Education
oracknows | January 26, 2011Beginning not long after this blog began, one recurring theme has been the infiltration of "quackademic medicine" into academic medical centers. Whether it be called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or "integrative medicine" (IM), its infiltration into various academic medical centers has been one of the more alarming developments I've noted over the last several years. The reason is that "integrative" medicine is all too often in reality nothing more than "integrating" pseudoscience with science, quackery with medicine. After all, when you "integrate" something like reiki or…
jdupuis | January 24, 2011A few days ago I posted some thoughts on the programming of the recent ScienceOnline 2011 conference and yesterday I posted some thoughts about the more social and fun aspects of the event.
In this post I like to look forward to next year's conference and start thinking about some of the sessions I might like to organize. My very early thoughts are coalescing around undergraduate education around. I have a couple of ideas which I think might be interesting to pursue.
First of all, I'm interested in collaborations around teaching undergrads about the scholarly information landscape. On…
pronald | January 21, 2011DESPITE overwhelming evidence to the contrary, roughly one in five Americans believes that vaccines cause autism -- a disturbing fact that will probably hold true even after the publication this month, in a British medical journal, of a report thoroughly debunking the 1998 paper that began the vaccine-autism scare. says Michael Willrich, a professor of history at Brandeis University in todays NYT
Similarly, according to Dr Oz, the TV host, papaya genetically engineered with a snippet of a mild strain of a virus to make it disease free, causes infertility. This in face of overwhelming evidence…
esiegel | January 21, 2011"You can lead a boy to college, but you cannot make him to think." -Elbert Hubbard
If you listened to some of the headlines accompanying a recent news story, you might conclude that College is a waste of time, money, and resources for practically everyone involved. The three links above have, as their headlines:
$80,000 For Beer Pong? Report Shows College Students Learn Little During First Two Years (Besides Party Skills),
Report: First two years of college show small gains, and
One in Three College Students Is Coasting. This Is News?
Over the past 15 years, I've lived and worked at…
mikethemadbiologist | January 20, 2011By way of Thers at Whiskey Fire, we read that the evangelical movement has recognized that sometimes homeschooling doesn't quite get the job done:
Suppose you have home-schooled your advanced blastocyst in the best evangelical wingnut way, to the age of 18. And suppose you recognize that no matter how much you would like to pray otherwise, your advanced blastocyst, age 18, is an absolute lettuce.
Dumb as a box of Bibles. A cretin by Sarah Palin standards. A doorstop. A rock.
Problems! Where do you park these burdensome home-unschooled-uli? In the godless local community college? Do you…
jtoney | January 19, 2011
Photo source.
This article was co-authored with Ms. Julie Dalley, Program Coordinator for the Research Academy for University Learning at Montclair State University.
Why pursue a college degree? It is a fair question. People pursue a college degree for many different reasons. It may be the realization of a personal goal, have cultural significance, or may simply be a stepping-stone to professional success. No matter what the motivation, all students have an expectation of learning and many pay a high price to achieve their learning goals. But is learning taking place? And if so, how?…
drorzel | January 16, 2011I was at a meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public of the American Physical Society at the tail end of last week, so it seems appropriate to post a couple of APS-related announcements here on my return:
1) The APS has just created a Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public. You may have read about this in the monthly APS News, but in case you missed it, there is a new organization with APS to bring people interested in outreach together:
"The forum provides a venue for people to congregate, provide best practice manuals...and disseminate things that work so people don't have to…
stoat | January 10, 2011#3 in the Is a Tosser series. For his grauniad article Universities must cut private schools intake, says Simon Hughes. Disclaimer: I went to private school, and to Oxford. My son is also at private school [*]. But this article is *not* going to be about my own experience. Meta-disclaimer: in England, it is obligatory for middle-class parents and politicians of all varieties to agonise about education, its funding, and its quality. In the case of politicians, it is strictly required for them to only talk about the quality; they are forbidden from doing anything to improve it [#].
Let us begin…
jtoney | January 10, 2011
Photo by Bruteitup.
A DOG or cat owner spends roughly $10,000 on the care and feeding of his pet over its lifetime. (Dogs cost more per year, but cats make up for it by living longer.) What does he get for this investment?
Surveys indicate that what most pet owners mainly want is companionship, unconditional love and a play pal. In recent years, however, we have also begun to regard pets as furry physicians and four-legged psychotherapists.
Hal Herzog, Op-Ed in The New York Times ("Fido's No Doctor, Neither Is Whiskers")
No one would question the emotional value of pets as our companions,…
bioephemera | January 7, 2011Here are some essay links I've had open as tabs in my browser for over a week, waiting to be posted. Unfortunately, I don't have time to do the extensive commentary they deserve, so I'm admitting that, and just posting them already. Enjoy.
Graphical Abstracts & Biologists as Designers
Andrew Sun discusses "graphical abstracts" at nature network:
Although they are irrelevant to the quality of the research in my opinion, graphical abstracts (GAs) are in fact increasingly appreciated nowadays. No matter you like them or not, chances are that you have to draw one in order to publish your…
mikethemadbiologist | January 6, 2011Having grown up (or at least physiologically developed) in Virginia, this story about the totally awesome and rigorous history textbooks used in what are the wealthier counties in the state is not at all surprising, though depressing (italics mine):
In the version of history being taught in some Virginia classrooms, New Orleans began the 1800s as a bustling U.S. harbor (instead of as a Spanish colonial one). The Confederacy included 12 states (instead of 11). And the United States entered World War I in 1916 (instead of in 1917)....
Historian Mary Miley Theobald, a former Virginia…
jtoney | January 4, 2011
Photo source.
I think that's what I'm trying to do," he says. "I think Darwin's life is a great story. So why not tell it as a great story?
NPR Interview with Jay Hosler, Feb. 14, 2005
Amidst the media storms about teaching evolution in the classroom, I wonder whether anyone considered using comics? It is such a simple, elegant idea. Comics can draw students into the subject, using humor and whimsy, in a way that is simply not possible using a textbook. Plus there's nothing like humor to throw water on a fierce debate between a self-righteous religious zealot and a town's school board.…
oracknows | January 4, 2011As a blogger, every so often I come across a link, file it away, and then when I look through my link collection looking for topics to blog about I rediscover the link but totally forget where I got it from. This is just one of these times. However, since it's less than three weeks until the event being promoted, I thought it might be entertaining to write about it. Unfortunately, it requires revisiting a topic that I've written about a few times before, albeit not recently. I'm referring to the American Medical Student Association and its embrace of woo, i which it has even gone so far as…
ksnyder | January 3, 2011This guest post is written by Norman Holden, a Brookhaven scientist in the National Nuclear Data Center and a member of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). After receiving his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the Catholic University of America, he spent a decade at the GE Knolls Atomic Power Lab before joining Brookhaven in 1974. He is the chair of an IUPAC subgroup that is producing a periodic table meant to show high school and college students the importance of isotopes in everyday life.
Norman Holden
When the clock struck midnight on Saturday morning, we rang…
pharyngula | December 22, 2010Oh, actually, shaved apes would be an upgrade from Josh Brecheen, who is more like a shaved and bipedal member of the subgenus Asinus. He's a new legislator who has announced his intention to introduce creationism into Oklahoma schools (or, as perhaps I should refer to them, "skools") for a set of reasons he laid out in a notably ignorant column in the Durant Daily Democrat.
His column is amazing. The faculty of Southeastern Oklahoma State University are covering their eyes in shame right now, since apparently this creationist-cliche-spewing plagiarist and professional goober managed to…
egrossman | December 14, 2010
New Solutions: The Drawing Board is a monthly feature produced by the journal New Solutions. Read more about it here.
By Charles Levenstein and Dominick Tuminaro
[In press, International Union Rights journal, volume 17(4), due out 20 December; posted with permission]
There is an important intersection between the movements for international trade union rights and worker health and safety. Both recognize that core trade union rights are also human rights.
On April 2, 2010, Ji-Yeon Park, a 23 year old former worker at a Samsung factory in South Korea, was buried, the victim of a blood cancer…
mikethemadbiologist | December 10, 2010Leave it to conservatives to actually conduct the War on Christmas (Got Scrooge?). I give you National Review editor Kate O'Beirne on the problem of hunger (italics mine):
O'BEIRNE: And then the title of our gathering is so crucial; "Less of Washington and More of Ourselves". The federal school lunch program and now breakfast program and I guess in Washington DC, dinner program are pretty close to being sacred cows... broad bipartisan support. And if we're going to ask more of ourselves, my question is what poor excuse for a parent can't rustle up a bowl of cereal and a banana? I just don't…
tfk | December 7, 2010I know Christopher Maloney is a quack because this is how quacks act. PZ Myers wrote a blog post way back when pointing out that Maloney is a quack, a naturopathic "doctor" in Maine. He urged parents to skip vaccinating their kids, and to have them drink berry juice and take garlic pills instead. That isn't how the real world works, alas. The flu vaccine really does stop the flu, while black elderberry has nothing like the clinical evidence required for this sort of recommendation.
Rather than taking that criticism to heart, Maloney had his wife, a lawyer, send nastygrams to the hosts of…
drorzel | December 7, 2010
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Research Design in a Recession
"My college is planning a major student survey for the Spring. We're drawing up questions that we think could help shape budget priorities over the next few years, assuming there's actually enough money to have some level of discretion. (That's far from certain.) We've got several of the usual questions: have they seen their academic advisor, how often do they use the library, etc. I suggested one asking whether they have internet access at home, so we could get a sense of the degree to which more open computer labs…
oracknows | December 1, 2010I don't recall if I ever mentioned this before, but back when I was in college I had quite the interest in a couple of sciences that you might not have expected or guessed at, namely anthropology and archaelogy. Indeed, an archeology class that I took as a senior was one of the most memorable and fascinating classes I took during my entire four years in college. If I have one regret about my college years, it was my laser-like focus on getting into medical school. It was that intense focus that kept me taking far more classes related to chemistry, biology, and other sciences that I thought…