Ed Yong and DrugMonkey have dusted off the invitation (seen here last summer) for readers to take a moment to introduce themselves in the comments.
It seems like a good idea to me, so I’m going to play along:
How to discourage scientific fraud.
In my last post, I mentioned Richard Gallagher’s piece in The Scientist, Fairness for Fraudsters, wherein Gallagher argues that online archived publications ought to be scrubbed of the names of scientists sanctioned by the ORI for misconduct so that they don’t keep paying after they have served their sentence. There, I sketched my reasons for disagreeing with Gallagher.
But there’s another piece of his article that I’d like to consider: the alternative strategies he suggests to discourage scientific fraud.
Gallagher writes:
Fraud, rehabilitation, and the persistence of information on the internet.
In the current issue of The Scientist, there’s a pair of interesting pieces about how professional life goes on (or doesn’t) for scientists found guilty of misconduct by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
Alison McCook’s article, Life After Fraud, includes interviews with three scientists against whom the ORI has made formal rulings of misconduct. A big concern voiced by each of these scientists is that after the period of their debarment from eligibility to receive federal grants or to serve on a Public Health Service (PHS) committee has expired, the traces of their punishment persist online. McCook writes:
Not dead yet.
Somehow, without actually planning it, I ended up taking a ten-day (give or take) hiatus from the internets, during which I immersed myself in the three-dimensional world. During my time offline, I learned many things, among them:
Friday Sprog Blogging: spectroscope.
At day camp yesterday, the sprogs (and their fellow campers) had a visitor:
Elder Free-Ride offspring; She was an astrophysicist. You know what that is, right?
She talked to us about studying light that comes from space, and all the different kinds of light there are traveling across space. There’s infrared, and ultraviolet, and even X-rays. And, of course, there’s white light that we can see with our eyes.
The appropriate cyborg for the job.
A conference paper I didn’t see coming.
I thought I’d share a snapshot of my morning with you. For some reason, the internet seems like a good place for it.
The paper promised to be about the evaluation of evidence in understanding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. What follows are the notes I took during the approximately 25 minute conference presentation, edited to clean up typos. I’m not naming names; Google will provide if you really need to know.
Question for the commentariat about the goal of science education.
This just came up in a plenary session I’m attending, looking at how best to convey the nature of science in K-12 science education (roughly ages 5-18).
It’s not really a question about the content of the instruction, which people here seem pretty comfortable saying should include stuff about scientific methodology and critical testing, analysis and interpretation of data, hypothesis and prediction, what kind of certainty science can achieve, and so forth. Rather, it’s a question about how that content is organized and framed.
Commitments, rational arguments, and other people.
As a brief follow-up to my post thinking about Dr. J’s view that cats are a special class of being that ought not be used in research, I would like to assert that:
Friday Sprog Blogging: building cells.
Last week, the Free-Ride offspring and I used our Cell Project kit from Galaxy Goo to build some three-dimensional models of animal cells out of clay.
