Society
Category archives for Society
The Status of Science: We Have No-one to Blame but Ourselves
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 15, 2011 Over in Twitter-land, Josh Rosenau re-tweeted a comment from Seattle_JC: It is a bad sign when the promotion of science and science education has been reduced to a grassroots movement in this society. It’s a nice line, but it doesn’t entirely make sense. When I hear the term “grass-roots movement,” I think of something that…
Economic Astronomy II: Gender Shares of Jobs
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 10, 2011 The other big gender-disparity graph making the rounds yesterday was this one showing the gender distribution in the general workforce and comparing that to science-related fields: This comes from an Economics and Statistics Administration report which has one of the greatest mismatches between the tone of the headline of the press release and the tone…
Economic Astronomy: Gender Gaps in Lifetime Earnings
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 10, 2011 There are two recent studies of gender disparities in science and technology (referred to by the faintly awful acronym “STEM”) getting a lot of play over the last few days. As is often the case with social-science results, the data they have aren’t quite the data you would really like to have, and I think…
Religion, Science, and Joy
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 2, 2011 I was just tagging this for the Links Dump, but I thought it deserved better. Fred Clark, blogdom’s best writer on politics and religion, is putting together a book-like thing from his blog, and has posted the introduction to the section on creationism: The oldest book in our Bible contains a hymn of praise to…
Reforming Education: Bonuses Aren’t Enough
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 20, 2011 One of the standard education reform proposals that gets suggested every time somebody brings up the condition of American public education is that teachers should be offered some form of performance incentive, whether in the form of “merit pay” programs on a continuing basis, or bonuses for reaching particular targets. This is one of those…
Grade Inflation? Blame the Baby Boomers
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 19, 2011 A lot of pixels have been spent discussing this study of grade inflation, brought to most people’s attention via this New York Times blog. The key graph is this one, showing the fraction of grades given in each letter category over the last fifty years: Lots of effort is being put into trying to explain…
Tribes, Classes, and Networking
Posted by Chad Orzel on July 14, 2011 Via Jessa Crispin on Twitter, there’s a really excellent article in the Paris Review about Harvard and Class: When I applied, I thought it would be great because I would get to meet lots of smart people. Those were the kinds of people I liked to be friends with, and I thought there would be…
I’ll Take “Hobbies Less Acceptable Than Blogging” for $1000, Alex
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 21, 2011 Via Inside Higher Ed, a professor in New Jersey took the whole social media thing to the next level: A Fairleigh Dickinson University physics professor is in custody for allegedly running a prostitution website involving about 200 women and more than 1,200 johns, police said Monday. David Flory of New York City, who teaches on…
It’s Not Just Science Journalism
Posted by Chad Orzel on June 6, 2011 One of the tabs I opened last week and didn’t have time to get to was this Clastic Detritus post about what it takes to get science stories in the media, which is (quoting Michael Lemonick): I get it that a stories involving science need a little something extra to make it in a magazine…
Is College Worth It?
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 17, 2011 As I noted the other day, we’re entering graduation season, one of the two month-long periods (the other being “back to school” time in August/September) when everybody pretends to care deeply about education. Accordingly, the people at the Pew Research Center have released a new report on the opinions of the general public and college…
