WHEREAS, Graduate Schools play an important role in enhancing the nation's economic competitiveness and innovation; and

WHEREAS, the National Science Foundation cites Illinois universities for attracting $5.4 billion in federally sponsored grants and contracts, over the past five years; and

WHEREAS, Illinois Graduate Schools play a vital role in developing the best and brightest domestic and globally recruited talent, evidenced by the fact that 46% of the Illinois legislature have received an advanced degree from an Illinois university, and 48% of certified elementary and secondary school teachers in Illinois have earned graduate degrees; and

WHEREAS, National laboratories in Illinois are dependent on graduate students and faculty from Illinois graduate schools; and

WHERAS, Graduate Education is inextricably linked to the global economy, evidenced by Illinois' #1 ranking in the Midwest as a destination for foreign investment, Illinois ability to attracted over 5,800 foreign businesses that employ more than 335,000 Illinois citizens, and Illinois Graduate Schools' ability to attract over 25,600 international students; and

WHERAS, the Illinois Association of Graduate Schools (IAGS), which represents private and public institutions statewide: 1) provides a forum for communication and develop a spirit of cooperation among graduate schools, graduate colleges, and graduate divisions of the colleges and universities of the State of Illinois; 2) plans and implements various mechanisms, consortia, and resource sharing to the benefit and best interests of graduate education, and the people of the State of Illinois; 3) serves in an advisory capacity, if so requested, to any State of Illinois agency or commission on matters relating to graduate education; and 4) aims to improve graduate education in the State of Illinois;

THEREFORE, I, Rod R. Blagojevich, Governor of the State of Illinois, do hereby proclaim October 20-24, 2008 as GRADUATE EDUCATION WEEK in Illinois and urge all citizens to recognize Graduate Deans and the Illinois Association of Graduate Schools for all that they do to promote graduate education and contribute to the public good.

Awesome! They finally realize that we're important. But wait... I can't seem to find the section in here where they treat us like real employees and offer us real health insurance and retirement benefits. Hmm... maybe if I look harder I can find that part that says something about only being paid for 20 hours a week when I'm working more than 60 teaching hundreds of students and doing research and not even really taking classes that 'costs' the university money. Maybe there's a little bit in there somewhere about giving us more money or benefits?

Wait... there's not?! that's odd. Why did they draft this thing then?

Can someone explain to me what the purpose of a 'proclamation' is?

What the midterm evaluation taught me.

1. Be specific with your language.

If you have a whole lot of foreign students who don't really understand the intricacies of your language things that you take for granted will be lost on them. If you write in your evaluation form, "Your instructor is...," They might just take you literally and write your name (the same goes for the text book title). This also made me realize that probably a full 90% of my humor is falling on deaf ears (no matter what country they are from. On the other hand if you cater to the person who only speaks basic English and can't understand the intricacies of the language the rest of the class will be bored so much so that they might decide that napping in class is a much better use of time than enjoying the lectures. I imagine that those who don't speak great English are also learning all sorts of interesting things about American culture.

2. Student evaluations are not that useful

I don't think people will actually be mean on an evaluation when they have to actually write something down as opposed to just choosing a number. Some of the comments are constructive, such as "slow down" or "more detail" but comments like "Steve is cool" or "Steve is a sharp dresser" only serves to stroke my already abnormally large ego and turn me into a raving egotistical teaching maniac who thinks his lectures and classroom/courtroom management skills are only equaled by Clarence Darrow. It would be really helpful if students could be prompted to be much more critical of me and my teaching style/skills. On the other hand one could wonder whether students really have any idea of what they actually need to do well and learn. Perhaps evaluations are not as useful for people who fool the class into thinking things by charisma alone as opposed to strict info only tutelage. Perhaps I should try to be more boring and see what happens?

3. Evaluations by an experienced instructor are ultimately more helpful than anything that can come from students.

I mean really, an experienced instructor isn't getting a grade from you and is in a different social position. It makes sense that they would be straight with you and have helpful ideas. When you dislike their comments it also makes you defend your own methods and figure out whether your own methods really make much sense to begin with. All in all I'm not sure I changed my teaching methods all that much from these rounds of evaluations - The most I'm learning about teaching is from the confused stares of the students when I try to explain the difference between two concepts that I barely understand the difference between. I think the next time around teaching and maybe even the next round of evaluations should really help me figure out what needs to improve since the things that obviously didn't work (that I totally know about) will be completely different.

Anyway... here's some of the details of the study:

In a recent experiment, captive primates were able to identify photos of their acquaintances' rears and match them with the right faces. The ability suggests that the animals possess mental "whole body" representations of other chimps they know.

Each participating chimp was flashed a picture of another's bum, with visible genitals, then shown the face of the derriere's owner and another face of the same gender.

Both males and females were successful in this anatomical match game, pairing faces and posteriors with much greater frequency than chance alone--but only if the photos showed chimps they already knew.

"Many animals look at parts of the body, the voice, the hands, as separate entities and don't wholly integrate them," said study co-author Frans de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Atlanta's Emory University.

On a related note, I know a professor who I guess I shouldn't mention by name who thinks that men have a breast related area. I'm not sure what evidence she has of this but I might be convinced.

-via Neatorama-

WATERBURY, Vt. -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow's milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman.

"PETA's request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow's milk in the food he serves," the statement says.

PETA officials say a move to human breast milk would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health.

Hmm.. I'm feeling a great business plan coming on here that shouldn't cause any problems whatsoever... I'm going to be impregnating women and then artificially keep them lactating all the while confining them to cages in order to harvest their breast milk. If that doesn't work I guess I can just open up a milking center at the mall so that I can get new mothers to stop by for a few minutes while I milk them. I could even offer them.. well lets see I could probably extract less than a gallon at a time...so at current rates - maybe offer them 10 cents for their time? I'll bet I could get at least enough milk from 100 malls to maybe provide enough ice cream for 1 mall.

Does anyone want to invest in my idea? All I need... a few trucks, a few refrigerators, and a whole shit load of breast pumps.

Time and Place
Date: Saturday, September 27, 2008
Time: 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Location: Jupiter's Pizza
Street: 39 Main St
City/Town: Champaign, IL

You can also check out the event (and RSVP) on facebook.com

We look forward to seeing you there! We'll even be buying a round or two!

Christopher was just a few days old and had a rare blood infection and fungal meningitis, a brain infection.

"I could tell in their eyes they had no hope for my son," Gorman said. "They told me to prepare for his death. They told me he might not make it through the night."

Gorman never believed the doctors. In fact, she did something she thinks annoyed these men and women of science: She prayed. She prayed all the time.

"They made me feel ridiculous for praying so much and so hard and leaving it up to God," said Gorman, who lives in Idaho Falls, Idaho. "But I told them my son not surviving was not an option."

When he was a month old, Christopher left the hospital. He's been healthy ever since, she says. He turns 3 next month.

"It was a miracle," she said. "There are just things doctors can't explain. Doctors are not in control of everything. There's stuff that happens every day that they can't explain."

A new study finds that many Americans have that same kind of faith. In the study, 57 percent of randomly surveyed adults said God's intervention could save a deathly ill family member even if physicians said treatment would be futile.

However, just under 20 percent of doctors and other medical workers said God could reverse a helpless outcome.

The study was published last month in Archives of Surgery and is one of many to show a "faith gap" between doctors and patients.

I get a little confused by studies like this. They are always made out in the press to sound like they are actually showing a relationship between praying and miracle healing or whatever. But all that they show is that a small number of people have ridiculous beliefs about medical miracles at the hand of God. A more informative study would be to correlate these people's beliefs and their reasoning ability as well as some measure of how good doctors are that believe that miracles could cure their patients. I don't think I want my doctor praying for my dying father when instead he could be working to actually save his life.

I'm also a little confused on the reporting. If you ARE going to report something like this you might want to at least write something to the effect that miracles=woo and that a single case does not science make.

Ohh.. well what are you going to do.

But hey... it's only 28$ I'm not sure how you can afford to NOT get one!

-via boingboing gadgets-

We look forward to meeting all you ScienceBlogs fans here in Champaign-Urbana. Home of.... uhh... the University of Illinois and uhh... corn?

Anyone else up for meeting up for some beers? (Or Soda... or I guess even water)

Any date preferences?

I'll be posting many more of my Psych 100 videos as I run across them for the rest of the semester :)

Check it out:

The Professor Funk also has a whole bunch of other entertaining looking videos about other aspects of science. We give them 4 thumbs up. I never did understand why Ebert, et. al. could only ever give a single thumbs up. After all there were two people with four total thumbs. Meh whatever, not everyone can be as awesome as Shelley and I.

Dear Reader,

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Now, we invite you to share with us directly your perspective on the state of science, and your opinion on how we can improve our own efforts to raise science literacy. The survey should take about 20 minutes to complete.

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Hook Adam up and head over there :)

It all starts innocently with this perfectly normal sounding setup:

Chem. Commun., 2007, 1733 - 1735, DOI: 10.1039/b614147a Electrochemical synthesis of metal and semimetal nanotube-nanowire heterojunctions and their electronic transport properties

Dachi Yang, Guowen Meng, Shuyuan Zhang, Yufeng Hao, Xiaohong An, Qing Wei, Min Ye and Lide Zhang

Metal and semimetal nanotube-nanowire heterojunction arrays have been achieved by sequential electrochemical-deposition inside the nanochannels of anodic aluminium oxide template with a layer of Au thin enough to leave the pores open.

Neato, Eh?! This is where it all goes horribly wrong:

Uh oh... cunt. uhhh huh huuuh heh huh huh.... I think I'm going to start a Beavis and Butthead knockoff where we read science papers. Maybe Mystery Science Theater 3000 would be a better show to knock off. meh... hehe... cunt.

-Thanks Terry! Via Carbon Based Curiosities-