Education
gregladen | August 28, 2009DURHAM, N.C. -- Two Duke University education experts have serious concerns about the Obama administration's proposal to link teacher evaluations to student tests scores as a criterion for how much federal stimulus money states will receive for K-12 education.
Friday (Aug. 28) is the deadline to submit public comments on the proposal that will disperse more than $4 billion in grants. The U.S. Department of Education has said it will issue its final rules sometime after the deadline.
Helen F. Ladd, the Edgar Thompson Professor of Public Policy at Duke, says that while student test scores play…
nisbetmc | August 28, 2009
Ted Kennedy endorses Barack Obama for president in a January rally at American University.
As the nation celebrates Senator Ted Kennedy's career and accomplishments, here at American University, Kennedy's influence is tangible and widely felt. In January 2008, when Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama for president in a rally on campus, it was a major turning point in the race for the Democratic nomination.
With Obama now in the White House, young people across the country and the world increasingly look to Washington, DC as a place to pursue careers and to realize their dreams. Many of those…
drorzel | August 28, 2009Dave Munger on Twitter drew my attention to this blog post on college costs, and I really wish he hadn't. The post in question is really just a recap-with-links of an editorial by John Zmirak, blaming the high cost of college on an unlikely source:
[W]hat if universities began to neglect this basic charge, and instead turned into featherbedding, unionized factories that existed to protect their overpaid workers -- who were impossible to fire? What if these factories botched the items customers paid for, and spent their energy generating oddball inventions no one wanted?
That is exactly what…
oracknows | August 28, 2009It really and truly saddens me to have to do this.
The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto is one of the finest children's hospitals there is. Unfortunately, as I documented yesterday, the hospital has, either knowingly or unknowingly, lent its good name to the metastasis of the quackfest known as Autism One from its primary site in Chicago to a metastatic deposit sullying one of the finest cities in our fair neighbor to the north, Toronto. The metastasis is a secondary quackfest known as Autism One Canada, and, unfortunately, the SickKids Foundation and the Dalla Lana School of Public…
jstemwedel | August 27, 2009Regular commenter S. Rivlin emailed me to describe a distressing situation in academia and to ask for advice:
Dear Janet,
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I write to you to solicit your opinion on a recent grievance case I am privy to at my university. I hope you'll find the time to respond, considering that you are back from your Sabbatical and fully engrossed in teaching and mothering.
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The grievance was filed against a head (a man) of a research institute for harassment, and against the chairman of the department of which that institute belongs to and the dean of the medical school, for not taking action to stop the…
clock | August 27, 2009The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.
Today, I asked Danielle Lee from the Urban Science Adventures! © blog to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I am Danielle Lee and I am a biologist. Specifically, I study animal behavior from an…
oracknows | August 26, 2009I realize that I'm possibly stepping into proverbial lion's den with this one, but a man's got to do what a man's got to do. As you may recall, former ScienceBlogs bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (and current Discover Magazine bloggers) recently released a book called Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As you may also recall, the arguments and assertions that Chris and Sheril made in their book ruffled more than a few feathers around ScienceBlogs, chief among them the big macher of atheism around here, P.Z. Myers, who really, really didn't like…
oracknows | August 25, 2009Geez, I wonder if Larry Moran knows about this. If he doesn't, I'm going to make sure that he does. I'm also guessing that he won't be pleased. He doesn't like pseudoscience at all. He detests "intelligent design" creationists. Based on that, I'm guessing that he won't like it at all to learn that the Canadian version of the autism "biomedical" antivaccine quackfest known as Autism One is metastasizing from its usual location in Chicago every Memorial Day to held at the University of Toronto in October, as this advertisement shows:
If you live in Canada, the Northeastern United States, the…
nisbetmc | August 24, 2009
This semester, I am serving on the search committee for an exciting new tenure track position in science, environmental, and/or health journalism. Our School of Communication at American University is a leading laboratory for professional education, research, and innovation in the fields of journalism, public communication, and film and digital media. The new faculty member would have the opportunity to train the next generation of science, environmental, and health reporters while working in Washington, DC on innovative projects that address major trends and challenges in the field.
See…
drorzel | August 21, 2009It's that time of year again, when the US News rankings come out (confirming my undergrad alma mater as the Best in All the Land) and everybody in academia gets all worked up about What It All Means. There are always a few gems in there with all the pointless hand-wringing, though, and Timothy Burke of Swarthmore has some of the best advice you'll ever read on choosing a college:
I sometimes join a faculty panel to talk to prospective Swarthmore applicants, and one of the first things that I say is that a college applicant and family can only have strong control over a few really basic…
mikethemadbiologist | August 18, 2009One of the more successful healthcare interventions has been home nurse visits to families that have recently had a child:
"Optional Coverage of Nurse Home Visitation Services" certainly doesn't sound controversial. The initiative, which has existed in various forms at the state and local level for decades, would fund programs that "provide parents with knowledge of age-appropriate child development in cognitive, language, social, emotional, and motor domains...modeling, consulting, and coaching on parenting practices; [and] skills to interact with their child." Most similar programs have…
oracknows | August 14, 2009Effect Measure is a site I highly recommend with experienced epidemiologists in charge. In other words, it's run by adults. But scientists often disagree about things. This is apparently a secret to non-scientists and many reporters who assume that when two scientists disagree, one is lying or wrong. But it's true nonetheless. Whatever the subdiscipline, there are disagreements. If you pick up almost any issue of Science or Nature you will find plenty of them, usually (but not always) couched in polite language in the Introduction or Discussion section of a paper or in the Letters. So it's…
razib | August 12, 2009Last week I pointed to the fact there seem to be a set of private educational institutions whose raison d'être is to feed at the trough of government-backed student loans. Mark Gimein has a follow-up at The Big Money. Here are some bits about the "college" which was sued by the graduate who couldn't get a job:
Trina Thompson's alma mater, Monroe College, is well-known to New York City commuters, thanks to glossy ads that festoon the insides (and sometimes the outside) of many subway cars. It has less of a presence, however, outside the New York public transit system. You will not find it…
jrosenhouse | August 11, 2009Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum have another of their New Atheist bashing essays up, this time in The Los Angeles Times. It is, alas, a dreadful piece of work. P. Z. Myers has already wieghed in here, as has Jerry Coyne here.
The actual arguments in the op-ed are standard fare: The New Atheists are needlessly confrontational, they scare away moderates, blah blah blah.
The novelty here is the bizarre, and very misleading, way they go about making their points. Even as they encourage mutual understanding and nonconfrontationalism, they are perfectly happy to ignore their own advice in…
cortex | August 11, 2009Sometimes, while working on a story one comes across a data set that's so interesting it just has to be shared. Unfortunately, it can't quite be shoehorned into the tight narrative of the article. That's why God invented the sidebar. My recent story on grit included a sidebar on some incredibly important work from the Perry Preschool, including an important new analysis of the data by James Heckman, et. al. which finds that preschool provides a crucial boost in "non-cognitive" skills.
In the 1960s, researchers began a study of 123 African-American children born into poverty. When the children…
drorzel | August 11, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Ethan Allen, a program manager.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I manage education and outreach (terrible term, hate it) for two different Centers here at UW the Center for Nanotechnology and the Genetically…
drorzel | August 10, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Joel Boyce, a high school science and math teacher in Canada.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I'm a high school science and math teacher.
2) What is your science background?
I have a B.Sc, majoring in…
drorzel | August 7, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Alric, a veterinary pathologist at a drug company)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I am toxicologic veterinary pathologist and work at a contract research organization. We use animal models to evaluate the…
nisbetmc | August 7, 2009Last week I participated in a two-day workshop at NSF on climate change education. The meeting brought together researchers in science education, communication, and informal learning; representatives from government agencies such as NOAA, the EPA, and NASA; and organizations such as the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. The presentations and discussions focused not only on school-based settings but also on public engagement campaigns, the news media, and the role of science centers and museums.
Among several participants, there was an emphasis on three…
bioephemera | August 6, 2009The initial reviews of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future produced a small blogospheric kerfuffle last month. But I think Unscientific America has much more constructive and useful things to offer than provoking more arguments, and there are a lot of reviews focusing on the positives. This surprisingly short but wide-ranging book is a nutshell primer on science policy and communication issues, perfect for dissatisfied lab rats who want to engage in advocacy but don't have communications or policy training outside…