Blog Profile / Adventures in Ethics and Science
| URL : | http://scientopia.org/blogs/ethicsandscience/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / General Science | |
| Posts on Regator: | 130 | |
| Posts / Week: | 1.3 | |
| Archived Since: | July 12, 2011 | |
Blog Post Archive
An invitation to Katelyn Campbell and other GWHS highest honors graduates.
Dear Katelyn, I was impressed to read about your willingness to take a stand against your high school's factually inaccurate pro-abstinence assembly, especially given your high school principal's (predictable) threat to retaliate. I was similarly impressed (though not surprised) by the response of my alma mater, Wellesley College, to your principled stand. I am disappointed [...]
A shift in the MOOCmentum (part 5): Tressie McMillan Cottom on what MOOCs learned from for-profit colleges, and on challenging the framing of higher education as a market.
In my last post, I insisted that you read what Aaron Bady has to say about "The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform". Now, I'm going to insist that you engage with Tressie McMillan Cottom's compelling look at dueling narratives around higher education. One of them is the narrative of market forces, of individuals [...]
A shift in the MOOCmentum (part 4): Aaron Bady's "The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform"
Aaron Bady's essay at The New Inquiry, The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform, is so thoughtful and devastatingly on-target that it gets its own post in the series rounding up links that respond to issues raised in the SJSU Philosophy Department's open letter to Michael Sandel (PDF of that letter here). If you [...]
A shift in the MOOCmentum: coverage of and conversations around our open letter to Michael Sandel (part 3).
This is a further continuation of my (futile) efforts to round up responses to the SJSU Philosophy Department's open letter to Michael Sandel (which you can see in full here). Part 1 collected links mostly from old media-affiliated sites. Part 2 started digging into some of the discussion in the blogosphere. This post picks up [...]
A shift in the MOOCmentum: coverage of and conversations around our open letter to Michael Sandel (part 2).
Here I'm continuing the round-up I began compiling in the last post of responses to the SJSU Philosophy Department's open letter to Michael Sandel (which you can see in full here) This post focuses on some of the discussion in the blogosphere. It is not exhaustive! There are other discussions worth reading, and responding to, [...]
A shift in the MOOCmentum: coverage of and conversations around our open letter to Michael Sandel (part 1).
In response to the SJSU Philosophy Department's open letter to Michael Sandel (which you can see in full here), at least two important things have happened. First, all the top-down pressure on our department to pilot the edX packaged version of Sandel's "Justice" MOOC as a "flipped" course (despite the fact that our existing PHIL [...]
My department and a MOOC.
The Philosophy Department at San José State University (of which I am a part) took a pass on teaching Michael Sandel's "Justice", a MOOC licensed by the start-up edX, as a "flipped" course (which would have involved students watching videos of Sandel's lectures -- including his Q&A with his Harvard students -- and then coming [...]
Reasonable reactions to kids messing up in dangerous ways.
Kiera Wilmot, a 16-year-old Florida high school student, was expelled from her high school last week for mixing toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum foil in a plastic bottle on school grounds, creating some smoke and enough pressure to pop the cap off the bottle. No property was damaged. No one was hurt. Kiera described what [...]
Thoughts on the American Philosophical Association Committee on Sexual Harassment.
Pat Campbell asks what I think of the announcement that the American Philosophical Association is putting together a committee on sexual harassment in the discipline. First, let me point out Rebecca Kukla's excellent interview of the Chair of the APA Committee on Sexual Harassment, Kate Norlock. The interview does a lot to set out what [...]
Ponderable: disciplinary specific data about questions at professional conferences.
This week I'm attending the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in San Francisco. There are lots of interesting talks on the program, but I find myself noticing some of the habits of philosophers that are on display in the question-and-answer periods at the end of the talks. For example, [...]
I don't know and I don't care: ignorance, apathy, and reactions to exposure of bad behavior.
I've already shared some thoughts (here and here) on the Adria Richards/PyCon jokers case, and have gotten the sense that a lot of people want to have a detailed conversation about naming-and-shaming (or calling attention to a problematic behavior in the hopes that it will be addressed -- the lack of a rhyme obviously makes [...]
Naming, shaming, victim-blaming: thoughts on Adria Richards and PyCon.
By now many of you will have heard the news about Adria Richards attending PyCon, notifying the conference staff about attendees behind her telling jokes during a conference presentation (about, among other things, making the coding community more welcoming for women and girls). Richards felt the jokes were sexualized enough to harm the environment of [...]
On the apparent impossibility of having dispassionate arguments about dogs or guns.
I have been following the discussions at DrugMonkey's and PhysioProf's blogs (here, here, here, here, and here) about apparent parallels between arguments offered to defend gun-ownership and arguments offered to defend dog-ownership, particularly when it comes to dogs of breeds that have been identified (rightly or wrongly) as "more dangerous" or at least capable of [...]
In which Argentine tango puts a valuable skill in my parenting toolbox.
The skill in question is creeping across floorboards silently. (It's all about how you shift your weight as you move your feet, and that's something about which my tango teacher was a little bit obsessive.) Being able to creep across floorboards silently is the skill of mine which (I dearly hope) has finally convinced my [...]
Does the University of North Carolina have any grasp of institutional ethics? (With a bonus thought-experiment.)
And here, the follow-up question to the one posed in the title of this post: Does UNC - Chapel Hill get that "institutional ethics" involves more than protecting the interests of the institution at the expense of people like its students? Because this story makes me wonder. In brief: UNC student Landen Gambill reported that [...]
A passing thought about a certain flavor of "citizen science" project.
I think that better public understanding of science (and in particular of the processes by which scientific knowledge is built) is a good thing. I'm persuaded that one way public understanding of science might be enhanced is through projects that engage members of the public, in various ways, in building the knowledge. Potentially, such "citizen [...]
The case study protagonist as unreliable narrator.
Even though it seems like my semester just started, I'm already grading the first batch of case study responses from my "Ethics in Science" students. (Students, if you're reading this: I'm quite happy with how the class is doing! You'll get detailed feedback on your response by the end of the week.) In case you're [...]
What did Jonah Lehrer teach us about science?
Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin wishes people would lay off of Jonah Lehrer. It's bad enough that people made a fuss last July about falsified quotes and plagiarism that caused Lehrer's publisher to recall his book Imagine and cost him a plum job at The New Yorker. Now people are crying foul [...]
An ad in the sidebar that kind of bugs me.
Just now, on this blog, I noticed an ad for an "online reputation management service". There are ads for services like these all over the place (including on the airwaves of the big San Francisco public radio station, although they don't call them "ads" because public radio isn't supposed to have ads). Anyway, I hadn't [...]
#scio13 aftermath: some thoughts about the impostor syndrome.
I didn't end up going to the Impostor Syndrome session at ScienceOnline 2013. I told myself this was because it would be more professionally useful to attend Life in the venn - What happens when you're forced to wear many hats? since I have recently added a hat of my own (Director of my university's [...]