The University of Wollongong just degraded the value of their degrees

The university has accepted the Ph.D. dissertation of Judy Wilyman, which is plum full of rancid bollocks. She’s an anti-vaxxer, and apparently her advisor had no problems with a thesis that basically lied about the science and promoted bizarre conspiracy theories.

wilyman

Look at that first line. There is no stringent monitoring of adverse events or evaluation of the effectiveness of vaccines in the population that would provide meaningful data on their effects in the population. Has she never heard of this science called epidemiology? Does she know what a Phase IV clinical trial is? This stuff is assessed out the wazoo. It’s the analysis of effectiveness and side effects that allows doctors to recommend dosages and schedules.

But it seems the social sciences department at UOW doesn’t believe in statistics or science at all. And most appallingly, the university is supporting this crap.

UOW ensures research is undertaken according to strict ethical and quality standards and supports researchers’ academic freedom of thought and expression, he said.

UOW does not restrict the subjects into which research may be undertaken just because they involve public controversy or because individuals or groups oppose the topic or the findings.

I can believe they have quality standards, but this is an admission that those standards are disgracefully low.

I would agree that research shouldn’t be restricted because it’s controversial. That’s not the case here. The problem with Wilyman’s research is that it is wrong, and that it violates the apparently non-existent standards at UOW for truth and accuracy.

they spend and waste their money on all this hateful stuff

That’s a direct quote from the militant idiot in Oregon. He’s very upset that people are sending them dildos — someone spent $17.90 to ship a sex toy as commentary to them. But in the category of spending and wasting money, I’d like to know how much he has spent on military-style weapons.

But what bugs me most in the video is the first line: So we went and picked up some mail. Really? These armed assholes have seized control of a bit of federal property…and they’re treated so lightly that they’re driving back and forth into town to pick up their mail and go to restaurants? What kind of takeover and siege is this? I can agree that some restraint is a good idea — please don’t charge in with tanks and guns blazing — but come on. When the criminals come into town to have a burger at McDonald’s and pick up their butt plugs at the post office, arrest them.

#astroSH : here we go again!

First it was Geoffrey Marcy, the astronomer who was sexually harassing students for at least a decade. Next it was Christian Ott, an astrophysicist at Caltech who was up to some publicly unspecified shenanigans. He’s been suspended.

For what is believed to be the first time in its history, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena has suspended a faculty member for gender-based harassment. The researcher has been stripped of his university salary and barred from campus for 1 year, is undergoing personalized coaching to become a better mentor, and will need to prove that he has been rehabilitated before he can resume advising students without supervision. Caltech has not curtailed his research activities.

Again, we don’t know what he had done specifically, but we can assume it was serious if they actually suspended a tenured professor with two NSF grants and a CAREER award.

And then there’s a third case. It’s an old case, a sexual harassment situation that was quietly resolved a decade ago, and the professor involved, Timothy Slater, says he is a changed man, that he had the sexual harassment sensitivity training and is thoroughly reformed, and now has a decade of problem-free research activity at the University of Wyoming.

Unfortunately, what prompted the initial accusations were pretty ugly.

Officials interviewed at least 10 witnesses who worked with Slater and told investigators that he routinely made lewd jokes and behaved inappropriately. Investigators described a work environment where sexual innuendo was frequent and tolerated and boundaries were often blurred. Slater and another senior member of his lab often invited graduate students to lunch and lap dances at strip clubs and and even gave students sex toys — such as chocolate handcuffs and the cucumber-shaped vibrator — as gifts.

One woman who worked for Slater told investigators that he regularly told her that “she would teach better if she did not wear underwear.” Once, she said, “he grabbed her underwear through her dress, stretched it and snapped it, and said ‘You’d look a whole lot better without these on.’”

The woman also told investigators that she once complained to Slater that the room they were working in was too cold. Slater, the woman said, responded by looking “at her breasts and comment[ing] that he thought ‘they’ were supposed to get hard and stand out when they were cold, and that it must not be too cold.”

On other occasions, she said, Slater told her: “I want to get you naked” and “Stand up, turn around — half the boys in your class are going home to masturbate after watching you teach.”

This occurred years ago, and he’s got a clean record now, so barring recent evidence, we should consider him reformed. But it leaves open a major question:

How the hell, in a fiercely competitive academic job market, could this guy have gotten a second chance?

I’m sorry, but this is a cutthroat business where we’ll roundfile an applicant for a job who only got two papers out of a post-doc, but apparently we’ll give a pass to someone who takes students out to strip clubs and is censured for sexual harassment by his university — and in this case, the university thought it appropriate to make their condemnation confidential. No wonder this situation persists when offenders get a slap on the wrist and the protection of a wall of silence.

One congressperson is trying to change the secrecy of the Old Boy’s Network.

Speier announced that she would introduce legislation aimed at requiring universities to inform other universities of the outcome of a disciplinary proceeding. “It’s time to stop pretending sexual harassment in science happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” she said.

This state of affairs was made public by Pamela Gay, who received the confidential file from an informant and passed it on more widely. I approve. We can’t get change from within if the within is hiding its sins.

“I did this when I realized that astronomy is currently not able to protect its community members from abuse, and that real change would only be possible with public and political pressure acting from the outside,” Gay said in an email.

Now as I said, Slater got a second chance he probably shouldn’t have, but if he’s been a good citizen since I can’t see punishing him again. But my sympathy kind of vanished with this comment.

“My wife, Stephanie, and I are admittedly very, very successful in our field, which causes more than a small amount of jealousy,” Slater wrote. “Dr. Gay and her comrades are our direct competitors, and have unfortunately engaged in this kind of gossip against us for years.”

…

The Slaters have since threatened to sue Gay. On Wednesday, Timothy Slater filed a version of his letter as a sexual harassment complaint with Gay’s university, accusing her of violating its sexual harassment policy by making “frivolous and malicious sexual harassment charges” against him.

Wait. The guy who was found guilty of rather blatant sexual harassment is now planning to sue the person who revealed his crimes…for sexual harassment? Maybe he hasn’t reformed as much as he claims. Suing whistleblowers for exposing bad behavior is a great way to shelter that bad behavior and allow it to continue on.

If Pamela Gay needs help fighting off this threat, I’ll let you all know.

One other thing: the American astronomical community is beginning to look like a terrible hotbed of abusive sexual predators, but what we should keep in mind is that the reason for that is that lately they’ve been exposing these problems to the light, and acting strongly to slap them down. That is a good thing. Maybe, instead of giving American astronomers suspicious looks, we should wonder why the European astronomers, or the biologists, or the chemists, are all sitting there so quietly. It’s almost as if they don’t want us to notice them.

I know that most of my colleagues and advisors were respectful and supportive of women, but I also heard second hand rumors of several who were not. I can’t name names, because these were second-hand…but if someone were to plop a file or a first-person account on me, I’d definitely make it public, as Gay did (note: that is not an invitation! I also know from experience how vicious the backlash gets. But I would not shy away from the responsibility, if forced on me). I would hope (and prefer!) others would, too. I know there are bad actors in every discipline, and so I’m less troubled by the vigorous and open reactions of astronomers than I am by the curtain of silence discreetly drawn over the affairs of other academics.

Here are Congressperson Speier’s remarks on the issue:

Oh, jebus. The full report (pdf) is available. Those select quotes weren’t the worst stories in there.

My last post on Perry Marshall

Once more unto the breach in Perry Marshall’s cranium, dear friends. He is once again trying to claim that he alone has the one true understanding of Barbara McClintock’s work, and he keeps getting it wrong. It’s just embarrassing to watch.

He makes obvious statements like this:

Damage is random. Repair is not.

Well, duh. If the cell were to just go charging in and practice excision repair (a process that snips out a short piece of one strand of DNA and brings in polymerase to re-synthesize it) on random stretches of DNA, it would increase the frequency of errors. Polymerase proofreads as it goes; it checks to see if the nucleotide it just copied into a new strand properly complements the nucleotide on the other strand, and if it doesn’t, it steps back, cuts out the error, and tries again. It doesn’t repeat if they match.

This is familiar stuff. Students in our classes here at UMM get all this kind of material, in far greater detail, by their second year here. The problem is that Marshall carries it too far: he assumes that the cell “knows” the nature of the specific error made, and intelligently acts to directly repair it. It doesn’t. The cell can invoke general mechanisms to attempt repair, but it doesn’t in any way “know” what to do.

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“hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper”

Those are the best things in life, according to Cohen the Barbarian, and I spent most of my morning taking advantage of the middle one. I have been shirking — it has been four years since my last dental checkup — so had a few hours to get a good thorough working over. My morning was spent lying back, getting x-rayed, having my teeth poked and prodded and scraped, getting the occasional metallic taste of blood, being ordered about, open wider, turn this way, bite down on this.

It was terrific. I don’t know why I don’t go more often — probably because I don’t have any pressing dental issues, and it does take a chunk of time — but a good workout at the dentist’s office is so relaxing, and I feel so mellow afterwards, in addition to having a sparkly clean tasty mouth, it’s like a spa day for me. I love the gadgets and the pointy little tools and dental chairs are incredibly comfortable, and it helps to have a bunch of competent professionals I can trust. So I’ve decided to be a responsible adult and made another appointment for the same thing in April.

And now, while I’m all loose and unstressed, it’s a good time to get the next step in my lab prep done for next semester, and finalize those syllabi. I don’t know why Cohen didn’t include a university education in his list…maybe it’s #4, right after the soft lavatory paper.

So, next term I’m teaching our introductory course, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development, and I’m also teaching our Genetics course. I can do these two course in my sleep, so prep is easy, except for the fact that I’m always tweaking something. The challenges I’m facing are:

  • Genetics is horribly oversubscribed. Our enrollments keep going up and up, and this year our required molecular biology course filled up fast (don’t panic for the students, they’ll just take another section in the fall) and everyone who couldn’t get in seems to have signed up, with my permission, for the elective Genetics course. Either that or I’m just incredibly popular.

    So I’m making up extra large batches of flies, and I’m going to be making extra, unscheduled time available in the lab.

  • I’ve taught FunGenEvoDevo many times…but on our weird two days a week, hour and 15 minutes each schedule. This time around it’s on a three days a week, 50 minute schedule. I’m going to have to tweak my timing, but it might actually work better to hit first year students with smaller, more digestible bites.

  • Notice that both courses have “genetics” in the title. This sometimes confuses me: I’m supposed to give the first-years a gentle, conceptual introduction to the basic ideas of Mendelian inheritance, while in the upper level course I can hit them with the wickedly tricky problems and hard ideas. Sometime I might mix the two up, which isn’t good.

Also, so many fly lines. I now have to go up to the genetics lab with my minty clean teeth and spend a few hours setting up dozens of bottles for the first fly lab, in two weeks.

Anti-choice honesty

I completely missed this when it was said back in October:

Dr. Monica Miller of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society, one of the main organizers of this weekend’s protest rallies at Planned Parenthood clinics, said on Tuesday that even if Planned Parenthood were to stop performing abortions, she would still want to strip it of federal funding because it promotes a corrupt view of human sexuality including sex for recreation, sex for mere pleasure.

Planned Parenthood from the top to the bottom is a corrupt organization, Miller told Ave Maria Radio’s Teresa Tomeo, corrupt in its view of the sanctity of human life and corrupt in its view of human sexuality. And I say even if Planned Parenthood didn’t perform one single abortion, just the mere fact that its sexual ethic is corrupted means right there, should be the reason right there, that they should not receive any federal money. The kind of sexual ethic that Planned Parenthood promotes is sex for recreation, sex for mere pleasure.

Wow. At least she openly admits that having sex for pleasure is bad.

I guess I’ll have to stop. Oh, my–I was supposed to stop about 25 years ago.

I think I know who is corrupt, twisted, and in opposition to reality, and it sure isn’t Planned Parenthood.

Everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity

barn

I’ve been informed that I’ve been at war for a while. I was surprised. Apparently, Perry Marshall thinks he’s been firing salvo after salvo at me…I just hadn’t noticed.

Oh, OK. I would just ignore him, but he’s presenting some fascinatingly common misconceptions. One of his boogeymen is chance, and I’ve noticed that a lot of people hate the idea of chance. Uncle Fred got hit by lightning? He must have done something very bad. It can’t just have been an accident. There are no accidents!

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Do we want our politicians to address science issues?

Probably. Every four years, ScienceDebate.org comes along to suggest that the presidential candidates ought to have a debate about the science issues that confront us. It’s a good idea, I think.

I’d like it to happen. On the plus side, watching Republicans poop the bed over and over again would be vastly entertaining. Just recently, Rick Santorum said something stupid, for example (and who are we kidding? Santorum has like an all-automated electric stupidity generator permanently mounted in his mouth.)

For me, when you say the states have the right to define marriage, it’s like saying, well, the states have the right to redefine the chemical equation for water, it can be H3O instead of H2O. Well, the states can’t do that. Why? Because nature dictates what water is, nature dictates what marriage is, and the states don’t have the right to violate what nature has dictated.

Imagine a two hour show with those loonies babbling on the stage. Comedy gold!

Unfortunately, on the negative side, I can’t quite imagine either Clinton or Sanders putting in a solid performance. They’d probably be OK by just going with the consensus science view and avoiding controversy, but I don’t think they could demonstrate a deep knowledge of science. And who knows, maybe they have some weird ideas that would slip out and throw me into deeper despair. Maybe Clinton is a UFO fan, or Bernie Sanders thinks there might be something to homeopathy. I don’t know whether I really want to turn over that rock.