Education
drorzel | August 31, 2011A currently popular explanation for the increasing price of higher education is that all those tuition dollars are being soaked up by bloated bureaucracy-- that is, that there are too many administrators for the number of faculty and students involved. While I like this better than the "tenured faculty are greedy and lazy" explanation you sometimes hear, I'm not sure it's any more valid. In part because proponents make it difficult to see if it's any more valid.
One of the major proponents of the administrative bloat idea is Benjamin Ginsberg, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, who is…
pharyngula | August 30, 2011Two years ago, a California science foundation gave permission to to the American Freedom Alliance ("freedom" is like "family" in these organizations; when you see it, you should be instantly suspicious) to show a movie in their IMAX theater. The film was titled "Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record", and it was an Intelligent Design propaganda piece. This happens fairly often; these sleazy organizations love to present the illusion of being scientific, so they like to rent out halls in museums and universities in order to put on their shows. The physics auditorium on…
krandall | August 29, 2011By Dr. Rachel Mastrapa; Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute, and Gail Jacobs
Rachel Mastrapa studies the surface processes of icy Solar System bodies by interpreting their infrared spectra. The majority of her work involves performing the ground truth measurements in the laboratory including calculating the complex indices of refraction of single composition ice samples. These measurements are then used to construct model spectra to interpret the chemical composition of observed spectra. She also studies the subtle changes seen in ice mixtures that are not…
kcollins | August 29, 2011At AT&T, research scientist Alicia Abella is known as a "change agent," an innovator who is keeping her corporation on the cutting edge of developing new and better ways to help people and companies communicate with each other -- including through innovations in teleconferencing, Web-based solutions and iPhone application-based approaches that increase work efficiency and rapid-response collaboration across the globe.
"We are really trying to enhance the way individuals communicate with each other over distance and time," says Alicia, Executive Director of Innovative Services Research at…
pharyngula | August 25, 2011Richard Dawkins hits this one out of the park: he slams the ignorance of Rick Perry specifically and the Republican party generally. There is no excuse for the foolishness we get from Perry, or Bachmann, or Huckabee, or Palin, or Robertson, or any of the candidates who have sought validation through the Republicans — it's as if they're selecting for stupidity.
There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today's Republican party (I disavow the…
pharyngula | August 24, 2011Here's an educational opportunity for everyone!
The Community College of Rhode Island [CCRI] has proudly announced that this fall, a "reiki master" will be holding a seminar on "crystal and mineral healing" at the college. This, we're told, is
…a type of alternative therapy that involves laying crystals or gemstones on the body. Each student will experience a crystal therapy session and get a really good idea about how it changes your energy and rebalances you.
This instructor at CCRI also does "Cranio Sacral Therapy," and uses such advanced quackery as "Bio Magnets," "Light Life Tools," "…
tlambert | August 24, 2011This is a guest post from John Mashey.
An amusing coincidence surfaced a few days ago, relating the US Presidential
campaign of Texas Governor Rick Perry to the Peter Wood kerfuffle at Chronicle
of Higher Education (CHE), including the stir in some parts of the
blogosphere.
I explain that, followed by the weird background.
0) Rick Perry and Peter Wood1) Chronology at CHE and NAS2) Deltoid and elsewhere3) Climate thuggery discovered by blogosphere4) Chronology of the thuggery wave5) Conclusion
0) Rick Perry and Peter Wood
See Washington Post, 08/18/11 Fact-Checker:
href="http://www.…
pharyngula | August 21, 2011David Colquhoun has posted an excellent series of posts on the Steiner Waldorf schools, 19th century crackpottery that persists even now, by hiding their fundamentally pseudoscientific basis under a fog of fancy invented terms. He discusses their goofy philosophy of anthroposophistry, their devious efforts to get state funding, and their unfortunate buy unsurprising history of racism. It's wild and crazy stuff, and it's been sidling under the radar for a while.
What initially drew me to DC's site was his article on quackery in retreat: the University of Westminster has discarded some of…
tfk | August 19, 2011Yesterday, Rick Perry commented "in Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools, because I figured you're smart enough to figure out which one is right." It got a lot of play, including my own post on the matter.
PolitiFact Texas examined the issue, providing a nice summary of recent fights at the state board of education over evolution and creationism:
We wondered whether heâs correct that creationism, the biblical explanation of human origins, and evolution, the scientific theory, are both taught in Texas public schools.
The U.S. Supreme Court has said that…
drorzel | August 15, 2011Over 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 has widespread popularity among the public at a low level, with that public support forcing political elites to take notice. Things like organized labor back in the day, or antiwar activism in the Vietnam era.
That's almost the opposite of how the term is used here. If we…
catdynamics | August 11, 2011Last year, Brad deLong did a most excellent dissection of the lecture, how it came to be, and why universities need to rethink the whole approach to learning concept before they get eaten by technology development providing even cheaper content delivery.
I've been meaning to editorialize on this for a while, and then Chad planning for start of classes prodded me into action, doubly so when Chad posted a link to jolly nice resource for active learning in physics at Learnification
Now, others have provided expositions on how to teach wellgreat...
So I guess it is up to me to risk the wrath of…
jtoney | August 2, 2011This piece was co-authored with Sir Harold Kroto.
New legislation suggests a more appropriate name for the U.S.A.: The Unenlightened States of America.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced the "Defending Childhood" campaign, focused on violence prevention, offering an opportunity for us to reflect upon sectarian violence, religious indoctrination and ethics and education. In the 40 years since the April 20, 1971 Supreme Court decision of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the landscape of American education has changed beyond its original goal of racial…
jdupuis | July 30, 2011Let's talk about Plagiarism
Who Is Punished for Plagiarism?
NYU Prof Vows Never to Probe Cheating Again--and Faces a Backlash
If your website's full of assholes, it's your fault
What Tech Do You Bring to Conferences?
Overeducated, Underemployed: How to fix humanities grad school
Know Your Value
"I graduated from a top library school." Yeah, so what?
The role of Facebook and Twitter in scientific citations and impact factors
Tweeting Science
Google Plus and The Social Media Moonshot
Does the Murdoch Hacking Scandal Signify the End of Privacy?
You Stay Classy, Ivory Tower!
Google Plus,…
oracknows | July 27, 2011The infiltration of quackademic medicine continues apace.
I know, I know. I say that a lot, but it's only because it is, alas, so very, very true and so very, very distressing to supporters of science-based medicine. It's not as though I haven't written about it many, many times over the last six and a half years; indeed, it's become a major theme of this blog and at least one other blog that regular readers here might be familiar with. Whether it be the American Medical Students Association (AMSA) pitching woo, Georgetown going beyond electives in "complementary and alternative medicine" (…
lborkowski | July 20, 2011One of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act is a requirement that new health plans cover preventive services for women without deductibles or co-payments. The Department of Health and Human Services asked the Institute of Medicine to review what preventive services are important to women's health and well-being and make recommendations about which of these should be required to be covered without cost-sharing.
The IOM issued its report, Clinical Preventive Services for Women: Closing the Gaps, yesterday, and it focuses on the preventive services not already spelled out for coverage in…
oracknows | July 17, 2011Note: I just got back from TAM; so if you happened to see a different version of this post somewhere else, now you know why.
Last week while I was at TAM, a study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). It is another beautiful example of how proponents of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) are able to spin even hugely negative results into something that supports CAM. Because I was at TAM, I didn't actually notice the article at first, but notice it I did eventually. Upon seeing it, my first question was: What on earth are the editors of NEJM smoking. Oddly enough,…
jtoney | July 16, 2011
With heated discussion about raising the debt ceiling for the U.S., this is a good time for some perspective about America's top earners and for some ideas of how their enormous earnings could lead to public good. No, they can't solve our spending problem, tax system or get us out of debt, but they do have some options unavailable to the average citizen. Public indignation over huge bonuses for bankers is old news, but a recent report that the top 25 hedge fund managers averaged $1 billion per year is a bit much.
Even more striking is the top ten list, with David Tepper (Appaloosa…
jdupuis | July 5, 2011Yet another science blogging community. The more the merrier.
We've had another quiet period in the science blogging universe these last couple of months. It seems that the rapid evolution that kicked off with the founding of Scientopia in the wake of Pepsigate is continuing.
And this is the big one: Scientific American Blogs. This is easily the biggest and most important science blogging community launch since ScienceBlogs itself launched back in 2006.
Of course, it was engineered by the master of us all, Bora Zivkovic.
Here's what he has to say about the makeup of the network:
Diversity…
jtoney | July 2, 2011
Photo Source, D W S' Flickr Photostream.
Dr. Cynthia Boaz, an assistant professor of political science at Sonoma State University, published a thoughtful article at Truthout that deconstructs an example of a news media outlet that is not "fair and balanced." I would like to share her analysis as "14 Ways to Skin a FOX {News}", supplemented with my own commentary. Note that this is in no way unique to FOX News and is presented to readers as a case study for your consideration.
As one of my mentors once told me:
Sometimes when you make an omelet you've gotta break a few eggs.
Below are…
kcollins | July 1, 2011 We've all heard the news: U.S. students aren't pursuing engineering careers in sufficient numbers to keep pace with the technical demands that our global markets will require for the future. So where do we start in turning this situation around? The answer is really quite basic, according to Celeste Baine, director of the Engineering Education Service Center (EESC) and the award-winning author of more than 6 publications on motivating and educating students towards engineering careers. "We've got to start communicating and demonstrating to students how important engineering is in…