Education
terrasig | October 2, 2009The Clinical and Translational Science Network (CTSciNet) section of Science Careers has just published a superb article by Karyn Hede on the issues of depression precipitated during the rigors of medical education. Hede is a freelance writer in Chapel Hill and has contributed before to Science Careers, particularly with this article on the challenges of women MD-PhDs and another on why so many of us have crappy interpersonal and lab management skills.
The current article focuses primarily on the medical profession given its placement in the clinical/translational section but these issues are…
gregladen | October 2, 2009The Medieval Religious State of Saudi Arabia has a school called King Abdullah's University of Science and Technology, which is co-ed (that is an extraordinarily progressive idea for Teh Kingdom) and very science oriented. The idea, obviously, is for Saudi Arabia to maintain it's old patriarchal relgious-oligarchic ways but at the same time not get mushed by the modern world by including some rational thinking and stuff. But a senior Saudi cleric has called for a vetting of the university's curriculum in order to remove "alien ideologies."
Evolution is an alien ideology, apparently.
"…
jdupuis | October 1, 2009In a reputation economy, social media can provide a powerful set of tools for establishing and enhancing your reputation. An enhanced reputation can lead to enhanced opportunities, in the form of job offers or other professional opportunity.
Academia is a reputation economy, of course, but really any knowledge economy/creative class job is going to be easier to get if you have a good reputation. Which brings us back to social media.
It seems to me that in a competitive job market, students can really make their own applications stand out if they can refer potential employers to a really…
terrasig | September 26, 2009
This morning, I once again get to join in with a group of noted journalists, authors, educators, and all-around people-who-do-things-I-can't for the annual advisory board meeting of the M.S. in Medical and Science Journalism Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Program founder and current director, Tom Linden, MD, is a Yale- and UCSF-trained physician-journalist with extensive broadcast experience across a series of California television stations. Dr Linden also recognized very early the potential value and pitfalls of…
tfk | September 25, 2009Jerry Coyne, 9/21/2009:
Kudos to the National Center for Science Education for putting up these videos [of Texas science standards hearings], and for their tenacious defense of evolution in Texas.
Thank you, Jerry. Since I shot those videos, and was present in Texas as part of that defense, I thought I was off Coyne's shitlist, and it certainly seemed like NCSE was off it as well.
But three days later he objects to a line I wrote about "atheists bent on insisting that literalism is the true form of religion":
Quote of the week, from the personal website of the Public Information Project…
razib | September 25, 2009I made a comment earlier that college students, and by inference college graduates, are not as intelligent as they used to be on average. I made that comment based on what I'd seen in the General Social Survey. What I had seen was a decline in average WORDSUM score over the years (WORDSUM being a variable which records how many correct responses individuals received on a vocab test). But I'll lay out the data here.
I limited the sample to whites between the ages of 22-35. That way I get a snapshot of those who graduate from university in a particular time period, and I need to limit the…
dmunger | September 24, 2009As an undergraduate, at my school it was practically a requirement to steal silverware from the campus cafeteria. There were students who'd commandeered full sets of china. The desk clerk at my dorm used to say that the only thing we were learning from our college education was "how to steal."
Somehow it didn't seem wrong to us to steal from the cafeteria (though I drew the line at a single setting of silverware). Plus, we'd heard that at other schools, students used the cafeteria trays as sleds after the first winter snow. At least we weren't doing that (though arguably this was only because…
nisbetmc | September 22, 2009
Michael Moore is in a class by himself when it comes to generating news attention, advance publicity, and box office for his documentary films. For example, when I was in Canada this past week, I picked up the National Post to read a lead front page story defending capitalism against Michael Moore's latest charges. Tomorrow night, Moore launches his film with a full hour on CNN's Larry King Live.
Yet the growing influence of documentary film is much more than Michael Moore. That's the focus of a special issue of the journal Mass Communication & Society that I co-edited with American…
oracknows | September 22, 2009I've often discussed how potentially misleading anecdotal evidence and experience can be. Indeed, I've managed to get into quite a few--shall we say?--heated discussions with a certain woo-friendly pediatrician, who, so confident in his own clinical judgment, just can't accept that his own personal clinical observations could be wrong or even horribly mislead him. Sadly, I've never managed to persuade him just how easy it is for us humans to be deceived or even to deceive ourselves.
However, just because anecdotal evidence can deceive us does not mean that it is worthless. Contrary to the…
bioephemera | September 20, 2009
Stanley Fish writes a provocative essay in the NYT on whether curiosity is tantamount to "a mental disorder," or even a sin:
Give this indictment of men in love with their own capacities a positive twist and it becomes a description of the scientific project, which includes among its many achievements space travel, a split atom, cloning and the information revolution. It is a project that celebrates the expansion of knowledge's boundaries as an undoubted good, and it is a project that Chairman Leach salutes when he proudly lists the joint efforts by the University of Virginia and the N.E.H…
rallain | September 17, 2009This is Tom's fault (Swans on Tea). He suspects that most of the physics blogs are read by physics bloggers.
I have kind of been avoiding this, but I guess I need to know who my readers are. Actually, there are two groups of readers - regular readers and googlers. So, who are you?
Loading...If you are a blogger, maybe you could list your blog in the comments. I will post the results after some time (or live if I figure that out).
Responses so far
I don't know how to make this live, so I will just update it every once and a while.
Here is a list of what was submitted as "other" (at this…
sb admin | September 17, 2009Today, Andrew Schneider at Cold Truth tells us that way back in April, acting Surgeon General Steven Galson issued a long-awaited statement about the dangers of asbestos, a statement urged for years by asbestos-disease victims, their families and public health advocates.  Galson's action was so stealth (intentionally, perhaps?) that the individuals who had been calling for it were never even notified--Not the Senators who marshalled a  Senate Resolution urging a Surgeon General's warning or the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO) who supported the congressional…
gregladen | September 16, 2009Amanda got her official letter today indicating that she has a Masters Degree in Biology from the University of Minnesota. This letter is important because it is what she shows her school HR department so they can give her the tiny raise teachers get if they have a Masters Degree.
They U sent it by airmail:
Which is good, because we live really really far from the U but close to the airport:
NOT!!!!
I wonder if the letter flew to Chicago and back before getting delivered?
mikethemadbiologist | September 16, 2009
This is not good public hygiene
...WASHING YOUR DAMN HANDS! From the NY Times:
In one study of four residence halls at the University of Colorado, two of the dorms had hand sanitizer dispensers installed in every dorm room, bathroom and dining area, and students were given educational materials about the importance of hand hygiene. The remaining two dorms were used as controls, and researchers simply monitored illness rates.
During the eight-week study period, students in the dorms with ready access to hand sanitizers had a third fewer complaints of coughs, chest congestion and fever. Over…
tfk | September 16, 2009On Monday I posted a reply to Jerry Coyne's clique-ish and philosophically naive report on a talk he didn't see. I thought this would be a useful exercise because:
Coyne is a former professor of mine, I respect him, and don't want to see him embarrass himself.
High school-level cliqueishness seems unbecoming in a tenured professor.
Philosophically naive claims about the nature of science are unbecoming in a tenured biology professor.
Launching invective-laden attacks on a talk one hasn't seen is entirely unbecoming.
I reply again because efforts to address some of the issues underlying the…
khannula | September 15, 2009This is a repost from my old blog, from a year and a half ago. But it's time for academic positions to be advertised - if they haven't been frozen due to budget cuts. So, some old advice on getting a job, while my own job is keeping me especially busy.
So. You want a job, do you? At an undergraduate college? Ok, then. Let me tell you what I know.
(This is based on being on six different search committees at two different schools - one private small liberal arts college (SLAC), and one public liberal arts college. However, I haven't been part of a search in the past seven years - my…
skookumchick | September 14, 2009It is that season again, where NSF-CAREER awards are being announced left right and center. In my world, there are three in particular to celebrate:
Dr. Julie Trenor, assistant professor in the Department of Science and Engineering Education at Clemson University, whose grant is titled "Influence of Social Capital on Under-Represented Engineering Students' Academic and Career Decisions"
Dr. Demetra Evangelou, assistant professor in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University, whose grant is titled "Developmental Engineering: An Examination of Early Learning Experiences as…
gregladen | September 7, 2009The Actual Words of Afroleninist Barack Hussain bin-Obama's planned speech to the School Children of Amerika have been obtained by this blogger, and I have few comments on them.
A Guest Blog by Jimmy James Bettencourt
Until I read this speech, I was pretty happy with Obama. I have not been paying any attention to his policies, but he's cool because he looks cool, acts cool, and is not a dick-head like John McCain or an ignorant moron like Palin.
But now I have changed my mind because of this speech. I've only read the first third of it but so far it's just a bunch of communistic…
terrasig | September 3, 2009In the United States, this is currently National HBCU Week (presidential proclamation here) and yesterday marked the end of the annual academic conference on HBCUs ("Seizing the Capacity to Thrive!") in Washington, DC. HBCUs span from Michigan and Ohio to Texas, Florida, and the US Virgin Islands - see here for the complete list and links to HBCUs.
Don't feel bad if you've never heard of HBCUs - as noted in my repost from last year, I didn't until I went to college. I've updated the post here and and added a few new morsels of knowledge stemming from my own continuing education about the…
pharyngula | September 1, 2009One of the big issues in science education is the topic of science standards: each state is supposed to have guidelines for the public school curriculum, which are intended to enforce some uniformity and also make sure that key subjects are covered. These standards are often accompanied by big political fights as the religious right tries, for instance, to get evolution (and sex education, and historical accuracy, and …) expunged from the curriculum. Sometimes they succeed, and sometimes the good guys win.
An article in Evolution: Education and Outreach assesses the current state of state…