I'm always a bit leery of edge.org, seeing as how it's first and foremost a promotional vehicle for John Brockman's stable of authors, but I do enjoy the Annual Question. This year's is no exception:

When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy.
When God changes your mind, that's faith.
When facts change your mind, that's science.

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?

Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?"

What struck me about the answers was that a number of them point out, if indirectly, that the wording of the question is utter bollocks. Whoever wrote the question has drunk deep of the "impartial search for Truth" Kool-Aid and needs an infusion of Kuhn¹ (or a week in an actual lab), stat.

Roger Highfield comes right out and says it:

I am a heretic. I have come to question the key assumption behind this survey: "When facts change your mind, that's science." This idea that science is an objective fact-driven pursuit is laudable, seductive and - alas - a mirage.

Science is a never-ending dialogue between theorists and experimenters. But people are central to that dialogue. And people ignore facts. They distort them or select the ones that suit their cause, depending on how they interpret their meaning. Or they don't ask the right questions to obtain the relevant facts.

That science is nothing like the simplistic picture we were all fed in school seems to be something of a theme in the answers to this year's Edge question:

Colin Tudge:

I have changed my mind about the omniscience and omnipotence of science. I now realize that science is strictly limited, and that it is extremely dangerous not to appreciate this.

Francesco de Pretis:

In two weeks I finished the book [that changed my mind] and then my way of thinking changed. I understood that science was not only a pursuit of knowledge but a social process too, with its rules and tricks: a never-ending tale such as human life.

Irene Pepperberg:

I've begun to rethink the way we teach students to engage in scientific research. I was trained, as a chemist, to use the classic scientific method: Devise a testable hypothesis, and then design an experiment to see if the hypothesis is correct or not. And I was told that this method is equally valid for the social sciences. I've changed my mind that this is the best way to do science. I have three reasons for this change of mind.

First, and probably most importantly, I've learned that one often needs simply to sit and observe and learn about one's subject before even attempting to devise a testable hypothesis. [...]

Second, I've learned that truly interesting questions really often can't be reduced to a simple testable hypothesis, at least not without being somewhat absurd. [...]

Third, I've learned that the scientific community's emphasis on hypothesis-based research leads too many scientists to devise experiments to prove, rather than test, their hypotheses.

Robert Provine:

Mentors, paper referees and grant reviewers have warned me on occasion about scientific "fishing expeditions," the conduct of empirical research that does not test a specific hypothesis or is not guided by theory. Such "blind empiricism" was said to be unscientific, to waste time and produce useless data. Although I have never been completely convinced of the hazards of fishing, I now reject them outright, with a few reservations.

I'm not advocating the collection of random facts, but the use of broad-based descriptive studies to learn what to study and how to study it. Those who fish learn where the fish are, their species, number and habits. Without the guidance of preliminary descriptive studies, hypothesis testing can be inefficient and misguided. Hypothesis testing is a powerful means of rejecting error -- of trimming the dead limbs from the scientific tree -- but it does not generate hypotheses or signify which are worthy of test.

Robert Shapiro:

I used to view the scientific literature as a collective human effort to build an enduring and expanding structure of knowledge. Each new publication in a respected, refereed journal would be digested and debated... [b]ut once it has passed scrutiny, a new contribution would be absorbed into the edifice of science, expanding and enhancing it, while providing a fragment of immortality to the authors.

My perception was wrong. New scientific ideas can be smothered with silence.

Steve Nadis:

At its heart, science is a human endeavor, carried out by people. When the questions are truly ambitious, it takes a great personal commitment to make any headway -- a big investment in energy and in emotion as well. I know from having met with many of the lead researchers that the debates can get heated, sometimes uncomfortably so. More importantly, when you're engaged in an epic struggle like this -- trying, for instance, to put together a theory of broad sweep -- it may be difficult, if not impossible, to keep an "open mind" because you may be well beyond that stage, having long since cast your lot with a particular line of reasoning. And after making an investment over the course of many years, it's natural to want to protect it.

A. Garrett Lisi:

...the ambivalence associated with an even probability distribution makes it terribly difficult for an ideal scientist to decide where to go for dinner. [...]

Ken Ford:

I used to believe that the ethos of science, the very nature of science, guaranteed the ethical behavior of its practitioners. As a student and a young researcher, I could not conceive of cheating, claiming credit for the work of others, or fabricating data. Among my mentors and my colleagues, I saw no evidence that anyone else believed otherwise. And I didn't know enough of the history of my own subject to be aware of ethical lapses by earlier scientists. There was, I sensed, a wonderful purity to science. Looking back, I have to count naiveté as among my virtues as a scientist.

Now I have changed my mind, and I have changed it because of evidence, which is what we scientists are supposed to do. Various examples of cheating, some of them quite serious, have come to light in the last few decades, and misbehaviors in earlier times have been reported as well. Scientists are, as the saying goes, "only human," which, in my opinion, is neither an excuse nor an adequate explanation.

Rebecca Goldstein:

Popper's characterization of how science is practiced --as a cycle of conjecture and refutation -- bears little relation to what goes on in the labs and journals.

______
¹ Yes, I read SSR fairly recently, and it gave me a clear structure for a lot of vague suspicions I'd been entertaining since grad school. I suspect I'm doing that "ooh, philosophy of science, yeah, I read Kuhn" thing that probably drives real philosophers of science bugfuck. By way of mitigation, the latter are invited to recommend further reading.

Well, one answer is that they are MEFs -- mouse embryo fibroblasts -- since that's what I started with. Only the cells pictured are pretty clearly not regular fibroblasts; they look more like neurons or macrophages of some kind. MEFs are a mixed population, consisting of whatever grows out of a dissociated (minced) mouse embryo minus the head, so there are some early neural and immune cells in the mix. The cells pictured are what remains after selection with either G418 or puromycin -- I was making stably transfected cells, and this is one of the control plates.

So what I'm wondering is, would a brief period of exposure to a selective agent like puro be a good way to isolate naturally resistant populations, and what would those populations contain? (Of course, whatever these things are, the most likely explanation for their resistance is terminal differentiation, so they're simply dying more slowly -- I haven't tried taking away the selective agent to see whether they will multiply.)

Any ideas, lazyweb?

Nature recently published an editorial in which they discussed an update to their 1869 (!) mission statement. The editorial is subscription-only, but Maxine published an excerpt on Nautilus, which I further excerpt here:

The original mission statement of this journal, first printed in Nature's second issue on 11 November 1869, was... running behind the times when it referred to "Scientific men" ... In other respects it is well worded -- which is why we print it every week in the Table of Contents.
[...]
In printing the statement verbatim every week as we have done, making it clear when it originated, we have hitherto assumed that readers will excuse the wording in the interests of historical integrity. But feedback from readers of both sexes indicates that the phrase, even when cited as a product of its time, causes displeasure. Such signals have been occasional but persistent, and a response is required.
There is a convention within the English language by which writers quoting text can indicate their view that a particular phrase is inappropriate. That is to insert sic, a Latin word meaning 'thus', after the phrase -- in effect expressing the sentiment 'alas, dear reader, this is what was said'.
This is what we will do in the mission statement from now on. The small, belated change takes place against the vast backdrop of a scientific world where the upper echelons of academia, academies and prestigious awards are still numerically greatly dominated by men, and where outright discrimination can still rear its ugly head... In this context, the insertion of a Latin word in a couple of paragraphs may be a tiny step: but it is at least one in the right direction.

Zuska took offence, and I was a bit puzzled myself so I went and asked Maxine to clarify:

This decision puzzles me. Why not simply change the wording (s/'Scientific men'/scientists) and say "we've updated the statement to better reflect our modern aims"?

Mission statements that date to 1869 are pretty damn cool, I'll grant you -- but it seems that here tradition is trumping concerns (which NPG obviously shares!) about inclusive language. Why take a "tiny step... in the right direction" when the whole step is so easy to take instead?

Maxine's response:

We did update our mission statement years ago, and I've added a link to the newer version (on the "about the journal" page in my post above, in light of your comment.
What the Editorial said was that the "original" mission statement would contain this correction, on any future occasions where we reprint it. It did not mean to imply that we had not updated our mission statement since 1869.

So that makes more sense; but as Zuska points out, there is some confusion over which statement is going to appear where. So, being a scientist -- we learn by doing -- I went and looked.

Online: I started by typing in www.nature.com and looked around the page for some kind of "about Nature" resource. The first thing I found was About NPG under "Information" at the bottom of the page -- since I was actually at the Nature Publishing Group homepage, Nature the journal being actually at www.nature.com/nature.

On the About NPG page, under "Browse", "Company Information", there's a link to mission, whereat we find the original in all its sexist glory.

From www.nature.com/nature (the journal itself), the obvious place to look is the About the journal link, which goes to the modern mission statement and includes a clearly labeled link to the same 1869 version as "mission" above.

In meatspace: I went to our little library here at work and picked up a physical copy of Nature for the first time in probably ten years. (Full disclosure, or something: it was the chimp genome issue, vol 437 issue 7055, Sept 2005.) The first five pages are full-page ads, and then comes the table of contents. In a sidebar on the left hand side is the following quote from the original mission statemtent, under the heading "NATURE'S MISSION, 1869:"; I've used a scan of the sidebar as a sort of sidebar for this entry. Note that this is not quite the same as, but not substantively different from, the online version.

So now at least I know what it is that I disagree with. I don't think NPG should link to the 1869 statement, at least not without going through the modern version, as Nature (the journal site) does. I think the print journal should print the modern mission statement -- with, if they want a nod to their impressive history, a comment to the effect that apart from updating sexist and exclusive language, not much has changed from the original (which is visible on our website, etc etc).

Andrew Hessel in MungBeing Magazine, quoted (approvingly, to my astonishment) by Jonathan Eisen:

Twenty five years ago, kids flocked to computers, pushing the limits of what they could do. Similarly, the next generation of genetic engineers won't need laboratories or even PhD: they'll have laptops, cheap mail order DNA synthesis, and, thanks to Google and Wikipedia and open journals like PLOS Biology, access to mountains of free biological data. They'll work in basements, garages, and cafes, and they'll trade ideas and collaborate on genetic designs the same way open source programmers now write computer code. Keep in mind that it was only 30 years ago that a little company called Apple started out of a California garage.

Which reminds me of Freeman Dyson in the NYRB a while back:

Every orchid or rose or lizard or snake is the work of a dedicated and skilled breeder. There are thousands of people, amateurs and professionals, who devote their lives to this business. Now imagine what will happen when the tools of genetic engineering become accessible to these people. There will be do-it-yourself kits for gardeners who will use genetic engineering to breed new varieties of roses and orchids. Also kits for lovers of pigeons and parrots and lizards and snakes to breed new varieties of pets. Breeders of dogs and cats will have their kits too.

Most of that is, in my opinion, complete and utter bollocks.

Despite the attractive and often useful analogy, genomes are not really software, and bio-tinkering is nothing like coding. It takes a lot more time and equipment, for one thing. There's a reason you don't see many people building jet airplanes for fun. When is "cheap DNA synthesis" going to be available to the general public? Who is going to sell J. Random Teenager a PCR machine? Don't wave your hands and airily declaim that everything is possible and it's someone else's job to make it work (as Dyson did while he was flogging his book in the NYRB): describe for me the business model. Sure, in theory you can do those experiments in your kitchen -- but have you ever actually tried it? Take it from someone who does them for a living, you don't have the patience to make it work. No one does. It's one thing to hack away at a piece of code until it runs the way you want; it's quite another to "hack" something in which every change requires several weeks' worth of complex and time-consuming manipulations, to say nothing of a generation or ten.

And then there's regulatory oversight. We let people hack away at computers as much as they can stand, but a computer is not a living thing. It's not cruelty if you get mad at your linux box and pound it into flinders. Those pigeons and lizards and parrots and cats are not toys; they can suffer, and if you let Joe Public futz with their genomes they will -- horribly. (I happen to think a good percentage of pet breeders are scum, too. What kind of despicable arrogance is required to manipulate a living genome for nothing more than your own twisted aesthetic pleasure? You people with the dogs and cats whose faces are so squished they can barely breathe -- you're sick.)

Further to the question of oversight, let's think about consequences. You've seen computer viruses: think about a world in which Kevin Mitnick meets Dylan Klebold at a smallpox swap-meet. How do you like your brave new world of garage biology now? And that's just the potential for malicious success -- the dangers of stupidity and failure loom considerably greater. Get your syntax wrong or wire your motherboard the wrong way around and, well, nothing much happens. Fuck up a genome, though, and see how you like the result -- especially if it survives.

The Hessel/Dyson version of our biotech future is not going come into being. Not in a decade, not in a millennium, not ever. Quite apart from its being about as likely in practical terms as me learning to fly by flapping my arms, we -- as a society -- will not let it happen. Not if we have any bloody sense at all.

Dr Shellie has run the job search gauntlet and -- O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! --- has multiple appealing offers from which to choose.  Reflecting on the process, and her years of anxiety leading to this point, she says:

... I think that if your goal is to get a tenure-track job at a research university in a place you want to live, it's hard to know your chance of success much in advance. Many smart people with excellent records do not get jobs. Which is too bad, since it can take 5-10 years just to get ready to apply -- counting the time you spend in a PhD and a postdoc. And how are you supposed to predict your chances then -- when you are starting grad school?

How indeed? I don't think the situation for postdocs has improved since this article appeared in 2002. In biomed research, I would guesstimate that about 10% of postdocs end up with "their own lab". Worse, this is not simply tough competition -- so many personal/political factors enter into the success equation that you might as well roll dice as try to forecast your future as a researcher by any rational method. It's my blog, so I'll go ahead and quote myself:

The system is broken: there are too many PhD graduates and not enough real jobs for them. A postdoc is not a real job; even a tenure-track position, one step up the foodchain from a postdoc, is not a real job. A real job will not be yanked out from under you every few years, unless you or your boss can continually win funding -- and when you get down to 20% funding levels, between politics and the sheer volume of work dumped on the granting committees, you might as well pick the names out of a hat. A real job does not leave you entirely at the mercy of your superiors, who can demand insane work hours from you, knowing that if you won't sacrifice your life on the altar of their lab/department/whatever, there are ten other PhDs clamoring for the chance to do so. I'm no fan of the dismal science, but the law of supply and demand does seem to be consistent with observed phenomena here.

Now, that gloomy beginning notwithstanding, this is not another postdoc complaint post. (That one is in the works; I'm saving up links for it here and here.) Right now I want to take a much more positive perspective, inspired by Dr Shellie, who asks:

How should I think about recruiting graduate students, when I am encouraging them to pursue an uncertain career path?

This is a very good question indeed, and the best thing about it is that a newly-minted research professor is asking it! Is it really ethical (anyone? anyone? BuellerFree-Ride?) to encourage students into grad school, given that the standard "career path" is long, tortuous and more than likely to land the weary traveler somewhere other than that fabled destination, the faculty slot?

Another way of looking at this is to ask: is the system so irreparably broken that we should dismantle it -- starting by turning away grad students -- or can we work with what we have, and fix it?  I'm a meliorist rather than a revolutionary myself.  Further, if you want to be a PI yourself you're going to have to take on grad students, and more generally if we want research to flourish we, as a community, are going to need grad students. 

So, since we're going to continue to lure bright-eyed, unsuspecting college kids into the postdoc trap via grad school, what can we do to reduce harm?  Herewith some thoughts:

1. Inform, inform, inform.  Let 'em know upfront what they're getting themselves into. 

1b. Repeat, repeat, repeat.  They're young, they'll think "it won't happen to me".  We're all bulletproof at eighteen.

2. Present alternatives, and treat those alternatives with respect.  Don't be another type-A asshole in a labcoat who thinks, and acts as though, any deviation from the One True And Shining Path To Glory (why, research of course) represents complete failure as a scientist and as a human being.  Scientists reading this are nodding their heads, the rest of you are probably thinking huh? surely he exaggerates -- but I assure you I don't.  Throughout the community of science, at least in academia where I've spent most of my time, there is a powerful and pervasive assumption that research is the pinnacle of human endeavour and that a person would only do something else because they couldn't make the grade in research.   This is not a conscious belief, it's a largely unexamined background of feeling, something absorbed by intellectual and emotional osmosis from a peer group of self-involved, highly-focused people who have, given their material situation, a deep investment in believing they are doing something that sets them apart and above.  It is also, of course, utter and unmitigated horseshit.  Don't perpetuate it.

3. Give a damn.  Your students are not fungible data-production units, they're people with lives outside the lab, hopes, dreams, and all that crap.  You don't have to get all touchy-feely if that's not your style -- just understand that some of your students will find that they don't want your job after all -- and that's OK.  Some will even start out with other destinations in mind -- and that's a good thing.  Wouldn't you like to see more people with solid research experience go into teaching, journalism, policy development, marketing, law, medicine and a dozen other vital professions?  Wouldn't you like to see an ecologist become US President right about now?  Don't take it as a personal affront if someone doesn't make emulating you their sole ambition; take the time to consider what might be best for them.

I'm sure there's more -- comments, please!  For one thing, I am clinging still to the last forlorn threads of hope that I might be taking on students myself one day, and those putative students will need all the help I can get.

Finally, to Dr Shellie, an answer of sorts: if you're asking yourself at this early stage whether it's ethical even to take on students, then you are probably just the sort of PI who should be taking on students, and who will provide them with solid lab experience with which they can do whatever they want -- even research.

I hate antibodies. There, I said it. When they work, they are an exquisite tool; when they don't, which seems to be most of the bloody time, they are an infuriating waste of money and effort.

About the only thing I hate more than antibodies is shopping, especially comparison shopping, for antibodies. Biocompare is OK, but not great -- and I distrust all commercial comparison-shopping services anyway, since I figure they sell priority listings.

Enter the internets: Alf recently pointed to a dynamic version of Google's custom search, and Nature recently published a tech feature on antibodies -- including a nice long table of suppliers, complete with websites.

So for now, here's the crude version: I just jammed both those things together onto a single page: Google Custom Antibody Search.

What I'd like to do, eventually, is to turn the thing into a communal resource. This will mean finding a way to make it quick and easy for anyone to add a new suppliers' website. I could put it on a wiki somewhere, but I'd like to be able to offer a one-click way for people to contribute... maybe a one-click Simpy button with a tag like "AbSupplier", a way to produce a non-redundant subset of the links so tagged, and then a way to write those links back out to the custom search page...

Anyway, there it is. I don't even know for sure that it will be useful -- I'll try it myself at work, and see. Feel free to leave a comment here suggesting ways I could improve it, or just take the idea and build the thing properly yourself.


... wait, that's not a mashup, is it? If I got it working with Simpy or something, then it'd be a mashup. Poo.

Via Peer-to-Peer, Ariberto Fassati in this week's Nature correspondence (sorry, toll access only):

Reviewers [of scientific publications] often make significant contributions in shaping discoveries. They suggest new experiments, propose novel interpretations and reject some papers outright. [...] It is well worth keeping a record of such work, for no history of science will be complete and accurate without it.

I therefore propose that journals' records should be made publicly available after an adequate lapse of time, including the names of reviewers and the confidential comments exchanged between editors and reviewers. The Nobel Foundation makes all its records available after 50 years, as do many governmental and other institutions. This delay may be reduced for scientific journals to, perhaps, 15 or 20 years.

Now that's a damn good idea: it's long past time that reviewing got its due as an essential part of a scientist's job, and opening the records should help to generate such recognition (to say nothing of the invaluable contribution to historiography of science).

My only quibble: why 15 years? If six months is long enough for an embargo on a closed-access paper, why is it not also long enough to keep the reviews secret? I presume the idea is to prevent retaliation for harsh reviews, but if all the information is public it would take a truly dedicated holder of a truly heinous grudge to follow up (in such a way as not to get caught doing it!) after six or twelve months. More to the point, we can dramatically reduce the risk of such retaliation by changing the community attitude towards reviewing. If peer review becomes a fully acknowledged part of the job, excellence in which is respected and rewarded -- and if everyone knows their reviews will be made public! -- then low quality (gratuitously mean, ill-informed, lazy, self-serving, etc) reviews should be a thing of the past.

Janet Stemwedel is a bit bummed out by all the cynicism in her comments section lately:

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.

Janet claims that "Norms are what we ought to do, not what we suspect everyone actually does". Me, I think "norms" is used to describe both sets of behaviours, and when observed behaviour norms differ from espoused value norms, there's something rotten in the state of whatever field or community you are looking at. Janet again:

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. [...] I don't think we can have it both ways. I don't think we can trumpet the reliability of Science and wallow in cynicism about the actual people and institutional structures involved in the production of science.

I don't disagree, but I do wonder what actual somethings Janet has in mind for "us" to do. One of Janet's examples (of how we can't have it both ways) involves reproducibility of results:

[we can't claim] that reproducibility is a central feature of scientific knowledge [...] but [...] only the "important" findings will be tested for reproducibility in the course of trying to build new findings upon them

I don't think this is actually a problem. Very little research is reproduced; most is confirmed or corroborated by means of further experiments predicated on the assumption that the original result is/was reliable.

If a result is false but never found out, it probably means no one cared. It's not as though people were combing through the original research literature and changing their lives or doing dangerous things on the basis of what they find there. (Or are they? If so, someone alert the Darwin Awards people.) If no one ever predicates a further experiment on a particular result, that result was presumably entirely uninteresting. I don't think that "a whole lot of findings on the books but not fully verified" is a problem -- the "books" are not running out of room, and the potentially useful findings will be verified or refuted precisely because they are potentially useful.

This, though:

when scientists report that their serious efforts to reproduce a finding have failed the journal editors and university administrators can be counted on to do very little to recognize that the original finding shouldn't be counted as "knowledge" anymore

is an entirely different kettle of fish -- rotten fish at that -- but you can't blame it on the scientific method. It's the scientific infrastructure that's the problem here: [publish or perish] x [shrinking funding] x [far more scientists than permanent positions] = powerful incentive to cut corners or outright cheat, and very little incentive -- even for those with tenure and power -- to stand up to the cheats or take the corner-cutters to task. When what should happen in response to irreproducible results does not happen, that's politics -- not science.

In a similar vein, Janet says:

I don't think we can proclaim that scientific work is basically trustworthy while also saying everyone has doubts about his collaborators [...], and it's a completely normal and expected thing for scientists to present their findings as much more certain and important than they are...

Again, I think the system works -- that is, scientific findings are generally reliable, for reasons of confirmation/corroboration as above. The larger question, though, is, does it work as well as it could? Here I think the answer is a resounding No, at least from the perspective of a working scientist. The system is a meatgrinder, and if you want to come out whole at the other end then things like not overselling your results become luxuries you can't afford.

That's not to say that there won't always, so long as funding has any limits on it at all, be corner-cutters, cheats, overselling of results (particularly to granting committees), and so on. What we have now, though, is a situation in which there are so many more postdocs than research positions to which they might aspire that it is hardly to be wondered at that "normal misbehaviour" does not seem an oxymoron.

When more than 75% of postdocs (and that figure is five years old, and I can't see it having dropped in that time!) will not go on to any kind of permanent research position, we are not talking about the kind of competition that selects the best individuals and ensures the best product. We are talking about a situation in which advancement is more dependent on personal politics and luck than on talent or hard work. Working harder won't give you an edge -- the guy in the next lab sleeps there. Being smart won't do it -- the average IQ where you work qualifies for MENSA. Being willing to cheat, though -- if you don't get caught, that might just help.

Janet goes on to say:

I do think that scientists who care about building good scientific knowledge have some responsibilities to shoulder here.

How do you behave in conducting and reporting your research, and in your work with collaborators and your interactions with competitors? In a community of science where everyone behaved as you do, would it be easier or harder to open a journal and find a credible report? Would it be easier or harder for scientists in a field to get to the bottom of a difficult scientific question?

What kind of behavior do you tolerate in your scientific colleagues? What kind of behavior do you encourage? Do you give other scientists a hard time for doing things that undermine your ability to trust scientific findings or other scientists in the community? If you don't, why not?

These are all very good questions, but it's that last one that gets to the heart of the matter. I do what I can -- I don't cheat or cut corners or steal, and if everyone did as I do the credibility of published research would improve, and it would be easier for scientists to do their work (in particular, given my support for Open Science, collaboration would be much easier).

If that sounds like blowing my own trumpet, it's not: I'm a lowly postdoc, and what I said of myself is probably true of the majority of scientists at or below my level on the food chain. It's also why I am likely to remain a lowly postdoc until I become unemployable in research: those who go on to be PIs and Department Heads and Directors of Institutes are largely those type-A assholes who are willing to cut corners and stomp on other people to get what they want. How exactly am I supposed to give a PI "a hard time"? If I don't, I think it's pretty damn clear why not. (You -- anyone reading this -- can think less of me for that if you wish, but since I doubt that you are one of the rare few who has put their own, and their families', livelihood on the line for a principle, you can also blow me.) I can, and do, discuss these issues with other postdocs -- but to what avail? It's precisely the ones who don't listen, who secretly think me naive or weak, who are going to have the competitive edge.

Janet ends by saying:

maybe it's time to turn from cynicism to righteous anger, to exert some peer pressure (and some personal discipline) so that hardly anyone will feel comfortable trying to get away with the stuff "everyone" does now.

Well, I'm full of anger. It doesn't seem to be helping anything.

Rob Knop is in a jam all too familiar to researchers and their long-suffering loved ones. He's on the tenure track, but he doesn't have independent funding -- and so his university is basically planning to kick him out:

Vanderbilt has made it 100% clear that without funding at the level of an NSF grant, I will not get tenure, regardless of anything else. Indeed, my chair has told me that funding is the only issue he sees as being a serious question with my tenure case.

Note that Rob is clearly a sufficiently good teacher and colleague, and his scientific acumen is clearly sufficiently well regarded, for him to be granted tenure -- which is the only form of job security available in academic research. Still, he's a goner if he doesn't make that funding cut -- which, these days, somewhere between 10 and 20% of applications do, depending on field and political climate.

The system is broken: there are too many PhD graduates and not enough real jobs for them. A postdoc is not a real job; even a tenure-track position, one step up the foodchain from a postdoc, is not a real job. A real job will not be yanked out from under you every few years, unless you or your boss can continually win funding -- and when you get down to 20% funding levels, between politics and the sheer volume of work dumped on the granting committees, you might as well pick the names out of a hat. A real job does not leave you entirely at the mercy of your superiors, who can demand insane work hours from you, knowing that if you won't sacrifice your life on the altar of their lab/department/whatever, there are ten other PhDs clamoring for the chance to do so. I'm no fan of the dismal science, but the law of supply and demand does seem to be consistent with observed phenomena here.

There have been a number of responses to Rob's cri de coeur, and if you're interested in the issue Google blogsearch and Technorati (if it's working) will find them for you. I have been collecting links on the "postdoc problem", and meaning to look for actual data on same, for some time -- maybe I'll even write that post one day. For now I just want to grab one sentence out of Chad's response:

I've been extremely fortunate in my career.

And this is key. The majority of successful (tenured, funded) academics got that way largely by luck. Most of them have all kinds of fairy tales, as Rob puts it, that they tell themselves so that they can believe it was talent and hard work and nothing else, which is why they continue to urge smart kids into dead-end "careers". (I do not mean to imply that Chad is untalented and lazy! The point here is that he is one of the few who recognizes what he owes to dumb luck.)

You cannot bank on luck.

I'm not saying "don't ever go to grad school, don't ever try to make a living out of research" -- research is addictive, just look at me, still kidding myself I have more than a year or two left. But I am saying "you probably won't make it", by which I mean "have a backup plan".

For my own field, biomed research, I would encourage would-be grad students to consider medical school instead. You can do basic or clinical research with an MD, and you have a backup career (a real career, not ten years of indentured servitude as a postdoc followed by "tough, yer out"). Hell, if you're really keen you can do an MD-PhD -- although frankly I don't see the point. You learn nothing about research in a PhD that you can't learn on the job, and it's not as though you're going to go straight from school to running a lab. You'll be serving a kind of apprenticeship, a sort of postdoc, in any case -- but you'll be treated better. (There's a widespread perception among PhDs that MDs make lousy researchers, but no one ever presents any hard data and my own experience indicates that the proportion of idiots is the same among MDs and PhDs -- roughly 90%, as per Sturgeon's Law.)

In case anyone was wondering, this is the sort of thing I do all day. That cotton-candy-looking stuff is mouse genomic DNA, about 600 micrograms of it, harvested from a tumor caused (we're trying to find out how) by deletion of the MNT gene in T cells. I was going to try to say something profound, but the little DNA monster (the "eyes" are air bubbles trapped when the DNA came out of solution) rather deflated my pomposity.

What's here? Why, the first-ever Science Blogging Anthology, of course: 50 posts, plus a couple of bonus entries, chosen from the best of science blogging in 2006. There's also a preface and introduction by the editor, Bora Zivkovic of A Blog Around The Clock.

I was privileged to help Bora narrow the field from well over 200 posts, and many of my favorites made it into the final 50. As Bora intimates in his introduction, blogs are conversations and so they lose a certain liveliness when embalmed in a blook (blog + book; don't blame me, I didn't coin it!) like this. Nonetheless, there is some excellent writing in this thing, it is as perfect an introduction to science blogging as you're likely to see offline, and it's a fun read all on its own. True to the open nature of the original medium, you can of course surf over to Bora's blog and find the anthology entries listed there. No one will mind if you do, but I hope you will also consider buying the blook -- which, after all, unlike the internets, you can carry with you on the bus and leave on the break-room table at work (which is what I plan to do with my second copy). It's priced at cost and any incidental proceeds will go towards next year's edition.

Bravo, Bora!

New(ish) bioethics blog Biopolitical Times has a post up which takes issue with PZ Myers' response to the proposal to carry out therapeutic cloning using enucleated cow eggs and human somatic nuclei. Myers:

In fact, I want to go further than these scientists propose.

Don't terminate the experiment after a few days when you've got healthy, growing blastocysts. Slip the best looking ones back into the cow. Work out methods for gestating them in a non-human mammal.

I want to be there nine months later when the vet reaches into the cow's vagina and pulls out a slick, slimy, healthy human infant.

I want to see the Pope's head explode when he sees it. I want David Cronenberg there with a camera, cackling happily.

Jesse at BT:

All this is proposed to rile up cultural conservatives, whom the blogger ridicules. Speaking as a generally secular political progressive, this attitude frightens and frustrates me. I've long felt that embracing the worst aspects of human biotechnology, such as these "Brave New World" scenarios, is a short road for progressives to lose sight of their core values and alienate the majority of the public. Rubbing this in the faces of those who are opposed - a group much larger than religious conservatives - for the purpose of a "fun and exciting" discussion is adolescent.

Now, I think Myers is trying to be funny. It's impossible to tell, of course, because mixed in with what might pass for humor is his usual brand of vicious elitism and kneejerk prejudice.

The thing to remember about Myers is that, as I've noted before, he's not a scientist (ask PubMed), nor is he an ethicist. He's just a loudmouth braying into the cozy echo chamber of his blog. Best to ignore him, except that I feel obligated to push back from time to time just in case real people ("Joe Sixpack", as Myers would have it) start mistaking him for a spokesman for actual research.

Further to the petition and boycott pledge I linked a while back, Tom Stafford has put together an open letter to Reed Elsevier that you can sign if you are an academic or researcher. Tom writes:

The letter will be sent to the Times Higher Education Supplement, a leading UK academics' weekly, with potential for other national and international coverage. This will be the next in what has now become a series of open letters from professional users of Reed products. Previous letters have been signed by medics (in The Lancet) and high-profile writers (in the Times Literary Supplement), and both have received considerable, and worldwide, media attention.

Here's the text of the letter (also available as a pdf here):

Mr Jan Hommen
Reed Elsevier PLC
1-3 Strand
London
WC2N 5JR

xx October 2006

Dear Mr Hommen

ARMS FAIRS AND ACADEMICS

We are an international group of academics who are extremely concerned
about Reed Elsevier's involvement in organising major arms fairs in the
UK and around the world.

We rely on our academic work to be disseminated chiefly by means of
books and peer-reviewed articles, a significant share of these via Reed
Elsevier publications. Being both contributors and (unpaid) referees,
and readers of Reed Elsevier journals makes us stakeholders in the Reed
Elsevier business.

On its website, your company states that it is "committed to making
genuine contributions to the science and health communities" and that it
is "proud to be part of [these] communities". Conversely, we are not
proud to be associated with Reed Elsevier as we feel your statements are
undermined by the conflict between your arms fair activities and our own
ethical stance. Arms fairs, marketing the tools of violence, are a major
link in the chain of the global arms trade which proliferates arms
around the world and fuels a cycle of human, scientific, economic and
cultural destruction.

This is entirely at odds with the ethical and social obligations we have
to promote the beneficial applications of our work and prevent their
misuse, to anticipate and evaluate the possible unintended consequences
of scientific and technological developments, and to consider at all
times the moral responsibility we carry for our work.

We call on Reed Elsevier to cease all involvement in arms fairs since it
is not compatible with the aims of many of your stakeholders.

Yours sincerely

[Signatories]

If you want to sign it, send email to tDOTstaffordATsheffieldDOTacDOTuk with "open letter to Reed Elsevier" in the subject line and a brief note including your full academic title, name, discipline and institution (or former institution if retired). The petition is ongoing, so also please sign that if you haven't already. As I write there are 357 signatories; if you're reading this you will probably recognize #19, 32, 55 and 90 (I'm #28).

I know that, after the umpteenth petition or letter or fundraiser or whatever, outrage fatigue starts to set in; and I know that, as world affairs go, there are more important issues than scumbags Reed Elsevier branching out into arms dealing. But -- and here I'm speaking to my colleagues: researchers, teachers and academics the world over -- this is our issue. It's in our professional backyard; we own a chunk of it. Not only is a major academic publishing house part of our community, or at least of its infrastructure (whether we like it or not), but as the primary consumers of their primary products and services we have an unusual degree of leverage in this situation. Reed Elsevier is a business: if enough of their customers sign Tom's letter and petition (and Nick's boycott), they will get out of the arms trade.

In the course of promoting next year's Science Blogging Conference, Coturnix writes:

Jean-Claude Bradley is the pioneer in the use of blogs in science in the way that too many of us are still too scared to do - posting on a daily basis the ideas, methods and data from the lab.

Not all of us are scared. I have colleagues with legitimate claims on all of the work I am doing at the moment, and none of them are willing to go to open-notebook. I anticipate even having trouble with my refusal to deal with Elsevier and my intention to publish only in open-access journals.

I've been in this lab a year, so everything I'm doing is directly based on someone else's data and ideas -- that is, to such an extent that I do not feel I can insist on an open notebook. Recently, though, I applied for funding to start an entirely new project. This will not mean that I can suddenly ignore my colleagues' wishes, but it will put me in a stronger position to say, "well, this is my project, and I want to do it this way".

I think of it as just another experiment. If I'm right, open science is a better way to work, and the benefits of choosing a better model will become apparent to my colleagues, and so open science will spread from early adopters like Jean-Claude (and, soon, I hope, me). If I'm wrong, I'll fail -- but I'll fail on my own terms, and I can live with that.

Lab meetings are an unavoidable part of lab life. I've worked or studied in seven labs in two countries, and in all of them a regular, usually weekly, meeting was part of normal lab function; I'd venture to say that it's pretty much a universal. The format doesn't change much from lab to lab, either. The "body" of the meeting consists of either everyone presenting a quick rundown of what they've been doing, or one person presenting their latest work in more detail, and general lab business is an "anyone got anything?" sort of affair tacked on at the beginning or end. No one has a defined role, there is no agenda, no records are kept. And then, of course, everyone complains about wasting time in lab meeting.

This entry was prompted by our (Hurlin lab) meeting on Friday, where we complained about wasting time and talked about ways to improve our meetings. It struck me that if you're going to do something 50-odd times a year, you might as well get good at it, and with our meeting format currently being overhauled this is the perfect chance for me to try things out. I'm going to go over this with the spousal unit, who is something of an organization junkie/expert, and I'm hoping that the Lazyweb will chime in as well. I'd be very interested to hear about what works, or doesn't work, in your lab meetings.

So why do we even have lab meetings? There seem to be three basic functions -- that is, three things we want to achieve. First, it's a chance to get everyone together for announcements, organization and joint decisions: do we need more gel rigs, who's going to be the new safety officer, that kind of thing. Second, it's a way to keep everyone, particularly the PI, in touch with everyone's projects. Finally, it's a way to get everyone's feedback on your project and any problems you might be having -- to get the combined lab brainpower focused on one question or set of questions.

Most of the information on the web relates to (*shudder*) corporate meetings, but I've picked out the bits I thought were applicable to lab meetings. Fwiw, here are most of the sites I used to put this list together.

1. Make sure you need a meeting.
Given the functions I listed above, we need the meetings, but perhaps not weekly? Would monthly be too infrequent? What about every two weeks? It probably depends on the size of the lab and how much time the PI spends actually in it, but for most labs I guess weekly meetings are best. Also, should we try to accomodate all three functions in one meeting, or would we be better off splitting the "admin" and "research" functions? Since "admin" doesn't usually take much time, I think the fewer meetings the better.

2. Start on time and end on time.
Nearly every site I read emphasizes these two points, and that timekeeping is crucial. Another common suggestion is to give people defined roles, including facilitator (see below) and timekeeper. In small meetings, I guess these two roles could be combined, but there might be benefit in keeping them separate.

The question this raises for me is, how long should a lab meeting be? Ours start at 09:30 and can easily stretch until 12:00, which more or less wipes out half a day. I think lab business should take no more than 20 minutes (and often much less), which leaves presentations. One way to get them down to a more reasonable time might be to make them a bit less informal than we currently do (photocopied pages out of someone's lab notes are not uncommon!). If the presentations were more structured, they could more easily adhere to a time limit. I think I'll suggest that it shouldn't take more than 30 minutes to present your last 6 weeks' worth of work, especially if you focus on questions you want answered by the lab Hive Mind. Supposing that questions and discussion take up a full hour, that's still a two hour meeting.

3. Have an agenda.
For a lab meeting, I think this means something more like set a format:

• Lab business first or last? (Last, so there's incentive not to drag it out. We currently do it first, and tend to yap.)


• Who will speak?-- one person at a time, or several, or everybody? I think this depends on the size of the lab. We have 6 people, so if only one person speaks we each present every 6 weeks. I think this is about right, but some of my coworkers would like to get the Hive Mind's and Peter's undivided attention more often.


• Should each presenter follow a general outline, so that talks have a structure? As above, I think so -- it will help keep the presenter and the meeting focused on what we're trying to achieve. I think I'll suggest something along the lines of: background (what project is this again?), current results, problems, future plans.

4. Keep minutes.
Another nearly universal recommendation. Minutes can be used to start the meeting with action items from last meeting, which can be useful to nudge people along with their commitments. (In the same vein, action items should always come with an attached Person Responsible.) Minutes should be archived in a communal place (like our shared disc drive), so that everyone can refer back and you don't have to keep reinventing the wheel. Keeper-of-the-Minutes is another role, like timekeeper and facilitator, that needs to be assigned or rotated.

5. End the meeting with a summary.
Mostly for lab business: what are we going to do? Who is going to do it?

6. Get feedback on whether the format is working.
We'll be experimenting with these ideas over the next few months, so it will be important to keep track of what's working. (I'll report back here.)

7. Facilitation is crucial.
Universally acknowledged, and may well be the most important point. Having someone to keep everything on track seems to be critical for what I am trying to achieve here: avoiding timewasting. Some ideas that seem good to me:

• the facilitator shouldn't take sides on an issue, but strive to find out what the consensus is (may be difficult in small meetings)


• the role of facilitator could be rotated around, so everyone shares the task (and if someone should prove to be especially good at it, they could take it up permanently)


• a good way to avoid sidetracks is to have a sheet of paper or whiteboard on which to "park" deferred topics


• a good way to encourage lurkers and dampen the dominant is to go round-robin and get everyone's feedback as a way of finalizing a topic

So, that's my first pass at improving lab meetings. Any ideas, Lazyweb?

Rob Helpy Chalk is a philosopher and a teacher and has a brain approximately the size of a planet (note: not a pluton), so I am very pleased to see that he's interested in scientific communication. I'll weigh in on his ideas later, when I have some time, but I'm posting this now to alert people I think will be interested. If you read me at all, you will probably be interested in Rob's thoughts on scientific communication and I'd really like it if you'd take a look at the linked post and give Rob some feedback. This has all the makings of a fun, useful conversation.

Comments are off here, go talk to Rob. Mind you don't put links in your comments though, his spam filter has got teeth. The comment I tried to post is below the cut; I'll wait until tomorrow and try again if it still hasn't appeared. it's now up at Rob's post. PZ Myers' comment thread also has some good stuff.

Update: Arunn of Nonoscience has put together an alternative chart and generated even more good discussion.

more...

Dammit, I (re)started this blog to talk about science, and I'm gonna talk about science!

Over at JOHO/blog, Dave is posting summaries of the talks he attends at Foocamp06. This one really pushed my buttons:

Chris Csikszentmihalyi says science doesn't work the way it thinks it does. For one thing, only 3-5% of experiments are re-proven. Often that's because they're so sensitive to instruments and materials. Also, much of the knowledge is tacit. Instead, scientific conflicts are usually settled by looking at the lab it came from, etc.

OK, let's unpack that a little:

science doesn't work the way it thinks it does.

Having just read Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I'm inclined to think this is true. However:

For one thing, only 3-5% of experiments are re-proven.

Where'd he get these numbers? This recent article (not freely available, brief summary and discussion here) shows that, of 19 papers in an apparently-randomly-chosen issue of Nature, 17 reported results that have been corroborated within four years. My own informal efforts seem to agree that a majority of results are "re-proven", for meaningful values of "re-proven". If CC is talking only about straight replication (same experiment, different hands) he's simply bypassing the more common mechanisms by which scientific results are established as reliable.

As for mechanism:

Often that's because they're so sensitive to instruments and materials. Also, much of the knowledge is tacit.

The article I linked talks about this --

[on] recreating an exact copy of a piece of experimental kit: "It's very difficult to make a carbon copy. You can make a near one, but if it turns out that what is critical is the way he glued his transducers, and he forgets to tell you that the technician always puts a copy of Physical Review on top of them for weight, well, it could make all the difference."

True, but let's not forget that ratio (17/19). This is exactly why most results are corroborated (shown to be reliable by work that builds on them) rather than directly reproduced. Well, actually, the more basic reason why is that scientists tend to trust published data, with good reason (fraud is real but not common¹) -- why waste time repeating an experiment that shows X when you can test X just as well, and move your own work forward at the same time, by designing an experiment to build on X? Unless X is thoroughly outrageous/counterintuitive/whatever, that's what most researchers do: assume that published results will stand up. If the odds are 17/19, I'd call that a pretty fair bet. If CC were right, and the odds were more like 95/5, wouldn't science have long since ground to a halt?

Then there's this:

The Prayer Gauge Debate. In the 19th Century there were attempts to measure the efficacy of prayer. Science went up against a popular paradigm. Chris contrasts this with lab press releases getting done if they promise a cure for cancer. I.e., scientists learn to mis-represent their projects in order to get funded.

See, that just chafes my scrote. Has CC ever tried to get an accurate representation of his work into the press? More to the point, has he ever watched helplessly as some PR flack mangled his research into a press release and made him look like an ass in the media? Scientists, as a matter of course, do not mis-represent their work to the media: they don't have to, the quality of science journalism being what it is. (They do, of course, tailor grant applications to the priorities of the funding bodies; the extent to which that practice approaches dishonesty is a different conversation altogether.)


----
¹ (though see here, particularly comments by per, for a different view)

OK people, when I talk about publishing data on blogs this is most emphatically NOT what I am looking for.

Words fail me. (Hat-tip blame: Chad.)

Dr Free-Ride has a good entry up about scientists and ethical behaviour. I have nothing to add to her basic point, which is that when ethics is seen as something imposed from outside, it is largely ignored; this idea will be entirely familiar to any researcher who has ever sat through the obligatory (!) ethics class or seminar or whatever their department requires.

Where I think Janet's discussion is missing something is in how to deal with this issue (and to be fair, she was mostly pointing out the problem, not trying to solve it):

To get "buy-in" from the scientists, they need to see how ethics are intimately connected to the job they're trying to get done. In other words, scientists need to understand how ethical conduct is essential to the project of doing science.

So OK, how exactly does that work? In a fairly straightforward sense, ethical conduct is demonstrably NOT essential to science or scientific progress. Science is being done now, often quite successfully (in terms of personal career advancement and, more importantly, in terms of real additions to the knowledge base), by unethical means. There is nothing about vivisection that makes it an inherently ineffective means of gathering information; many experiments that do not make it past IACUC would yield useful data. Further, if I successfully steal your ideas and publish them, I will have been doing science from the point of view of anyone (or anything, like the knowledge base itself) that doesn't know or doesn't care that I stole the ideas.

The trivial category here is unethical conduct like that of the Korean stem-cell team; this was dumb as well as wrong, because it produced bad data and was bound to be found out. The important category is unethical conduct that produces clean (useful, reproducible) data: what makes such conduct unethical, what aspect of its unethical nature makes it antithetical to doing science, and what is the mechanism of that opposition?

Within this category, we can distinguish between conduct that, if you get caught, will hamstring you within the scientific community (thieving) and conduct that, if you get caught, will cause the wider community to stop supporting you (vivisection). The key phrase here is "if you get caught"; that is, ethical judgement is community judgement. An individual cannot do much science without the scientific community; infrastructure needs alone make that clear. Neither, for even more obvious reasons, can the highly-specialized scientific community do anything without the support of the wider community. Unless you posit something like karma or divine retribution, I don't think you can find an unethical behaviour that both produces clean data AND is in and of itself "anti-scientific", that is, proof that ethical conduct is in and of itself essential to scientific progress -- unless, that is, you take into account the reliance of scientific research on community support.

In other words: what is ethical conduct? Whatever the community decides is ethical conduct. Why is ethical conduct essential to the project of doing science? Because community support is essential to that project.

I have, of course, sidestepped the larger question of HOW the community -- the scientific community, or society at large -- decides what constitutes ethical conduct. It's not true that vivisection is wrong only because if you get caught doing it your grant will be cut off (without anaesthesia, of course). Scientists are not just scientists, they are members of society at the same time. This is an enormous question, but a quick look at the scientific community will allow me to sketch my own view: why is it unethical for me to steal ideas? Because if everyone stole ideas, collaboration and other networks of trust would collapse. It's far more efficient to act in good faith and initially to assume the same of others. The same holds true for the wider community: whatever benefit I derive from someone else's disadvantage will eventually come back and bite me in the ass. On any but the short-term, immediate-future view, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is not a Divine Command but a sensible way to maximize one's own preferences.

Ah, Selva is wondering about something that has also been puzzling me:

For the past few weeks I have been in sneezing hell. Everyday when I wake up, my phlegm factory wakes up with me and kicks into high gear producing copious amounts of that white jelly that dribbles out of my nose (disgusting? Imagine what I feel..It's coming out of MY nose!) England has too many flowering plants. The damn pollen is killing me. Anyway, the question is: All the air borne irritants are present even while I sleep but I do not dribble when I sleep. Why? Why is that my nose runneth over only when am awaketh?

I, too, am afflicted with this yearly blight, this vile assault on my mucosae. Portland Anthophyta are trying to kill me; Satan has relocated his infernal Itch Factory to my nose.

On a bad (especially pollenaceous?) day, my nose and eyes begin to itch and run within moments of waking. Surely the offending gametes were present in the moments before I awoke: what part of the reaction requires consciousness? Conversely, what aspect of the sleep state prevents the physical manifestations of the allergic reaction? Now, sneezing being a reflex, it seems intuitively reasonable that it might be suppressed by sleep; although it seems less clear, itching might be a similar case¹. I'm also aware that the sinuses can produce mucus in one's sleep, as is anyone who's ever had a cold or 'flu. This is different: not only does the sneezing hold off while I'm asleep, but so does the snot. I sometimes wake with blocked sinuses, but never -- unlike when I have a cold -- with a runny nose. Once I'm awake, though, all bets are off and I have to make a run for the drug cabinet.

I have no idea what is going on, and would be most grateful if the lazy web could tell me. (A quick google reveals nothing of any use.)


¹ Mechanism, of course, is a whole nother can of worms in both cases. Is there a neurologist in the house?

Bora recently asked whether anyone was using Connotea. I am, and I like it fine. It's open source and has a web API, there's a lively dev forum, and it's continually improving. You could use any bookmarking service, like Simpy, to collect your science/work-related links, of course, but Connotea offers the compelling advantages of auto-discovery of relevant fields (DOI, author list and so on), an improving ability to play nice with reference manager software, and a more focused community with whom to share tags, bookmarks and ideas.

Now, much to my glee, Connotea has started actively supporting citations to blog entries:

A lot of you are increasingly bookmarking articles from personal blogs alongside traditional journal-published articles. In response to this, Connotea now has experimental support for treating bookmarked blog posts as citations, and it will automatically import publication data for those articles wherever possible.

Hot damn, says I! Of course I had to try it out, on the obvious test post. Here's a screenshot, with a regular PubMed entry for comparison: As you can see, Connotea correctly identified the blog, although it didn't grab the entry title (and I'm not the only one reading Science & Politics!).

This is the sort of thing that makes me feel that there really is an open science revolution underway. The internet is making possible real-time collaboration between large numbers of people with minimal regard to geography; as proprietary barriers to information flow are dismantled, this collaborative process can only accelerate and will, I believe, supplant traditional competitive models of research.

Dr Free-Ride linked to Zuska (Goddess of Science, Empress of Engineering, and Avenging Angel of Angry Women) talking about sexual harassment in science, in light of a recent study linking a sense of injustice among researchers to the probability that they will compromise their integrity. Zuska's Seven Scientific Commandments, paraphrased, are:

1. Do not rape your students and colleagues. No means no. Coercion is rape.
2. Don't engage in sexual harassment, either. If you don't know what that is, your university will have policies in place and people willing to explain them.
3. Er, that all goes for grad students too.
4. The points above all apply "even if you think she's willing or she wants it or she's asking for it or she needs it or whatever other excuse you come up with to put the agency on her and absolve yourself of guilt. They also apply even if she is actually willing."
5. Racial harassment? Also a no-no.
6. Don't steal ideas.
7. Don't steal ideas that have been published (that's plagiarism).

There's more to each point, including links, so do read the whole thing. Me, I continue to be astonished by my own naivete. I was aware that sexual harassment is a problem in science -- I've seen a few instances, and I'm even aware that I only saw most of those instances because the women involved stood up for themselves. But rape? Yes, rape. Zuska is serious. I am -- horrified.

Zuska, in turn, led me to Dr Shellie, who describes her blog as

...a year-long project to develop and articulate my opinions on the following themes, as they apply to my life and research:

• women in science
• how to improve the culture of science, particularly in academia
• societal benefits of science and technology

There's plenty to read in the couple of months Dr Shellie's been blogging, but just to continue the theme of this post for a moment, here's (part of) her take on women in science:

Making science departments more welcoming to women and minorities will result in a better working environment for everyone. Fortunately, a number of great initiatives are in place to do just this. Some of the main issues are to:

• Insure equal recognition for equal work.
• Encourage all students to actively participate in classroom activities in research, particularly talented students with low initial confidence.
• Value scientific contributions and content, not aggressiveness and self-confidence. Teach scientific communication skills and conflict resolution techniques.
• Promote role models for women and minorities in science and engineering.
• Work to accommodate dual-career issues and hiring concerns, which disproportionately affect women scientists.
• Develop university policies to accommodate childbirth and parental child-care responsibilities.

Again, there's more to each point than I'm copying here, including a good many links to resources and references, so go read the original post. I just want to focus for a moment on the first three points. There's nothing in those that is necessarily specific to women; that they apply more to women than men is a reflection of the general social disadvantage that affects women. Momentarily taking sex out of the language makes it clear that we are talking about a rising tide that will lift all boats: male and female scientists alike will benefit from changes in the culture of science that focus on rewarding merit and promoting cooperation. This is much the same as my usual "bottom line" argument in support of feminism: placing half of the population at a systematic disadvantage is a waste of human resources and a net loss for the population as a whole. Conversely, equality of opportunity across all demographics allows for the most efficient possible use of those human resources. It's clear that my interest in open science —

Anything to do with open access to source code, published information, raw data, &c. Blogs, wikis, databases, journals, anything that views information and information sharing as common goods or could be used to further that view. Also anything to put collaboration ahead of competition.

— has much in common with the interests and goals of feminist scientists.