Teaching Ethics to Student Engineers

Ayn Rand observed that for most people, “integrity” is not putting your hand in your neighbor’s pocket, when, in truth, integrity is having no conflicts between your morals and your ethics, between the ideal and the practical, between what is and what you want.  Rand’s Objectivist ethics derive from a primary consideration of human nature.  Plants and animals do not choose, therefore for them, morality cannot exist.  For us, every choice, by definition, is a moral choice.  Rand identified the fact that in building a bridge, every girder is designed in answer to one question: Right or wrong? 

Every teacher knows – contrary to the claims of political commentators left and right – that there is no way to open a student’s head and pour in the answers.  The door to learning swings from the inside.  Ideally, any book on ethics for engineers would be written from the rational-empirical (objectivist) foundation of the scientific method.  The reality of university learning requires that we admit to the existence (if not the validity) of pragmatism, contractarian ethics, deonotology, existentialism, and other limited and limiting offerings.  Students come to the classroom with these assumptions – and others: many kinds of Christian interpretation are common in the English-speaking world.  Generally, we use these formal structures to defend the opinions we bring to the classroom, and take out into the working world. 

When I was in the 9^th grade, our civics class had a debate on capital punishment.  Two of the class were girls from the same Pentecostal church.  They took opposite sides.  Forty-five years later, I took both sides of that debate for a criminal justice class.  While I believe that objectivism offers a better set of tools for analysis, I have to admit that no system can resolve all the conflicts, or even state all the questions, unambiguously.  Ethics is harder than mathematics.

On that basis, 4Es: Ethics, Engineering, Economics & Environment by John St. J. S. Buckeridge (Annandale NSW: The Federation Press, 2011) is a convenient platform for delivering the opportunity to bring students in science, engineering, and technology to the task of asking the right questions about professional ethics.  The book is essentially an outline, 128 pages in all, that opens the door to the lectures, papers read and written, and discussions engaged. 

Because morality is choice, ethics is all about problems.  How do we identify and reconcile competing interests or conflicts of interest?  What consequences will follow? Which of them is important?  To what degree is each relevant? This book begins with ethical problems common to the news.  After a brief discussion of morals, ethics, values, and profession, the first chapter offers case examples of moral and ethical conflicts.  Among them are the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Marsupial Mouse, the rights of indigenous peoples, and the debate over fur and leather garments.  Chapter 2 begins the formal investigation of theories of morality and ethics: Aristotle’s virtue ethics; egoism, John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, and John Rawls’ contractarian theory; deontology; and existentialism.  Chapters 3 and 4 return to the problems.  Examples such as the new mandates for fluorescent lamps are from the recent news, though others such as the fishing of common waters have been continuing for generations.   Most important are the cases of Andrew Wakefield, Peter Davis, and Vishwar J. Gupta involving research misconduct, conflict of interest, and research fraud, across national borders and within national politics.

While intended for upper division university students, the book could easily serve a high school class.  The writing is clear and direct.  The problems are timely.  The treatment can serve an important purpose in providing a foundation for the same investigations later at university and at work.

From my point of view, it would have been better to provide an authoritative source for the section on egoism, just as Mill, Rawls, Kant, and Heidegger were cited in the other presentations. 

The book came to my attention because the author relied on a vignette I wrote about the Athenian “owl” tetradrachma, “Of Owls, Wooden Walls, and Flower Girls.”  Buckeridge uses the reverse of the coin (the owl side) with his own inscription EOS standing for both the Earth and Oceanic Systems Research Group at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and, of course for the Greek word for “dawn.”

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More on Necessary Factual Truths
David Harriman's Logical Leap
David Harriman's Logical Leap Almost Makes It
The Sokal Affair
Reflections on the Sokal Affair
Misconduct in Scientific Research

Junk Criminology as Pseudo-Science

Choose Your Virtues

Virtue is contextual. It is easy to claim that honesty is the best policy.  That would contradict the fact that no dress ever made any woman look fat.  

Jane Jacobs compared and contrasted the Commercial and Guardian modes of survival.  The Guardian is the traditional one, common also to animal packs.  The Commercial was invented with cities.  Both, however, ignore the moral context.  Guardians may be good guys or bad.  Commerical enterprises can be benefactors or swindlers.  For Jacobs, the key consideration was that these arrays were syndromes. Literally, they run together to define a complex system. 

Deirdre McCloskey contrasted bourgeois virtues against those of the aristocrat and peasant.  But it can be a challenge to cull wit from jocularity from humor.  McCloskey's goal was not to elevate the middle class merchant above the aristocrat and peasant.  Rather, she sought only an open dialectic space in which trustworthiness, thrift, and integrity are recognized as being hallmarks of the entrepreneur and the sales clerk.  It is who we are today.

TWO CATALOGS OF VIRTUES
From Jane Jacobs' Systems of Survival: Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.

From "The Bourgeois Virtues" (1994) by Deirdre McCloskey.

















"The point is not to elevate bourgeois virtue over the others in some universal sense. The point is to sidestep universal senses. In some personal and social circumstances, courage is a virtue. ... So is humility.....  But when the class left out by the virtue-talk is half the population, on its way to all the population, the vocabulary of the virtues is not doing its job." -- McCloskey

LIBERTARIANS AND RACISM

Ayn Rand's essay on “Racism” in The Virtue of Selfishness was unequivocal: racism is the crudest form of collectivism. 

Anyone who discriminates among individuals on the basis of anything other than moral character should be shunned.  Ancestry is irrelevant.  Yet libertarians broadly excuse racial discrimination as your right.  It may well be for a libertarian.  To the libertarians, you have a perfect right to use heroin, work as a prostitute, and join a Wiccan collective.  So, for them, racism is just one more silly thing that people do.  They defend it on those grounds.  Objectivists think differently.  For them, rational individualism begins with the law of identity: A is A.  From that absolute, they derive ethics and politics.  

Thus, for an Objectivist, racism is irrational and therefore immoral. 

Being immoral racism is anti-life, by definition.  Seldom will you find any self-identified Objectivist defending the irrational as your political right except, perhaps, as a marginalized counter-example.  By the same standard, you have a political right to attend religious services; but Objectivists are atheists, so for them, the question is moot.

However, racialist ideology permeates the entire conservative-libertarian-objectivist spectrum.  Among Objectivists many do argue well against it.  Nonetheless, the existence of racialists among them cannot be denied.  On the Objectivist discussion board Rebirth of Reason, racist “Brad Trun” posted his “libertarian realist” ideas.  He was relegated to the Dissent forum because his posts directly contradicted Ayn Rand on Racism.  The ensuing discussions revealed racialist ideas among several of the strong and regular posters. 

It gets so complicated so quickly ...

On the Rebirth of Reason site, Objectivist Steve Wolfer offered peer-reviewed publications from mainstream anthropology in support of his claims that races exist.  Wolfer was firm – even adamant – that race is not a moral status.  Good people and bad come from all such groups, however defined.  Still, he accepted the existence of races.  He is not alone.  The US Government insists that I must choose a race, though they recently allowed me to select “Two or more” which I do, as I deny the existence of race, except as a social construct among the uneducated.

Remaining uneducated may be your right to a libertarian.  Majoring in criminology, I took many sociology classes, including “Race and Ethnic Relations” (SOC 205) at Washtenaw Community College.  It was interesting.  In the first or second class, one young woman said to a fellow student, “I do not see you as a Black man, but as a person.”  Replied the man with the dreadlocks: “If you do not see me as a Black man, I am insulted.”  We all have a right to self-identification … and a right to worship the moon and do our financial bookkeeping in Roman numerals…  An Objectivist sees the situation differently.

Addendum January 29, 2012
This page has received an inordinate visibility and therefore I want to clarify, if possible, that my classmate with the great hair was only uneducated about race.  We were, after all, in the same class and therefore equally educated.  He chose to identify with his African, not European, forebears.  As a numismatist, I confess that I found the Greeks and Cartheginians of Sicily interesting; and I collected a set of coins from the Hungarian Malcontents Revolt.  Call it ancestor worship; it is not rational.  So, I get the hair. And he had at least one good story:  Visiting Nigeria, people stopped him on the street and gave him money because they thought that he was a holy man; whereas in Detroit, the police on patrol, pulled over and demanded to see his identification papers. It was a cogent point from an insightful campus peer -- and all the more reason for us all to abandon the social construct of race.

Ayn Rand’s essay “Racism” by LibertyPen “C. M. Herdert” narrator here

and a different presenter here

And another speaker here

Printed format excerpts from  “Racism” by Ayn Rand here

“Money dissolves skin colour on contact. The fact that Silicon Valley, the freest market in the world, has produced the United Colours of Geek proves it.”—Dan Gardner.

Most Popular Necessary Facts

According to the Stats provided by Google, these were the most popular pages in 2011.

• Firefly: Fact and Value Aboard "Serenity"- June 5, 2011 -164 Pageviews
• ...that goddam Ayn Rand book...- October 9, 2011 -103 Pageviews
• Nerd Nation: Natalie Portman, Danica McKellar, and Felicia Day - July 2, 2011 - 96 Pageviews
• Unlimited Constitutional Government - January 17, 2011 - 95 Pageviews
• Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History - April 25, 2011 - 84 Pageviews
• Junk Criminology as Pseudo-Science - June 16, 2011 - 72 Pageviews
• The Roots of Poverty - September 17, 2011, - 71 Pageviews
• Capitalist Culture - May 29, 2011 - 71 Pageviews
• Austin Science and Engineering Festival - November 7, 2011 - 55 Pageviews
• MerryNewtonmas! - December 12, 2011 - 54 Pageviews

Readers came from these geographies:

• UnitedStates 4,060
• Russia 310
• Germany 242
• France 196
• United Kingdom 191
• Canada 155
• Brazil 135
• Ukraine 115
• Latvia 94
• Netherlands 60

 I am surprised by the traffic from Russia. A website there, Domar, seems to be some kind of portal to here.  I never go there.  I never go to Russian or Chinese websites. Ever.  But I am happy to have the readers.  I trust that they are enjoying the experience.  I wonder what it is about Firefly and Serenity for them, because other statistics indicate that that one blog entry is the most popular driver for the Russians.

What (if Anything) Did Dorothy Learn?

One of our favorite morality plays ends with a vacuous non-sequitur.

At the end of the 1939 movie version of The Wizard of Oz, Glinda the Good Witch says that Dorothy could have gone home any time, but she had to learn that for herself.  Scarecrow asks Dorothy what she learned.  She replies:  

"Well... I think that it ... That it wasn't enough just to want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie Em.  And it's that if  I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any farther than my own back yard because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with."

 Clearly, what begins as a cliche ends as a contradiction.

In addition to Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, 15 more writers contributed to the script.  Bert Lahr improvised some dialog; and Ogden Nash also wrote.  This scene is not in the original L. Frank Baum story.  There, having recovered the one silver slipper taken by the Wicked Witch, Dorothy flies home instantly, but drops both silver slippers over the desert.  Historians, economists and numismatists have read much into this yarn, calling it an allegory for the political campaigns of William Jennings Bryan and the question of "free silver" versus a gold standard.  

Be all that as it may, in the context of the film, Dorothy could have encapsulated her experiences in many ways.  She learned that anything truly important is worth overcoming obstacles to achieve.  She learned that while some people are wicked, very many more are not.  Certainly, on the eve of a great war that was obviously about to break out, she learned that small, apparently weak, and seemingly helpless people can defeat evil, if they work together.  She learned that the servants of wicked people are happy to throw off their oppressor. She learned that our limitations are often of our own making: Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Man each already possessed what they sought.  The first thing she learned was that not all witches are ugly.  

Why did 18 screen writers fail?  It is easy to cite cliches about too many cooks and the committee that designed the horse.  Such folk wisdoms endure because they are so often right.  It is possible that the producers, Mervyn LeRoy and Arthur Freed, feared that any strong statement would ruin the mood of an unintellectual fairy tale.  Speculation may be fruitless.  The fact remains that as a closing statement, Dorothy's summation is best heard once rather than being read closely.

Addendum
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been variously reinterpreted, often by historians, economists and numismatists.   Does Scarecrow represent the Farmer, while Tin Man stands for the industrial worker?  See The Wizard of Oz under Numismatics on WashtenawJustice here.

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The Wizard of Oz and the Anti-Intellectual Tradition 
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The Scientific Method 
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Do You Know Your Military?
"Soldier's Heart" by Elizabeth Samet

The Origin of ... (What?)

Fertile hybrids demonstrate the limitations of strict Darwinian taxonomy.  According to the easy definitions, a species is a genetically distinct group of plants or animals.  In fact, fertile hybrids are common. And they seem fundamental to evolution.

Dozens of Hybrid Sharks Found Off Australia
January 2nd, 2012 - 10:59 AM ET
The world's first hybrid sharks have been discovered in substantial numbers off the coast of Australia, and scientists say it may be an indication the creatures are adapting to climate change.
Australian researchers say they've found 57 animals that are a cross between the Australian blacktip shark and the common blacktip shark, two closely related but genetically distinct species.  (More here.)

Since 1874, at Halle, a series of successful matings of polar bears and brown bears were made. Some of the hybrid offspring were exhibited by the London Zoological Society. The Halle hybrid bears proved to be fertile, both with one of the parent species and with one another. Polar bear/Brown bear hybrids are white at birth but later turn blue-brown or yellow-white.   DNA studies indicate that some brown bears are more closely related to polar bears than they are to other brown bears. All the Ursinae species (i.e., all bears except the giant panda and the spectacled bear) appear able to crossbreed. (Wikipedia on Ursid hybrids here.)

Granting that hybrids are possible between species of the same genus, such as donkeys and horses, it is too easy to expect them all to be "mules", i.e., sterile.  Macroevolution.net is a blog by biologist Eugene M. McCarthy, PhD.  His site includes biographies of biologists, helpful glossaries of Greek and Latin for science, and much more.  He also provides an authoritative explanation of the prevalence of fertile animal hybrids.  Read here.

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Mayim Bialik

Debt: the seed of civilization

In these days of anti-capitalist protest, it is important to know that keeping track of debts led to the inventions of counting and writing, and eventually gave voice to art. [This is based on “Money: the seed of civilization,” an article for the Texas Numismatic Association’s TNA News, vol. 53, no. 6, November/December 2011. Other text is derived from comments posted to the Econolog and OrgTheory blogs about the recent works of anthropologist David Rolfe Graeber. Citations are at the bottom.]

 As a numismatist and an advocate for the Austrian school of free market economics, I find David Graeber’s work fascinating. Von Mises, Hayek, and Rothbard were largely ignorant of numismatics, hence of the history, art, and science of the moneys in which they invested so much emotion and thought.  Nonetheless, Graeber’s left-wing anarchist fear of money validates the warning from von Mises that capitalists and socialists often agree on the facts; they disagree on what the facts mean.  Graeber does know the facts. 
The works of numismatists Charles Opitz and Robert Leonard on primitive money substantiate at least the broad outlines of Graeber’s conjecture. Underlying that, however, is the deeper understanding of “debt.” It begins as a social obligation: not the transfer of “stuff” but the acknowledgement of status and relationship.  Wampum was invented by Hiawatha to ameliorate conflicts in order to rally the local tribes against the French and English invaders.  Soon, those invaders, knowing money, adopted wampum as an ad hoc currency. 

Left anarchists are not alone in their fear of the marketplace. 

“The Money Masters” is a video you can watch on YouTube.  The argument is that the Rothschilds created debt-based fractional reserve banking to control the world.  This video was touted by two Objectivist websites, Rebirth of Reason (here) and Objectivist Living (here).  Like most American conservatives, Objectivists advocate for gold as the monetary standard.  Murray N. Rothbard (though purged from Ayn Rand’s inner circle) argued that anything other than 100% gold backing for currency is fraud.  Most conservatives agree with this argument.  F. A. von Hayek, a self-identified liberal, did not.  Hayek argued for complete laissez faire in banking and did not presume to predict what forms of money would compete best in which markets once the legal monopoly is removed. 

There is in fact no known example of a human society whose economy is based on barter of the ‘I’ll give you ten chickens for that cow’ variety. Most economies that don’t employ money — or anything that we’d identify as money, anyway — operate quite differently. They are, as French anthropologist Marcel Mauss famously put it, ‘gift economies’ where transactions are either based on principles of open-handed generosity, or, when calculation does take place, most often descend into competitions over who can give the most away. … [The] economists get it … precisely backwards. In fact, virtual money comes first. Banking, tabs, and expense accounts existed for at least 2 thousand years before there was anything like coinage, or any other physical object that was regularly used to buy and sell things, anything that could be labeled ‘currency’. (Graeber here.)

I agree with Graeber that ultimately money grew from ritual gift exchange, just as the turbine generator descended from the campfire.  However, it is erroneous to project ourselves on so-called “primitive” people, even by reading the reports of “early” explorers.  From your grandparent to your grandchild is five generations. Any longer period may be “forever.” Assimilation of neighbors, displacement by foes or weather, and the occasional brilliant idea are among the many factors that can be lost to time.  When European explorers, including anthropologists, first met other people, the assumption was too easy that they always lived here, spoke this language, ate these foods, married in or married out.  They may not have. 

We do have a good history of the evolution of debt to money.  Again, we too easily assume that coinage is the foundation of money.  It was not.  Sophisticated fiduciary documents are thousands of years older than the first coins.

Clay tokens were antecedents to writing

Starting about 8000 BCE, a system of small clay tokens standing for farm produce became common across the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East.  By 5000 BCE, the tokens were routinely stored in clay jars.  You cannot see into a ceramic envelope, so the tokens were also impressed on the outside to show what had been baked within.  Two thousand years later, rather than the tokens, pictographs of them were written on solid clay hemispheres.  In another thousand years, these became tablets with cuneiform writing. 

Pre-Literate Art from Catal Huyuk

Through this long development, large numbers such as 4, 5, 6, and 7 were invented.  Before about 5000 BCE they could not even be conceptualized: five was recorded as “three-one-one.” 

Also, starting about 3000 BCE, as inscribed on statues, these cuneiform characters recorded personal names. They also begged short prayers of the gods.  The first poetry only came about 2700 and the famous Code of Hammurabi dates only to 1700.  Most subtly, the ordered writing of merchants, left to right, up to down, lesser to greater, eventually gave painting and sculpture a vocabulary of space.  Before debts and contracts were invented, artistic space was open and unstructured. 

Neo-Sumerian cylinder seal

Prof. Schmandt-Besserat first published her findings in Scientific American in 1978.  Ovcr the next decade, visiting museum collections, she arrayed enough proof to fill a large two-volume corpus, Before Writing (University of Texas Press, 1992).  The essential facts and evidences were then condensed into a popular paperback, How Writing Came About (University of Texas Press, 1996).  A children’s book was published in 1999, The History of Counting.  Most recently (2007) the University of Texas Press released When Writing Met Art. 

The weakness in Graeber’s theory, like that of Marx’s communal prehistory, and even the self-sufficient yeoman of Jefferson's democracy, is that there was no Eden stolen from us by the Serpent of Debt, Commerce, and Division of Labor.  We now know a direct line of development from debt to numeracy, literacy, and the spatial vocabulary of art. 

Schmandt-Besserat makes clear that these early instruments were not money as indirect barter.  They were not passed from hand-to-hand.  However, they did record economic value and carried seals naming the parties.  In that, they foreshadowed the invention of coinage thousands of years later.  More subtly, this medium was like a modern bank draft because when these promises were paid and cleared, they were discarded. 

Debt led to writing by way of numeracy: inventories precede the Gilgamesh by thousands of years. We may be no more trapped and enslaved by debt than we are by literature, central heat, and the Hubble Telescope. If greed is good, then debt may be better.

Sources:

• Curious Currency: The Story of Money from the Stone Age to the Internet Age by Robert Leonard, Whitman, 2010. 
• Odd & Curious Money by Charles Opitz, First Impression, 1986. 
• An Ethnographic Study of Primitive Money by Charles Opitz, First Impression, 2001. 
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011)
• “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” (essay) by David Graeber online in many places including 
• MetaMute here http://www.metamute.org/en/content/debt_the_first_five_thousand_years
• And The Anarchist Library here http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/David_Graeber__Debt__The_First_Five_Thousand_Years.html
• “Money and Politics - The Money Masters” posted by Michael Stuart Kelly to Objectivist Living 27 April 2007 - 08:07 PM here. http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3514
• “‘The Money Masters’ Documentary,” posted by Mr. Jeremy M. LeMay (pseud.), to Rebirth of Reason, April 25, 2007. Here http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/GeneralForum/1045.shtml
• “Graeber Book Forum Part 1” by Fabio Rojas posted to Org Theory, December 6, 2011, here http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/graeber-book-forum-part-1/
• “On the History of Money,” by Arnold Kling, posted to EconLog, October 3, 2011, here http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/10/on_the_history.html

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Accounting for Civilization

Art as Ordered Narrative

Money is Speech

City Air Makes You Free

Merry Newtonmas!

The Birth of Modernity

"Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:

God said, let Newton be! and all was light."

A little boy born in a small village across the sea would grow up to bring light to the world. 

Sir Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642, the same year that Galileo died.  Newton is perhaps best remembered for his work in physics, the Three Laws of Motion and his Law of Gravity.  To prove his physics, he invented the calculus.  He also invented the reflecting telescope.  His work in optics showed that white light is composed of colors.  This laid the foundation for the wave theory of light, though he advocated for light being a particle.  Newton demonstrated vector arithmetic.  He delivered an algorithm for conveniently computing square roots.  He offered an original proof for the Binomial Theorem (also called “Pascal’s Triangle”).  His image appears on coins and bank notes, which is appropriate since he was Master and Warden of the Mint, rescuing Britain’s money from looming disaster.  Sworn as a justice of the peace, he circulated in disguise among criminals to pursue counterfeiters.  He served in Parliament, representing Cambridge.  He was president of the Royal Society, England’s crown chartered association for scientists.  Alone, any of Newton's achievements would have left his imprint in history.  Together, they give shape to a complex and powerful intellect. 

Middlesex token 1792

Today, we ignore his religious writings, the extent of which actually eclipsed his scientific production.  His heretical Arian beliefs foreshadowed modern Unitarianism, but he swore under oath to be a Trinitarian so that he could teach at Cambridge. 

Newton’s colleagues called him fearful, cautious, suspicious, insidious, ambitious, excessively covetous of praise, and impatient of contradiction. Even his relatives and his true friends were modest in their praise of Newton. Physically sound in his life, he died at 84. He had lost only one tooth, still had much of his hair, and read without glasses. Yet, he was a hypochondriac, suffering from illnesses and diseases that he treated with medicines he made for himself.  

Newton's Reflector built by Himself

Newton’s many biographers illuminate different aspects of his life.  To Richard S. Westfall, he was “never at rest.”  Michael White called him “the last sorcerer” a soubriquet first suggested by John Maynard Keynes.  Newton did bring his alchemical knowledge to the Mint to test the gold plate for coinages; and he also conducted time-and-motion studies to improve efficiency.  But David Berlinski closed his story when Newton was appointed to the Mint, calling the last 30 years of his life “uninteresting.”  Yet that is where MIT professor of science journalism, Thomas Levenson, begins his narrative.  Richard P. Feynman once sought to treat his students to a complete demonstration of Newton’s proof of Kepler’s Laws and found that he could not: thanks to the calculus, we have forgotten much geometry. 

The fundamental industrial technology we take for granted is possible only because of Newton.  Moreover, his work launched the Enlightenment, offering a rational and experimentally-testable explanation for both celestial and mundane motion.  This suggested that all natural phenomena, including human events, could be understood by the same scientific method.   

Merry Newtonmas, everyone!
The Zebrowskis are part of small, but apparently growing, number of atheists, skeptics and other nonbelievers who make merry over Newton’s contributions to science and math—the discovery of gravity, the invention of calculus and the first reflecting telescope, to name a few.
Religion News Service 12/16/2011 here.

SOURCES

Berlinski, David. Newton's Gift: How Sir Isaac Newton Unlocked the System of the World. New York: Free Press, Simon and Schuster, 2000.

Craig, Sir John. Newton at the Mint. Cambridge: University Press, 1946.

Craig, Sir John. "Isaac Newton and the Counterfeiters."  Notes and Records of the Royal Society (18), London: 1963.

Craig, Sir John. “Isaac Newton - Crime Investigator,” Nature 182, (19 July 1958), pages 149-152.

Keynes, Milo. “The Personality of Isaac Newton,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society (49), London: The Royal Society, 1995.

Levenson, Thomas. Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist (Boston;New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. 336 pp. $25

Marotta, Michael. “Merry Newtonmas,” Newsgroups: rec.collecting.coins, Date: Mon, 25 Dec 2000 11:49:41 GMT

Marotta, Michael. “Sir Isaac Newton: Warden and Master of the Mint” http://sites.google.com/site/washtenawjustice/numismatics/sir-isaac-newton

Newman, E. G. V. "The Gold Metallurgy of Isaac Newton." The Gold Bulletin Vol 8. No. 3, London: The World Gold Council, 1975.

Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest: a Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

White, Michael. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Reading, Mass.: Helix Books, Perseus Books, 1997.

www.experiencefestival.com/newtonmas

www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/, The Newton Project, Professor Rob Iliffe Director, University of Sussex, East Sussex - BN1 9SH

www.royalmint.com/museum/newton Web site pages of the British Royal Mint.

Another Case of Fraud in University Research

“ ...  he was immediately fired by the university, admitted to his lengthy fraud, and handed back his PhD degree.”

On the Strategy Profs blogsite (here) Prof. Freek Vermeulen (associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the London Business School) wrote about the case of Diederik Stapel.  Stapel earned a cum laude master’s (1991) and a cum laude doctorate (1997) from University of Amsterdam.  He taught at the University of Groningen (2000-2006) and then the University of Tilburg, where he launched the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics Research.  He was made dean of the social and behavioral sciences faculty in 2010.  (Wikipedia here.)   Then, it all fell apart.

In Vermeulen’s words:  "For years – so we know now – Diederik Stapel made up all his data. He would carefully read literature, design all the studies (with his various co-authors), set up the experiments, print out all the questionnaires, and then, instead of actually doing the experiments and distributing the questionnaires, made it all up. Just like that."

In my response on that blog site, I pointed out that loss of your degree is the appropriate remedy for academic fraud. 

One of the highlights of my studies at Eastern Michigan University was the class in “Ethics in Physics” which I took for graduate credit as a cognate elective.  The class was first created over 25 years ago by Prof. Marshall Thomsen, and has continued to top the list of such offerings by all schools.  My professor was Patrick Koehn.  (Prof. Beth Kubitskey made this her master’s thesis and also has taught the course.)  For my term paper (Google Docs here), I set academic fraud in a criminological context because very little research has been done by criminologists on this.  I also found a deep precedent for allowing the university to deal with its own problems.  The word “universitas” refers not to the collection of colleges or their classes, but to the charter which grants the institution legal standing to deal with its own members.

Academic sanctions also avoid the useless reprisals, retaliations, and retributions of the governmental courts and prisons.  

“In responding to and resolving the criminal behavior of employees, organizations routinely choose options other than criminal prosecution, for example, suspension without pay, transfer, job reassignment, job redesign (eliminating some job duties), civil restitution, and dismissal...

While on the surface, it appears that organizations opt for less severe sanctions than would be imposed by the criminal justice system, in reality, the organizational sanctions may have greater impact...  In addition, the private systems of criminal justice are not always subject to principles of exclusionary evidence, fairness, and defendant rights which characterize the public criminal justice systems. The level of position, the amount of power, and socio-economic standing of the employee in the company may greatly influence the formality and type of company sanctions.  In general, private justice systems are characterized by informal negotiations and outcomes, and nonuniform standards and procedures among organizations and crime types.”

(Hallcrest Report cited in Introduction to Private Security, Hess and Wrobleski, West Publishing, St.Paul, 1982, 1988. The Hallcrest Report I and II, by William C. Cunningham and Todd H. Taylor, et al., Butterworth-Heinemann, Boston, 1985 and 1990.)

Criminologists point to the failure of “general deterrence.” It is famous that cutpurses worked crowds gathered to watch the hanging of a cutpurse.  However, white collar crime in general and academic fraud specifically meet all the criteria for free will and rational choice.  It is planfully competent.  Academic fraud cannot be blamed on your parents, your neighborhood, or your lack of educational opportunities.  It is not a genetic disorder or a vitamin deficiency. 

Diederik Stapel gave back his doctorate.  Jan Hendrik Schön had his rescinded by the University of Konstanz.  For defrauding the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Eric Poehlman was sentenced to a year and a day in prison; but he kept his degrees.  While prison is pain and is intended to be so, a year of incarceration is nothing more than a harsh sabbatical.  Disgrace is bad enough, but the loss of your degree – having to give it back or having it taken from you – is and should be a sword over your head.

Earlier posts on this blog:

Misconduct in Science and Research

Who Guards the Guardians? links to my other blog CSI:Flint – Who Guards the Guardians? which I created after presenting to two middle school classes for "Super Science Friday" at the University of Michigan Flint campus, May 5, 2011.

The Economic Value in a Liberal Education

On the blog, OrgTheory, Prof. Fabio Rojas has been arguing against indiscriminate college education. His thesis is that college is largely not necessary for the work that college graduates find. The majors in question are humanities and fine arts. Clearly, engineers including computer science majors remain in demand. These comments are edited from and based on my responses there.

Adam Smith pointed out that theology degrees were subsidized and produced little life earnings, whereas doctors and lawyers pay for their own schooling and are rewarded well. So, this is all known.

On the other hand, Mark Van Doren's Liberal Education taught that the full range of intellectual pursuits combined is necessary to the development of a fully competent individual. In the medieval university, the two broad studies were the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy). Today, these are classes in communications, literature, film, art and art history, foreign languages, computer literacy, algebra, statistics, calculus, physics, biology... the entire university catalog.

The first steam engines were not built by degreed mechanical engineers because that college major did not yet exist. The same applies to electrical engineering and famously to computer programming. Community colleges and universities alike scramble still today to offer classes in computing topics that did not exist when professors were freshmen from medical imaging and geographic information systems to website design and mobile applications. (Music is no longer taught with mathematics and physics, as it was in the Middle Ages, though electronic hardware and software offer frontiers of understanding and expression). Yet in those cases, exactly and specifically, broad and deep knowledge bases were integrated to create new technologies.  The  most economically valuable education may be the one that is pursued for its own sake.

Moreover, as Prof. Fabio Rojas is a sociologist studying economic interactions, I had to ask what value is delivered by classes in sociology and economics. Sales and marketing, and bookkeeping and accounting were and are important and valuable services; but neither sociologists nor economists were ever in demand. Despite the polling and public relations work of Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert King Merton, sociology never escaped from Marxist criticism of our market society. And sociology ends there with no practical solutions to any perceived social problem, except that we should be nice to each other. Do Microsoft and Apple employ hundreds or even dozens of economists from Chicago or Harvard, while hometown pizza and florist shops take on part-time economists with community college certificates? Of course not.

We know from measurable results that police officers with college degrees both make more traffic stops, and yet have fewer negative interactions with the public: they work harder and better. But college classes in criminology do not teach traffic stops or public relations. Something else is engaged. 

Alternately, it may be true that only hubris allows anyone to predict today what skills will be demanded tomorrow. Rather than perceiving education as something we pass through as we acquire the sum total of all previous knowledge - a task never really possible even to a medieval apprentice - we recognize the importance of lifelong university engagement. We should look forward to a future where several degrees at every level are the hallmark of a productive intellect - while keeping in mind that neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs would have met that benchmark.

Caution is demanded when we speak of “the job market” or “the economy” or “society.” These may be reifications or they may be easy labels or they may be fantasies. Ben & Jerrys, the Mondragon cooperative, the solitary Microsoft Developer, or the person working part time for three places in three different capacities may be outliers or they may be the hidden norm. That is what change is: an unperceived new norm, measurable only after the event.

One complaint from Prof. Rojas, made also by some of the Occupiers in the news, is that the massive student loans can never be repaid from expected earnings, especially from degrees in the humanities. However, over the course of a lifetime, a communications major at a series of low-paying white collar jobs may never pay back the principle and interest of a loan, but still net out more money than working without a degree. Sending Sallie Mae a check for $100 or $200 a month is not much worse than the billing for cable-TV, heat, or electricity, and less than an automobile loan. Second, while it is broadly true that service sector and manual labor jobs pay less than white collar work, it is not necessarily true. You do not need a degree to be successful in sales. (A communications degree would be a good choice.) Third, it is a truism that entrepreneurship pays more than employment, for instance owning a styling salon or an oil change franchise. Perhaps the problem is training people to work for wages rather than for opportunity.

If the college loan program fails – as it seems it may – then, this is merely another bubble, no different from the South Seas or Dot.Com or Housing bubbles … given that the failures are allowed to wash out. Of course, that is not true here, as student loans are not affected by bankruptcy and default. That does not mean that the loans will be repaid, only that the debt will carried on everyone’s books, as liabilities for borrowers and assets for lenders, and not real at all in either case.

Ultimately, education can never be taken away. Thus, we raise the general education level. In previous generations, we taxed property in order to create public schools. But we know that government spending is necessarily a bad investment — and these are often bond issues: the district sells bonds to raise cash and pays them off from taxes. Again, these are apparently massive debts that are never repaid.  Were universal high school or grammar school bad ideas, not worth the investment?

Prof. Fabio Rojas's relevant posts on OrgTheory

College Fundamentalism versus College Realism

Poll on College and Jobs

Useless Majors

All of the above based on this discussion from Arnold Kling on Economics and Liberty about wasted education, "The Great Stagnation."

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Profits and Benefits in Foreign Languages
Education in America: At Least Two Cheers
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
The Scientific Method