Category: Follies of the Human Condition

#standingwithDNLee

Blogger, post-doc, and science communicator DN Lee politely declined an offer to work for a money-making operation for free. The word “whore” was used in response. DN Lee wrote about this experience and what it meant from her perspective as a black, female scientist at an early stage in her career. The overlords at Scientific American deleted the post for very vague reasons without consulting with DN Lee.

But that is not how the Internet works. And that is not how the online science communication community works. As requested by Dr. Isis with DN Lee’s permission, we are putting up the censored post. Unlike Scientific American, we think the human experiences of scientists are of interest to people who are interested in science. To get a grasp on the issue you can read the following:

UPDATE 14 OcTOBER 2013

DN Lee’s original post is back up at Scientific American after the factual accusations were confirmed. She does not get the credit she deserves if you are reading this here in measurable ways that will benefit her career. So, we are removing the post as its utility has passed.

As many, including yours truly, guessed early on, the take-down was due to lawyers worrying if the alleged events (ie, emails) were authentic. The lawyers were not necessarily worrying that they were made up. The correspondent may not have been a real Biology-Online representative (he was).

Scientific American stepped in it by obfuscating about the real reasons for the takedown, allowing it to appear that they did not try very hard to discuss the legal concerns with the author before or immediately after the takedown, issued conflicting explanations, appeared to doubt the victim’s veracity, and used explanations that easily reminded folks of loaded rhetoric used routinely to dismiss and distract. They also seem to have failed to grasp the immediacy of response necessary to manage response on the internet.

It doesn’t make the folks at Scientific American bad or misguided. They aren’t. They were very unaware of the situation they were stepping into, and that isn’t a good excuse for such an organization. It was legitimate to expect better. The whole incident was about managing appearances, and they failed. Hopefully, this has been a learning experience.

 

Please don’t blindly follow PopSci’s lead and get rid of comment spaces

Originally posted by Marie-Claire on her home blog, Boundary Vision. Reposted here with permission, because EXACTLY.

A tiny explosion happened in the online science communication world yesterday. Popular Science.com announced that they will be closing off opportunities to post comments on their news stories: no more public comment spaces. Why? They argue that uncivil commenters have an overly negative effect on readers, so negative that it isn’t worth maintaining the comment spaces. They make some scary claims too about a small number of negative commenters poisoning the way readers perceive the stories and about a war waged on expertise. They use an New York Times Op-Ed written by Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele to back up those claims.

I must, however, respectfully disagree. Continue reading “Please don’t blindly follow PopSci’s lead and get rid of comment spaces”

Baby’s First Genome

Human_genomeSomeday in the future each child that is born will have a file of their genome sequence prepared at birth. For some newborns in Boston, Kansas City, San Fransisco, and Chapel Hill the future is now. The National Institutes of Health is funding a new initiative to examine how the early availability of a child’s genome  will affect medical care decisions and the families. $25 million dollars over 5 years is to be allocated between research sites. Each location is approaching the issue of infant genomes slightly differently. Continue reading “Baby’s First Genome”

Sunday Science Poem: Defying the Outer Black

Robert Frost’s “A Loose Mountain” (1942)

Leonid_MeteorA Balearic slinging competition, as I learned from slinging.org, involves slinging rocks at an iron disk fastened to the center of a board. In “A Loose Mountain,” Frost suggests that the Earth may be the target of a cosmic slinging game played with loose mountains instead of small stones, and that the major contestant, the Outer Black, is just waiting for the perfect shot.

Frost plays on the tension between our remarkable achievements as a species and our apparent insignificance in the universe. We can stand outside and ooh and aah over the incineration of high velocity rocks during the Leonid meteor shower, and then walk back inside, out of the night and into our well-lit homes, no longer at the mercy of the diurnal cycle. And yet there is no reason we can’t be snuffed out with one well-placed asteroid, just like the dinosaurs.

Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Defying the Outer Black”

Sunday Science Poem: People Are Organisms Too

Seamus Heaney’s “Death of a Naturalist” (1966)

In honor of Irish Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, who died Friday, we’re reading “Death of a Naturalist”, from Heaney’s first poetry collection.

Haeckel_frogs_with_labelsAs the old cliché goes, children are natural scientists, and of those who do grow up to be professional scientists, their childhood obsessions reveal what kind they’ll become. Physicists grow up tinkering with radio sets (or more recently, computers), while biologists roam the woods catching frogs and snakes, or in Darwin’s case, beetles. There are exceptions, of course (and in fact, I suspect that childhood obsessions poorly predict career outcomes), but Edward O. Wilson’s childhood pursuit of venemous snakes in the Alabama swamps fits the cliché:

A swamp filled with snakes may be a nightmare to most, but for me it was a ceaselessly rotating lattice of wonders. I had the same interest in the diversity of snakes that other 15-year-old boys seemed automatically to develop in the years and makes of automobiles. And knowing them well, I had no fear. On each visit I found something new. I captured live specimens, brought them home to cages I had constructed of wood and wire mesh, and fed them frogs and minnows I collected at the hatchery.

Even after a nearly lethal encounter with a Cottonmouth as big as he was, Wilson was not deterred, and he grew up to be a renowned naturalist. Not so the boy in Heaney’s poem, whose shocking first encounter with unsentimentalized biology ends his budding career as a naturalist. Instead, he becomes a great poet. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: People Are Organisms Too”