Education
oracknows | July 6, 2012What would we do without the Internet?
It's become so necessary, so pervasive, so utterly all-enveloping that it's hard to imagine a world without it. Given how much it pervades everything these days, it's easy to forget that it wasn't that long ago that the Internet was primarily the domain of universities and large research groups. Indeed, the Internet hasn't really been widely and easily available to the average citizen for very long at all. Go back 20 years, and most people didn't have it. For example, Netscape Navigator, the popular browser that made the Internet accessible, wasn't…
lborkowski | July 6, 2012By Anthony Robbins
On 19 June, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and other Federal agencies and private sector groups concerned with worker health convened a two-day workshop at the Department of Labor’s Frances Perkins Building in Washington. About 100 researchers gathered to discuss how workers compensation data could be analyzed and used to study worker safety and health. NIOSH asked me to moderate the first session. I was flattered, but for all my roles in public health since leaving NIOSH’s directorship in 1981, I was surely not an expert in workers’ compensation…
jdupuis | July 5, 2012I'm on my annual summer hiatus for the month of July so I'll be only publishing my weekly Friday Fun posts as well as re-posting some of the interviews I did a few years ago on the old blog with people from the publishing, library and science worlds. Not that my posting of late has been particularly distinguishable from the hiatus state, but such is the blogging life after nearly ten years: filled with ups, downs, peaks, valleys.
This interview, with Eugene Wallingford, is from July 9, 2008.
I'm hoping to get these out weekly, but we'll see. They're mostly cobbled together in odd moments…
sastyk | July 3, 2012A little while back we took our current foster sons to visit the university where Eric teaches physics. The boys had never visited a university before, and were curious about who goes there and what they do when they are there. This led to a discussion of the value of a college education, what kinds of jobs require college, and what kind don't.
From here, we segued to "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and it was here that the enormous gap between my biological children, trained from birth to see an adult profession/vocation, mixed perhaps with informal economic activities, as…
sa smith | June 26, 2012File this under 'Religion has nothing to do with morality'--
Some religions have a problem with a vaccine that, when dosed appropriately early enough, virtually eliminates risk of cervical cancer, as virtually all cervical cancer is caused by HPV. Its even better if males get the vaccine as well, not only because if fewer males get HPV, fewer males can transmit HPV to females-- but also because the HPV vaccine might protect against non-cervical HPV cancers (which males can get).
I wish I was making this up, but some religions reject the HPV vaccine because it will turn little girls (its…
jdupuis | June 26, 2012This collection of posts is only the tip of the iceberg of reaction to the ongoing controversy at the University of Virginia. For more, see the first item in the list for a digital archive.
I consider this particular crisis a very interesting one to follow, one with implications for all universities and similar in scope and importance as the McMaster and Harvard Libraries controversies were for libraries. I guess I'll have to come up with one of these posts for the Harvard reorganization too. The current crisis at the Library and Archives Canada seems to have larger implications as well,…
jrosenhouse | June 24, 2012Among the side effects of all the asinine hand-wringing over the phony problem of “scientism” is that it distracts attention from the real threat facing the humanities. I am referring to the corporate mindset that has come to dominate many aspects of higher education.
That threat is on full display in the current fracas at the University of Virginia, where the Board ousted the popular President, basically because she wasn't moving fast enough to gut the humanities. HuffPo has a useful run-down:
Members of the board, steeped in a culture of corporate jargon and buzzy management theories,…
esiegel | June 22, 2012"Some prophecies are self-fulfilling
But I've had to work for all of mine
Better times will come to me, God willing
Cause I can't leave this world behind" -Josh Ritter
You sure can't leave this world behind. At least, not very easily. The reason for it, of course, is gravity.
Image Credit: Physclips, via the University of New South Wales' School of Physics.
Here on the surface of the Earth, the gravitational potential well is pretty large; large enough that there's no easy way off. Sure, you can pour a huge amount of energy into a rocket to try and overcome this gravitational potential…
tsmith | June 21, 2012This is the tenth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Jean DeNapoli.
I own a small back yard flock of sheep and lambing season is the most exciting and rewarding time of the year. Nothing is more enjoyable than watching a lamb who takes a few wobbly steps and nurses for the first time as her mother nickers encouragement. Within a day, the lamb will be playing, bucking, running, and exploring her world.
Despite the pastoral wonders of the season, lambing is also inherently stressful. I must constantly check the barn to monitor for birthing problems and help out when necessary. This…
esiegel | June 20, 2012“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.” -Frank Zappa
Inside of every student I've ever taught lives a passionate, curious mind that can either flourish or stagnate, both inside and outside the classroom. The teachers that get it -- that get you -- are the ones that help bring you there, but that is not all teachers, not by any means. I think everyone, by this point in their life, has had experience with at least one teacher that stands out…
jtoney | June 19, 2012
Kean University Graduates 2012
At my Commencement Speech to the Class of 2012 at Carteret High School this Thursday, I will deliver something like this:
Class of 2012: You need to fail more …. take chances …. Reach.
Let me explain.
After hearing my bio, some of you might think of that person who has succeeded at anything. You may know someone like that. He can earn A’s without much studying, letter in a varsity sport without much sweat. Life seems easy, because he never faces defeat or failure. I am not that person. I am lucky enough to be a leader in higher education because I…
jrosenhouse | June 19, 2012Over at Kevin Drum's blog, there is an interesting exchange between Drum and an unnamed college professor. In a post that was primarily about issues related to paying for a college education, Drum wrote:
The fact is that UCLA provides undergraduates with an education that's just as good as Harvard, and the country might be a better place if we all faced up to that and took Harvard and the rest of our super-elite universities off the pedestal we've placed them on. That pedestal has long since become corrosive and damaging to the public welfare.
Alas, the unnamed professor provides provides…
jdupuis | June 9, 2012
Academic Librarians As Campus Hubs
Intellectual Freedom and the Library as a Workplace
MLA Shift on Copyright
Book Beat 2012 (on university presses at BEA)
Commencement Address to Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School (Laurence Lessig on political corruption)
How to Fail When Using Internal Social Media
The Curious Case of Internet Privacy (by Cory Doctorow)
Reaching Out: Why Geeks Need a Manifesto
How journals once facilitated and now hinder scientific progress.
Top Libraries in U.S. and Canada Issue Statement Demanding Better Ebook Services
How President Obama could really lead on open…
oracknows | May 28, 2012I always thought that the University of Toronto was a great school, but lately I've been starting to have my doubts.
My doubts began three years ago, when I noticed that Autism One Canada, which is basically the Canadian version of the yearly antivaccine biomedical quackfest held every Memorial Day week in the Chicago area, was being held at the University of Toronto. As I said at the time, "Say it ain't so!" As it turns out, it wasn't so, at least not exactly, in that the University of Toronto wasn't sponsoring the quackfest. Rather, Autism One had rented a hall at the University of Toronto…
gregladen | May 21, 2012Missouri, the "Show Me State," had two bills in the state house that wuld have promoted Intelligent Design in the public school science class. The legislature adjourned a couple of days ago without advancing the bills, and that is how a bill dies. RIP bad bills in Missouri.
Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Evolution is Real! The Asbury Park (as in The Boss) carried out a poll along with Monmouth University which asked if citizens "believe in" evolution. 51% said yes, 42% said no, and 7% said they didn't know. I would apply a 1% correction to that to account for Snarky Skeptics who would say "Believe…
sa smith | May 16, 2012La Sierra University April 2011--
L. Lee Grismer, a field biologist at La Sierra University in Riverside, is gaga over a new species of forest gecko from Southeast Asia that he will present in the scientific journal Zootaxa in three months.
...
Grismer will test his hypothesis that the forest lizard is closely related to another new species he discovered last June. He will isolate the forest gecko's DNA and compare it to that of a similar reptile he tracked down in a cave at the Malaysia-Thailand border.
"We're still in the age of discovery," said Grismer, who is credited with detecting more…
drorzel | May 16, 2012
n+1: Lions in Winter, Part One
A very long and thorough history of the New York Public Library, how its current plans to gut the main research library came about, and what they mean for the idea of a public research library.
Correcting the Record on College Graduates and Job Prospects by Joshua Tucker | Washington Monthly
Using the same American Community Survey for 2009 and 2010 as Fogg and Harrington, but focussing on actual unemployment by major, Carnevale, Cheat and Strohl (Hard Times, Georgetown University, Center for Education and the Workforce, 2011) have similar findings (p. 7).…
jhalper | May 14, 2012Sometime around junior high, this Weizmann science writer stumbled upon Mathematical Games, the late Martin Gardner's monthly math puzzle at the back of my mom's Scientific American, and I became a devotee. The best ones, of course, were those that required a little sideways thinking, and these yielded the pleasure of that "Aha" moment when the answer became clear. (For more on the neurobiology of the Aha moment, look at our site.)
So it is no surprise (to me at least) that of the hundreds of science education programs offered through the Davidson Institute of Science Education (the…
cmonforton | May 1, 2012Earlier this month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a report on the snail's pace of the OSHA process of issuing new rules to protect workers from health and safety hazards on-the-job. One telling table in the document showed the agency issued about 20 new major regulations in each of the previous two decades (i.e., 24 in the 1980's and 23 in the 1990's), but during the 2000's, OSHA only issued 10 final rules. Although some of these regulations only affected a fraction of all U.S. businesses because the hazards are industry-specific (e.g., servicing of rim wheels, grain…
lborkowski | April 27, 2012By Rena Steinzor, cross-posted from CPRBlog
Yesterday evening, when press coverage had ebbed for the day, the Department of Labor issued a short, four-paragraph press release announcing it was withdrawing a rule on child labor on farms. The withdrawal came after energetic attacks by the American Farm Bureau, Republicans in Congress, Sarah Palin, and--shockingly--Al Franken (D-MN).
Last year, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis said: "Children employed in agriculture are some of the most vulnerable workers in America." "Ensuring their welfare is a priority of the department, and this proposal is…