Globalizing science
jstemwedel | October 9, 2006In a post months and months ago, I wrote the following*:
I've heard vague claims that there are some cultures in which "plagiarism" as defined by U.S. standards is not viewed as an ethical breach at all, and that this may explain some instances of plagiarism among scientists and science students working in the U.S. after receiving their foundational educational experiences in such cultures. To my readers oversees: Is there any truth to these claims? (I'm suspicious, at least in part because of an incident I know of at my school where a student from country X, caught plagiarising, asserted, "…
jstemwedel | September 20, 2006In Tripoli, Libya, five nurses and a physician are in danger of being executed by firing squad if the international scientific community doesn't raise its voice.
As reported by Nature:
The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998, so far causing the deaths of at least 40 of them. ...
During the first trial [in 2004], the Libyan government did ask Luc Montagnier, whose group at the Pasteur Institute in Paris discovered HIV, and Vittorio Colizzi, an AIDS researcher at Rome's Tor Vergata University, to examine the…
jstemwedel | January 24, 2006Every now and then, I take a moment to read my unsolicited commercial email before binning it. (Note to eMarketers: This moment is generally used to mock and deride the goods and/or services offered in the unsolicited commercial email. Take me off your stupid mailing lists!) The other day, I came upon a message offering me a service that's a new one to me: outsourcing research.
As a professional philosopher, I don't have much call to outsource my research (which mostly consists of reading, thinking hard, pounding away at the keyboard, and swearing if MS Word crashes in the middle of a…