Education
oracknows | March 21, 2011I graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in the late 1980s. Back then, U. of M. was really hardcore about science back then, so much so that it was viewed as seriously old-school. No new (at the time) organ system approach for us! During the first two years, ever four weeks, like clockwork, we'd have what was called a concurrent examination, which basically meant that we were tested (with multiple choice tests, of course!) on every subject on the same morning. At the time I was there, the medical curriculum for the first two years had been fairly constant for quite some time…
drorzel | March 17, 2011The 2011 NCAA Men's Basketball Championship officially started Tuesday, with the first of the "First Four" games, formerly known as the "play-in" game. It gets going in earnest today, though, which means that once this posts, I'll be shutting the Internet down and working like crazy for a few hours, so I can justify moving everything into the living room and working at a slower pace through a long, glorious afternoon of hoops overload. I may or may not post periodic updates on Twitter (mirrored to Facebook), so if you want live-ish sort-of-blogging follow me there.
As always, the run-up to…
drorzel | March 16, 2011
Who Benefits Most From Attending Top Colleges? - Innovations - The Chronicle of Higher Education
"Now [Stacy] Dale, a senior researcher with Mathematica Policy Research, and [Alan] Krueger, a professor at Princeton University, are back with an extension of their earlier research, examining earnings over a longer period of time, looking also at a second more recent cohort of students and using a new database for earnings. They find that neither average school SAT nor tuition cost affects earnings on average, but that certain groups--black and Hispanic students and those with parents with…
lborkowski | March 8, 2011Given how many complaints we've been hearing lately about wasteful government spending, I thought this might be a good time to highlight some lesser-known, worthwhile government-funded programs that promote public health. (Core agency functions, like EPA's Clean Air Act enforcement, are also crucial for public health, but I trust this audience is already fairly familiar with them.)
One example - which comes immediately to mind because we have one affiliated with our department here at the George Washington University School of Public Health & Health Services - is pediatric environmental…
tfk | March 7, 2011BCSE reports, via the Independent:
A prominent British imam has been forced to retract his claims that Islam is compatible with Darwin's theory of evolution after receiving death threats from fundamentalists.
Dr Usama Hasan, a physics lecturer at Middlesex University and a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, was intending yesterday to return to Masjid al-Tawhid, a mosque in Leyton, East London, for the first time since he delivered a lecture there entitled "Islam and the theory of evolution".
But according to his sister, police advised him not to attend after becoming concerned for his…
drorzel | March 2, 2011
Charlie Sheen Quotes Cats « Medium Large
"Because turnaround is fair play...or some nonsense like that."
(tags: internet silly culture television movies pictures)
Neil Tyson's Advice to Young Science Communicators | The Intersection | Discover Magazine
"So in graduate school, I wrote a question and answer column for StarDate magazine, out of the University of Texas, and that became a book, and when you have a book, TV shows want your views on things-one thing leads to another. But in all cases, the common denominator is that it starts out by writing.
So my advice to someone who wanted to…
mikethemadbiologist | February 28, 2011By way of Bob Somerby, we come across this Brookings Institution report by Tom Loveless, "How Well Are American Students Learning?" There's a lot in the report, especially since it's really three studies rolled into one, but part of section I, which debunks the notion that Finland has the best educational system in the world highlights the intersection of educational goals, curriculum, and testing. Loveless writes (p. 10):
But by 1999, Finland slipped to only a little above average in TIMSS (z-score of 0.06), ranking fifth of the original twelve countries and fourteenth of all countries…
oracknows | February 27, 2011Naturopathy has been a recurrent topic on this blog. The reasons should be obvious. Although homeopathy is the one woo to rule them all in the U.K. and much of Europe, here in the U.S. homeopathy is not nearly as big a deal. Arguably, some flavor of naturopathy is the second most prevalent "alternative medical system" here, after chiropractic of course, and perhaps duking it out with traditional Chinese medicine, although naturopathy does embrace TCM as part of the armamentarium of dubious medical systems that it uses. In any case, some sixteen states and five Canadian provinces license…
oracknows | February 25, 2011It's Friday. That means I'm in the mood for something more amusing. In the past, I used to use Fridays to have some fun with some particularly outrageous bit of woo, such as quantum homeopathy or DNA activation. Lately, I haven't done Your Friday Dose of Woo nearly as often as I used to, but that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate good woo when I see it. However, some bits of craziness just aren't suitable for YFDoW not so much because they aren't crazy enough but because of the deadly seriousness of the intent or because they lack that light-hearted bit of looniness that characterizes the…
jdupuis | February 21, 2011While I don't have a huge amount of experience reading science-themed graphic novels, I do sort of have a sense that they come in two different broad categories.
The first is basically transforming a boring, stilted, text-heavy textbook into a boring, stilted, illustration- and text-heavy graphic novel. In other words, the producers think that anything in graphic novel format will by definition be more interesting and engaging than something that's purely text-based.
The second involves taking advantage of the strengths of the graphic novel format to re-imagine how scientific knowledge can…
jdupuis | February 19, 2011
Earn a Nobel Prize in your Lunch-Break! The Best "Citizen Science" Games Reviewed!
Digital Technology Innovation in Scholarly Communication and University Engagement
On Twitter and Machiavellian Intelligence
Who Needs a Netbook?
Tech Tools for Scholars - The Sequel
From the Archives: On Blogging
Letter Re Software and Scientific Publications - Nature
The urgency for change
In Defense of Science Blogs (yes again)
Want to succeed in online content? Get small, be open, go free
Science Dogme: a manifesto for science, technology and medicine exhibitions and here for the article.
Citation tools…
pharyngula | February 17, 2011So I guess they can't be all bad. Yesterday, I chastised Michio Kaku severely for stepping out of his expertise as a physicist to say something stupid about biology. James Kakalios agreed with me, and sent along a little essay about the subject that also makes the point that expertise is important.
In Defense of Elites
James Kakalios
Following the recent mid-term elections, the consensus of many pundits is that this past November the American public sent a strong message of "anti-elitism." The good news is that nothing could be further from the truth.
Americans are certainly not anti-…
oracknows | February 16, 2011$37 million.
If you were a medical school dean or a hospital administrator and had $37 million for a project, how woud you use it? What would you build? What would you renovate? What research projects would you fund? What infrastructure improvements would you make? Yes, $37 million is a lot of green. Back at my old job, if memory serves me correctly, a whole new addition to the cancer center that nearly tripled its square footage cost somewhere in the range of $35-40 million. True, that was nearly ten years ago; so building the same building might now cost more than $37 million. My point…
oracknows | February 16, 2011A couple of weeks ago, I had a bit of fun with a position statement by the International Medical Council on Vaccination (IMCV), which I called, in my own inimitable fashion, The clueless cite the ignorant to argue against vaccines. That's exactly what it was, too, some truly clueless anti-vaccinationists arguing against vaccines and bolstering their argument with a hilariously pathetic list of signatories, among which were noted anti-vaccine activists, chiropractors, homeopaths, and other dubious practitioners totaling only between 80-90. Among those signatories was a woman named Suzanne…
kcollins | February 16, 2011From lack of role models in the elementary classroom to a learning culture that isn't engaging boys in the learning process, meet Nifty Fifty Speaker Ali Carr-Chellman who talks about how to change these things.
--For every 100 girls suspended from school there are 250 boys suspended from
school.
--For every 200 girls expelled from school there are 350 boys expelled
--For every 100 girls in special education there are 217 boys in special ed
--For every 100 girls with a learning disability there are 276 boys with such a
disability (Boys are four times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with…
jdupuis | February 14, 2011Welcome to the long-awaited latest instalment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the library, publishing and scitech worlds. This time around the subjects of my first group interview are the gang at EngineerBlogs.org.
From my welcome-to-the-blogosphere post, here's a condensed bit about them:
Cherish The Scientist (EB)
I am an electrical engineer with an interest in various areas of electromagnetics, including antennas and numerical simulation techniques, as well as IC packaging. I have completed a master's degree in electrical engineering and am currently pursuing a…
jrosenhouse | February 7, 2011Elaine Howard Ecklund has a confusing post up at HuffPo. It is confusing because it is very unclear what exactly she wants.
There is strong evidence that religion is resurging among students on America's top university campuses. Yet, a large number of academic scientists firmly feel that they should not discuss religion in their classrooms. I have spent the last five years surveying nearly 1,700 natural and social scientists working at elite U.S. universities -- talking with 275 of them in-depth -- in an effort to understand their religious beliefs and practices, or lack thereof. As I…
jdupuis | February 5, 2011I got an email the other day announcing the 2011 Canadian Engineering Education Association Annual Conference. It'll be held from June 6 to 8, 2011, at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland & Labrador.
The conference page is here and the call for papers is here.
The call for papers:
The Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA) is an organization whose mission is to "enhance the competence and relevance of graduates from Canadian engineering schools through continuous improvement in engineering education and design education." This second annual CEEA conference…
pharyngula | January 28, 2011I am completely unsurprised by the recent report on the state of evolution in the American science classroom. It confirms entirely my impressions from years of freshman college students and from previous studies of the subject, and puts specific numbers and issues to the problem.
The short summary: public schools suck at teaching basic biology. You already knew this, too, though, didn't you? The question has always been, "How bad?"
We can now say how many high school biology teachers do a good job, teaching the recommendations of the National Research Council and also, by the way, obeying the…
oracknows | January 28, 2011Sometimes a comment in the comment thread after one of my posts ends up turning into the inspiration for another post. This is especially likely to happen if I respond to that comment and end up writing a comment of myself that seems way too good to waste, forever buried in the comments where, as soon as the commenting on the post dies down, it remains, unread again. So it was after my post on the "integration" of quackery into academic medical centers. In that post, I applied some of my inimitable not-so-Respectful Insolence to a deal between Georgetown University, what should be a bastion…