Category Archives: Current events

John Tierney thinks he’s being daring.

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The title of John Tierney’s recent column in the New York Times, “Daring to Discuss Women’s Potential in Science”, suggests that Tierney thinks there’s something dangerous about even raising the subject:

The House of Representatives has passed what I like to think of as Larry’s Law. The official title of this legislation is “Fulfilling the potential of women in academic science and engineering,” but nothing did more to empower its advocates than the controversy over a speech by Lawrence H. Summers when he was president of Harvard.
This proposed law, if passed by the Senate, would require the White House science adviser to oversee regular “workshops to enhance gender equity.” At the workshops, to be attended by researchers who receive federal money and by the heads of science and engineering departments at universities, participants would be given before-and-after “attitudinal surveys” and would take part in “interactive discussions or other activities that increase the awareness of the existence of gender bias.”
I’m all in favor of women fulfilling their potential in science, but I feel compelled, at the risk of being shipped off to one of these workshops, to ask a couple of questions:
1) Would it be safe during the “interactive discussions” for someone to mention the new evidence supporting Dr. Summers’s controversial hypothesis about differences in the sexes’ aptitude for math and science?
2) How could these workshops reconcile the “existence of gender bias” with careful studies that show that female scientists fare as well as, if not better than, their male counterparts in receiving academic promotions and research grants?

I’m not up for a detailed reply to Tierney today, nor a serious look at the literature he mentions (or at the literature he doesn’t mention). Maybe I’ll be able to double back for that once I clear some of the more pressing items from my to-do list. But I would like to throw out a few observations that are relevant to the discussion.

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Earth Day 2010: change I can believe in.

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First, let me refer you to Sharon Astyk’s excellent post on what has become of Earth Day. If I had the time or energy to pay much attention to Earth Day as a particular day of observance, I think I’d share Sharon’s grumpiness.
After all, paying attention to our impacts on our shared environment just one day out of 365 is not likely to make much of a difference, and buying stuff as a strategy to deal with our over-consumption of resources (and the pollution that follows upon the manufacture and transport of that stuff) seems pretty perverse.
That said, I’m going to take this Earth Day as an opportunity to notice some sustainable changes in the direction of treading more lightly that I’ve made in the past year. This isn’t quite rising to the level of Mike Dunford’s Earth Day resolutions meme, in which the sprogs and I participated last year. Resolutions are good, but sometimes when you set a goal and then fail to live up to it, you throw your hands up and kind of give up.
Giving up, I’d argue, doesn’t do much to help. On the other hand, noticing places where you imagined change would be painful and it turned out not to be might actually help motivate more change.
Here are the changes that have stuck since last Earth Day:

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Pseudonymity and undisclosed conflicts of interest: online book review edition.

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I’ll confess that I am not one who spends much time reading the reviews of books posted on the websites of online booksellers. By the time I’m within a click of those reviews, I pretty much know what I want. However, a lot of people find them helpful, and the ability to post your own review of a book (or a film, or a product, or a business) online seems to give consumers more of a voice rather than leaving it to “professional” reviewers or tastemakers.
Who, after all, knows whether those professional reviewers’ first loyalties are to the public?
But, unsurprisingly, it turns out that citizen-reviewers can be just as gripped by potential conflicts of interests. From the Associated Press:

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Market forces, tough times, and the question of raises for postdocs.

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Over at the DrugMonkey blog, PhysioProf noted that a push to increase NIH postdoctoral fellowship stipend levels by 6% may have the effect of reducing the number of postdoctoral positions available.
To this, the postdoctoral masses responded with something along the lines of, “Hey, it’s possible that there are too damn many postdocs already (and fighting for those rare tenure-track positions in a slightly less crowded field might be better),” and “Being able to pay my damn bills might significantly improve my quality of postdoctoral life.” There were also the expected mentions of the fact that, given their education and experience, the pay in a postdoctoral position is often dramatically less than in private industry.
In a number of comments, though, DrugMonkey pointed out that it is not just postdocs who are paid “less than they are worth” (with respect to education and experience) and frequently living in regions with higher-than-average cost of living. Why should postdocs be singularly worthy of a 6% bump but not PIs, technicians, and grad students, too?
Of course, such across-the-board increases would bump up the budgets required to run research projects, possibly by quite a lot. And in case you hadn’t heard, times are tough for everyone right now.
Then, in that comment thread, becca puts forth a proposal:

Basically, if you are going to argue in favor of pauperizing your lab workers, pauperize them enough so they can get on public Welfare.

Call me an idealist, but when a comparison of academic science and Walmart starts making the big-box giant look like the more humane employer, academic science may want to take a moment to examine its course.

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Animal research, abortion, and ethical decision making as a matter of balance, not absolutes.

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Making good ethical choices in the real world is hard, in large part because it requires us to find the best balance in responding to interested parties whose legitimate interests pull in different directions. The situation is further complicated by the fact that as we are trying to make the best ethical decision we can, or evaluating the ethical decision-making of others, we can’t help but notice that there is not universal agreement about who counts as a party with legitimate interests that ought to be taken into account, let alone about how to weight the competing interests in the ethical calculus.
We’ve talked about these difficulties before, especially in the context of the ethics of research with animals. In these discussions, we’ve noticed that some folks oppose such research across the board (at least if the research includes anything beyond purely observational studies in the field) on the basis that non-human animals’ capacity to feel pain creates a situation where it is unethical for humans to use them in any manner that might cause them pain (or discomfort, or distress, or boredom), no matter what benefit such use might bring to humans. Here, at least one set of people doing the ethical calculus assert that non-human animals need to be counted as an interested party, and that their interests ought not to be sacrificed in favor of those of any other interested party.
Of course, arguments about the ethical status of animal research are not the only place such ethical claims arise. I refer you to the new law signed this week by the Governor of Nebraska. As The New York Times reports:

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Intelligence, moral wisdom, and reactions to the University of Alabama-Huntsville shootings.

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From a recent article in the New York Times considering University of Alabama-Huntsville shooter Amy Bishop’s scientific stature and finding it lacking, this comment on why so many denizens of the internet think they can understand why she did what she did:

Why did people who knew Dr. Bishop only through reading about her crime make excuses for her?
Joanathan D. Moreno, a professor of medical ethics and the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks reactions have to do with a long tradition that goes back to Plato. The idea, he said, is that someone who is very intelligent is assumed to be “morally wise.” And that makes it hard to reconcile the actions of Amy Bishop, with her Harvard Ph.D., her mantle of scientific brilliance.
“There’s a common-folk psychology,” Dr. Moreno said. “If you are that smart, you know the difference between right and wrong.”
“That is what’s going on,” Dr. Moreno said. “In cases like hers that contradict the framework, we look for excuses.”

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ClimateGate, the Michael Mann inquiry, and accepted scientific practices.

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In my earlier post about the findings of the Penn State inquiry committee looking into allegations of research misconduct against Michael Mann, I mentioned that the one allegation that was found to merit further investigation may have broad implications for how the public understands what good scientific work looks like, and for how scientists themselves understand what good scientific work looks like.
Some of the commenters on that post seemed interested in discussing those implications. Others, not so much. As commenter Evan Harper notes:

It is clear that there are two discussions in parallel here; one is serious, thoughtful, and focused on the very real and very difficult questions at hand. The other is utterly inane, comprising vague ideological broadsides against nebulous AGW conspirators, many of which evince elementary misunderstandings about the underlying science.
If I wanted to read the second kind of conversation, there are a million blogs out there with which I could torture myself. But I want to read – and perhaps participate in – the first kind of conversation. Here and now, I cannot do that, because the second conversation is drowning out the first.
Were that comment moderators could crack down on these poisonous nonsense-peddlers. Their right to swing their (ham)fists ends where our noses begin

Ask and you shall receive.

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In the wake of ClimateGate: findings of the misconduct inquiry against Michael Mann.

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Remember “ClimateGate”, that well-publicized storm of controversy that erupted when numerous email messages from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers and widely distributed? One of the events set in motion by ClimateGate was a formal inquiry concerning allegations of research conduct against Dr. Michael E. Mann, a professor in the Department of Meteorology at The Pennsylvania State University.
The report (PDF) from that inquiry has been released, so we’re going to have a look at it here.
This report contains a lot of discussion of how the committee pursuing the inquiry was constituted, and of which university policies govern how the committee is constituted, and of how membership of the committee was updated when members left the university for other positions, etc. I’m going to gloss over those details, but they’re all there in the ten page report if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
My focus here will be on what set the inquiry in motion to begin with, on the specific allegations they considered against Dr. Mann, on how the committee gathered information relevant to the allegations, and on the findings and decisions at which they arrived. Let me state up front that committee decided that one allegation merited further consideration in an “investigation” (which is the stage of the process that follows upon an “inquiry”), and that to my eye, that investigation may end up having broader implications for the practice of science in academia.
But let’s start at the beginning. From the inquiry report:

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