khannula

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June 9, 2009
I spent last Friday grading for my five-week summer class. It took about nine hours*, which wasn't that bad, considering that the main graded work consisted of papers. I like making students write. It lets me see their thought processes, and helps me differentiate between the students who can…
June 8, 2009
Much of the celebration of World Oceans Day focuses on the ocean's importance as an ecosystem, especially in relation to climate change. But the bottom of the ocean is still relatively unknown - I've been told by marine geologists that we know the topography of Venus better than that of our own…
June 7, 2009
I bet I'm not the only geologist who always wants to list "time machine" in the budget request for every grant proposal I write. Yes, we've got a lot of tools to sort out what's happened in the past, but wouldn't it be a lot easier if we could just go back and see for ourselves? So I love this…
June 2, 2009
There's a question-and-answer in The Scientist online [free registration required] entitled "Is Tenure Worth Saving?" The interviewee, Dan Clawson (a tenured sociologist at the University of Massachusetts) goes through some of the history that's all-too-familiar to people who want jobs in academia…
May 30, 2009
I made a promise to myself that every month, I would at least look through the abstracts on my RSS feeds and note interesting articles that I wanted to find time to read. So now it's May 30, and I'd better do it before the June issues come out. So... articles in the May issue of Geology that look…
May 28, 2009
When I saw there was going to be a discussion of issues facing mid-career faculty at last year's Geological Society of America meeting, my first thought was: "Call the waaaaaaahmbulance!" I mean, pre-tenure faculty have issues. Job-hunting post-docs have issues. ABD grad students have issues. Mid-…
May 28, 2009
My climatological Scibling Stoat used "geologist" as an insult, I think: hard rock geologists have done rather poorly in science, because they have become unfashionable Hey! I resemble that remark! (Point taken, at least career-wise. In the past 20 years, many departments have replaced retiring…
May 25, 2009
You would think that, with 4.6 billion years of geologic history to play with, geologists wouldn't get all hung up about a mere 2.6 million years. But when those 2.6 million years include the glacial episode popularly known as the Ice Ages (and the evolution of some weird naked ape), well...…
May 24, 2009
The Accretionary Wedge, the monthly carnival of geology, is still alive! Or, well, it's still active, at least. Its originator, Brian, got too busy to keep it up, so he handed off responsibilities to Lockwood (of Outside the Interzone), Chris (of goodSchist and the Podclast), and me. Lockwood will…
May 20, 2009
I have a confession to make. My favorite rocks are flaky. Really flaky. Phyllites are the metamorphic rock that gets left out of intro geology labs. They're kind of like slates, in that they break into slabs. But they're shiny like schists. The crystals are too small to see with the naked eye -…
May 18, 2009
Andrew Alden at about.com received a question from a reader. She's in her second year studying geology in Australia, she likes hard rock stuff, she thinks mining and petroleum sound interesting, and she's worried about juggling it all with a small child. I teach a fair number of non-traditional…
May 17, 2009
In the news this week: Andy Revkin at the NY Times has a news story and a blog post about the UN's new report assessing disaster risk. One of the experts quoted in his story sent him a comment with a lot of concern about the promotional video. Dave Petley (who writes Dave's Landslide Blog) looked…
May 17, 2009
Earlier this month, a group of biologists, oceanographers, volcanologists, geophysicists, and other scientists from many institutions took a trip to the area between Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga to look at actively erupting submarine volcanoes, including a backarc spreading ridge (never directly observed…
May 14, 2009
Water. Too much and you drown, not enough and you die of thirst. Getting it just right is important. But how? One of the fears associated with global warming is that it could lead to droughts that could lead to wars. There was an essay in Nature in March that argued that those wars don't really…
May 13, 2009
Ok, you're probably thinking. Now she's really lost it. California's got earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, coastal erosion, oil, gold, sinking ground, a funky inland delta with levees in danger of failing, major water issues... and that's not even getting into the really cool stuff, like…
May 11, 2009
One year ago today, a M 7.9 earthquake struck the Chinese province of Sichuan. It was horrific. I don't have anything profound or helpful to say about it myself, but I want to pass on links to other remembrances: Berkeley SeismoBlog explains the tectonics of the earthquake, and the possibility (…
May 8, 2009
So you're a fairly new professor, done with classes for the summer, ready to dive into research. And then you get your course evaluations back. What do you do? If the course evaluations were excellent, yay! You can walk around feeling good about yourself for a while, and then go back to the…
May 6, 2009
I'm neck-deep in a five-week summer class, and spending my evenings reading for class prep and thinking about how to run discussions. So I'm on a blogging semi-hiatus, at least until I've got an hour or two free of other commitments. In the meantime, I'll occasionally post some of my old favorites…
May 3, 2009
I'm deep in class-by-class planning for the summer session class that I start teaching tomorrow. I've decided not to blog about the class once it starts, in part because I'm going to be encouraging the use of Internet sources, and I expect my students to run across the geoblogosphere and Science…
April 30, 2009
I should have finished designing the new version of my disasters class. I've been thinking about it forever. But then I was trying to get a paper written, and then I went to a conference, and then there were senior thesis presentations and end-of-semester grading and a six-year-old's birthday, and…
April 25, 2009
It's that time of year again. The plotter is out of paper and the students have new haircuts and clothes I've never seen. It must be time for senior thesis presentations. In about an hour and a half, the senior geology students will be giving 15-minute talks (the same length as at professional…
April 23, 2009
I got back from a conference Tuesday night, and came home to the craziness of the semester's end. Part of me wants to blog about how cool undergraduate research is, after we had our big school-wide undergraduate research symposium, but I really should be grading the proposals for next year's senior…
April 17, 2009
I've been awakened by an earthquake, but it was only M 4. I can't imagine what it would have been like to be in San Francisco 103 years ago this morning, when a M 8-ish earthquake struck at 5:12 am. Shaking ten times stronger than the Loma Prieta earthquake - I couldn't stand up in M 7 quake; would…
April 16, 2009
I'm brainstorming for my summer class, and I'm thinking about creating an exercise or assignment in which students try to figure out whether a web site (or blog post, or whatever) is reliable. (I'm going to be teaching in a computer classroom, so I've got a choice of having students do a homework…
April 16, 2009
Last night, we were having another one of those incredible dust storms that have been blowing in this spring (and which may be decimating the spring snowpack). This morning, I woke up to this: I was happy to see it - it will melt by the end of the day, and will keep the soil from being so…
April 15, 2009
The cores of mountain belts formed by continental collisions often contain metamorphic rocks, formed when sediments were buried in the collision and transformed by heat and pressure. But the heat and pressure don't happen simultaneously - rocks can be buried (and increase in pressure) much faster…
April 13, 2009
My reviewers commenters on yesterday's post on chocolate chip cookie deformation had some great points. (Some of them also seem to have been very hungry. For those who want me to experiment more, and to get to analyze the results: looks like I've got something that I can promise once the Donors…
April 12, 2009
I probably shouldn't have baked chocolate chip cookies yesterday, what with today being one of the two biggest chocolate-buzz holidays on the American calendar. But I did. I've had a lot of trouble figuring out the best recipe adjustments for high elevation. My cookies have a tendency to puff up…
April 11, 2009
Advising and registration for summer and fall semesters has just finished, so I've been spending a lot of time talking and thinking about general education requirements. In particular, I've been thinking about one question: why? What's the point of general education requirements? What are they good…
April 9, 2009
The Small Human sometimes insists that I build Something with his legos. So today, in honor of National Poetry Month, I made this: Can anyone name that poem? (It's about the only poem that I have memorized.) (This post is brought to you by the encouragement of my English-major husband.)