Are you planning a conference?

Then you need this book, How to Respond to Code of Conduct Reports, by Valerie Aurora and Mary Gardiner. It’s free! My first thought was that wouldn’t this deserve a short pamphlet, at best? But no — it’s incredibly thorough, explaining all the hows and whys of codes of conduct, giving examples and showing the advantages, and also why you’re going to get screwed if you don’t implement one. Since it’s free and comprehensive, you have no excuse for ignoring it…and if you do ignore it, it just means you’re going to have a poorly managed conference.

It also has links to other resources, like this article, No more rock stars: how to stop abuse in tech communities. Oy, but that one resonates. Not just for tech communities, but atheist/skeptical communities — we have a plague of “rock stars” who suck resources and may also draw valuable attention to events and movements, until ultimately and seemingly invariably, they turn into black holes of bad PR. Read it before you start inviting speakers.

End of a project

I am now committed. This morning, I got to work and started dismantling my jerry-built zebrafish facility. It was built to last, with annoying bolts everywhere, some of them quite high up on the structure, and now I can’t feel my right shoulder after all the wrench work above my head. We got the bulk of it disassembled and removed, and all that’s left right now is a lot of PVC plumbing suspended from the ceiling and going nowhere, with a huge cattle trough (the water reservoir) and a big ol’ water pump. That’ll go tomorrow, clearing up a whole bunch of bench space, which I think will be home to a new, additional incubator.

Now I need to figure out what to do with the stuff. Mary might use some of it to set up a herb garden in our sun room — it’s a lot of shelving and shallow trays. There is also a great deal of hydroponic gear I used to deliver recycled water to the tanks, and she got a glint in her eye and dreamt of a hydroponic drip system for plants…which may be overly ambitious.

But there’s no going back now. I’m going to be running an arthropod lab, rather than a fish lab, which is a bit of a change. I’m still young enough to change my research focus, right? Although not young enough to do serious physical labor without feeling like I overtaxed every muscle in my upper body.

American inhumanity claims another victim

I had a nice, relaxing Christmas day yesterday. We had my oldest son Alaric over for dinner, and we did a little hangout online with Connlann, Ji, and Knut (he walks now! Watch out, world!), and and with Skatje, Kyle, and Iliana (who was quiet and wise throughout). Christmas has no religious associations at all for me, but the one thing it means is reconnecting with family, and a reminder that my greatest accomplishment in my life is producing three wonderful kids who have gone on to become admirable adults. And now there’s another generation coming along.

The worst thing you can tell me on Christmas, the thing that most violates my humanist, family-focused interpretation of the day, is to tell me that children are dying. So of course, once again, a young child has died in the custody of the US Customs and Border Patrol.

…an agent noticed Monday that the child had become ill. The boy and his father were taken to Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center in Alamogordo, N.M, where the boy was diagnosed with a cold, according to a CBP news release.

Later, he was found to have a fever and was held for an additional 90 minutes before he was released with prescriptions for an antibiotic and Ibuprofen.

But the child became more seriously ill Monday night, when he vomited, and was taken back to the hospital. He died shortly after midnight on Christmas Day.

Diagnosed with a cold, and given an antibiotic? That makes no sense. There was something more there in the child’s symptoms, which was basically ignored but for handing him a pill. Colds don’t make you vomit, or give you a fever. There was something seriously wrong with this boy (obviously, given that he died of it), and he got inadequate care.

You know, when you’re dealing with thousands of people, it is inevitable that some will fall ill, and some will die. I’m sure that children in the solicitous care of loving parents die every day. If the Border Patrol were thoroughly humane and careful in their treatment of people in their care, there would still be occasional deaths. But what matters is how well they actually do care for those people — do they take seriously the moral obligation imposed on anyone who takes responsibility for children? I don’t think they do.

That’s the thing about this wall obsession — it’s about building an excuse to deny responsibility for people on your doorstep. Even more children would die if they were isolated on the southern side of a wall, but we’d then get to pretend it wasn’t our fault, despite the fact that the reason there are migrants in the first place is the US has been working for decades to destabilize and wreck countries in Central America. We own that. And if we aren’t working to our utmost to help these people, the dead children are our fault.