In the process, I've run across some fascinating books, including:

- A semi-promotional volume called The Progress of Paper, which was produced in 1947 to mark the 75th anniversary of a trade journal imaginatively entitled Paper Trade Journal, and which presents a (probably slightly biased) account of the history of papermaking;

- A massive and wildly broad-ranging tome rejoicing in the complete title The Great Industries of the United States, being an Historical Summary of the Origin, Growth, and Perfection of the Chief Industrial Arts of This Country; by Horace Greeley, Leon Case, Edward Howland, John B. Gough, Philip Ripley, F.B. Perkins, J.B. Lyman, Albert Brisbane, Rev. E.E. Hall, and Other Eminent Writers Upon Political and Social Economy, Mechanics, Manufactures, Etc., Etc. With ober [sic] 500 Illustrations, which was published in 1873 and is basically just what it says on the tin; and

- A tiny pamphlet produced in 1920 by the Maine Centennial Committee, and grandiosely entitled Maine: Its History, Romance, Famous Sons and Daughters, Physical Features, Industrial, Commercial, Agricultural Possibilities, Epitomized. This features a timeline of important moments in the (white; it was 1920, after all) history of the state, and on page 2, the rather charming boxed demand, Sons and daughters of Maine living outside of the State: Observe the 100th anniversary of Maine's entrance into the Union by paying the old home town a visit.

All of this is well and good, but over the past few weeks, for the most part I've been preoccupied with the last formally scheduled course I had to take: INT 601, Responsible Conduct of Research.

This course is a bit of an oddity. It's only one credit, but it's a credit every person at the University of Maine has to have if they are pursuing a graduate degree that requires a thesis or dissertation. The thing about it is that it is largely (although not completely) irrelevant to anyone in the humanities; it's mainly about the ethics of laboratory research, of the kind performed by groups of scientists and/or engineers working in a large research institution. The bulk of the course covers things like data management, patent rights, and the proper treatment of human and animal test subjects, all of which have no bearing on the kind of solo/small-group, strictly archival research done by, say, historians.

The fact that this course is required for everyone who does a thesis smells like an accreditation thing to me. Like someone somewhere decided, "People should have a basic grounding in research ethics before they hit the job market," so whichever authorities provide the University's accreditation set the condition that the University must require it, while targeting the requirement with all the fine precision of a shotgun. To be fair, the units at the end about authorship, publication, and peer review do apply (in somewhat modified forms) to the humanities, but I am never, ever going to need to know how to, for example, clear an animal experiment with the University's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

Anyway, it's required, so grumble as I might, I had to take it, and if I'm going to take a course, I might as well do the best I can at it, because academically if in no other measurable way, I am a tryhard.

There were two core projects that had to be done for this course. First, we had to select one of the class's 10 topic units and prepare a presentation on it, in essence teaching that segment and leading the discussion thereof. (This annoyed me slightly, because it requires the use of Microsoft Powerpoint, and anyway classroom pedagogy is not my thing, but OK, fine.) Fortunately, I was able to score one of the units that's actually somewhat relevant to my field, so I wasn't up there trying to give a TED talk about the ethical treatment of laboratory mice or something.

Because it was a five-week course compressed into four (because I ended up taking the section scheduled for the bit of the semester that included Thanksgiving week), some of us had to double up on presentation topics, so I ended up talking about the closely coupled subjects of authorship and publication. Here are my slides, if you're extremely bored sometime.

Annoyingly, mere hours after I had to finalize my slides and send them to the instructor, this news story broke, neatly encapsulating within itself a lot of the very issues we would be discussing the next day. I slid a mention of it in while discussing the slide about piecemeal publication, but if it had broken the day before, I'd have been able to structure that whole part of the presentation around it.

But, it is what it is. The presentation went reasonably well regardless, despite the difficulties of presenting a slide show where you don't control the slides and aren't in the room where most of the listeners are sitting (several of us, myself included, attended the class by teleconference from home).

The other project was a term paper on some subject relating to one of a very broad list of possible topics involving ethics. I chose engineering ethics and suggested a range of different case studies to examine, including the Citigroup Center crisis of 1978, the DC-10 cargo door scandal, and the belated struggle within the nuclear physics community over the ethics of nuclear weapons, but the one the instructor chose to have me report on was the Therac-25 fiasco of the mid-1980s.

So I did, and something weird and kind of exciting happened. In the process of researching the paper, I ran across something that I thought was really strange, but which had gone almost unremarked in the (quite voluminous) literature published about the affair to date, namely: One of the key figures in the entire business virtually disappeared from history while it was still unfolding. Even when authors do remark on this, it's almost by-the-way; they tend to drop it like it's a vaguely interesting detail, but not strictly relevant to the matter at hand. Maybe that's just because the academic structure doesn't lend itself to expressing astonishment about something that's truly bizarre, or, I suppose, maybe the strange part is that I think it's so strange. That could happen.

Anyway, here is the paper, and you can decide for yourselves if you are so inclined.

And yes, I was doing this over the last few weeks, at the same time that Friends Like These was barging out of my head, which suggests that I can only get creative work done when I have other work I'm supposed to be doing? That's not ideal, but whatever works, I guess.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I'm imagining some sort of poorly-designed safety system in your brain which fixes one problem while potentially creating another.

In any case, this is a great read, and it only reinforces my opinion that if the world still worked in a way that you could easily get paid for writing, you'd be in high demand.

Peter Eng
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Insert humorous comment here.

I think "the academic structure doesn't lend itself to expressing astonishment" is exactly right, because the matter of The Programmer is indeed mysterious and astonishing.