The consciousness of John Searle

I met John at an IBM conference a bit over a year ago in California. Here’s David Papineau of Kinds College in London on John.

Money quote:

Quantum mechanics tells us that the probabilities of physical effects are always fixed by prior physical circumstances. If Searle’s suggestion is right, then this principle breaks down inside the human brain, at those points where conscious minds exert an independent influence on events. This implication is not incoherent, but it seems highly unlikely. Serious physicists are unlikely to start looking for violations of quantum mechanics inside the human skull. With free will, as with consciousness, it seems that Searle’s affinity for common sense has left him in a philosophically unstable position.

Jim

Blogs and scholarship

Librarians are learning about blogs in the context of scholarship. Interesting if true. As a journal editor, I have a difficult time accepting that peer review and editing aren’t part of the crucial value-added part of publishing when scholarship is concerned.

Jim

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