the summer is almost over

With all these warm sunny days, you wouldn’t say that the Summer is almost over. But it is. Academics are returning from vacations and clean their messy desks. Only this could explain the fact that within a week I have received three responses (all negative ones) re. my long-forgotten job applications. (One of the applications was submitted last December, another one this January, and the most recent one in March.) Interestingly, or maybe not, one of the letters contains a copy of the evaluation committee’s report (which looks like, well, a concise version of my CV, but at least it’s an evidence that somebody actually did read it) and a note that I am welcome to comment on this report not later than some day last month.

Needless to say, it doesn’t do much good to my ego. Even if I take the view that it is their loss. Which it is, but it is not my gain either. In any case, I am not getting paid for them losing me. (Hey, I’d like to develop this line of thought one step further. It seems that in some institutions people spend lot of time evaluating my applications. By not applying, I could save their time, effort, and valuable desk/disk space, so it’s only fair to get remunerated for that.)

Oh well. With these three off my Christmas card list, my potential employers are not exactly queuing outside. Which means I can go away again and not miss anything.

cool badges

The Science Scouts develop some seriously cool badges. For all humankind.

Anyone is welcome to use these badges, although a link to this site (or the specific badge entry) is much appreciated. Even better is if you provide an anecdote in the comments section to explain your reasons for awarding yourself the badge.

Excellent. I allow myself to award myself a few.

she’s such a geek

You will be wanting to read my excellent essay, ‘Suzy the Computer’ vs. ‘Dr. Sexy’: What’s a Geek Girl to Do When She Wants to Get Laid? in She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff.

It was this charming announcement on Zuska’s blog that prompted me to get hold of the said book. And what a book it is!

a threat to scientific communication

Once again, I am getting spammed by Nature — this time it is an email with a modest subject “Impact Factor confirms Nature is top research journal”. It informs me that its Impact Factor is 31.434 now. The reason they bother to send me this?

To celebrate we are offering you an exclusive 30% discount if you subscribe to Nature this week.

No thank you.

can accent damage your career?

We all know about racism, sexism and ageism, in the workplace or otherwise. But what about accentism? From A Plum in Your Mouth: Why the Way We Talk Speaks Volumes About Us by Andrew Taylor:

The BBC poll that so damned the Welsh accent was one of many over recent decades which have arranged regional accents in order how pleasant, prestigious, or socially desirable they are. A similar survey, carried out a few months later, reached much the same conclusions, with the added twist that Welsh found itself languishing around the bottom of a list of accents which supposedly gave the impression of hard work and diligence. It is significant that of the ten accents at the bottom of the poll, seven were those of big industrial cities or conurbations, namely Bristol, Swansea, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Black Country and Birmingham. There are other fairly clear prejudices against the other three, South African, German and Asian — but overall, the poll was simply a vote against urban working-class speech. It is probably not unduly cynical to point out that the second survey was carried out on behalf of the Aziz Corporation, a company which specializes in ‘executive communications’, and includes ‘voice development’ among the services it offers. It’s also noticeable that surveys such as these tend to tke place either in Summer or around Christmas, when news is in short supply.

what to tell my younger self

“If I knew then what I know now” is a regular column in The Big Issue magazine, in which celebrities tell us what they would tell their younger selves if they had a chance. It is, of course, impossible, that’s why I enjoy reading it.

What would I say — or rather, write in a column like this?

academic matters

Idly browsing the web (as usual), I came across Academic Matters, the open access Canadian magazine. The latest (May 2009) issue is devoted to Ethics in the Academy. Incidentally, this enjoyable article by Sergio Sismondo deals with issue of ghosts in some detail.

Academic authors are well versed in the art of multiplying papers and, also, with complaining about it. However, in the pharmaceutical industry each publication is part of a marketing campaign and has an expected return. The professionalization and commercialization of publishing makes a science out of the multiplication of papers.

guests, ghosts, gofers

Thanks to this paper by Peter R. Mason from Zimbabwe, I got acquainted with an interesting classification of the authorship of (scientific) papers.

Guest authors are those “important” persons who insist that their names appear on the papers of their juniors, even when they have made minimum contribution to the research. Ghost authors are those who make a significant contribution to the writing of a paper, but their names do not appear as an author on the publication. This is often a situation found in clinical trials sponsored by pharmaceutical companies. A “gofer” is a name given to someone who is regarded as very junior and so is sent to “go for” something and bring it back to the more important members of a team.

how many scientists fabricate and falsify research?

Well, this illuminating study by Daniele Fanelli suggests that quite a few (without giving us any exact numbers of course). It all depends on how you formulate your question. For instance,

scientists were less likely to reply affirmatively to questions using the words “fabrication” and “falsification” rather than “alteration” or “modification”. Moreover, three surveys found that scientists admitted more frequently to have “modified” or “altered” research to “improve the outcome” than to have reported results they “knew to be untrue”.

That does not surprise me at all, but it’s good to have something like that published in peer-reviewed journal. Speaking of peers,

The grey area between licit, questionable, and fraudulent practices is fertile ground for the “Mohammed Ali effect”, in which people perceive themselves as more honest than their peers.

The decrease in admission rates observed over the years in self-reports but not in non-self-reports could be explained by a combination of the Mohammed Ali effect and social expectations. The level and quality of research and training in scientific integrity has expanded in the last decades, raising awareness among scientists and the public. However, there is little evidence that researchers trained in recognizing and dealing with scientific misconduct have a lower propensity to commit it. Therefore, these trends might suggest that scientists are no less likely to commit misconduct or to report what they see their colleagues doing, but have become less likely to admit it for themselves.

And now, from the past to the future (misconduct):

There seems to be a large discrepancy between what researchers are willing to do and what they admit in a survey. In a sample of postdoctoral fellows at the University of California San Francisco, USA, only 3.4% said they had modified data in the past, but 17% said they were “willing to select or omit data to improve their results”. Among research trainees in biomedical sciences at the University of California San Diego, 4.9% said they had modified research results in the past, but 81% were “willing to select, omit or fabricate data to win a grant or publish a paper”.

Now, really difficult question. Are San Diego guys more fraudulent than their San Francisco colleagues? Or more honest because thay admit being more dishonest?

we are all Iranians

Sometimes (and quite often) I wonder whether the “international scientific community” can do anything useful at all. Useful and noble. The recent editorial in Nature suggest that it can, actually that it has to.

The international scientific community has been laggard and passive in responding to the current situation <in Iran>. But Iranian scientists say that the solidarity of the international academic and scientific community is needed now more than ever.

Research bodies and universities — and perhaps a few Nobel laureates — need to speak out louder. They should encourage, rather than discourage, collaboration, and replace past discrimination by welcoming Iranian researchers and students.

Iran is not the only country in the region where human rights and democracy are violated; and the West has hypocritically been relatively silent on similar abuses by several of its allies in the Middle East. But in Iran at least, the country’s long traditions of democracy, education and free thinking — suppressed for decades by the regime, and in particular the current hard-line leadership — are now out in the open.