So, at the end of the PSA I was so sick that I took to my overpriced hotel bed, forgoing interesting papers and the prospect of catching up with geographically dispersed friends in my field who I can only count on seeing every two years at the PSA. I managed to get myself back home and then needed another eight days to return to a “functional” baseline.
Checking in with the internets again, I feel like maybe I was in a coma for six months.
In particular, I was totally sidelined when Isis the Scientist issued her manifesto and when Zuska weighed in on the various reactions to Isis and her manifesto. Both posts are must-reads, and if my head were not still swimming in mucus I might be able to add something substantive to advance the discussion.
However, since my head is still swimming in mucus, I’m afraid you’ll be getting something rather more stream-of-consciousness.
Category Archives: Social issues
Prizes for women. Progress for women?
2008 is the tenth year of the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science awards to remarkable female scientists from around the world. Indeed, our sister-site, ScienceBlogs.de, covered this year’s award ceremony and is celebrating women in science more generally with a For Women in Science blog. (It, like the rest of ScienceBlogs.de, is in German. Just so you know.)
In addition to the global contest, three further scholarships are given to women scientists in Germany. But, the only women eligible for these awards are women with kids. (The rationale for this is that childcare options in Germany are not as good as they should be for working mothers, so women scientists with kids need special support.)
Freelance chemistry for fun and (illegal) profit.
You know how graduate students are always complaining that their stipends are small compared to the cost of living? It seems that some graduate students find ways to supplement that income … ways that aren’t always legal. For example, from this article in the September 8, 2008 issue of Chemical & Engineering News [1]:
Jason D. West, a third-year chemistry graduate student at the University of California, Merced, was arraigned last month on charges of conspiring to manufacture methamphetamine, manufacturing methamphetamine, and possessing stolen property. West allegedly stole approximately $10,000 worth of equipment and chemicals from the university to make the illegal drug.
West, 36, pleaded not guilty to the charges and as of press time was in jail on $1 million bail. Police have found materials traced to West at three different meth labs and in one vehicle, says Tom MacKenzie of the Merced County Sheriff’s Department.
The police ended up arresting West following an investigation by UC-Merced campus police of the whereabouts of a vacuum pump that went missing from West’s graduate lab. Graduate students take note: your advisor will miss that expensive piece of lab equipment.
Book review: And the Band Played On.
Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
There are a few books on my shelf that I can read any given number of times without being bored or impatient. One of these is And the Band Played On, a painstaking work of journalism that never feels laborious in the reading — despite being in excess of 600 pages.
Randy Shilts, who was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle reporting on AIDS in the early 1980s, assembled an intricate chronological telling of the early unfolding of the AIDS epidemic, from the first glimmerings of awareness of a new disease among doctors, public health workers, and trackers of epidemics, to the reactions of people in communities hit by this new disease (especially the gay communities in New York City and San Francisco), to the responses of politicians and policy makers who, almost without exception, dropped the ball.
Connections.
Because it strikes me as somehow related to my last post, and because Memorial Day is the Monday after next, I’m recycling a post I wrote last year for WAAGNFNP:
On Memorial Day, because I really needed to do something beside grade papers for awhile, I decided to go to the nursery to buy some plants. First, though, because the kids (who had the day off from school) were actually entertaining themselves pretty well, I poured myself another coffee and decided to actually read some of the articles in The Nation issue on climate change.
Do jokes reveal something about who you’re talking to?
On April Fool’s Day, our local Socrates Café had an interesting discussion around the question of what makes something funny. One observation that came up repeatedly was that most jokes seem aimed at particular audiences — at people who share particular assumptions, experiences, and contexts with the person telling the joke. The expectation is that those “in the know” will recognize what’s funny, and that those who don’t see the humor are failing to find the funny because they’re not in possession of the crucial knowledge or insight held by those in the in-group. Moreover, the person telling the joke seems effectively to assert his or her membership in that in-group. People in the discussion probed the question of whether there was anything that could be counted on to be universally funny; our tentative answer was, “Probably not.”
With this hunch about joking in hand, I wanted to take a closer look at a particular joke and what it might convey.
Sustainability starts with sustainable habits.
Another Earth Day rolls around, and I still have major qualms about the typical American approach to it (which seems to boil down to “Consumer choices will save the world!”). Possibly, viewing ourselves and each other primarily as consumers explains how we have had such a dramatic effect on the environment in the first place.
Still, while we try to muster the political will and get ourselves together to respond collectively to the challenges to the Earth we all share, it’s undeniable that our individual choices do have impacts. Here in the U.S., some of those impacts can be pretty big. So, I’m marking this Earth Day by taking stock of some of the habits I’ve tried to cultivate to lighten my impact.
Noticing class privilege.
Via Bint Alshamsa, this is a version of a “social class awareness experience” used in the residence halls (and possibly also classrooms?) at Indiana State University by Will Barratt et al. In the classroom, students are asked to take a step forward for each of the statements that describe them; they don’t talk about the exercise (and how they feel about it) until after they’ve gone through the whole list.
Doing this online, I’m bolding the statements which describe my background. Also, I’m including a second list that Lauren added based on the suggestions Bint’s commenters made as to other markers of class privilege.
Raising money for classroom projects to create a more scientifically literate society (DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2007)
Maybe you remember that fund-raiser we did for DonorsChoose last June. We’re kicking off another today. But this time, it’s not just ScienceBlogs bloggers — partners like Google, Yahoo!, Six Apart, and Federated Media are watching the efforts across the whole blogosphere to see which blog has the most generous and engaged readers.
But before we get to the frenzy of competition, let’s start with what matters: the school kids yearning to learn.
As I wrote last year:
Those of us who blog here at ScienceBlogs think science is cool, important, and worth understanding. If you’re reading the blogs here, chances are you feel the same way.
A lot of us fell in love with science because of early experiences in school — teachers who made science intriguing, exciting, maybe a little bit dangerous. But tightening budgets are making it harder and harder for public school teachers to provide the books, equipment, and field trips to make science come alive for kids.
DonorsChoose.org gives us a way to help teachers get the job done. A bunch of us at ScienceBlogs have set up Blogger Challenges which will let us (and that includes you) contribute to worthy school projects in need of financial assistance. We’ll be able to track our progress right on the DonorsChoose site. And — because we like a little friendly competition — we’ll be updating you periodically as to which blogger’s readers are getting his or her challenge closest to its goal.
You don’t need to give a barrel of money to help the kids — as little as $10 can help. You’re joining forces with a bunch of other people, and all together, your small contributions can make a big difference.
This year, the challenge runs for the entire month of October. A number of ScienceBloggers have already put together challenges, but I suspect a few more may arrive fashionably late. Here’s who’s in so far:
A Blog Around the Clock (challenge here)
Adventures in Ethics and Science (challenge here)
Aetiology (challenge here)
Cognitive Daily (challenge here)
Deep Sea News (challenge here)
Evolgen (challenge here)
Gene Expression (challenge here)
Omni Brain (challenge here)
On Being a Scientist and a Woman (challenge here)
The Questionable Authority (challenge here)
Retrospectacle (challenge here)
The Scientific Activist (challenge here)
Stranger Fruit (challenge here)
Terra Sigillata (challenge here)
Thoughts From Kansas (challenge here)
Thus Spake Zuska (challenge here)
Uncertain Principles (challenge here)
How It Works:
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?