CSIRO Astronomy!

[Merlin66 (Ken)]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-1...nomers/8036582
I'm at a loss for words.....

[glend (Glen)]

Yes Ken i have seen that story as well and am shocked that this sort of behavior has cost us very talented individual astronomers. It has to be very serious for a career astromomer to resign a tenured position and leave the field altogether. It seems that the offender/s may be protected from within. Perhaps a Royal Commission is in order, or at the very least a Senate inquiry into bullying and harassment in the CSIRO.

[bojan]

This problem is not specific to SCIRO...
I know of the very clever female astrophysicist who suffered a long years of harassment from a guy who knew her from visiting the local astronomy club as a student. The letters he wrote (and they were cc-ed to a number of people, most of them were not even known to her) were absolutely disgusting.. I personally couldn't do anything specific about it but I felt I simply have to apologise to her in a separate email and distance myself from his actions.
The problem was, he was (when we were mates as teenagers) quite OK guy, but subsequently something cracked in his head... and he was basically beyond help (and he really needed a professional help IMO).
All this did not have a visible impact to her professional career as astrophysicist and university lecturer/professor (at least what I know and hope for).

[PCH (Paul)]

It's the BBC and Jimmy Saville all over again!

[AstralTraveller (David)]

That makes very disturbing reading. I'll try to find time to listen to the podcast over the weekend to get a fuller picture. I suppose this is an unfortunate affirmation of the fact that scientists are prone to all the faults and failings of the rest of society. That doesn't make it right of course, just a bit less surprising. I don't know about CSIRO but around here the mood is very much against that type of behaviour. So I hope the problem is confined to a few individuals - hopefully a few old relics who haven't moved into the 20thC.

[Kunama]

I guess the real problem is that these cover-ups by various organisations would be seen almost as tacit consent for the perpetrator's grubby behaviour.

It is a shame that the research time of people like Professor McClure-Griffiths and Celine d'Orgeville et al is impacted by the need for them to address problems being still caused by people whose attitudes should have died with the dinosaurs...

Perhaps the CSIRO Executive are just trying to protect their funding sources by their "secrecy provision"......

[Regulus (Trevor)]

This might account for some of the news lately about staff number reductions that everyone seems up in arms about. It may be that they will replace the positions later, but for now treat it as a permanent reduction as a means of getting rid of these people (or some of them).
There are other reports from that page going back to 2014, so it's a cultural thing. And a link to similar problems at Antarctic bases.

Trev