike until the people who purport to represent us came around to the view that our personhood and bodily autonomy is non-negotiable?

Sure, such an action is unlikely to reach the forced-birth theocratic extremists, since they are pretty open in their view that women are lesser creatures, not to be trusted with decisions about their own health or lives.*** My guess is that these people do not care terribly about the wishes of women with whom they are partnered**** (or, if they do, that they regard these women as exceptional compared to the women against whom they seek to use governmental power). Persuading these extremists of my personhood would be about as rewarding trying to have a dialogue with a hexagon, and significantly less likely to succeed.

But maybe a sex-strike would grab the attention of our fair-weather feminist allies, the ones who pay all kinds of lip service to our personhood and bodily autonomy when there’s an election to win, then turn on their heels and start bargaining it away for their own political advantage.

These folks might change their ways if they had skin in the game — or, as they case might be, if they got no skin and no game.

Far be it from me to suggest that men are more vulnerable to their desire for funsexytime than are women. They are not. However, I reckon it’s easier to be in the mood for funsexytime when your very personhood is not up for debate.

I find legislative threats to my bodily autonomy a real mood-killer. And, I’d much rather share funsexytime with a partner who takes my well-being seriously enough to view the war on woman as a war that needs to be stopped in its tracks, now. Someone who wouldn’t see it as politically expedient, let alone clever.

Because guess what? I would never presume I was entitled to funsexytime with someone whose personhood and bodily autonomy I didn’t step up to fight for when it was under threat. Heck, I would step up to fight for the personhood and bodily autonomy even of people with whom I have no desire to have funsexytime because that’s what decent human beings do.

And my choice is to refrain from funsexytime with anyone to whom my interests do not matter at least that much. People who cannot manage to see me and others like me as fully human do not deserve to get any action that might not also result in a repetitive stress injury.

Not being all-in in the fight to protect the bodily autonomy and personhood of women and others with uteri is a deal-breaker for me. Is it a deal-breaker for you?

_____
*Including no “Lioness on The Cheese Grater,” a sex position upon which we can only hope SciCurious will one day blog.

**This is also a war against the bodily autonomy of other persons with uteri.

***And yet, to be entrusted with babies that they may not want. If ever there was a non-standard logic …

****This does raise the question for me of how men of this sort can have sex with women who they view as not-fully-human by virtue of the very fact that they are women. Wouldn’t such sexual congress amount to bestiality, the next step on the slippery slope after gay marriage, which they are generally against?

Straightforward answers to questions we shouldn’t even have to ask: New York Times edition.

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The Public Editor of the New York Times grapples with the question of whether the Times‘ news reporting ought to get the facts right.

The question is posed nicely in a letter quoted in the piece:

“My question is what role the paper’s hard-news coverage should play with regard to false statements – by candidates or by others. In general, the Times sets its documentation of falsehoods in articles apart from its primary coverage. If the newspaper’s overarching goal is truth, oughtn’t the truth be embedded in its principal stories? In other words, if a candidate repeatedly utters an outright falsehood (I leave aside ambiguous implications), shouldn’t the Times’s coverage nail it right at the point where the article quotes it?”

Arthur S. Brisbane, the Public Editor, responds by asking:

Is that the prevailing view? And if so, how can The Times do this in a way that is objective and fair? Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another? Are there other problems that The Times would face that I haven’t mentioned here?

Here’s a suggestion: Budget some money for fact-checking, whether by dedicated fact-checkers or the reporters themselves. And then, make sure every piece of the story that makes a factual claim — whether it is in the reporter’s background or analysis, or in a direct quotation from someone else — is checked against the available facts. Tell us whether the claims are supported by the available evidence. Present the readers with the facts as best they can be established right there in the story.

Because people reach for newspapers to get factual details of things happening in the actual world we’re trying to share. If the paper of record views getting the facts right as a style choice, where the hell is the public supposed to get the facts?

The Thanksgiving feast and sleepiness: let’s crowdsource some data!

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A few years ago, we talked about the role turkey consumption might (or might not) play in post-Thanksgiving-feast fatigue. The oft-heard hypothesis is that the tryptophan in turkey gives you the yawns, but there was the suggestion that carbohydrates from starchy and sweet side dishes were an accomplice — and that eating additional protein might counteract the tryptophan’s soporific effects. Also, the amount you eat may be involved in how your body prioritizes consciousness relative to digestion.

It gets complicated pretty fast when we don’t eat standardized lab chow.

Also, in passing, let me note that for all its association with tryptophan, turkey doesn’t even crack the top 50 in this list of tryptophan-rich foods. (Number one: stellar sea lion kidney.)

Bora has a nice discussion of what tryptophan is up to in your body. Myself, I’m interested in working out observable patterns in Thanksgiving dining-and-yawning experience. Once we know what the patterns are, then we know what we need to explain with a biochemical mechanism.

To this ends, let’s conduct some citizen science (and, come Friday, to collect some reports from the field).

Here is a form for data collection (*.doc format).

Ideally, we’d all want to sit down to the same Thanksgiving meal together (having all gotten a good night’s sleep the day before, etc., etc.). Sadly, that’s not going to happen. However, maybe you can rope those with whom you are dining on Thursday into participating.

Depending on the vibe at your Thanksgiving table, you can either ask the diners to keep track of what kinds of foods they eat, or you can assign your guests particular consumption objectives. Then, before dessert, have everyone do a quick assessment of his or her energy level.

With luck, we’ll get data for the following variations:

  • High-tryptophan food (like turkey), high carbohydrate intake. (Prediction: sleepy)
  • High-tryptophan food, low carbohydrate intake. (Prediction: not sleepy)
  • Skip the high-tryptophan food, high carbohydrate intake. (Prediction: sleepy)
  • Skip the high-tryptophan food, low carbohydrate intake. (Prediction: not sleepy)
  • High-tryptophan food, high carbohydrate intake, extra protein. (Prediction: not sleepy)
  • High-tryptophan food, low carbohydrate intake, extra protein. (Prediction: energetic)
  • Skip the high-tryptophan food, high carbohydrate intake, extra protein. (Prediction: not sleepy)
  • Skip the high-tryptophan food, low carbohydrate intake, extra protein. (Prediction: frighteningly energetic)

Of course, if you track participant input a bit more precisely, maybe we’ll stumble upon some other factor that turns out to be important, like vitamin A or sage.

If you use my form, you can return your results to me (as a *.doc or scanned into a PDF) by email: dr – dot – freeride – at – gmail – dot – com. I’ll compile the responses and we’ll see if we can make sense of the data.

See you back here on Friday morning with your results!

Some ethical decisions are not that hard: thoughts on Joe Paterno.

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Ethical decision-making involves more than having the right gut-feeling and acting on it. Rather, when done right, it involves moving past your gut-feeling to see who else has a stake in what you do (or don’t do); what consequences, good or bad, might flow from the various courses of action available to you; to whom you have obligations that will be satisfied or ignored by your action; and how the relevant obligations and interests pull you in different directions as you try to make the best decision. Sometimes it’s helpful to think of the competing obligations and interests as vectors, since they come with both directions and magnitudes — which is to say, in some cases where they may be pulling you in opposite directions, it’s still obvious which way you should go because the magnitude of one of the obligations is so much bigger than of the others.

The ethical decision-making strategy I teach my students (drawn from Muriel J. Bebeau, “Developing a Well-Reasoned Response to a Moral Problem in Scientific Research”) is one I find useful in all sorts of real situations (which is pretty much the point of an ethical decision-making strategy). Occasionally, this means applying it to evaluate whether a decision which someone else describes as “really tough” actually is.

For example, on the downfall of Joe Paterno, I encountered comments on the ethical decision he had to make (and on how well or badly he did with that) like this:

If this guy met his “legal obligations” by reporting the report, not something he saw himself even, then why isn’t that enough? He likely would have preferred to do even less. And he’s not the police, he isn’t charged with investigating and finding out the facts.

and this:

We all have to balance competing ethical obligations all the time, let’s at least do each other the courtesy of admitting that it’s difficult.

Is it difficult?

If you would rather not think about a situation where a responsible adult had to figure out what to do when child rape was reported to him, you probably don’t want to read the rest of this post. I don’t blame you. However, if you should find yourself in a relevantly similar position as the responsible adult, whether you want to think of it or not, you’ll be on the hook to do good ethical decision-making of your own.

Let’s have a look at the bare-bones of the JoePa case: A graduate assistant tells the head coach that he has witnessed an emeritus member of the coaching staff in the team’s shower facilities performing a sex act on a 10-year-old. The head coach need to figure out what to do.

Who are the interested parties here?

  • The head coach, who needs to make the decision about what to do.
  • The child who was abused, who has an interest in being protected from future abuse.
  • The graduate assistant, who has an interest in being an effective member of the football program, as well as in not being punished for being a whistleblower.
  • The emeritus member of the coaching staff. He has an interest in maintaining his reputation and relationship with the football program, and in being treated fairly. If he didn’t actually abuse the child, being treated fairly may amount to something different than if he did commit the abuse.
  • Law enforcement agencies have an interest in getting information about criminal acts so they can investigate them, establish the evidence for a prosecution, and stop criminal acts that are ongoing.
  • The football program, the university, the university community, and the larger society. These communities have a bunch of interests, including continuing a successful football program that lots of people enjoy, keep kids in the community safe from abuse, and upholding the values off the institutions and communities.

The head coach is (I hope) thinking through possible courses of action that include taking the matter to the police or taking the matter to the university’s athletic director. He might also be considering what would happen in the case that he does nothing. What are the possible consequences of these various courses of action?

If he takes the matter to the police:

  • The police may act to stop the emeritus matter of the coaching staff from committing further abuse.
  • The police will likely launch an investigation of the allegations to determine whether they are grounded. The police investigation will also collect evidence that may be used in a prosecution.
  • The head coach’s relationship with the emeritus matter of the coaching staff may be damaged.
  • The reputation of the emeritus matter of the coaching staff will likely be damaged.
  • The administration of the athletic department and the university might be upset at the unfavorable light cast on them by the incident, if the allegations become public.
  • The reputation of the football program with the university community and the broader community may be tarnished by news of the incident.
  • It may take a bunch of time to cooperate with the police investigation.

If he takes the matter to the university’s athletic director:

  • The head coach’s relationship with the emeritus matter of the coaching staff may be damaged.
  • The reputation of the emeritus matter of the coaching staff will likely be damaged.
  • The administration of the athletic department and the university might be upset at the unfavorable light cast on them by the incident, if the allegations become public.
  • The reputation of the football program with the university community and the broader community may be tarnished by news of the incident.
  • It may take a bunch of time to cooperate with the police investigation — if the university’s athletic director passes the matter onto the police.
  • The abuse may stop — if the athletic director passes the matter onto the police.
  • If the athletic director doesn’t pass the matter onto the police, the head coach may have to involve the police himself, which may anger the athletic director.
  • Or, if the athletic director doesn’t pass the matter onto the police, the head coach may have to spend a lot of time trying to convince him to involve the police. This may anger the athletic director and be emotionally draining to the head coach.
  • If the athletic director doesn’t pass the matter onto the police, the head coach may feel guilty that he didn’t do more to stop the abuse.

If the head coach decides to do nothing:

  • The abuse may continue, and more kids may be abused.
  • The reputation of the football program and the university may remain intact.
  • In the event that the situation becomes public later, the reputation of the football program and the university may be badly damaged — as might the reputation of the head coach.
  • The head coach’s relationship with the emeritus member of the coaching staff may remain intact. Or, it might not.
  • The head coach’s relationship with the graduate assistant may suffer.
  • The reputation of the emeritus member of the coaching staff may remain intact.
  • The head coach’s conscience may be troubled.

What are the head coach’s obligations here?

  • To protect those who cannot protect themselves.
  • To protect his team.
  • To uphold the values of the athletics program, the university, and the larger community.
  • To protect the reputation of the athletics program, the university, and the larger community.
  • To protect colleagues from unfair treatment (but not from just consequences)
  • To provide the information he has about the child abuse to law enforcement so they can investigate the allegations to determine whether there is evidence to support them.
  • To maintain his own integrity and good conscience

I take it there is no ethical obligation to avoid headaches or awkward moments with one’s colleagues.

Looking at these obligations, nearly all seem to pull in the direction of the head coach doing something, rather than doing nothing. Indeed, they strike me as all pulling in the direction of doing something effective, rather than passing the buck to a higher-up and being done with it.

Some might argue that there’s a conflict between the obligation to protect those who cannot protect themselves and the obligation to protect colleagues from unfair treatment. However, it seems like the head coach should be able to uphold his obligation to protect colleagues from unfair treatment without having to cover up what was reported to him (and without that allegation being buried by an administrator higher up in the hierarchy). Indeed, as a grown-up, the emeritus member of the coaching staff has far more resources to secure fair treatment than does the 10-year-old child.

How people make decisions tells us something about what obligations and interests they take most seriously. Do they care more about the values of their organization or its reputation? Do they care more about vulnerable people or about people they know personally who might be hurting those vulnerable people? Do they choose blissful ignorance over the involvement that might be required to obtain accurate information, or to pass on the information they have (no matter how uncertain it might seem to them) to the people whose job it is to conduct investigations in these sorts of cases?

(I’m not claiming here that police investigations of allegations of child rape are perfect. However, they seem likely to do better by the potential victims and other vulnerable members of the community than not investigating such allegations at all.)

Some ethical decision-making is hard. There are cases where we are bound by strong obligations that pull us in different directions.

But this particular case really isn’t that hard. It may require effort to do the right thing, but figuring out what the right thing to do is here is not rocket science.

College students face a crummy future: Occupy Wall Street inspires campus activism.

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Inside Higher Ed reports that college students across the U.S. have been staging protests in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations:

In true Occupy Wall Street fashion, the campus protesters didn’t have any specific demands. Instead, they spoke out against the general issues that have long plagued students: high debt, rising tuition, the privatization of public education and uneven distribution of wealth.

At the State University of New York at Albany walkout, about half of the 300 or so protesters managed to secure an hour to express their concerns to President George Philip in an open forum in the administration building. He reportedly agreed with some of their qualms, but upset many when he told them, “I’m not giving you back my pension.” The president of the New School, David E. Van Zandt, meanwhile, issued a supportive statement that encouraged students “to devise peaceful, practical solutions to longstanding problems of inequality.”

The article considers how many students at various campuses did (or did not) walk out of classes or turn up for demonstrations, and why that might be (e.g., it’s easier to indicate on Facebook that you’ll attend an event than it might be actually to attend it — especially with midterm exams looming). Still, in an age where we old farts tend to shake our heads at student apathy, there seems to be growing a palpable sense of discontent that may bubble into action. From the article:

Lettie Stratton, a St. Lawrence senior, said that regardless of who turned out to protest, many could relate.

“Our overall goal was really just to create a dialogue and get people talking about what matters to them,” Stratton said. “As students, we’re part of the 99 percent,” she said, referring to the Occupy Wall Street slogan describing the vast majority of the American population who aren’t super-rich. “Crippled with student loans, we’re already behind before we even have a chance to set foot in the real world.

“I think a big part of this is speaking out against ignorance and realizing that 99 percent can make a change. We also want to make sure that it doesn’t stop today – we want people to keep talking about it. It’s not just like, ‘Oh, the protest is over, so let’s go back to doing nothing.’ ”

For those of you who aren’t dealing with college students on a daily basis, it is important to recognize the context in which students are raising these objections. These are not the perennial student gripes about not having a plan for what to do after graduation, or not being able to find a job immediately after graduation that feels like a career, if not a calling.

As much as the economy has not been improving for those of us who are not CEOs, it has been even worse for college students.

It’s not just that the so-called “job creators” have created precious few jobs, but that employers are now explicitly seeking to hire job applicants who already have jobs. (The logic of this strikes me as of a piece with banks that only want to lend money to people who already have money.) The young people who went to college to prepare themselves to enter the work force are, of course, less likely to already have jobs (since they went to college to acquire the skills and credentials and such to get jobs). In most cases, the jobs they’re working while they are students are not the jobs they hope to be working for the rest of their adult lives.

Basically, we have a generation that has been urged to go to college because it was purportedly a reliable route to a middle-class standard of living. No one warned them that the middle class might be squeezed nearly out of existence.

Depending on your views about the point of a college education (here’s how I described mine five years ago, in the shadow of the dot-com bust), you might extend special sympathy to the students who opted for the “prudent” route of selecting some practical major that helped them acquired a focused set of skills and credentials that could plug them right in to some existing career path. They might have wanted to major in something less practical, like philosophy or history or English (or even a more theoretical science), but they wanted to know that they’d be employable immediately after graduation.

The lack of even such well-defined jobs must make recent graduates feel pretty cheated.

Well, we older people might reply, at least they (or their liberal arts major compatriots) got the enrichment of a college education, which is something a lot of working stiffs (and unemployed folks) never get. Indeed, you might expect me to say something like this, given my earlier defense of “impractical” majors:

A job is nice. So is political power, a fancy chariot, hangers-on. But you can have all these things and still not be happy or fulfilled. And, if your happiness depends on having such things, you’re pretty vulnerable to sudden reversals.

So how can a human find fulfillment that isn’t all about having lots of stuff, or a high-paying job, or a top-rated sit-com?

Well, what do you have that’s really yours? What is the piece of your life that no one can take away?

You have your mind. You have the ability to think about things, to experience the world, to decide what matters to you and how you want to pursue it. You have your sense of curiousity and wonder when you encounter something new and unexpected, and your sense of satisfaction when you figure something out. You have the power to imagine ways the world could be different. You even have the ability (the responsibility?) to try to make the world different.

This is what I think a college education should give you: lots of hands-on experience using your mind so you know different ways you can think about things and you start to figure out what you care about.

I still think a college education should give you experience using your mind in lots of different ways, and that this does impart skills (although broad ones, not just narrow ones) that can be of use in the workplace as well as in life.

However, I also wrote:

There is always the danger of going overboard with the idea that the life of the mind is the only life that matters, which could be used as an excuse to get people to pipe down about truly horrible material conditions. And, a mind is not invulnerable to certain kinds of threats, whether natural or man-made. Still, I’d rather have a supple mind than a whole bucketful of skills so specialized they might only be useful for another six months.

Now, we have a situation where even the most practical majors cannot count on employment at graduation. We’ve created an economy where people who have taken all the prudent steps to enter the world of work — often while assuming significant debt to earn their degrees — cannot find jobs!

(Even at public universities, student debt is a big deal. When state budgets get tight, student fees go up. Cutting instructional staff means fewer sections of courses students need to graduate — which means more years in school and more term bills to pay. Plus, more and more of those courses needed to graduate are being shifted outside of the regular academic calendar to summer sessions and winter sessions. These special sessions don’t receive the same level of support from the state, so students have to pay a lot more to take the same classes in them — essentially, privatizing some of the instruction at public universities.)

It strikes me that we, as a society, owe college students and recent college graduates more.

We should want our government, and our society more broadly, to take care of its members (including its youth) at least as well as its banks.

It is reasonable for the youth to want people in government, in the private sector, in the media (hello corporate ownership) to hear their voices, their grievances, and their hopes for the future even if they can’t spare thousands of dollars to make campaign donations, or to incorporate.

If Mitt Romney is right that corporations are people, what he didn’t mention is that many of them are legal persons that suck — sucking all the attention of our policy makers, all the best tax benefits, all the reflexive good will of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, what have these legal persons done for young people lately besides jacking up the interest on their student loans and the fees on their debit cards?

Young people are entitled to their anger and frustration, and they are reasonable in recognizing the need to go outside normal channels to get the attention of those with the power to change things. I’m hopeful that this leads them to pursue some concerted action when election time comes around — to hack our system and start dismantling the structures that currently ensure that no matter which of the two major parties wins, the corporations can keep on keeping on.

So … where do the faculty stand in all of this? Where should we stand?

I think we need to be committed to delivering the highest quality education we can to our students given the resources we have. (We do have to recognize, though, that with the resources we have right now, we may not be able to deliver the education we think our students deserve without hurting ourselves.)

We need also to be honest with our students about how crummy the economy is, and how dismal their job prospects may be.

Further, we need to do what we can to change the conditions that make the economic future our students face so very dismal. That responsibility doesn’t belong solely to the people teaching college students, though — it belongs to the generations who came before them, especially those who were able to parlay a college education into a middle-class existence.

(We also owe it to people in our society who don’t go to college to provide conditions for them to live decent lives … but at least they’re not laboring under the expectation that their education is a ticket to economic stability.)

Some of us have seen already that the folks at the top of the power pyramid will try to play students and faculty off against each other — to make it look like a forced choice between delivering promised pensions to faculty and raising student fees, for example. We owe it to ourselves and each other to resist this zero-sum-game framing that exempts administrators and corporations from sharing sacrifice in meaningful ways.

Philosophers may have a well-earned reputation for corrupting the youth, but we have no interest in eating our young. We must find a way to go forward and build a society that has room for us all.

* * * * *

If you want to support the younger generations of our society in a tangible way, please consider donating to a project on my DonorsChoose giving page. Even a few dollars can bring a public school classroom closer to providing the kind of engaging math and science education that our kids deserve.

A thought for Texas Governor Rick Perry about science.

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Despite my best efforts to steer clear of debates between presidential hopefuls at this point in the calendar (because I have important job-related stuff to do with those waking hours, and also, I have been cautioned that the budget will not provide a replacement for my existing desk should my head eventually break it), bits of information from these debates do manage to get my attention. For example, in the September 7 Republican debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, Texas Governor Rick Perry (with an “E”) made some comments on science and the state of scientific agreement, especially as relates to what we know about climate change. The following exchange began with a question from John Harris of Politico:

HARRIS: Governor Perry — Governor Perry, Governor Huntsman were not specific about names, but the two of you do have a difference of opinion about climate change. Just recently in New Hampshire, you said that weekly and even daily scientists are coming forward to question the idea that human activity is behind climate change. Which scientists have you found most credible on this subject?

PERRY: Well, I do agree that there is — the science is — is not settled on this. The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at — at — at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet, to me, is just — is nonsense. I mean, it — I mean — and I tell somebody, I said, just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact, Galileo got outvoted for a spell.

But the fact is, to put America’s economic future in jeopardy, asking us to cut back in areas that would have monstrous economic impact on this country is not good economics and I will suggest to you is not necessarily good science. Find out what the science truly is before you start putting the American economy in jeopardy.

HARRIS: Just to follow up quickly. Tell us how you’ve done that.

(APPLAUSE)

Are there specific — specific scientists or specific theories that you’ve found especially compelling, as you…

(CROSSTALK)

PERRY: Let me tell you what I find compelling, is what we’ve done in the state of Texas, using our ability to regulate our clean air. We cleaned up our air in the state of Texas, more than any other state in the nation during the decade. Nitrous oxide levels, down by 57 percent. Ozone levels down by 27 percent.

That’s the way you need to do it, not by some scientist somewhere saying, “Here is what we think is happening out there.” The fact of the matter is, the science is not settled on whether or not the climate change is being impacted by man to the point where we’re going to put America’s economics in jeopardy.

(Bold emphasis added.)

In less than 500 words, we get some insight into Gov. Perry’s attitudes towards science.

He thinks it would be a mistake to be guided by “some scientist somewhere saying, ‘Here is what we think is happening out there,’ ” although, presumably, he can bolster Texas’s success in cleaning its air with empirical measurements of nitrous oxide and ozone taken by some scientist somewhere.

He’s aware that weekly, maybe even daily, scientists are bravely coming forward to question the idea of anthropogenic global warming, but when asked to identify the scientists that he has found most credible on the subject of climate change, Perry either cannot name any of these scientists, or won’t identify them as credible … or maybe is keeping their names to himself to protect them? (From whom is he protecting them? Does this mean that these scientists have not “come forward” to state their views within their scientific communities — or to the public — but that they have “come forward” to Gov. Perry in private?)

Perry also references Galileo, stating that this hero of scientific progress also “got outvoted for a spell.” I leave it to full-time historians of science to explicate the problems with Perry’s understanding of Galileo, but I will note that there is a difference between having one’s theory accepted by one’s fellow working scientists and having one’s theory accepted by the Roman Inquisition of the Catholic Church — and I’m pretty sure Galileo himself did not have a vote in the latter.

But, here’s the piece of Perry’s position that really struck me: He states that climate science is not settled enough that it ought to guide policy which, by Perry’s lights, would jeopardize the American economy. But this turns on an assumption that economics is a more settled (and more reliable) science than is climate science.

Really?

I suppose, then, we have the awesome predictive power of economic theory (about which there is strong consensus) to thank for warning us about the great recession before it happened, and for laying out a set of effective interventions that, once implemented, will save the economy and put millions of people back to work!

The economists, I’m sure, will be holding a press conference to explain their theory, describe the interventions that are needed, and call on our political leaders to implement them, just as soon as they’ve gotten their academic terms off to a good start. I’ll be here (with my unicorn) waiting for that press conference.

The San Bruno pipeline explosion and PG&E’s response.

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The evening of September 9, 2010, a natural gas pipeline under San Bruno, California, ruptured and exploded. The resulting conflagration destroyed a neighborhood worth of houses and killed eight people.

PG&E, the utility company responsible for the pipeline, has not been terribly helpful in providing information to pinpoint why the disaster happened, nor in adopting changes to head off future disasters of this sort. Today, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) releases findings of its investigation of the incident, and of PG&E’s handling of it. As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle:

A defective weld in the pipe segment that ruptured existed from the moment the line was buried under the Crestmoor neighborhood in 1956, said investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board. The flaw would have been apparent if anyone had checked, either then or in the years since, the investigators said at a hearing in Washington, D.C.

Agency Chairwoman Deborah Hersman, in her opening statement, traced the Sept. 9 disaster to PG&E’s installation of a “woefully inadequate pipe,” whose source remains a mystery.

The company, Hersman said, “exploited weaknesses in a lax system of oversight, and regulatory agencies that placed a blind trust in operators to the detriment of public safety.”

The use of the defective pipe “was compounded over the years by a litany of failures” by PG&E, Hersman said, “including poor record-keeping, inadequate inspection programs, and an integrity management program without integrity.”

“It was not a question of if this pipeline would burst,” Hersman said. “It was a question of when.”

(Bold emphasis added.)

PG&E has posted a response to the NTSB investigation. Among other things, it states:

Since September 9, 2010, PG&E has taken multiple steps to improve the safety of our natural gas operations, including:

  • Creating a separate operating unit for our gas operations under the leadership of a newly hired gas operations expert who brings 30 years of experience in improving some of the nation’s oldest gas systems
  • Implementing more stringent pipeline operating standards
  • Hiring more than 90 new gas engineers as well as additional project managers, mappers and other employees in a major nationwide recruiting effort
  • Providing additional training to our gas operations employees
  • Retaining leading safety experts to help implement public and employee safety best practices
  • Beginning a major new initiative to replace or upgrade many older gas lines, add automatic or remote shut-off valves, and help develop state-of-the-art pipeline inspection technologies
  • Improving our coordination with local emergency responders

That’s a fine list of improvements, as far as it goes. But I’m a little surprised that it fails to explicitly address at least one of the big criticisms from the NTSB that was highlighted (above the fold, even) in all of the news coverage of the investigation I’ve seen so far.

Are we going to address the shortcomings in record-keeping?

Better inspections will help — if PG&E can keep track of when they happen and what they discover (and share that information with local, state, and federal officials when asked to do so).

Serious efforts to maintain, upgrade, and replace flawed sections of the pipeline should also help — if there’s a usable paper-trail of the maintenance, upgrades, replacements, and so forth. Because there’s a whole lot of pipe underground, and apparently PG&E has, at present, not a clue about which sections of it are riddled with bad welds like the section that failed in San Bruno.

“Trust us” isn’t going to work here. Without adequate record-keeping, PG&E cannot know what we would need the organization to know to inspire anything like trust — and cannot demonstrate that they’re doing the job to the regulators. We don’t need to impute evil intent here; incompetence is sufficent.

As I type this post, NTSB is holding a public hearing on the incident. You can catch the live webcast (until 12:30 PM Pacific time/3:30 PM Eastern time) here

Or, if you miss the webcast (or prefer text on a screen), John Upton is liveblogging the hearing.

Pseudonymity and ethics (with a few more thoughts on Google+).

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In a comment on my last post, Larry Moran takes issue with my defense of pseudonymity:

Janet says,

But Larry, other than my say-so (and that of those with whom I’ve cultivated online ties), how do you know “Janet D. Stemwedel” is really my “real” (by which I assume you mean “legal”) name? You didn’t peek at my driver’s license, so maybe the government here knows me my some other name.

That’s not a very good argument from someone who specializes in ethics! :-)

The issue is whether I prefer dealing with people who identify themselves or with people who use fake names to disguise their real identity. What you’re saying is that there will always be unethical people who will get around any rules designed to avoid false identities, therefore we shouldn’t even try to enforce a policy requiring real names.

I doubt very much that you use an argument like that when you discuss other issues like plagiarism, or preparing a CV. Let’s drop that argument, okay? We all know that there will be unethical people who will lie and cheat to get around any rules. That’s not an argument against having rules.

The issue before us is whether we want to live in an internet society where people identify themselves and stand behind what they say and do, just as they do in the real face-to-face world, or whether we want an internet society with different rules. I try to teach my students that it is important to take a stand on certain issues but they have to be prepared to suffer the consequences (both good and bad).

Larry is right that the part of my comment he’s quoted isn’t a very good argument. Indeed, I meant it mostly as a suggestion that Larry’s comfort dealing with me as a person-attached-to-her-real-name is based on a certain amount of trust that I really am properly attached to that legal name (since Larry has yet to demand to see my papers).

Neither, of course, would I want to say that the existence of people who get around a rule is a good reason to abandon the rule or attempts to enforce it. Instead, my support for the rule would turn on what the rule was meant to accomplish, what it actually accomplished, and whether the intended and/or actual effects were worth pursuing.*

However, Larry seems also to be suggesting that something stronger than his own personal preference against the use of pseudonyms.

As I read what he’s written, it seems like he’s suggesting that there’s something inherently unethical about using a pseudonym — that being pseudonymous online is somewhere on a spectrum of deeds that includes plagiarism and C.V.-padding. Let the record reflect that I’m not convinced this is actually what Larry is saying. But given that it might be read that way, I want to examine the suggestion.

Is pseudonymity always deceptive?

At the heart of the matter, I think we need to look at the question of how pseudonyms are used.

The suggestion in Larry’s comment is that a pseudonym is a fake name intended to disguise one’s identity. However, it strikes me that “disguise” might be a loaded term, one that has an additional connotation of “mislead” here.

Misleading is a variety of lying, and I’m happy to grant that lying is generally unethical (although, unlike Kant, I’m prepared to accept the possibility of a case where lying is less unethical than the existing alternatives).

But, my sense from the pseudonymous people I have encountered online (and from my own brief experience as a pseudonymous blogger) is that not all people using pseudonyms are aiming to deceive. Instead, I think it’s more accurate to say that they are choosing how much of their personal information to disclose.

And, I’m inclined to think that non-disclosure of personal information is only unethical in specific instances. I don’t think we have a positive right to total information about everyone with whom we engage.

Indeed, I don’t think we actually want total information about all of our contacts, whether online or in real life. My students have no interest in the current state of my digestive health, nor in what’s in my record collection (let alone what a “record” is). My children have no need to know whether the user interface for grade entry at my university is well-designed or clunky. Readers of my blog probably care less about my opinion of baseball teams than about my opinions on recent news stories about scientific misconduct.

Even being on the receiving end of an accidental overshare can feel like a violation of a relationship, as I had occasion to note a few years ago:

There was an academic blog I used to read that I enjoyed quite a lot. I had to stop, though, when it became apparent that the (anonymous) blogger was married to someone that I knew. (What clinched it was a post about a social occasion that I attended.) To keep reading the blog would have felt, to me, like a violation of the blogger’s trust — from real life, I knew certain details about the blogger that had not been revealed to the blog’s readers, and from the blog, I knew certain details about the blogger’s life that had not been revealed to the blogger’s real-life friends and acquaintances. Caring about the blogger (and the real-life person) meant I had to respect the walls of separation the blogger had erected.

We are always making judgments about what pieces of our experiences and ourselves it’s relevant to share. And we make those judgments differently depending on with whom we’re interacting, in what kind of context, how that will affect our comfort level (and theirs), and what kinds of consequences (deserved or undeserved) sharing what we share may bring.

I’m happy to be accountable for my views on research with animals, for example, but voicing them publicly can make me (and my family members) targets of people who think it’s OK to use threats of violence to silence me. I can fully understand why people actually conducting research with animals might not want to attach their real names (which are attached to addresses and phone numbers and license plate numbers of cars under which someone might put incendiary devices) to their candid views online — and, I think that our public conversation about research with animals would be greatly impoverished without their participation in it.

Courage, as Aristotle would remind us, is the right balance of confidence and fear for the circumstances at hand. Too little confidence makes us cowardly, but too little fear makes us foolhardy.

I should also note that many of the notable users of pseudonyms in the blogosphere choose pseudonyms that are extremely unlikely to be mistaken for legal names — which is to say, in withholding certain personal details they are not also trying to deceive others into believing that their “real” names in the three-dimensional world are “SciCurious” or “GrrlScientist” or “DrugMonkey” or “Prof-like Substance”. That’s not to say that such a clear ‘nym can’t be intentionally deceptive — for example, if GrrlScientist were male, or if PhysioProf were a certified public accountant, or if SciCurious had not a whit of curiosity about matters scientific. But either way, you’d have no expectations that a Social Security search on the surname Curious would help you locate Sci.

Perhaps ironically, it is the people with obviously assumed names like these, not people with “real-looking”** assumed names that might actually fool others into thinking they’re real, who have had their access to Google+ accounts revoked.

I won’t claim that no one uses an assumed name to mislead — obviously, there are people who do so. But this doesn’t make it the case that everyone using a ‘nym is using it to deceive. Indeed, pseudonymity can create conditions in which people disclose more honest information about themselves, where people share opinions or experiences that they could not comfortably (or safely) share using their real names.

I understand that not everyone is comfortable dealing with online persons who could, in an instant, dismantle their pseudonymous online identities and vanish. Especially if you’ve dealt with troll-y exemplars of pseudonymity, your patience for this may be limited. That’s fine. I’m happy to live in a world where people get to choose with whom they engage in their own online spaces, as well as which online spaces maintained by others they will frequent.

Indeed, I even noted that Google is free to make its own rules for Google+. That Google establishes a real-name rule for Google+ doesn’t raise it to the level of a moral precept (“Thou shalt use only thy full legal name”). If the rule is clearly explain in the Terms of Service, it probably imposes an obligation on the person who agrees to the ToS to follow the rule … but it probably also imposes an obligation on Google to enforce the rule consistently (which so far it has not).

And, Google setting its own rules does not preclude our discussing whether these are reasonable rules, ones with well thought out aims that have a reasonable chance of achieving those aims or some close approximation of them.

I think Larry is right that the names policy (and/or who will want to sign up for Google+) is going to come down to people’s comfort levels. Opting for one set of rules may make some groups of potential users very comfortable and others so uncomfortable that it effectively bars their participation. Google needs to think about it in those terms — who do they want in, and who are they happy to cede to their competition.

Right now, to me, Google+ feels a little like a country club to which I was admitted before I knew what kind of people the membership rules were going to exclude (because they’re “not our kind, dear”). Personally, this particular sort of “exclusivity” makes me less comfortable, not more. Depending on Google’s next move, I may be removing myself from the spiffy new clubhouse and spending a lot more time on the internet’s public beaches.

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*Of course, I don’t need to tell you that rules are not always completely congruent with what’s ethical. There are plenty of rules that are unjust, loads of rules that we use to encode our ethical commitments, and a plethora of rules that seem to have no ethical content to speak of. (How would a utilitarian, a Kantian, and a virtue ethicist come down on “No white shoes after Labor Day”?)

**Naturally, which names look “real” and which look “made-up” is tied up in lots of cultural assumptions.