Because I am engaged in a struggle with mass quantities of grading, I’m reviving a post from the vault to tide you over. I have added some new details in square brackets, and as always, I welcome your insight here.
Category Archives: Tribe of Science
Norms are what we ought to do, not what we suspect everyone actually does.
In the comments on a number of recent posts, I’ve been sensing a certain level of cynicism about the realities of scientific practice, and it’s been bumming me out. (In fairness, as I reread those comment threads today, the comments aren’t as jaded as I remember them being; it’s probably that the ones with a cynical edge are staying with me a bit longer.)
I am not bummed because I think people ought to have a picture of the scientific community as one where everyone is happy and smiling, holding hands and singing and wanting to buy the world a Coke. What’s sticking in my craw a little is the “Eh, what are you gonna do?” note of resignation about some of the problematic behaviors and outcomes that are acknowledged to be even more common than the headlines would lead us to believe.
I do not think we can afford to embrace resignation here. I think that seeing the problems actually saddles us with some responsibilty to do something about them.
Independent confirmation and open inquiry (investigation? examination?): Purdue University and the Rusi Taleyarkhan case.
My recent post on the feasibility (or not) of professionalizing peer review, and of trying to make replication of new results part of the process, prompted quite a discussion in the comments. Lots of people noted that replication is hard (and indeed, this is something I’ve noted before), and few were convinced that full-time reviewers would have the expertise or the objectivity to do a better job at reviewing scientific manuscripts than the reviewers working under the existing system.
To the extent that building a body of reliable scientific knowledge matters, though, we have to take a hard look at the existing system and ask whether it’s doing the job. Do the institutional structures in which scientific work is conducted encourage a reasonable level of skepticism and objectivity? Is reproducibility as important in practice as it is in the scientist’s imagination of the endeavor? And is this a milieu where scientists hold each other accountable for honesty, or where the assumption is that everyone lies?
The allegations around nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan — and Purdue University’s responses to these allegations — provide vivid illustrations of the sorts of problems a good system should minimize. The larger question is whether they are problems that are minimized by the current institutional structures.
Why wouldn’t this be a good way to do peer review?
When my “Ethics in Science” class was discussing scientific communication (especially via peer reviewed journals), we talked about what peer review tries to accomplish — subjecting a report of a scientific finding to the critical scrutiny of other trained scientists, who evaluate the quality of the scientific arguments presented in the manuscript, and how well they fit with the existing knowledge or arguments in the relevant scientific field.
We also talked about the challenges of getting peer review to function ideally and the limits of what peer review can accomplish (something I also discussed here). In many instances, the people peer reviewing your manuscripts may well be your scientific rivals. Even if peer review is supposed to be anonymous, in a small enough sub-field people start recognizing each other’s experimental approaches and writing styles, making it harder to keep the evaluation of the content of a manuscript objective. And, peer reviewing of manuscripts is something working scientists do on top of their own scientific research, grant writing, teaching, supervision of students, and everything else — and they do it without pay or any real career reward. (This is not to say it’s only worth doing the stuff you get some tangible reward for doing, but it can end up pretty low in the queue.)
Why, one of my students asked, don’t the journals hire people to do peer reviewing? Why not make it an actual paid job?
What would it be like to be an engineer?
It has recently transpired that I will be teaching (and before that, designing and constructing) a brand new ethics module in the large introduction to engineering class at my university that all the freshman who are majoring in any of the multitude of engineering disciplines must take. I’m jazzed, of course, that the College of Engineering thinks that it’s worth cultivating in their students the idea that ethics is an integral part of being a good engineer (and a good engineering student), so much so that they are devoting two weeks in the fifteen week term to this. And, I want to do a good job pitching the material to the audience.
I have some experience teaching to frosh. But it occurs to me that I’m a little fuzzy in understanding just what makes an engineer an engineer.
How easy would it be to dig yourself out of this hole?
We just hit the point in the semester where my “Ethics in Science” class discusses the novel Cantor’s Dilemma by Carl Djerassi. For those who inhabit the world of scientific research — and for those who don’t but are hungry for an insight to how human relationships and scientific activities are entwined — it’s a nice little novel. (Indeed, I’ve discussed it already in a couple other posts.)
What I’m going to discuss in this post is a situation that’s pretty much at the end of Cantor’s Dilemma, a situation where my view of what was most likely to happen after the last page (in Novel-land, where the fictional characters go on with their lives after we close the book and put it back on the shelf) turns out to be very, very different from my students’ views of how things would probably go for those characters. I’m curious to know whose reading of the likely outcomes seems most reasonable.
But, to lay that out, I need to give you details about where things are at the end of Cantor’s Dilemma.
If you have not yet read Cantor’s Dilemma, and if there is even a remote possibility that you might read Cantor’s Dilemma at some point in the future, and if knowing how the novel ends has any non-zero probability of taking the fun out of your future reading of this novel (as I imagine it would for me), then for goodness sake do not read any further in this post! This post will be loaded with spoilers. Not just minor spoilers, either. To really explain the situation at the end of the novel about which my students and I disagree, I need to spoil most of what there is to spoil.
I’ve warned you. Choose carefully.
Some quick thoughts on undergraduate research.
Jake, Chad, and Rob have posted about a newly published study about the benefits of research experiences for undergraduates. The quick version is that involvement in research (at least in science/technology/engineering/mathematics disciplines) seems to boost the student’s enthusiasm for the subject and confidence, not to mention nearly doubling the chances that the student will pursue a Ph.D.
I’m going to chime in with some observations of my own:
To correct or to retract? The ethics of setting the record straight.
An important part of the practice of science is not just the creation of knowledge but also the transmission of that knowledge. Knowledge that’s stuck in your head or lab notebooks doesn’t do anyone else any good. So, scientists are supposed to spread the knowledge through means such as peer reviewed scientific journals. And, scientists are supposed to do their level best to make sure the findings they report are honest and accurate.
Sometimes, scientists screw up. Ideally, scientists who have screwed up in a scientific communication need to set the record straight. Just what is involved in setting the record straight, however, sometimes presents interesting problems, as the following case illustrates nicely.
And the point of publishing scientific findings was what again?
Pencils ready? Here’s a quick quiz; circle all that apply*:
1. You’re a scientist and you’ve just published some research in a peer reviewed journal. You want:
a. Scientists in your field to read and discuss your work.
b. Interested non-scientists to get the important bits of what you found and why it matters, whether by powering through the article themselves or by getting a clear explanation of the article from a scientist.
c. No discussion of your article at all — once it’s on the page in the journal, there’s nothing else to say about it.
d. All discussions of your findings to be based on press releases rather than the details in your journal article.
Question: How have you adapted the laboratory for students and researchers with disabilities?
I have some posts gestating on ethical issues in science, but I have to clear a bit more grading and committee work before I can do them justice. In the meantime, I want to pose a set of questions to those of you who teach labs and/or supervise laboratory research:
Have you been asked to adapt your laboratories for students or researchers with disabilities?