Slashdot Mirror
Scientific American In Blog Removal Controversy
Lasrick writes "Danielle N. Lee, Ph.D, the Urban Scientist blogger at Scientific American, has been mistreated twice: once by the blog editor at biology-online.org and now by SciAm itself. The blog editor asked Dr. Lee to contribute a blog post at Biology-Online, and when she declined (presumably for lack of monetary compensation), the blog editor asked her whether she was 'an urban scientist or an urban whore.' Then, SciAm deleted her blog post, in which she wrote about the incident."
so Biology-online is mostly what we'd call an urban click-whore?
Except the whole point is that many science bloggers at SciAm have posted "non-scientific" posts as well, so the "this is not about discovering science" excuse is BS.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/context-and-variation/2013/10/12/this-is-not-a-post-about-discovering-science/
--- "Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." ~ Ben Kenobi, 'Return of the Jedi'
In any case, it's kind of hard to get worked up about someone insulting someone else on the internet.
Agreed.
But it wasn't even an internet insult. The insult happened in Email, presumably as private as the NSA will allow it to be.
No one knew about it besides the recipient and someone claiming to represent the blog site.
Reprehensible as it was, It would have ended there, and probably should have.
Her reputation was not enhanced by dragging it into the public.
She had her own blog, The Urban Scientist, on which she could have answered this if she really
felt the need to take a private matter public, but to drag that into someone else's forum was
inexcusable.
Sci-Am is not the platform to settle scores for private insults. Taking it there merely damages Sci-AM,
an innocent bystander.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Scientific publishing operates more on trust than most people realize, and more than the legal system does. If I say I got this band on a western blot, and submit it to Science (the journal), they run routine checks to make sure I haven't done any very dumb editing like in MS paint. They send it to reviewers who will flag it if there's anything glaringly obvious technically. If the claims are extraordinary, they'll require more proof. But at the end of the day, I'm sending them things which could fairly easily be faked.
Why is it this way? Two reasons, one it's impossible to be absolutely sure of anything (as zero kelvin pointed out) and two, because scientists are generally not in it to lie to other people.
So unless there's a good motive for the person to lie, like an undisclosed financial incentive, why don't we assume scientists are being honest? Especially given that no one is disputing it and SciAm gave a politician's apology (or apologized without apologizing).
Reprehensible as it was, It would have ended there, and probably should have. Her reputation was not enhanced by dragging it into the public.
Maybe not, but airing things out in public can have other benefits. I've on many occasions responded to such harassment by mentioning it to others working for the same organization, and invariably I get replies describing similar treatment that others have received from the same perp(s). I've even seen a few cases where, after a bit of open discussion of the topic, the aggressor was the one fired. This hasn't happened with me, but I'm pretty sure I've triggered at least a few "reorgs" by talking openly about how the org was being run. This can be to most of the workers' (and the org's) benefit in the long run.
Mistreating someone and then trying to intimidate them into silence is rarely in the organization's best interests. It usually means that the upper management is being kept ignorant of their organization's internal problems, and it doesn't take a managerial genius to understand the problems that this can lead to.
In any case, I seriously doubt that it would have ended there. In my experience, people who get away with such things generally conclude that their behavior is accepted, and they continue to treat others the same way.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It should also be noted that the blog with the offensive editor is a business partner of Sci-AM so they are not an innocent bystander. This blog has a screen shot of Sci-AM's "Partner Network" before it was edited. Furthermore, her Sci-AM blog IS her blog. As others have pointed out, Sci-AM is being inconsistent at best in their actions.
Well, the bastard has been fired: http://www.biology-online.org/biology-forum/about34647.html Good riddance.