Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

Email and academia: hidden dangers

I came of academic age with the advent of email. I remember during my graduate school years being amazed that by adding a complicated suffix ending in “edu” my email would somehow make it from Ann Arbor to Pasadena in seconds. During those years, my emails became very long and often were an extension of my conversations with others. The Michigan Terminal System (MTS) had a command-line email interface which was quite convoluted and the modems we used for dial up (2400 baud) often resulted in a long email spilling out across the screen like little yellow “pac-men“.

Later, during my years at NIH, I learned that email was a bit more complicated than my previous notion. It wasn’t simply an “extension of conversation”. It was also indexable and potentially of interest to record keepers. I remember laughing with my fellow postdocs at an order that came down from on high to print out and save all emails. We thought the idea was ridiculous.

Of course emails are now viewed by courts and the law in the same way that paper memos used to be. They are certainly much more than an extension of conversation. They are in fact discoverable. Nowadays, we all, at some level know, that there is no way to ever really delete an email. They are all there, in some data warehouse, waiting for some lawyer to e-discover what we wrote about whatever, at some point in the past.

This is of particularly relevance to academia. Particularly because most current faculty members “grew up” with the “extension of conversation” notion that I did. When combined with a strong belief in academic freedom, there is perhaps a tendency to put in an email something you might not be entirely comfortable seeing on the cover of say, the NY Post.

When this small indiscretion pertains to sensitive issues like faculty searches, evaluations, student information and the like, then modern academic email can bite in a really big way. An email that ends up as evidence in a law suit can have consequences that reach beyond your own career and affect your institution.

And that’s where discretion comes in. I have one simple rule for my email: never put anything down in writing, that I wouldn’t mind reading in the newspaper tomorrow. Everything else flows from that. The obvious dangers of forwarding, blind carbon copies, and going into specifics when pronouns work just as well all come to mind.

Jim

What is scientific misconduct?

At a recent meeting, several colleagues raised the point that for whatever reason, new faculty members may not be as aware of what constitutes scientific misconduct as previous generations of professors. It seems that there are two clusters of the confused: 1) those for whom the US definition (and I’ll get to that in a bit) is obscure because they were trained in other countries where the “rules” may be different and 2) US trained faculty members who may be under the impression that the “rules” are somehow relaxed for less formal contributions (such as blogs).

The sense among my colleagues was that it is very important for both of the clusters that the word get out–scientific misconduct can get you very quickly into a whole lot of trouble.

So what constitutes scientific misconduct? It’s useful to remember the mnemonic FFP (fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism). Fabrication is the making up of experimental data. Falsification is the changing of experimental data. Plagiarism is the use of another person’s work (usually written) without giving them proper credit.

It’s never OK to do anything of these things.

Jim

We can relax about celebrities talking about science

Clive Cookson in today’s Financial Times on an organization to prevent celebrities from making misstatements about science.

Money quote:

A year ago Sense About Science, the educational charity, launched a drive for celebrities or their agents to check the facts before making claims. It quoted many examples of famous people making questionable statements.

The group’s scientific reviewers found a marked decline in gaffes during 2007, although there were still controversial statements.

“Dodgy claims about make-up are definitely up,” says Sense About Science. “Celebrities [also] continue to believe that they eat chemical-free food and use chemical-free products.”

Update from the Blue Ridge

Well it’s been about two weeks since I decamped from Fairfax to the northwestern ridge of Wintergreen mountain in Nelson County Virginia. In the meantime, the new year has started and there’s a lot going on at the institute for advanced study. We are still in the midst of faculty recruiting season (it’s getting exciting) and at the same time working on getting a new cellular imaging facility in place as a core facility. I’m looking forward to returning to Mason on Monday and diving into the backlog of email. In the meantime, broadband seems to be working well up here and I’ve developed new respect for the old-fashioned land-line telephone.

Jim

Putting 2007 to bed

Today marks the last day of what has been a very eventful calendar year for the Institute. It began with a new MRI brain imaging center and ends with plans for a Decade of the Mind. At the same time, it marked the beginning of my second term as institute director and the opening of a new chapter as a full academic unit of George Mason University with two new departments: Social Complexity and Molecular Neuroscience.

None of these achievements would be possible without the folks who do the science here, our faculty. So, to all of our faculty–those who have just joined us, and those who have been here since the beginning back in 1990, I wish you the best of luck in 2008 and heartfelt thanks for your creative efforts in 2007.

I would also like to thank our support staff–your dedication, loyalty and hard work act to enable our scientists. Happy New Year.

Jim

Decade of the Mind: Wikipedia

I’ve been working today on the Wikipedia entry for the Decade of the Mind project. Turns out to be more complicated than writing a blog entry. The key trick was to link it appropriately into the category tree, provide the citations and un-orphan it (from the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study entry).

And yes, I confess to using Wikipedia extensively when reading scientific articles outside my own field.

Jim