Like Revere and the folks at The Scientist, I received the series of emails from “ACS insider” questioning the way the American Chemical Society is running its many publications — and in particular, how compensation of ACS executives (and close ties to the chemical industry) might influence editorial policies at ACS publications.
The ACS disputes the details of the anonymous emails, so I won’t have much to say about those. But as an ACS member (who is, at present, participating in an ACS regional meeting), I’d like to ask the Society for some clarity.
Category Archives: Tribe of Science
Do you self-report lab mishaps?
This is a question that occurred to me earlier this month when I had occasion to observe an undergraduate laboratory course: If something goes wrong in the lab, do you tell the lab instructor? The “something wrong” could range from breaking a piece of glassware, to getting a stick with a syringe (of non-biohazardous material), to getting a stick with a syringe (of biohazardous or radioactive material), to spilling a nasty reagent. Of course, it could include other mishaps not enumerated here.
I’m not as interested in hearing when students should tell the lab instructor about a mishap, but rather in the conditions in which you would bring the lab instructor into the information loop.
A little ditty about a fertile object of scientific study.
While discussing poop with a bunch of life scientists — in particular, we were discussing its utility in a wide variety of research projects — one of the scientists at the table related a rousing cheer which I simply must share:
A code of ethics for scientists.
At least, for scientists in the UK.
The BBC reports that the chief scientific advisor to the British government, Professor Sir David King, has set out an ethics code of “seven principles aimed at building trust between scientists and society”.
The seven principles:
What the scientists don’t talk about in their papers tells you something, too.
On Stranger Fruit, there’s a response by historian of science Naomi Oreskes to recent criticisms of her 2004 paper in Science discussing the consensus position regarding anthropogenic climate change. While the whole trajectory of these sorts of “engagements” is interesting in its way — attacks on claims that weren’t made, critiques of methodologies that weren’t used, and so forth — the part of Oreskes’ response that jumped out at me had to do with the kinds of issues on which scientists focus when they’re talking to each other in the peer-reviewed literature:
How do you think we ought to deal with information about bad actors?
This is a follow-up, of a sort, to the previous post on why serious discussions (as opposed to shouting matches or PR campaigns) about the use of animals in research seem to be so difficult to have. One of the contentious issues that keeps coming up in the comments is how (if at all) such discussions ought to deal with prior bad acts that may not be representative of what’s happened since, or even of the actions of most of the scientific community at the time of those prior bad acts.
My sense, however, is that the real issue is who we think we can engage in a serious reasoned dialogue with and who we’ve already written off, who we think is worth engaging because there’s really a shared commitment to take each other’s interests seriously, and who intends to “win” at any cost.
Thoughts on the passing of Leona Helmsley.
Perhaps you’ve heard the news that Leona Helmsley died yesterday. Her obituaries have noted the the “Queen of Mean” came to be viewed as the embodiment of the greed of the 1980s (at least as it played out in the world of Manhattan real estate).
The public didn’t like her much.
I have no real basis for making a judgment about whether she was a nice person deep down, whether she became a nicer person after doing jail time for tax evasion, or whether she was kind to animals. But I would like to have a look at something she was widely reported to have said (but denied saying):
“Only the little people pay taxes.”
Is a shift away from peer review cause for concern?
Today, Inside Higher Ed has an article about the recent decline of peer reviewed papers authored by professors in top five economics departments in high profile economics journals. A paper by MIT economics professor Glenn Ellison, “Is Peer Review in Decline?,” considers possible explanations for this decline, and the Inside Higher ed article looks at the possible impacts of this shift.
The alternative threatening the peer reviewed journals here is the web, since scholars can post their papers directly to their websites (or blogs) rather than letting them languish with pokey referees. But I think the issues here go beyond the tug-of-war between old media and new media and bring us to the larger question of just what is involved in building new scientific* knowledge.
Opening lines of communication between universities and the FBI.
In the July 16 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (secure behind a paywall), the article “FBI Reaches Out to Campuses” [1] caught my attention. The gist of it is that academic scientists are increasingly the targets of foreign espionage, where the stakes have less to do with national security than potentially huge economic losses. The FBI would like to help academic scientists avoid being dupes and giving scientists in other countries an unfair advantage.
Book review: Storm World.
When I was growing up in New Jersey, hurricanes were “on the radar” for us, one of many possible (if infrequent) weather patterns during summer and fall. Later, in my first semester of college in Massachusetts, the morning of my first broadcast on the college radio station was made memorable by the landfall of Hurricane Gloria; I remember the name of the storm because I closed my show by playing the U2 song “Gloria” before signing off the air at 7 am. (The governor of the Massachusetts had just declared a state of emergency, although it wasn’t until some 30 minutes later that the trustees of the college decided it might be a good idea to cancel classes.) The Atlantic coast, and the inland area not too far from it, was a site of weather events that commanded your attention.
For nearly two decades now, I’ve lived in California, in an area described as having climate, not weather. When I started reading Chris Mooney’s new book Storm World, a part of me wondered whether the fact that hurricanes are no longer a part of my day to day life would make it harder for me to get into this book about the scientific efforts to understand and forecast hurricanes, and the political struggles around the science.
My worry was misplaced.