RPM has put up an amusing bestiary of typical science seminar attendees — it’s all true, I’ve seen all of those people.

But you know what the problem is? It’s a collection of pedants and old people! Where are the celebrities misbehaving in our talks? Maybe we’d get more attention for science if we had a Paris Hilton vamping around, or a Britney Spears breaking down and flashing her anatomy, or a Mel Gibson getting drunk and haranguing the speaker about his Jewish background, followed by a Chris Crocker histrionic shrieking at everyon to leave the speaker alone.

Scientists are a pretty dry and sedate lot, I’m afraid. I’ve never seen anyone like that at a seminar.

Full-Time, One-Year Faculty Position in Biology
University of Minnesota, Morris

The University of Minnesota, Morris seeks an individual committed to excellence in undergraduate education, to fill a full-time, one-year position in biology beginning August 18, 2008. Responsibilities include: teaching undergraduate biology courses including an introductory level survey of organismal biology (with lab) and a core ecology course (with lab); advising undergraduates; and sharing in the governance and advancement of the biology program as well as the campus at-large.

Candidates must be at least A.B.D. in ecology, organismal biology or a closely related field. One year experience teaching undergraduate biology is required. (Graduate TA experience is acceptable.)

The University of Minnesota, Morris (UMM) is a nationally-recognized, small, selective, residential, undergraduate liberal arts campus of the University of Minnesota. It has an enrollment of about 1650 students with 120 faculty members. The campus is located in west-central Minnesota, 160 miles from Minneapolis, in a rural community of 5000 people. The college is organized into four academic divisions, of which Science and Mathematics is one. Disciplines represented in the division are Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Geology, Mathematics, Physics, and Statistics. The college attracts excellent students many of whom go on to graduate or professional studies. Visit www.morris.umn.edu/positions/ to learn about other open positions at UMM.

Excellent fringe benefits and a collegial atmosphere accompany the position. Appointment will be at the Assistant Professor level for those having the Ph.D. in hand and at the Instructor level for others. The standard teaching load is twenty credit hours per year.

Applications must include a letter of application, resume, transcripts, a teaching statement (in which teaching goals and methods are discussed), and three letters of reference. Send applications to:

Biology Search Committee Chair
Division of Science and Mathematics
University of Minnesota, Morris
600 East 4th Street
Morris, MN 56267-2128

Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Screening begins March 14, 2008. Inquiries can be made to Ann Kolden, Executive Office and Administrative Specialist, at (320) 589-6301 or koldenal@morris.umn.edu.

The University of Minnesota is committed to the policy that all persons shall have equal access to its programs, facilities, and employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, disability, public assistance status, veteran status, or sexual orientation.

The Warda and Han paper has been officially retracted, and the editor has made an official statement, as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

The paper has drawn a blizzard of criticism in the blogosphere about the peer-review process at the journal, Proteomics. The editor of the journal, Michael J. Dunn, a professor at University College Dublin’s Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research, told The Chronicle last week that the paper had passed peer review.

Today’s announcement says that the two authors of the article, who are scientists at Inje University, in South Korea, agreed to the retraction. Initially only one of the authors had asked for a retraction.

In the news announcement, Mr. Dunn said: “Clearly human error has caused a misstep in the normally rigorous peer review that is standard practice for Proteomics and should prevent such issues arising.”

The plagiarism is bad all right, but my main concern was that such a blatantly goofy paper made it through peer review. How? All Dunn is saying is that it did pass review, which suggests that somehow, someone read it and didn’t pull the alarm, and even approved it. Was it a lazy reviewer? Or was it some other kind of hole in the process? “Human error” is an awfully vague label.

We may not ever get an answer, but you know everyone will be scrutinizing Proteomics papers critically. Other journals, too, of course — a reader just sent me another freaky paper that I’ll describe tomorrow.

I’ve received email from one of the authors of that bafflingly bizarre paper on mitochondria. I’m still confused.

Dear Dr. Myers

First of all, I am very sorry for that trouble for you.
I found the serious mistakes in the paper during the process of edits, which I confused between the early drafts and the latest versions: I did not check the use of the sentences in the references (more than 200 references). Finally I made serious error to make the final version.
In order to rectify an error, I requested to retract the paper to the editorial office of Proteomics.
Thank you very much for indicating this carelessness.
Based on this good experience, I will study science and prepare a manuscript with caution.
Again, I am very sorry for that trouble for you.

With best regards,

Jin Han

The author is clearly not a native speaker of English, but I can’t criticize that — his English is far better than my Korean. The explanation that this was just a confusion of an early draft simply doesn’t work. We are talking about a peculiar title and a specific, grammatically correct assertion made in the abstract that is not supported in the text, except by a claim of a “mighty creator”. Where did that come from? One of the authors? Someone who assisted them in polishing the language? The instance of plagiarism are also left dangling.

It also doesn’t address the other concern here. If we accept the idea that Warda and Han made a clumsy mistake and submitted the wrong draft, one that was full of errors, we’re still left with the question of how that mess made it through peer review to the stage just prior to publication. Something broke somewhere, and one unfortunate consequence of the retraction of the paper by the authors is that we may not find out what.

The authors don’t need to apologize, especially not to me. All I’m interested in is tracking down how a paper that is so thick with warning signs could get so far through the review process.

The beautiful state of Washington, my native home and still home to many of my family members, has some people ready to enact some major legislative stupidity. David Horowitz was a right-wing nut who was making noise a few years ago with his witch hunt for evil leftists (Hi, Michael!) and his promotion of an Academic Bill of Rights, which was basically a ham-handed attempt to force academia to grant special privileges to intellectually bankrupt ideas, all under the guise of “fairness”. The Washington bill reeks of that familiar stench.

This bill aims to impose the ideological biases of ignorant politicians on the curricula of the state’s universities. It claims to be about “intellectual diversity,” but it’s really about stripping intellectual responsibility from the hands of professors. You can read the whole thing, but as an example of the kind of superficial promises the bill wants to make, but which do little more than corrupt the integrity of the classroom, look at this clause:

Develop a procedure in which a student may present his or her objection to a classroom assignment due to its opposition with the student’s conscience.

What, exactly, is a student’s conscience here? Well, if a UW biology professor tries to demand her students understand the mechanisms of evolution, a creationist student could formally demand accommodation for his beliefs. A chauvinist in a feminist history class could demand a better grade for his paper claiming that women have been oppressing him because they keep turning down his demands for dates. Basically, it throws the doors wide open and allows students to turn their subjective, poorly formulated, or even falsified “objections” into legitimate excuses to subvert the classroom…which is exactly the intent of deranged ideologues like Horowitz.

I know some Washington state residents read this blog. Get on the phone or email to your representatives and tell them that SB 6893 is a disaster in the making and that they better not support it. In particular, if your rep is on the Committee on Higher Education (which contains two of the sponsoring senators, unfortunately — Shin and Delvin) make sure to voice your displeasure and let them know that anyone who supports this abomination of a bill is no friend to higher ed.

I’ve been tagged with a teaching meme: I’m supposed to answer the question, “Why do you teach and why is academic freedom critical to that effort?”. We science types are late to the game; there are already several examples online, mostly from those humanities people.

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