Uncle Fishy and RMD pointed me to this story in the New York Times about a last-minute extra assignment (due today) for students enrolled in “Critical Issues in Journalism” at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Not an extra credit assignment, mind you — an extra assignment they all get to do just to pass the course, on account of the fact that the 200+ students enrolled in the class apparently had some trouble handling the exam without cheating:
Category Archives: Ethics 101
Murtha, ethics, and “real issues”.
Apparently John Murtha lost his bid to be the new Majority Leader in the House of Representatives to Rep. Steny Hoyer. In the run up to this decision, Murtha was reported as saying the House ethics reforms being proposed by Nancy Pelosi were “total crap”.
As you can imagine, that got my attention.
Below the fold, a bit of the transcript of Murtha’s interview with Chris Matthews where Murtha tries to put his comment in context.
A tale of two job searches (Having a family and an academic career, part 4).
A long time ago, on a flight to a conference, a friend and I discussed the psychology of search committee members. We noticed that even people who thought they were exceedingly fair and open-minded might unconsciously make decisions that don’t seem fair, but do, from a certain point of view, seem rational. So, when faced with two equally talented and promising job candidates, the committee members might opt against the one with visible signs of “a life” (such as children, a partner, even a serious hobby) and for the one with no visible signs of a life. Why? Well, which candidate is more likely to come in every day (maybe evenings and weekends, too) to bust his or her butt for the job? Which is less likely to be distracted from teaching, research, and service to the organization? Which is less likely to need time off for someone else’s medical crisis? Which is less likely to leave suddenly when a partner gets a job offer elsewhere?
The candidate with no life.
For the job seeker, then, we decided the best strategy would be to hide all traces of “a life” from the search committee. Once you had a job offer, though, you could safely ask questions about childcare facilities, employment opportunities for a spouse, etc., because once the committee was at the point of offering you a job, the committee members had a stake in convincing themselves they had made a completely rational decision that you were the best person for the job. Believing themselves to have made a rational decision to hire you, they could accommodate the knowledge that you came with some baggage; not to do so would force them to engage with the possibility that maybe their decisions were not always based on qualifications for the job.
Four months pregnant with younger offspring, as I prepared to fly, alone, to New York for philosophy’s major job-seeking convention, I couldn’t help but recall this earlier discussion on a plane. I was going stealth with my baggage.
Dealing with plagiarism once the horse is out of the barn.
Not quite a year ago, I wrote a pair of posts about allegations of widespread plagiarism in the engineering college at Ohio University. The allegations were brought by Thomas Matrka, who, while a student in the masters program in mechanical engineering at OU, was appalled to find obvious instances of plagiarism in a number of masters theses sitting on the library shelves — paragraphs, drawings, sometimes whole chapters that were nearly identical, with no attribution at all to indicate a common source.
Pretty appalling stuff. But back in November 2005, the OU administration didn’t seem to see it as a big problem — at least, not as of problem of the magnitude Mr. Matrka saw. But Mr. Matrka’s efforts have finally had some effects. Chickens are coming home to roost not only for the students who plagiarized in their theses, but for the faculty members who seemed willing to let this conduct slide.
Boredom, sensationalism, and toxic idiocy: Is there any good way to talk about science with non-scientists?
Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon put up a post about gender essentialism that starts by citing this post at Mixing Memory on how people’s representations of homosexuality affect their attitudes toward homosexuality. Because Chris’s post cited my two posts (initially sparked by Jessica’s post at Feministing), I came in for some criticism from Greensmile in this comment at Pandagon. As I believed these criticisms to be based on a misunderstanding of my position, I responded. Greensmile then was kind enough to read my posts and to respond that we seem to be having “the most violent agreement”, given that Greensmile has also mused on the the science on sexual orientation (in two thoughtful and detailed posts that you really should read) and has come to substantially the same conclusion I have, that “how we treat gays should not depend on what science eventually understands about that collection of behavior paterns”.
Can I tell you, before we go any further, that I really like how these new technologies make it possible for us to track down what other people are actually saying in order that we may discover where we are in agreement? When people gnash their teeth and say that cyberspace is hosting the world’s largest shouting match, this is just the sort of counter-example I like to have handy.
Anyhow, I do think there is one smallish point of disagreement between me and Greensmile that ought to be noted. But then, I want to turn my attention to a larger issue Greensmile raises in another comment at Pandagon:
Research is not conducted in public. And in fact, publicly funded research can be jeopardized by dimwitted popular misconceptions about the subject of the research…ultimately to the disservice of all. So discussion of research in public may be a matter where discretion is advised. Chris commented that to do otherwise is naive. That may be so. But as this little tempest of unrecognized agreeing has demonstrated, discussion travels far and fast nowdays. So I stick by my guns: scientists and people who follow and defend that way of knowing the world are going to have to deal with toxic idiocy anyway, lets just get good at it as well as, or instead of, trying to avoid it. As I commented back to Chris:
“naive”: Thats me all right. But I do not go back and forth much: dissemination of ideas is virtually impossible to control in this day and age…unless you can make it sound boring [which was Jessica Vallenti’s original faux pas: she sensationalized a routine scientific paper] If senationalism and instant dissemination are here to stay, then we just have to keep learning and calmly explaining what we have learned…and calmly refuting from our facts the distortions others reach from their assumptions and fears.
To boil down the larger issue to a question: What is the best way for scientists (and others) to talk about scientific ideas and findings with non-scientists?
A few words about Ward Churchill.
I’m not going to do this to death, partly because others will and partly because Churchill isn’t a scientist. But, given that I’m working the ethics beat at ScienceBlogs, I ought to give you the ethical crib-sheet:
- Plagiarism is bad.
- Self-plagiarism (that is, recycling stuff you’ve written and published before without indicating that you’re recycling it) is bad.
- Ghost-writing pieces for other “scholars” in what purports to be a scholarly anthology might be acceptable under some possible set of circumstances, but it’s fishy enough that it’s probably best presumed bad.
- Citing pieces you’ve ghost-written for such an anthology in other works you’ve produced without indicating that you’re actually citing yourself is bad.
- Citing pieces you’ve ghost-written using the author of record’s name as support for a point you are trying to establish (by making it look like other authors agree with your analysis of the facts) is very, very bad.
- The badness in these behaviors lies in their deceptiveness. Essentially, they are all different ways of lying to your audience and the community of scholars trying to build good knowledge in your area.
- Universities, as institutions charged with maintaining academic integrity, have a right to cut loose professors who engage in this kind of bad behavior. Indeed, if a professor habitually engages in these bad acts, the university probably has a duty to fire this bozo.
Beneath the fold, I approvingly quote Eugene Volokh. (Yeah, I’m surprised too.)
My ethical style (according to an internet quiz).
Chad thinks it’s a good point in the week for internet quizzes. So, since I saw it at Arbitrary Marks, I took a quiz to determine my ethical style. (No, “bossy” isn’t one of the possible results.)
What the quiz says about me after the jump.
The inevitable follow-up to the last breastfeeding post.
I think after this one, we’ll be ready to move on to cow (or soy) milk and solids!
My last post on the breastfeeding issue pointed you to an academic examination of some of the claims being advanced in support of the superiority of breastfeeding. Joseph from Corpus Callosum left a detailed comment expressing some dissatisfaction with that examination. You really should read the whole comment, but his main points are roughly:
- You can find evidence that supporters of breastfeeding are biased, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t also biased.
- In a body of scientific literature, we ought to weigh not only how recent a study is, but also its quality. (So, for example, it may be fine to rely on an older study over a more recent one if the older one is better — where “better”, of course, would be judged by scientific criteria rather than on agreement with the result you were hoping the research would support.)
- It’s not enough to simply point out flaws with the scientific case that is being made to support breastfeeding if there exist reasonably rigorous studies that shed light on the issue (especially if they end up supporting the conclusion for which the shoddy case is being offered as support).
It’s hard to argue with Joseph’s points. The Goldin et al. didn’t give a comprehensive analysis of all the available literature. Then again, it seems like it was intended as a rapid response to a news item that was creating a buzz. As I noted in my last post, the scientific research is certainly suggestive that breastfeeding is a Very Good Thing as far as infant health is concerned. The contentious issue seems to be how big the risk of not exclusively breastfeeding. And here, I’m not sure I’m in complete agreement with Joseph’s take on things. He writes:
Being ethical — and being prudent — with pseudonymous blogging.
I’m following up on my earlier post in the wake of the outing of dKos blogger Armando. At Majikthise, Lindsay Beyerstein had posted an interesting discussion of the issues around pseudonymous blogging, and whether it might sometimes be ethical to reveal the secret identity of a pseudonymous blogger. She raises lots of interesting issues about whether blogging is properly regarded as a species of journalism, and how the ethics of blogging might be related to the journalistic ethics of the “old media”. As well, Armando turns up in the comments to disagree with Lindsay’s analysis of the issues.
My read is that the disagreement between Armando and Lindsay arises from a conflation of a number of distinct questions:
- Are bloggers journalists, or are they something else?
- If bloggers are not journalists, what are their ethical obligations (e.g., to their readers)? Do they have a duty to disclose potential conflicts of interest?
- Do journalists have a duty to protect the secret identity of a blogger who wishes to blog pseudonymously?
- Does a blogger who wishes to blog pseudonymously have a right to have his or her secret identity protected (by journalists, bloggers, and others)?
There seem to be some important theoretical details to work out here, such as whether bloggers are journalists, and whether the ethics of blogging are different from traditional journalistic ethics. As well, though, there are important questions about what sorts of policies are prudent for a blogger who wishes to blog pseudonymously — regardless of the ethical obligations relevant others might have in the situation.
We’re pro-truth.
It’s not just a science thing, it’s also an ethics thing. The truth is good. Departures from it, more often than not, get you into trouble.
A couple examples:
The Guarantee of Medical Accuracy in Sex Education Act was recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. Wouldn’t you think that education would be premised on accurate information? What have we come to when it takes a law “to prohibit the federal government from providing assistance to any entity whose materials on human sexuality contain medically inaccurate information”?
Memo to the folks who are spinning this as an unwarranted attack on abstinence-only sex education: If abstinence-only education is not supported by medically accurate information, stop trying to sell it on the basis of medically inaccurate information. You can still try to sell it on the basis of its allignment with a moral standard, if that’s why you favor it, but don’t lie to sell it on the basis of advantages it doesn’t actually have.
Sheesh, if you have to use bad data to sell a view, can you really be certain it’s a good view? (And, even if you’re certain, should it surprise you that other people won’t be when they discover that some of the premises of your argument are false — and that you knew they were false as you repeated the argument?)
From the political to the personal, I want to pick up on a detail from First Year Teacher’s heart-breaking and angry-making letter of resignation (which I saw via A Blog Around the Clock).