A thought for Texas Governor Rick Perry about science.

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Despite my best efforts to steer clear of debates between presidential hopefuls at this point in the calendar (because I have important job-related stuff to do with those waking hours, and also, I have been cautioned that the budget will not provide a replacement for my existing desk should my head eventually break it), bits of information from these debates do manage to get my attention. For example, in the September 7 Republican debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, Texas Governor Rick Perry (with an “E”) made some comments on science and the state of scientific agreement, especially as relates to what we know about climate change. The following exchange began with a question from John Harris of Politico:

HARRIS: Governor Perry — Governor Perry, Governor Huntsman were not specific about names, but the two of you do have a difference of opinion about climate change. Just recently in New Hampshire, you said that weekly and even daily scientists are coming forward to question the idea that human activity is behind climate change. Which scientists have you found most credible on this subject?

PERRY: Well, I do agree that there is — the science is — is not settled on this. The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at — at — at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet, to me, is just — is nonsense. I mean, it — I mean — and I tell somebody, I said, just because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact, Galileo got outvoted for a spell.

But the fact is, to put America’s economic future in jeopardy, asking us to cut back in areas that would have monstrous economic impact on this country is not good economics and I will suggest to you is not necessarily good science. Find out what the science truly is before you start putting the American economy in jeopardy.

HARRIS: Just to follow up quickly. Tell us how you’ve done that.

(APPLAUSE)

Are there specific — specific scientists or specific theories that you’ve found especially compelling, as you…

(CROSSTALK)

PERRY: Let me tell you what I find compelling, is what we’ve done in the state of Texas, using our ability to regulate our clean air. We cleaned up our air in the state of Texas, more than any other state in the nation during the decade. Nitrous oxide levels, down by 57 percent. Ozone levels down by 27 percent.

That’s the way you need to do it, not by some scientist somewhere saying, “Here is what we think is happening out there.” The fact of the matter is, the science is not settled on whether or not the climate change is being impacted by man to the point where we’re going to put America’s economics in jeopardy.

(Bold emphasis added.)

In less than 500 words, we get some insight into Gov. Perry’s attitudes towards science.

He thinks it would be a mistake to be guided by “some scientist somewhere saying, ‘Here is what we think is happening out there,’ ” although, presumably, he can bolster Texas’s success in cleaning its air with empirical measurements of nitrous oxide and ozone taken by some scientist somewhere.

He’s aware that weekly, maybe even daily, scientists are bravely coming forward to question the idea of anthropogenic global warming, but when asked to identify the scientists that he has found most credible on the subject of climate change, Perry either cannot name any of these scientists, or won’t identify them as credible … or maybe is keeping their names to himself to protect them? (From whom is he protecting them? Does this mean that these scientists have not “come forward” to state their views within their scientific communities — or to the public — but that they have “come forward” to Gov. Perry in private?)

Perry also references Galileo, stating that this hero of scientific progress also “got outvoted for a spell.” I leave it to full-time historians of science to explicate the problems with Perry’s understanding of Galileo, but I will note that there is a difference between having one’s theory accepted by one’s fellow working scientists and having one’s theory accepted by the Roman Inquisition of the Catholic Church — and I’m pretty sure Galileo himself did not have a vote in the latter.

But, here’s the piece of Perry’s position that really struck me: He states that climate science is not settled enough that it ought to guide policy which, by Perry’s lights, would jeopardize the American economy. But this turns on an assumption that economics is a more settled (and more reliable) science than is climate science.

Really?

I suppose, then, we have the awesome predictive power of economic theory (about which there is strong consensus) to thank for warning us about the great recession before it happened, and for laying out a set of effective interventions that, once implemented, will save the economy and put millions of people back to work!

The economists, I’m sure, will be holding a press conference to explain their theory, describe the interventions that are needed, and call on our political leaders to implement them, just as soon as they’ve gotten their academic terms off to a good start. I’ll be here (with my unicorn) waiting for that press conference.

Mandatory training violates my rights (and tenured faculty are chickensh*t)!

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Via the Twitters, DrugMonkey paged me for a consult:

Loon-tastic. Where’s @docfreeride? RT @CackleofRad: Sexual harassment training is an attempt to brow-beat the tenured.http://clarissasblog.com/2011/09/06/who-has-the-power-to-refuse/

The post linked in the tweet contains some interesting tidbits:

I wanted to call your attention to the story of Dr. Alexander McPherson who resisted the attempts of  the University of California Irvine to take the mandatory sexual harassment training:

“I have consistently refused to take such training on the grounds that the adoption of the requirement was a naked political act by the state that offended my sensibilities, violated my rights as a tenured professor, impugned my character and cast a shadow of suspicion on my reputation and career,” McPherson said.

“I consider my refusal an act of civil disobedience. I even offered to go to jail if the university persisted in persecuting me for my refusal. We Scots are very stubborn in matters of this sort.”

It’s so good to hear that such things still take place. Normally, at every campus I have visited or heard of, the most beaten down, brown-nosing, terrified folks who are ready to kiss ass of every minor administrator are not the tenure-track faculty, the adjuncts, the instructors, the grad students, or the secretarial staff. It’s the tenured profs. It’s as if the moment you got tenure, you somehow immediately learned to tremble in the presence of any minuscule administrative pseudo-authority. I have no idea why that is but I have gotten used to the fact that any resistance even to the greatest act of stupidity on campus will not come from tenured people. …

Every year, I am forced to take the so-called “ethics training” that teaches me in the most condescending way you can imagine not to accept bribes, not to divert university funding to my relatives, and not to steal office supplies. So I know where McPherson’s outrage is coming from.

I’m a little pinched for time at the moment (it being the first instructional day after a long holiday weekend) and thus will have to postpone a deeper and more nuanced consideration of the constellation of issues raised by the post. But, if I can channel the advice-nurse from our pediatrician’s office, here’s a quick identification of some of those issues, and my shooting-from-the-hip response to some of them:

What to say about required faculty training in safety, ethics, sexual harassment (and how not to do it), etc.?

It’s fair to say that faculty, among other employees, frequently grumble about such training. Many feel (and not without cause) that the training they are required to complete (whether in a face-to-face meeting in a conference room or by way of an online module with a quiz) focuses on stuff that should be pretty obvious to anyone who is paying attention. And, given the obviousness of much of the content, it would not be surprising to find that some of the people delivering it did so in a condescending manner (because it could be challenging not to be condescending to a grown-up who didn’t know better than to accept bribes or to demand sex for good grades or what have you).

But, it’s not clear that the obviousness of the content or the seeming pointlessness of the task raises it to the level of an attack on one’s academic freedom. Without something like a positive argument, I’m not persuaded by the claim that mandatory training violates anyone’s rights or impugns his character any more than having to turn in grades by the grade-filing deadline or having to take roll on Census Day does.

And, the mere fact that ethics training, or safety training, or sexual harassment avoidance training is delivered in a stupid way that is likely not to engage faculty productively in being ethical or safe or non-harass-y does not mean that faculty have no need for training in these areas. Arguably, the fact that a handful of faculty members each year will be caught doing unethical stuff, or sexually harassing their students or colleagues, or running labs that are death-traps, suggests that such training would be really helpful — if not to the wrongdoers, then to their colleagues, supervisors, and underlings looking for effective ways to respond to the wrongdoing. It just needs to be good training.

Are tenured faculty more cowardly in the face of administrative edicts, and if so, why the heck don’t they put on their Big Professor Pants and stand up to the stupid edicts?

I would love to see some actual empirical data to support the claim that the tenured professoriate are the biggest chickens in the academic pecking order. This has not been my experience of things (especially in a department with many senior colleagues who will go to the mat for their students and colleagues and department on a fairly regular basis).

But, in the absence of clear data one way or another, let me suggest that the underlying phenomena that might be observed in a coarse-grained manner as “taking a stand” or “folding like a card table” could be more complicated. For example, an apparently spineless tenured faculty member who doesn’t publicly protest the annual ethics training may:

  • Be collecting actual data on the effectiveness of the training currently in place, in order to build a stronger argument to the administration for abandoning this training and/or replacing it with more effective training.
  • Be involved in ongoing discussions with administrators about the effectiveness of this training, and/or the size of the burden it puts on the faculty to complete it — and may be reasonably confident that the administrators with the power to change the training requirement will be most receptive to such one-on-one engagement rather than public defiance.
  • Be picking her battles, having judged the required ethics training far less onerous than (for example) the new course assessment regime or paperwork requirement for ordering lab supplies or what have you; fighting all the battles you could fight in an academic workplace can use you up right quick.
  • Be of the opinion that actually, the existing ethics training, while imperfect, is doing some good (and that the people who seem to be making the biggest stink about it are actually the ones who seem most inclined to cut a corner or two when it serves their interests) — in other words, she may disagree with you that this is a site of administrative inhumanity to faculty, and thus be disinclined to protest it.

It’s also worth noting that, at least on campuses where administrators have been chosen from the ranks of the faculty, tenured faculty may be more likely to know the administrators from their time in the faculty. This makes it harder to regard administrators as pure evil in a suit. Dealing with folks you know to be human beings with commitments to the self-same institutions and principles you value sometimes requires some finesse. — and using some finesse when dealing with an administrator does not make you that administrator’s lapdog.

Finally, at least some tenured faculty may be casing the administrative joint, figuring out how they might bring about lasting change for the better from the inside. Flipping the bird to the existing administration might take that option off the table.

The San Bruno pipeline explosion and PG&E’s response.

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The evening of September 9, 2010, a natural gas pipeline under San Bruno, California, ruptured and exploded. The resulting conflagration destroyed a neighborhood worth of houses and killed eight people.

PG&E, the utility company responsible for the pipeline, has not been terribly helpful in providing information to pinpoint why the disaster happened, nor in adopting changes to head off future disasters of this sort. Today, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) releases findings of its investigation of the incident, and of PG&E’s handling of it. As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle:

A defective weld in the pipe segment that ruptured existed from the moment the line was buried under the Crestmoor neighborhood in 1956, said investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board. The flaw would have been apparent if anyone had checked, either then or in the years since, the investigators said at a hearing in Washington, D.C.

Agency Chairwoman Deborah Hersman, in her opening statement, traced the Sept. 9 disaster to PG&E’s installation of a “woefully inadequate pipe,” whose source remains a mystery.

The company, Hersman said, “exploited weaknesses in a lax system of oversight, and regulatory agencies that placed a blind trust in operators to the detriment of public safety.”

The use of the defective pipe “was compounded over the years by a litany of failures” by PG&E, Hersman said, “including poor record-keeping, inadequate inspection programs, and an integrity management program without integrity.”

“It was not a question of if this pipeline would burst,” Hersman said. “It was a question of when.”

(Bold emphasis added.)

PG&E has posted a response to the NTSB investigation. Among other things, it states:

Since September 9, 2010, PG&E has taken multiple steps to improve the safety of our natural gas operations, including:

  • Creating a separate operating unit for our gas operations under the leadership of a newly hired gas operations expert who brings 30 years of experience in improving some of the nation’s oldest gas systems
  • Implementing more stringent pipeline operating standards
  • Hiring more than 90 new gas engineers as well as additional project managers, mappers and other employees in a major nationwide recruiting effort
  • Providing additional training to our gas operations employees
  • Retaining leading safety experts to help implement public and employee safety best practices
  • Beginning a major new initiative to replace or upgrade many older gas lines, add automatic or remote shut-off valves, and help develop state-of-the-art pipeline inspection technologies
  • Improving our coordination with local emergency responders

That’s a fine list of improvements, as far as it goes. But I’m a little surprised that it fails to explicitly address at least one of the big criticisms from the NTSB that was highlighted (above the fold, even) in all of the news coverage of the investigation I’ve seen so far.

Are we going to address the shortcomings in record-keeping?

Better inspections will help — if PG&E can keep track of when they happen and what they discover (and share that information with local, state, and federal officials when asked to do so).

Serious efforts to maintain, upgrade, and replace flawed sections of the pipeline should also help — if there’s a usable paper-trail of the maintenance, upgrades, replacements, and so forth. Because there’s a whole lot of pipe underground, and apparently PG&E has, at present, not a clue about which sections of it are riddled with bad welds like the section that failed in San Bruno.

“Trust us” isn’t going to work here. Without adequate record-keeping, PG&E cannot know what we would need the organization to know to inspire anything like trust — and cannot demonstrate that they’re doing the job to the regulators. We don’t need to impute evil intent here; incompetence is sufficent.

As I type this post, NTSB is holding a public hearing on the incident. You can catch the live webcast (until 12:30 PM Pacific time/3:30 PM Eastern time) here

Or, if you miss the webcast (or prefer text on a screen), John Upton is liveblogging the hearing.

Pseudonymity and ethics (with a few more thoughts on Google+).

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In a comment on my last post, Larry Moran takes issue with my defense of pseudonymity:

Janet says,

But Larry, other than my say-so (and that of those with whom I’ve cultivated online ties), how do you know “Janet D. Stemwedel” is really my “real” (by which I assume you mean “legal”) name? You didn’t peek at my driver’s license, so maybe the government here knows me my some other name.

That’s not a very good argument from someone who specializes in ethics! :-)

The issue is whether I prefer dealing with people who identify themselves or with people who use fake names to disguise their real identity. What you’re saying is that there will always be unethical people who will get around any rules designed to avoid false identities, therefore we shouldn’t even try to enforce a policy requiring real names.

I doubt very much that you use an argument like that when you discuss other issues like plagiarism, or preparing a CV. Let’s drop that argument, okay? We all know that there will be unethical people who will lie and cheat to get around any rules. That’s not an argument against having rules.

The issue before us is whether we want to live in an internet society where people identify themselves and stand behind what they say and do, just as they do in the real face-to-face world, or whether we want an internet society with different rules. I try to teach my students that it is important to take a stand on certain issues but they have to be prepared to suffer the consequences (both good and bad).

Larry is right that the part of my comment he’s quoted isn’t a very good argument. Indeed, I meant it mostly as a suggestion that Larry’s comfort dealing with me as a person-attached-to-her-real-name is based on a certain amount of trust that I really am properly attached to that legal name (since Larry has yet to demand to see my papers).

Neither, of course, would I want to say that the existence of people who get around a rule is a good reason to abandon the rule or attempts to enforce it. Instead, my support for the rule would turn on what the rule was meant to accomplish, what it actually accomplished, and whether the intended and/or actual effects were worth pursuing.*

However, Larry seems also to be suggesting that something stronger than his own personal preference against the use of pseudonyms.

As I read what he’s written, it seems like he’s suggesting that there’s something inherently unethical about using a pseudonym — that being pseudonymous online is somewhere on a spectrum of deeds that includes plagiarism and C.V.-padding. Let the record reflect that I’m not convinced this is actually what Larry is saying. But given that it might be read that way, I want to examine the suggestion.

Is pseudonymity always deceptive?

At the heart of the matter, I think we need to look at the question of how pseudonyms are used.

The suggestion in Larry’s comment is that a pseudonym is a fake name intended to disguise one’s identity. However, it strikes me that “disguise” might be a loaded term, one that has an additional connotation of “mislead” here.

Misleading is a variety of lying, and I’m happy to grant that lying is generally unethical (although, unlike Kant, I’m prepared to accept the possibility of a case where lying is less unethical than the existing alternatives).

But, my sense from the pseudonymous people I have encountered online (and from my own brief experience as a pseudonymous blogger) is that not all people using pseudonyms are aiming to deceive. Instead, I think it’s more accurate to say that they are choosing how much of their personal information to disclose.

And, I’m inclined to think that non-disclosure of personal information is only unethical in specific instances. I don’t think we have a positive right to total information about everyone with whom we engage.

Indeed, I don’t think we actually want total information about all of our contacts, whether online or in real life. My students have no interest in the current state of my digestive health, nor in what’s in my record collection (let alone what a “record” is). My children have no need to know whether the user interface for grade entry at my university is well-designed or clunky. Readers of my blog probably care less about my opinion of baseball teams than about my opinions on recent news stories about scientific misconduct.

Even being on the receiving end of an accidental overshare can feel like a violation of a relationship, as I had occasion to note a few years ago:

There was an academic blog I used to read that I enjoyed quite a lot. I had to stop, though, when it became apparent that the (anonymous) blogger was married to someone that I knew. (What clinched it was a post about a social occasion that I attended.) To keep reading the blog would have felt, to me, like a violation of the blogger’s trust — from real life, I knew certain details about the blogger that had not been revealed to the blog’s readers, and from the blog, I knew certain details about the blogger’s life that had not been revealed to the blogger’s real-life friends and acquaintances. Caring about the blogger (and the real-life person) meant I had to respect the walls of separation the blogger had erected.

We are always making judgments about what pieces of our experiences and ourselves it’s relevant to share. And we make those judgments differently depending on with whom we’re interacting, in what kind of context, how that will affect our comfort level (and theirs), and what kinds of consequences (deserved or undeserved) sharing what we share may bring.

I’m happy to be accountable for my views on research with animals, for example, but voicing them publicly can make me (and my family members) targets of people who think it’s OK to use threats of violence to silence me. I can fully understand why people actually conducting research with animals might not want to attach their real names (which are attached to addresses and phone numbers and license plate numbers of cars under which someone might put incendiary devices) to their candid views online — and, I think that our public conversation about research with animals would be greatly impoverished without their participation in it.

Courage, as Aristotle would remind us, is the right balance of confidence and fear for the circumstances at hand. Too little confidence makes us cowardly, but too little fear makes us foolhardy.

I should also note that many of the notable users of pseudonyms in the blogosphere choose pseudonyms that are extremely unlikely to be mistaken for legal names — which is to say, in withholding certain personal details they are not also trying to deceive others into believing that their “real” names in the three-dimensional world are “SciCurious” or “GrrlScientist” or “DrugMonkey” or “Prof-like Substance”. That’s not to say that such a clear ‘nym can’t be intentionally deceptive — for example, if GrrlScientist were male, or if PhysioProf were a certified public accountant, or if SciCurious had not a whit of curiosity about matters scientific. But either way, you’d have no expectations that a Social Security search on the surname Curious would help you locate Sci.

Perhaps ironically, it is the people with obviously assumed names like these, not people with “real-looking”** assumed names that might actually fool others into thinking they’re real, who have had their access to Google+ accounts revoked.

I won’t claim that no one uses an assumed name to mislead — obviously, there are people who do so. But this doesn’t make it the case that everyone using a ‘nym is using it to deceive. Indeed, pseudonymity can create conditions in which people disclose more honest information about themselves, where people share opinions or experiences that they could not comfortably (or safely) share using their real names.

I understand that not everyone is comfortable dealing with online persons who could, in an instant, dismantle their pseudonymous online identities and vanish. Especially if you’ve dealt with troll-y exemplars of pseudonymity, your patience for this may be limited. That’s fine. I’m happy to live in a world where people get to choose with whom they engage in their own online spaces, as well as which online spaces maintained by others they will frequent.

Indeed, I even noted that Google is free to make its own rules for Google+. That Google establishes a real-name rule for Google+ doesn’t raise it to the level of a moral precept (“Thou shalt use only thy full legal name”). If the rule is clearly explain in the Terms of Service, it probably imposes an obligation on the person who agrees to the ToS to follow the rule … but it probably also imposes an obligation on Google to enforce the rule consistently (which so far it has not).

And, Google setting its own rules does not preclude our discussing whether these are reasonable rules, ones with well thought out aims that have a reasonable chance of achieving those aims or some close approximation of them.

I think Larry is right that the names policy (and/or who will want to sign up for Google+) is going to come down to people’s comfort levels. Opting for one set of rules may make some groups of potential users very comfortable and others so uncomfortable that it effectively bars their participation. Google needs to think about it in those terms — who do they want in, and who are they happy to cede to their competition.

Right now, to me, Google+ feels a little like a country club to which I was admitted before I knew what kind of people the membership rules were going to exclude (because they’re “not our kind, dear”). Personally, this particular sort of “exclusivity” makes me less comfortable, not more. Depending on Google’s next move, I may be removing myself from the spiffy new clubhouse and spending a lot more time on the internet’s public beaches.

______
*Of course, I don’t need to tell you that rules are not always completely congruent with what’s ethical. There are plenty of rules that are unjust, loads of rules that we use to encode our ethical commitments, and a plethora of rules that seem to have no ethical content to speak of. (How would a utilitarian, a Kantian, and a virtue ethicist come down on “No white shoes after Labor Day”?)

**Naturally, which names look “real” and which look “made-up” is tied up in lots of cultural assumptions.

Pseudonymity and Google.

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In case you haven’t been following recent developments with the much-hyped Google+ (hailed by social media mavens as in position to replace both Facebook and Twitter), you may not have heard the news (e.g., in the linked ZDnet article by Violet Blue) that Google unceremoniously deleted “[a] striking number of Google+ accounts”, many apparently owing to the requirement that people with Google+ accounts must be registered under their “real names”.

A follow-up from Violet Blue notes that the real-name policy is not being enforced uniformly (e.g., Lady Gaga’s profile is still intact), and that the disabling of accounts that seems to have started July 22 or so was notable in that there were no notifications sent to users ahead of time that their accounts would be disabled (or why). Moreover, there seem to be at least a few cases where people deemed out of compliance with the real-name policy loss access not only to Google+ but also to other Google products like Gmail and Google Docs.

There are plenty of posts kicking around the blogosphere in response to this, pointing out legitimate reasons people might have for not using their “real name” online. (In the past, I wrote such a post myself.) You should definitely read what SciCurious has to say on the matter, since she explains it very persuasively.

There are those who argue that a real-name policy is the only effective deterrent to bad online behavior, but I have yet to see convincing evidence that this is so. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better citizen of the blogosphere than SciCurious, and “SciCurious” is not the name on her birth certificate or driver’s license. However, I’d argue that “SciCurious” is her real name in the blogosphere, given that it is connected to a vast catalog of blog posts, comments, interviews, and other traces that convey a reliable picture of the kind of person she is. Meanwhile, there are people using their legal names online who feel free to encourage violence against others. Is it more civil because they’re not using pseudonyms to applaud car-bombs?

Google, being a private company, is of course free to set its own terms of service (although enforcing them consistently would be preferable). That means it can set the rules to require people who want the service to sign up using their legal names. However, unless they are going to require that you submit documentation to verify that the name you are using is your legal name (as, apparently they have from some folks trying to get their Google+ accounts back) it strikes me that the safest default assumption is that everyone is signing up with an assumed name. How do you know that Paul Butterfield is Paul Butterfield if he’s not scanning his passport for you, or that Janet D. Stemwedel isn’t a totally made-up name?

The truth is, you don’t.

And if Google wants to get so far into its users’ business that they do know who we all officially are, that’s going to be enough of an overreach that a bunch of people drift off to Yahoo or Hotmail or some other company that isn’t quite so desperate for a total information dossier.

All of this is disappointing, since Google+ looks like it might be a spiffy little product. But if it can’t get out of beta without Google burning through the good reputation it had with netizens, pseudonymous or not, who were most likely to embrace it, Google+ may have all the success and longevity of Google Buzz and Google Wave.

A modest proposal to Amazon.com or California big-box outlets.

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… whichever can muster a shred of corporate social responsibility.

As has been noted elsewhere, Amazon.com is put out that states are asking it to collect sales tax on online purchases. You may have had occasion to notice that most states are still experiencing major economic difficulties. Especially given major anti-tax sentiments among lawmakers, the states are relying on sales taxes for an ever increasing proportion of state revenue.

Yes, sales taxes are regressive, and tend to hit the poor more heavily than the rich. But my guess is that some non-negligible proportion of Californians making online purchases with Amazon are living comfortably above the poverty line.

Amazon.com is so committed to not collecting California sales tax that it is prepared to spend several buckets of money to get a measure on the ballot to free it from having to collect the sales tax.

Meanwhile, word on the streets is that the brick-and-mortar big-box retailers that are Amazon’s biggest competition here — who, naturally, collect sales tax on purchases — are prepared to spend their own buckets of money to urge a “no” vote on the ballot measure.

I offer this proposal in the hopes of being able to dodge yet another situation where we’re calling for a plague on both your houses.

Amazon:
The state of California needs that sales tax revenue at the moment, surely more than Jeff Bezos needs it. California consumers (at least the ones who still have disposable income to spend) are sold on the convenience you offer and the wide range of goods you sell. They happily pay sales tax on online purchases they make with other retailers. You won’t lose them by collecting sales tax, at least, not too many of them.

However, you may lose a bunch of them if you pour lots of money into a ballot measure. The whole governing-by-ballot-measure thing has gotten pretty tired, and it’s expensive, and we don’t love it when big corporations buy all that commercial time to lie to us about our best interests.

So, why not collect that sales tax and look like a benevolent corporate entity rather than greed made flesh (or whatever the cyber-retail equivalent of “flesh” might be)? Heck, you could even just meet us halfway and create a sales tax opt-in toggle for California consumers who would like to avail themselves of Amazon’s selection and convenience without feeling like greedhead-supporting scumbags?

Big-box retailers in California:
I get where you’re coming from here. You’re not wrong that Amazon gets an unfair advantage by dodging collecting California sales tax. And undoubtedly the Amazon-bankrolled ballot measure will be supported by all sorts of misleading (and self-serving) claims that you’ll want to counter.

But this is a golden opportunity to be the less evil of corporate entities here. That might reward you with dividends, whether from California consumers, or communities who make zoning decisions, or lawmakers, down the road.

Why not take that money that you’re prepared to spend to defeat the get-Amazon-out-of-sales-tax-collection ballot measure and use it to create jobs in California communities?

I reckon that embarking on such an unorthodox move would get you all sorts of free publicity from reporters on the economic and political beats, among others. Probably some bloggers would talk it up, too.

The California budget is broken enough that we need every dollar we can get to support crumbling infrastructure, essential services to the poor and the sick, little things like education. This is not an auspicious time to be pouring money into fighting about whether Amazon.com can keep stiffing California. The corporate entity that steps away from the expensive game of chicken and uses its power and money for good may end up winning lots goodwill from California consumers — goodwill that carries over to better economic times (assuming someday we’ll have those) when people have more money to spend and want to feel good about where they’re spending it.

On the other hand, both sides can stay the course and help Californians feel better about pulling back from consumer culture.

Harvard Psych department may have a job opening.

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… because Marc Hauser has resigned his faculty position, effective August 1.

You may recall, from our earlier discussions of Hauser (here, here, here, and here), that some of his papers were retracted because they drew conclusions that weren’t supported by the data … and then it emerged that maybe the data didn’t support the conclusions on account of scientific misconduct (rather than honest mistakes). Harvard mounted an inquiry. Hauser took a leave of absence from his position while the inquiry was ongoing. Harvard found Hauser “solely responsible, after a thorough investigation by a faculty member investigating committee, for eight instances of scientific misconduct under FAS standards.” In February, Hauser’s colleagues in the Psychology Department voted against allowing him to return to the classroom in the Fall. Meanwhile, since Hauser’s research was supported by grants from federal funding agencies, the Office of Research Integrity is thought to be in the midst of its own investigation of Hauser’s scientific conduct.

So perhaps Hauser’s resignation was to be expected (although it’s not too hard to come up with examples of faculty who were at least very close to scientific fraudsters — close enough to be enabling the fraud — who are still happily ensconced in their Ivy League institutions).

From Carolyn Y. Johnson at the Boston Globe:

“While on leave over the past year, I have begun doing some extremely interesting and rewarding work focusing on the educational needs of at-risk teenagers. I have also been offered some exciting opportunities in the private sector,” Hauser wrote in a resignation letter to the dean, dated July 7. “While I may return to teaching and research in the years to come, I look forward to focusing my energies in the coming year on these new and interesting challenges.”

Hauser did not respond to e-mail or voicemail messages today.

His resignation brings some resolution to the turmoil on campus, but it still leaves the scientific community trying to sort out what findings, within his large body of work, they should trust. Three published papers led by Hauser were thrown into question by the investigation — one was retracted and two were corrected. Problems were also found in five additional studies that were either not published or corrected prior to publication.

“What it does do is it provides some sort of closure for people at Harvard. … They were in a state of limbo,” said Gerry Altmann, editor of the journal Cognition, who, based on information provided to him by Harvard last year, said the only plausible conclusion he could draw was that some of the data had been fabricated in a study published in his journal in 2002 and retracted last year. “There’s just been this cloud hanging over the department. … It has no real impact on the field more broadly.”

Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be a mixed message in those last two paragraphs. Either this is the story of one bad apple who indulged in fabrication and brought shame to his university, or this is the story of a trusted member of the scientific community who contributed many, many articles to the literature in his field and now turns out not to be so trustworthy. If it’s the latter, then we’re talking about potential impacts that are much bigger than Harvard’s reputation. We’re talking about a body of scientific literature that suddenly looks less solid — a body of scientific literature that other researchers had trusted, used as the basis for new studies of their own, perhaps even taken as the knowledge base with which other new findings would need to be reconciled to be credible.

And, it’s not like there’s no one suggesting that Marc Hauser is a good guy who has made important (and presumably trustworthy) contributions to science. For example:

“I’m deeply saddened by the whole events of the last year,” Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard, said today. “Marc is a scientist of enormous creativity, energy, and talent.”

Meanwhile, if the data from the Harvard investigation best supports the conclusion that Hauser’s recent work was marred by scientific misconduct characterized by “problems involving data acquisition, data analysis, data retention, and the reporting of research methodologies and results,” this seems to count against Hauser’s credibility (and his judgment). And, although we might make the case that teaching involves a different set of competencies than research, his colleagues may have decided that the his to his credibility as a knowledge-builder would also do damage to his credibility as a teacher. The Boston Globe article notes:

Another researcher in the field, Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said today that Hauser’s departure was not unexpected. “Once they didn’t let him teach –- and there are severe restrictions in his ability to do research — you come to office and what do you do all day?” he said. “People in the field, we’re just wondering — this doesn’t change anything. We’re still where we were before about the [other] studies.”

What could Hauser do at work all day if not teach and conduct research? Some might suggest a full slate of committee work.

Others would view that as cruel and unusual punishment, even for the perpetrator of scientific misconduct.

Helpful hint for ethics students.

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Let’s say you have been given a case study and asked to suggest an ethical course of action for the protagonist in the case.

If, in the course of explaining the course of action you are recommending, you find yourself writing, “Even though it would be unethical, the protagonist should …,” you may be doing it wrong.

A small happy parenting moment.

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A conversation yesterday at the dojo where my better half and the younger Free-Ride offspring do aikido:

Younger offspring: I think [Dr. Free-Ride’s better half] needs to man up and start coming to aikido regularly again.

Dr. Free-Ride: I get what you’re saying, but when you say “man up”, what are you suggesting about women?

Younger offspring: Oh, I didn’t think about that.

Dr. Free-Ride: Because the quality you want [Dr. Free-Ride’s better half] to summon isn’t something only men have, right?

Younger offspring: No, women have it too. I didn’t mean men were better.

Dr. Free-Ride: I know that. But sometimes our words seem to say things we don’t mean them to mean.

Younger offspring: I could say “toughen up” instead, ’cause that’s what I mean.

Dr. Free-Ride: That would totally work.

I’m especially happy that it took all of five minutes for the younger offspring, aged 10, to get the distinction between what she meant to say and what the words themselves might communicate — and that she was able to have this discussion without feeling attacked or turning it into an exchange focused on the innocence of her intent.

To me, this feels like significant progress towards maturity.