In the August 25, 2008 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, there’s an interview with Carol Henry (behind a paywall). Henry is a consultant who used to be vice president for industry performance programs at the American Chemistry Council (ACC). In the course of the interview, Henry laid out a set of standards for doing research that she thinks all scientists should adopt. (Indeed, these are the standards that guided Henry in managing research programs for the California Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, the American Petroleum Institute, and ACC.)
Here are Carol Henry’s research standards:
Category Archives: Institutional ethics
The system as it currently exists.
Over at DrugMonkey, PhysioProf delivers a mission statement:
Our purpose here at DrugMonkey is to try to help people identify and cultivate the tools required to succeed within the system of academic science as it currently exists. We did not create this system, and we are not in a position to to “take it down”. We do the best we can to help the people we train in our own labs to succeed within this system, and we try to share some of our insights here at the blog.
In a winner-take-all system like this, there will always be people who do not succeed through no fault of their own. People who are smart, talented, dedicated, hard-working, articulate, persuasive, and who do all the right things sometimes still fail. This is the nature of a winner-take-all system: there is an intrinsic randomness that influences to some extent who succeeds and who fails. It is the same in professional sports, law, medicine, performing arts, entertainment, comedy, business, entrepreneurialism, journalism, engineering, and most other professional career enterprises.
Many of us may not like this situation, but this is how things currently work. Academic science is not a … Care Bears tea party, and wishing that it were is not going to make it so.
I think this is a fine statement of purpose for a blog. But I think the community of academic science could — and should — set its sights higher.
How committed are paleontologists to objectivity (in questions of ethical conduct)?
There’s another development in Aetogate, which you’ll recall saw paleontologists William Parker, Jerzy Dzik, and Jeff Martz alleging that Spencer Lucas and his colleagues at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNHS) were making use of their work or fossil resources without giving them proper credit. Since I last posted on the situation, NMMNHS decided to convene an ethics panel to consider the allegations. This ought to be good news, right?
It probably depends on what one means by “consider”.
Paleontologists behaving badly.
A recent news item by Rex Dalton in Nature [1] caught my attention. From the title (“Fossil reptiles mired in controversy”) you might think that the aetosaurs were misbehaving. Rather, the issue at hand is whether senior scientists at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science were taking advantage of an in-house publishing organ (the NMMNHS Bulletin) to beat other paleontologists to the punch in announcing research findings — and whether they did so with knowledge of the other researchers’ efforts and findings.
From the article:
Is a fake university a step up or down from a diploma mill?
Saying you’ve seen everything is just asking the universe to do you one better. So I won’t. Still, this story nearly required grubbing around the floor on my hands and knees to find the location to which my jaw had dropped:
Bogus university scam uncovered
Investigation
By Nigel Morris
BBC London Investigations Producer
An international education scam that targets foreign students who come to study in the capital has been exposed by a BBC London investigation.
The bogus Irish International University (IIU), which offers sub-standard and worthless degrees, has been allowed to flourish in the UK – virtually unchecked by the government – for the last seven years.
Let me pause here to note that these are not “sub-standard and worthless degrees” by the lights of your parents (who warned you not to major in philosophy or English or whatever discipline it was they deemed suitably flaky or disreputable) — they are actual fake degrees.
Why ethics matter to science.
Regular readers of this blog know that I teach an ethics class aimed at science majors, in which I have a whole semester to set out ethical considerations that matter when you’re doing science. There’s a lot to cover, so the pace is usually more breakneck than leisurely.
Still, it’s rather more time for detail and reflection than I get in the four 50 minute lectures of the ethics module in the introduction to engineering class. In that context, my main goal is to persuade the students that ethical considerations aren’t completely disconnected from the professional community of engineers they hope someday to join (nor from the learning community of which they’re already a part).
But even these four meetings seem like a lot of time compared to the research ethics session I have facilitated the past couple summers (and will facilitate again this summer) for undergraduates doing summer research internships at one of the local private-sector centers of science and engineering. There, I get a whopping 90 minutes with the students.
With that kind of time pressure, you start stripping off the bells and whistles to locate the core message you want to get across. The core message, as I see it, is after the jump.
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:
Is the NCAA encouraging academic fraud?
I’m pretty sure the National Collegiate Athletic Association doesn’t want college athletes — or the athletics programs supporting them — to cheat their way through college. However, this article at Inside Higher Ed raises the question of whether some kind of cheating isn’t the best strategy to give the NCAA what it’s asking for.
From the article:
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?
If you pay us to put your name on our college, what are you expecting us to give up in return?
The Des Moines Register reports a bit of a to-do at the University of Iowa about whether the College of Public Health will be accepting a “naming gift” from Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Some objections have been raised on the basis that a giant of the health insurance industry might have (or be seen to have) significantly different values and goals than a college of public health: