Recommended reads #122
This is wonderful: NSF is now requiring awardee institutions to report findings of sexual harassment by personnel on NSF grants, and to report when individuals are placed on leave related to an investigation. And they are prepared to take serious measures in response. Here’s the NSF statement, and related stories published by Nature and The New Republic. (How bout rounding up a few PIs and your Title IX coordinator, and schedule a meeting with the person in charge of post-award at your university, to make specific plans for implementing this, including the reporting mechanisms and training that NSF expects.)
Intellectual property law 101 for academics
Hell yes: ” If universities took up this challenge to think of themselves as producers of value, not arbiters of merit, universities could do much more to support marginalized students in applying to college.”
“STEM universities aren’t doing enough to make students feel welcome and close racial gaps, students and experts say”
Where being an environmentalist and being a climate hawk are in conflict
A science writer describes the steps he took to make the sources in his articles better represent the scientific community: “We don’t contact the usual suspects because we’ve made some objective assessment of their worth, but because they were the easiest people to contact. We knew their names. They topped a Google search. Other journalists had contacted them. They had reputations, but they accrued those reputations in a world where women are systematically disadvantaged compared to men.”
PLOS Biology says they’re happy to consider your manuscript after someone else has scooped you.
An editorial in Scientific American is calling for universities to take measures to encourage scientists to speak up about issues that matter to society.
Conserving honey bees does not help wildlife
Not only do entomologists fail to voucher specimens from published research, they often don’t even bother to explain how or who did their identifications. This is a real problem.
According to this piece, in this movie Lady Bird, academic cheating is not posed as an ethical dilemma in the movie, but rather a straightforward means to an end. (Or is it just not a loop in the story that intentionally remains unclosed? I dunno, I haven’t seen it yet.)
The cost of performing service work in academia
Nick Haddad wrote a beautiful piece, “Resurrection and resilience of the rarest butterflies.”
Nigel, the world’s loneliest bird, dies next to the concrete decoy he loved
Christian Ott, who harassed his own grad students at the CalTech, lands a research position at the University of Turku, in Finland. Within a week after he announcement, he loses that job, as the university responds to the outrage of the Finnish astronomy community. Speaking out can work.
In New Orleans, 46 tons of beads were pulled out of the street drainage system.