Cognitive Enhancers

According to media reports, it's the latest and greatest craze on competitive college campuses across the country! What are we speaking of? The use of stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall, that are typically prescribed for ADHD (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), by normal (often overachieving!) college students to improve their academic performance, or just to stay up all night studying or writing papers.

Check out this video on the topic.

Also read this piece (profs helper.pdf) from the journal Nature.

Search the Web a bit and read some media reports about the alarming rates of abuse of these drugs. Tell us some particulars of what you found in your comments to this blog.

Finally, tell us what you think about the ethical issues involved? Does any of this seem relevant for you as graduate students? What about from teh perspective of medical students? Or undergraduates trying to get into med school? Any problems with people just trying to get a little edge on the competition in this way?

Plagiarism

Judging by the plethora of new plagiarism-detecting tools available on the Internet, Plagiarism is apparently a growth industry in higher education. Recent reports also suggest that plagiarism and other forms of professional misconduct are serious problems in the worlds of science and publishing.

Are you aware of WMU's policies on academic dishonesty? Do you know how an instructor or Teaching Assistant should act when faced with an act of plagiarism or academic misconduct in a class at WMU? Check out WMU's policies at the web site of the Office of Student Conduct and be prepared to discuss them in class next week.

Do you know of any high profile plagiarism or other forms of research misconduct in the world of science, anthropology, or history? Do the names of David Baltimore, Steven Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, or Hwang Woo-Suk ring a bell? Check out the famous Korean cloning scandal at Slate.

Finally, what would you think are the chances that one could get away with publishing/plagiarising an entire article from the scientific literature? Read this brief news piece (Plagiarism) to find out how common this practice is in the recent scientific literature.

Welcome to the RM Blog

Hi Folks, and welcome to our Research Methods Blog for ANTH 5300 Spring semester 2009 at WMU.

We will be using this blog to discuss a series of controversial issues related to questions of research ethics in Anthropology. The basic approach will be that I will post something here every week (typically a link to a pdf or two and some questions or comments designed to start the discussion) which you will then read and respond to by submitting comments below each blog entry. I will post my material over the weekend, which you all will read and react to by noon on Thursday (class meets Thursday evening). Everyone should then read all blog entries on Thursday of each week after noon but before the start of class. This will allow us to talk about our blogs in class each week.

This week's picture is of some of the beautiful wild horses or mustangs that live in the Great Divide Basin of SW Wyoming, where I have been leading field crews to collect primate and other mammalian fossils and to study geological deposits of Paleocene and Eocene age.