Education
pharyngula | June 12, 2009I got a very annoying announcement on our university listserv today. Among the usual community and campus events, it says:
Please mark your calendars: Don Bierle, PhD in Biology, polar explorer, and former skeptic, shares FaithSearch Discovery at Morris Area High School Sunday, September 27, 6:30 pm. This event is sponsored by Stevens County Ministerial and area churches.
This really pisses me off.
Our local high school has problems. It's underfunded, it's academically compromised in many ways, and we were immensely relieved to get our kids out of there. It's a small school, with a total of…
terrasig | June 11, 2009
The heavy blanket of moisture across the City-That-Tobacco-Built is being broken this morning on the 69th wedding anniversary of the late civil rights scholar, Dr John Hope Franklin, and his late wife, Aurelia Whittington Franklin, with a high-profile memorial and celebration of their lives. Leading the dignitaries in speaking will be former President William Jefferson Clinton and attorney Vernon Jordan, Jr.
The memorial will be held today, 11 am - 1 pm EDT, on the campus of the University-That-Tobacco-Built in the conservatively-named Duke Chapel, more appropriately described as a Gothic…
nisbetmc | June 9, 2009
In this month's issue of Nature Biotechnology, I join with other authors to suggest several bold new initiatives in science communication and journalism. The Commentary article includes an overview of key issues and trends in the field and closes with a series of specific recommendations.
The article is based on a workshop held this past year in Washington, DC, organized by Timothy Caulfield and Tania Bubela of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta. The authors reflect the participants in that workshop and include representatives from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany and…
drorzel | June 8, 2009
Youâre Like School in the Summer⦠« The First Excited State
"Summertime is a time to focus on your research, without the distractions of tests, homeworks, and (hopefully) teaching duties. But many grad students, at least in physics, take the summer as an opportunity to attend summer schools, which are short, intense sessions aimed at advanced grad students that are held at various institutions around the country and the world. "
(tags: science academia physics education blogs)
Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: The Dizzying Data Rate Conundrum
Theorists are more likely than…
oracknows | June 8, 2009Here we go again.
As regular readers know, I've lamented long and loud the infiltration of unscientific "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM, or what Dr. RW dubbed "quackademic medicine, a term I very much like) into medical school curricula, academic medical centers, and postgraduate medical education. A while back, in particular, I got rather worked up over how the University of Maryland's respected Shock Trauma Center. But it wasn't just any woo. Rather, it was one of the absolute woo-iest of woos, namely reiki, which is nothing more than magical faith healing based on Eastern…
denialism | June 5, 2009Science has an editorial today discussing a topic near and dear to me, what medical schools should require from undergraduates before admission.
Since I was a bit non-traditional as an undergraduate premed (I was a physics major), I am happy to see that they've ignored calls to overload undergraduate education with a bunch of pre-professional courses that prevent people from being anything but biology majors.
How should preparation for medical study be assessed? Medical schools generally determine scientific readiness for admission by course requirements and scores on the MCAT, which mainly…
oracknows | June 5, 2009SETTING: A NONDESCRIPT CLINIC IN AUSTIN, TEXAS
TIME: AFTER DARK
It had been a long, hard day at the clinic. The man trudged to the back of the building and plopped himself down on a large, cushy leather office chair, causing it to spin around. He was fiftyish, but still boyish in appearance, possessed of a seemingly unflappable self-confidence. Even so, he was not happy.
Damn, I hate being here. He thought. I'd much rather be back in London than stuck in this hick state. At least Austin is about as good as it gets here. I suppose it could be worse; I could be in Arkansas.
He sighed. "Damn…
nisbetmc | June 4, 2009Hello, I'm Katherine Broendel, and I will be guest blogging this month about sexual violence. As Matt mentioned in a previous post, I am a Master's degree candidate in Public Communication at American University, and I wrote my capstone (thesis) on the framing of sexual violence in the media. The goal of my research was to reevaluate the current frames being used by the news media in order to provide women's groups and issue advocates recommendations on how to get accurate, sensitive coverage of sex crimes. My experience in graduate school has allowed me to focus on women's issues in…
gregladen | June 3, 2009 Speaking at a London girls' school, Michelle Obama makes a passionate, personal case for each student to take education seriously. It is this new, brilliant generation, she says, that will close the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be.
Michelle Obama's life as First Lady of the United States is informed by her early life, growing up as the daughter of a pump operator for the Chicago water department. Though money was tight, her parents emphasized education and possibility for their two brilliant children. Both kids went to Princeton (her older brother, Craig Robinson…
cpikas | June 3, 2009This is the 5th of the test essays in preparation for comps.
This question was posed by my advisor. I opened it
and went, "wow." It's sort of like the perfect storm of question.
When I first finished it, I thought I did really well, but
now it seems less than completely satisfying. So here's the essay written in 2 hours, timer started prior to opening the question.
Question (IR 1)
Informal interpersonal communication is very important among
scientists. Describe a retrieval system to identify collaborators.
Include the following in your answer:
a. Knowledge representation to enhance…
grrlscientist | June 3, 2009tags: NYC, Upper West Side, Manhattan, science, education
Nick with his potato gun,
on the downtown-bound A Train.
Image: GrrlScientist, 3 June 2009.
Today as I was riding the A Train to the library so I could use their free wifi, I ran into Nick and his friend who are high school students in NYC. Their hobby is science. Physics, to be precise. In the above picture (blurry -- the train provides a very bumpy ride), you can see Nick with one of his physics experiments, a potato gun that he designed and built using PVC pipe. Since I have designed and built a few items from PVC myself (mostly…
edyong | June 1, 2009History has had no shortage of outstanding female mathematicians, from Hypatia of Alexandria to Ada Lovelace, and yet no woman has ever won the Fields medal - the Nobel prize of the maths world. The fact that men outnumber women in the highest echelons of mathematics (as in science, technology and engineering) has always been controversial, particularly for the persistent notion that this disparity is down to an innate biological advantage.
Now, two professors from the University of Wisconsin - Janet Hyde and Janet Mertz - have reviewed the strong evidence that at least in maths, the gender…
rallain | June 1, 2009Notice how much I like the word "stuff". It really is a very useful word. I wonder if I did a wordle for this whole blog, would "stuff" be the biggest?
Anyway, I have been thinking about this popular Chronicle of Higher Education article Will Higher Education be the Next Bubble to Burst?. The basic argument the article makes is that higher education (especially private schools) are too expensive. It also talks about online universities such as Phoenix online and how they are becoming more popular. In all this "bursting bubble" discussion, there is an extremely important question:
What is…
nisbetmc | May 31, 2009
I spent the past three days with my colleague Ed Maibach and several graduate students conducting one-on-one interviews about climate change with participants recruited and screened from among the diversity of visitors to the National Mall in Washington, DC.
In conducting these qualitative interviews--which varied in time between 30 minutes to more than an hour--I was amazed at the forms of localized knowledge and depth of reasoning that participants from different educational backgrounds and with varying political views brought to the topic of climate change.
The experience reflected…
jstemwedel | May 28, 2009There's a new feature article by Liza Gross [1] up at PLoS Biology. Titled "A Broken Trust: Lessons from the Vaccine-Autism Wars," the article does a nice job illuminating how the themes of trust and accountability play out in interactions between researchers, physicians, patients, parents, journalists, and others in the public discourse about autism and vaccines. Ultimately, the events Gross examines -- and the ways the various participants react to those events -- underline the questions: Who can we trust for good information? and To whom are we accountable for our actions and our…
gregladen | May 20, 2009... tbooks. (get it?)
Josh Rosenau, of the National Center for Science Education, has a piece in Seed online:
The National Center for Science Education, in Oakland, CA, where I work, has tracked hundreds of attacks on evolution education in 48 states in the last five years. In the last two years alone, 18 bills in 10 states have targeted the teaching of evolution. These bills, like the flawed science standards approved by the Texas Board of Education in March, don't ban evolution outright. But they do authorize teachers to omit evolution or include creationism at their whim. "These bills…
terrasig | May 19, 2009
Although I saw this obituary over the weekend, I didn't get to posting it until today. I was reminded by a local friend, an outstanding young scientist in her own right, of the impact that Dr Schanberg had made on so, so many lives in science, medicine, and our larger community.
I only had the honor of meeting Dr Schanberg once, shortly after his cancer diagnosis, while we were at a Duke Cancer Patient Support Center fundraising dinner. His wife of over 50 years, Rachel, is founder and former director of the organization which they started following the loss of their own daughter.
Among…
grrlscientist | May 18, 2009tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter
Lear's Macaw, Anodorhynchus leari: a great example of a conservation success story.
Image: Andy and Gill Swash, World Wildlife Images.
Birds in Science
A record number of bird species are now listed as threatened with extinction, a global assessment has revealed. The IUCN Red List evaluation considered 1,227, or 12%, of all known bird species to be at risk, with 192 species described as Critically Endangered. The main threats affecting bird numbers continued to be agriculture, logging and invasive species, the…
palmd | May 17, 2009So, President Obama is getting an honorary degree and giving a commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, and some folks aren't too happy about that. Why? The stated reasons is his support of limited abortion rights. Let's examine why this stance is hypocritical and nonsensical, then examine the real reasons for the protests.
Beliefs of a speaker
Notre Dame has a reputation as a good university, and I'm quite certain that classes on campus include ideas not part of official Catholic belief. I'm willing to bet that not every student, professor, and employee hold to every letter…
pontiff | May 13, 2009Over at TechFlash there is an article about some words Ed Lazowska, professor extraordinaire here in the computer science & engineering department at UW, had for the Seattle tech scene (see also xconomy):
"It seems to me that the issue with this state is that we are one big happy family in which everybody is doing extremely well. Everyone's college program is above average. And everyone's company is above average. And everyone's venture fund is above average. And if you go a little bit more above average than the next guy, then they get all Dirty Harry and whack you down. It is a state of…