Education
drorzel | March 4, 2008
Information Processing: Bell and GHZ: spooky action at a distance
Comments and references on one of the great examples of quantum weirdness.
(tags: physics quantum science academia education)
Can I See My Grade? :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
""Can I see my grade?" There's simply no defense against this question. You can reply as Harried Professor or Good Buddy. You can comprehend yourself or be comprehended as Registrar or Service Rep."
(tags: academia education)
BostonHerald.com - Blogs: Working Stiff» Blog Archive » What would Einstein put…
nisbetmc | March 4, 2008I will be spending next week (my spring break) in San Francisco as an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium science museum. While in the Bay Area, Chris Mooney will be flying up from LA to join me Tuesday evening at UC Berkeley for our latest in the Speaking Science 2.0 tour. Details are below. (We are expecting a pretty sizable turn out for the event, so make sure you arrive early. The auditorium holds roughly 150 people.)
Speaking Science 2.0:
A New Paradigm in Public Engagement
A conversation with Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
5:00 pm-6:30 pm
Location: 155 Dwinelle…
purepedantry | March 3, 2008Conventional wisdom + bigger microphone = excellent journalism!
High fives all-around for Charlotte Allen who repackages conventional wisdom about sex differences to a degree rarely attained by print journalists.
My favorite part:
Depressing as it is, several of the supposed misogynist myths about female inferiority have been proven true. Women really are worse drivers than men, for example. A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men's 5.1, even though men…
drorzel | February 27, 2008
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Ask the Administrator: Suggestions for Research?
What should people be studying about community colleges?
(tags: academia social-science economics science)
Buying a Spot on the Syllabus :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
"The gift in question was $1 million to Marshall's business school, from the BB&T Foundation [...] [T]he funds would support a lecture series and an upper level course that would focus on the principles of Atlas Shrugged "
(tags: academia economics humanities social-science stupid)
How…
tsmith | February 27, 2008This is the sixth of 6 guest posts on infectious causes of chronic disease.
By Ousmane Diallo
I was dumbfounded when I read this news article relating HPV to the increase of lip and oral cancers because of oral sex.
It reminded me my younger years, as a med student, debating with my professor of psychology the fundamentals of Freudian psychoanalysis, the Id, the Ego and the Super-ego. It was a rather philosophical debate more than anything else, a combination of religious and cultural reciprocal statements of beliefs. At that time, we were exposed to the new French "sexual education"…
clock | February 27, 2008Karl Bates is the Manager of Research Communications at Duke University where he is involved in a number of very cool new online projects. He is also a "repeat offender" - his experience at the first Science Blogging Conference did not stop him from attending the second one last month.
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? What is your Real Life job?
My name is Karl Leif Bates (Leif has a long A like "safe"). I'm the science editor in Duke's news office, where I edit press…
clock | February 26, 2008Dr.Tara C. Smith is one of the original Gang Of Four(teen) here at Scienceblogs.com. She blogs on her Aetiology as well as contributes to Panda's Thumb and Correlations group blogs. At the 2nd Science Blogging Conference last month Tara moderated the session on Blogging public health and medicine.
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? What is your Real Life job?
Well, let's see. Working backwards, I'm an assistant professor; my field is infectious disease epidemiology.…
laelaps | February 26, 2008
Today marks the 25th anniversary of my birth, and even though this particular day isn't especially extraordinary I figured that I should at least write a few thoughts about hitting the quarter century mark.
As regular readers know, I've been a bit frustrated with my academic career up to this point; I feel like I'm straining at the leash to get out and get to work, and my university hasn't made it especially easy for me. Still, as embarrassing as it might be to still be completing my undergraduate work, I have benefited from taking the "scenic route" and now have a better idea of what I want…
drorzel | February 25, 2008
SMU's Deal With Bush :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
'"What self-respecting university would accept a censored library?" said Rev. William McElvaney, a professor emeritus of preaching and worship at SMU's theology school, and one of the leading critics of the library.'
(tags: US politics academia stupid)
Crystal bells stay silent as physicists look for dark matter
Still nothing, at higher sensitivity than ever before.
(tags: astronomy physics science news)
Engineers demonstrate a new type of optical tweezer
A press release crippled by typography,…
purepedantry | February 25, 2008Stanley Fish of the NYTimes Think Again blog has some interesting things to say about the appointment of Bruce Benson, oil magnate and Republican activist, to be president of the University of Colorado at Boulder. The appointment raised eyebrows and protests from the faculty and students. Partly the issue is that Benson has never sought a degree higher than a BA, though he has been active in higher education in an advisory capacity before. Partly this issue is that Benson is conservative, and anyone who has spent about 4 seconds in Boulder realizes it is hardly Republican country. (We all…
clock | February 25, 2008Shelley Batts and I are of the same "generation", meaning that we became SciBlings on the same day. You need to hurry up and check out her blog Retrospectacle before she moves to a new blog in a few days. At the Science Blogging Conference last month Shelley moderated the Student blogging panel--from K to Ph D.
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 background? What is your Real Life job?
I'm an end-stage Neuroscience graduate student at the University of Michigan, my thesis is related to…
j7uy5 | February 25, 2008A fellow blogger, Logtar,
href="http://blog.logtar.com/2008/02/18/bodies-revealed-boycott/">tipped
me off to a controversy, and asked if I had anything to say
about it. The controversy has come about over an exhibit:
rel="tag" href="http://www.bodiesrevealed.com/index-home.html">Bodies
Revealed. It's a traveling exhibit that displays
plastinated human cadavers. The exhibit was organized by
href="http://www.prxi.com/prxi.html">Premier Exhibitions, Inc.
A bit of background can be gotten from an article in Scientific
American,
href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=…
grrlscientist | February 23, 2008tags: Evolution: What The Fossils Say And Why it Matters, fossils, dinosaurs, creationism, Donald Prothero, book review
I was in love with dinosaurs when I was a kid, and I still am. It was my love for dinosaurs and fossils and especially my time spent learning the minutea of the evolutionary history of horses that quickly brought me into direct conflict with the church that I was being inculcated into when I was very young and innocent. Subsequently, I had to learn about evolution in small niblets on the sly. But I wish I had been able to read paleontologist Don Prothero's beautifully…
razib | February 22, 2008In my post below, Pentecostals are stupid? Unitarians are smart?, I derived some conclusions from data which suggests that different religious groups in the United States have different IQs and/or academic aptitudes. The data are not particularly surprising, as some noted the class biases of American Protestantism have long been observed, and class usually has some correlation with education and performance on intelligence tests. That being said, one must be careful about extrapolating from one nation to others. Darwin Catholic stated:
For comparison, I seem to recall reading that…
clock | February 21, 2008I discovered Pondering Pikaia less than a year ago and it has immediately become one of my favourite daily reads. Thus, I was very happy that Anne-Marie Hodge could come to the Science Blogging Conference last month so she could meet with all the other science bloggers in person.
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 background? What is your Real Life job?
Thanks, Bora, I feel really honored to be an interviewee! Let's see, who am I...I grew up in a military family, so I moved around quite a bit…
skookumchick | February 19, 2008I realized this morning that I had no meetings scheduled for today. HOORAY!!! In addition, my department (recently renamed a School) is all in an uproar because our academic advisory council is arriving tomorrow, and our open house to the university is Friday. So I decided that I could take the day at home to catch up on all the email I've been ignoring avoiding unable to get to recently. Here's a sampling of my inbox (currently at 400 messages):
umpteen million tables-of-contents for journals I want to read but don't have time to. I try and scroll through the email TOCs when they arrive…
clock | February 15, 2008Gabrielle Lyon is the Executive Director and Cofounder of Project Exploration. But the story is much longer. She went to grad school (U. of Chicago) with my brother and he thought that Gabe and I would be interesting to each other due to our shared interest in dinosaurs. So we got in touch and kept it over e-mail over many years. She sent me a vial of Sahara sand and a small plant fossil from the trip, Project Exploration materials and t-shirts, etc. and I promoted PE here at my blog. We finally met in person at Scifoo last summer and conversations we had there, led, through some…
purepedantry | February 15, 2008I haven't been in a large lecture for a while, but this semester I decided to take a course in introductory economics at a local community college for my own enrichment. The experience has reminded me why I was so happy that I didn't have to go to lectures anymore.
(Ed. sentence removed. See below.) My classmates need to stop. They ask so many irrelevant questions. It is astonishing how much of everyone's time they have wasted. What is even more astonishing is that the rest of the students haven't conspired to have them renditioned to some foreign gulag.
I know what you're thinking. The…
drorzel | February 14, 2008Via a EurekAlert release with the catchy headline "As graduation rates go down, school ratings go up", a new study of the Texas school system, which provided the inspiration for "No Child Left Behind". It's not pretty:
A new study by researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas-Austin finds that Texas' public school accountability system, the model for the national No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), directly contributes to lower graduation rates. Each year Texas public high schools lose at least 135,000 youth prior to graduation -- a disproportionate number of whom are African-…
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2008Good news from Uppsala: after the end of the year, there will be only one PhD student in archaeology left in that august academic city. This is the result of a simple reform enacted ten years ago by Minister for Education Carl Tham: since that date, no student may enter a PhD program at a Swedish university unless she has funding. The reform was a non-event in well-funded economically productive subjects, but it hit the humanities like a bomb. PhD student seminars started to melt away as people graduated or gave up.
But, as I said: good news. It's neither in the best interest of students nor…