Evaluation of News Magazine Stories

Honestly this portion of my process work was mildly infuriating. Out of the magazines in the table, I wasn't able to find any story that revolved around a controversy or argument. So I sort of took it upon myself to find a new magazine from which to pull articles. So behold, two controversy-related articles about science from The Guardian magazine.

Nobel scientist: female scientists cause men trouble in labs

GrrlScientist, "female-scientist" 3/7/2014 via Flickr. Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

1. Tim Hunt is 72-year-old proof that being successful may sometimes result in being an asshole. He made some comments about how women and men should be separated in the lab, for bad reasons like "women just make men fall in love with them" and "they cry when criticized". He made the comments in front of an audience full of female scientists and science journalists, a.k.a. the people against which he was being sexist and the people who were going to go home and write slam articles about him. The article was published in June of 2015, so the words were hastily spoken sometime around then.

2. The sympathetic character is the body of women in science who have to deal with men like this. It's not like women didn't have a hard enough time getting along in STEM careers without judgment or gender bias. The fact that they have to deal with sexist idiots like this is so infuriating to me. Women shouldn't be cast as any less able based on gender alone. As a woman, let alone a woman going into science, I can definitely envision their frustration.
3. The least sympathetic character is easily Tim Hunt because generally I don't sympathize with the person in the argument who is wrong. He has no right to be saying bad things about women. Just because he's old doesn't mean he's right or gets to say whatever he wants without consequence or backlash. And honestly, like I mentioned above, I'm a woman going into science and I don't want anything to do with someone like this.


Replication frustration: What stops experiments from being reliably replicated?


The University of Queensland, "Pitch drop experiment with John Mainstone" 5/25/2007 via Wikipedia. "GDFL, requires acknowledgement of the University of Queensland"

1. The issue in this article is about being able to successfully re-do an experiment and get the same result. It's important to do this to make sure the initial result was accurate, but it seems that often reproduction of experiments does not lead to the same result. The article mainly focused on grad student Samuel Mehr attending Harvard University. He and his team of psychologists tried to reproduce an experiment published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and ran into various roadblocks and difficulties. It becomes a debate because PNAS's policy conflicts with copyright policy, and it's almost impossible to settle on a compromise.
2. The most sympathetic character is probably Mehr because he did all kinds of things to make the reproduction work and it just wouldn't. Replicating the experiment using different videos than were used in the original didn't work, and trying to obtain the original videos resulted in copyright issues. There's no reasonable way around it, and this is unfortunate for scientists like Mehr who just want to reproduce the experiment for themselves.
3. Honestly, I'm not able to pick a least sympathetic character. No one in this case is really the bad guy; copyright rules exist for reasons, and same for the journal's policy, and nothing could really be done to help that. All parties tried to find a compromise or solution, and it just didn't seem possible, though everyone was trying. So sorry, but this question isn't really applicable.