Education
clock | October 7, 2008
Again, let me introduce a bunch of people who have registered to attend and participate in ScienceOnline09 in January. Today - folks associated with Duke University.
Anton Zuiker, one of the organizers of this conference, is a long-time blogger, the founder of BlogTogether.org, and manager of Internal Communications at Duke Medicine, which involved designing and running the Web-based Inside Duke Medicine as well as re-designing their print newsletter.
Andrea Novicki is the Academic Technology Consultant at the Center for Instructional Technology, Duke University Libraries.
Marsha Penner is…
sporte | October 4, 2008Long Branch, NJ, is a lovely town on the Atlantic Ocean, with long beaches and brand new shops and condos. It is also part of an area in, central New Jersey, where biotechnology education is entering an exciting time thanks to efforts of NJBEC, Bio-1, and a WIRED grant from the U.S. Department of Labor.
NJBEC, Bio-1, WIRED? What do all these acronyms mean?
I get these things confused all the time, so I'll take a quick moment and explain.
NJBEC is the New Jersey Biotechnology Educators Consortium. Bio-1 is a partnership between five counties and several schools in central New Jersey, that…
revere | October 4, 2008I'm on record here as being very optimistic about the younger generation. Perhaps it's conceit. They remind me of us (sixties era and even before). Still, there is no shortage of older folks who are condemned to repeat history by bemonaing how the young 'uns have gone to the dogs. And the world is going to hell in a handbasket with them. Academics are just as prone to this nonsense as anyone and in 2006 the mainstream media, enablers of whatever conventional wisdom floats their way, were talking about how sociologists were revealing that people were increasingly isolated ("bowling alone")…
goodmath | October 1, 2008 Every year at ScienceBlogs, we do a charity drive for
DonorsChoose.org. If you haven't heard of them, DonorsChoose is a charity that takes proposals from schoolteachers, and lets people pick specific proposals to donate money to. We run our charity challenge through the month of October.
For personal reasons, I couldn't participate last year. The year before that, Good Math/Bad Math readers donated just over two thousand dollars to support math education in impoverished New York area schools.
This year, I'm still focusing on the NYC area, because with where I live and work, I get to…
autismvox | October 1, 2008Deconstructing David Kirby.
This is the title of one of two follow-up posts that Dr. Rahul Parikh wrote after reviewing Dr. Paul Offit's Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure and getting the usual treatment by the usual "anti-vaccine/pro-vaccine-safety/mercury militia" suspects: A smackdown by the likes of David Kirby himself, Kirby being the author of the book Evidence of Harm, whose very subtitle proclaims that mercury in vaccines has something to do with a supposed "autism epidemic," and that this is a "medical controversy." Since its publication…
sciencewoman | October 1, 2008
There's an interesting commentary in the current Chronicle of Higher Education about how men and women experience college differently. The author is Linda Sax, an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Here's the part that first caught my eye:
Second, men who work with faculty members on research or receive advice, encouragement, and support from them hold more-egalitarian views on gender roles. They become less supportive of the notion that "the activities of married women are best confined to the home…
sb admin | September 29, 2008Despite a short 30-day comment period, dozens of interested individuals and organizations provided comments to Asst. Secretary Leon Sequeira about his proposed so-called risk assessment policy. I've pulled some of my favorite excerpts for your consideration:
"The proposed rule is a parting gift from an outgoing administration to its supporters in industry and should be withdrawn." (Public Citizen, full comments here)
"The Asst Secretary for Policy has no legal authority to issue this proposal or to finalize it. ...The authorities granted to him all involve performing economic reports and…
drorzel | September 29, 2008In the comments to last week's science majors follow-up post, commenter Jim G calls me out:
OK, I agree with that 100%, and I'm sure everyone who reads this post has observed the phenomena you mention dozens of times or more. But I wonder whether you have a proposal, or if you're just pointing out the problem. With no snarkiness intended, to change this we need something a bit more concrete than "it's the fault of the kids/parents/media/poverty," or "someone needs to spend more money" to fix it.
Really, I'm curious. I don't want to clutter up your blog with my own theories; but this is your…
grrlscientist | September 28, 2008tags: ScienceBlogs Millionth Comment Party, ScienceBlogs in Seattle
ScienceBlogs millionth comment party in Seattle.
Image: GrrlScientist 27 September 2008 [larger view].
I finally managed to find a stable and free wifi connection AND an outlet, thanks to the University Bookstore, so here are a few photographs from yesterday's ScienceBlogs' Millionth Comment Party in gorgeous Seattle!
We celebrated at Ozzie's Roadhouse, and because it was warm and sunny, we all congregated on their second floor deck for the afternoon and evening.
Conversation.
ScienceBlogs millionth comment party in…
jrosenhouse | September 25, 2008My friends, I have just read one of the dopiest essays I have ever seen in my life (and regular readers of this blog know that's really saying something.) It is called “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: Our Best Universities Have Forgotten that the Reason They Exist is to Make Minds, Not Careers,” and was published in The American Scholar. It's author is William Deresiewicz, who, we are told, English at Yale University from 1998-2008. It is the latest representative of a tiresome genre: “You Ivy Leaguers think you're soooooo smart. But you're really just a bunch of spoiled rich…
hrynyshyn | September 25, 2008I usually like to refer to the actual study, but I can't find it, so we'll have to make do with the Independent's story on a survey of thousands of British primary and secondary schoolchildren that found most have no idea that science is something of value.
The story starts off with the now predictable gnashing of teeth over the finding that "among every generation of school leavers, there are tens of thousands of potential scientists who are, partly owing to ignorance, turning their backs on careers with a science component." But the really depressing part comes in the form of some…
oracknows | September 20, 2008I know I don't blog about pure politics much, but it's the weekend, I'm too tired to do anything heavy-duty about medicine or science, and this depressed me.
As much as I'd like to delude myself that things have changed, it turns out that they haven't changed nearly as much as I'd like to think, as this poll demonstrates:
WASHINGTON (AP) _ Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks -- many calling them "lazy," ''violent" or…
edyong | September 18, 2008When we're suddenly confronted with a shocking image, our skin becomes moist and we blink strongly. These actions are automatic and unintentional; they happen without conscious thought. So it may come as a surprise that they can also predict some of our most seemingly considered beliefs - our political attitudes.
According to a new American study, the stronger these responses, the more likely people are to support the Iraq War, Biblical truth, the Patriot Act and greater defence budgets. Conversely, people who show weaker "startle reflexes" are more likely to support foreign aid, immigration…
drorzel | September 17, 2008I have never been a huge proponent of the Open Access and Open Data movements in science publishing, because they've always struck me as wasted effort. I've never really seen what value is supposed to be added by either project.
When I think about the experiments that I've been involved with (see, for example, the Metastable Xenon Project blogging), and what the data for those experiments looked like, I doubt that anybody not directly associated with the experiments could do anything useful with the data. It's not just that many of the analysis steps required tacit knowledge of the set-up,…
clock | September 17, 2008When I posted this originally (here and here) I quoted a much longer excerpt from the cited Chronicle article than what is deemed appropriate, so this time I urge you to actually go and read it first and then come back to read my response.
From Dr.Munger's blog, an interesting article: Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual By MARK BAUERLEIN, The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 12, Page B6 (that link is now dead, but you can find a copy here):
Hmmmm, why was the poll conducted only in social science departments (e.g., sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, anthropology, perhaps…
clock | September 15, 2008The Power of Political Misinformation:
As the presidential campaign heats up, intense efforts are underway to debunk rumors and misinformation. Nearly all these efforts rest on the assumption that good information is the antidote to misinformation.
But a series of new experiments show that misinformation can exercise a ghostly influence on people's minds after it has been debunked -- even among people who recognize it as misinformation. In some cases, correcting misinformation serves to increase the power of bad information.
Why the Facts Don't Matter in Politics:
What's interesting about…
clock | September 14, 2008This post was first written on October 28, 2004 on Science And Politics, then it was republished on December 05, 2005 on The Magic School Bus. The Village vs. The University - all in your mind.
Eric at Total Information Awareness wrote two excellent posts on something that touches me personally, yet has much broader consequences on the country as a whole: the well-organized and well-funded assault of the Right on the University (check some links in the comments section, too): Freedom Fighters and Academic Freedom Fighters.
There were a couple of other articles on the same topic, e.g.,The…
terrasig | September 9, 2008When I went away to college after the summer when MTV was first launched, I had never heard of the term, "Historically Black Colleges and Universities." But during the following summer while taking organic chemistry, I lived in a dorm with two visiting HBCU students who were doing internships at a local pharmaceutical company. The gentleman who I grew closest to had come from Hampton University (then-Hampton Institute) in Virginia.
As a Yankee born the same year as passage of US Civil Rights Act, I had not truly appreciated that African Americans, particularly in the South, had…
evolvingthoughts | September 6, 2008
Thony Christie, a regular commenter on this blog, is also a historian of science, and he sent the following guest post that I thought well worth publishing.
Commentator “Adam” asked John’s opinion on a book he is reading, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success by Rodney Stark, saying that he himself was not knowledgeable enough to judge this work. He then produced three short quotes from the book as representative of Stark’s thesis. John dismissed the quotes in his usual pithy style; From what you quote, it is about 100% wrong.
Actually…
drorzel | September 5, 2008
Adventures in Ethics and Science: Data paparazzi.
Is it ethical to write a paper based on a snapshot of a data slide at a conference?
(tags: ethics science publishing physics academia)
Jonathan Martin's Blog: Democrat reader email of the day (so far) - Politico.com
"Mrs. Palin needs to be reminded that Jesus Christ was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a governor."
(tags: politics US religion history class-war literature)
Scientists get death threats over Large Hadron Collider - Telegraph
"Such is the angst that the American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the…