Education
sporte | February 13, 2008Confused about terms like "autonomy" and "beneficance" and their relationship to biomedical research?
The Northwest Association for Biomedical Research (NWABR) is offering a short course at the University of Washington, Feb. 29th and March 1st, on Ethics in Science.
Registration details and a description are below.
An Ethics Shortcourse
February 29, 2008, 4-8pm and March 1, 10am-4pm Waterfront Activities
Center, University of Washington
Registration Deadline: February 15, 2008 To apply online, please visit:
http://www.nwabr.org/education/esc.htm
$25 with credit card or $20 with check.…
skookumchick | February 13, 2008My husband and I will have been "together" for 10 years this July. Of those 10 years, we have lived about 3.5 in the same city. It's a hard gig.
We met when I was an undergrad and Steve was a grad student (scandalous!) over the summer when I was home from college, working in a water chemistry lab. He made goofy jokes about the carbon analyzer and wore Wallace and Gromit t-shirts, and our first date was to go see Mulan (no kidding. We now consider Disney to be bscs=blood-sucking corporate scum, an opinion we recognize we can only hold for now because we don't have kids who love them yet…
terrasig | February 12, 2008There are responsible ways to present medical information and irresponsible ways. I will say at the outset that I have no ethical issues with discussing complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) with cancer patients, as long as the information presented is based in fact.
So it was no surprise to me and actually quite alarming to read a recent report suggesting that while only 1 in 20 breast cancer websites offer incorrect information, CAM-focused websites were 15 times more likely to contain inaccurate or incorrect information. The study to which I refer will appear in the 15 March issue…
clock | February 10, 2008Patricia B. Campbell, PhD is a tireless fighter for science education and for gender equality in science. She runs the FairerScience website and the FairerScience blog. At the Science Blogging Conference three weeks ago, Pat was on the panel on Gender and Race in Science: online and offline.
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?
Hmmm who am I? Good question--well professionally I was a college professor of Research Measurement and Statistics at Georgia…
clock | February 9, 2008Vedran Vucic (voo-tcheech) is a Linux afficionado in Serbia. He and his organization have gone all around Serbia, wired up the schools, taught the teachers and students how to use Linux, taught the teachers and students how to use various online educational resources ranging from blogs to ATutor, etc. Vedran also gives technical support to about 30 Serbian bloggers whose work he also aggregates. He is now putting a lot of energy into persuading scientists, especially the young, not-yet-entrenched ones, to go online and to promote Open Access. It is an uphill battle, but he is persistent!…
skookumchick | February 9, 2008Hello? - ello - ello - lo... Wow, this is a big sandbox. Can I come play?
My name is Alice. As in Wonderland. I'm a newbie faculty member in the super-cool School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. I've also been blogging 2 months shy of 2 years, but pseudonymously - that's the first time I've publicly blogged my name and job. It's true, blogging under your own name does sort of make you feel like you're naked in a crowd. At least, until I get used to it. ;-)
I'm an engineer. But a comparatively weird engineer: a feminist, radical, social justice-y engineer. In my…
nisbetmc | February 9, 2008The Center for Inquiry has posted a list of its many Darwin Day events scheduled for locations across the country. For science enthusiasts, these events serve as an important ritual for building community and social identity.
Darwin Day events also provide a news peg for generating local media attention. In this case, a positive message would be framed around the value of Darwin's original idea as the building block for medical and social progress. For example, without evolutionary science we would be hard pressed to understand problems such as bird flu.
This message should be paired with a…
chaoticutopia | February 6, 2008I hadn’t planned to write another post full of complaints. I’m a mother; I intrinsically hate whining. Yet, here I am, with nothing but frustration and disappointment (and an awful pun in the title) to share. Here it is, in a nutshell: I missed my lab in the field yesterday. It was one of those moments where life is chaos, pure and simple. I left for Boulder early, only to face slippery roads (covered in several inches of slush from Monday’s snowstorm) and heavy traffic. I made it to the park-n-ride where I catch a regional bus at what would normally be a reasonable time. If the busses were…
sb admin | February 6, 2008This month's Environmental Health Perspectives features an informative but disturbing article by Andrea Hricko entitled  "Global Trade Comes Home". It describes the adverse impact on communities of the "goods movement" system, where imports to the U.S.---electronics, food, toys, furniture--- make their way from waterfront ports to trains and trucks, and into warehouses and to our neighborhood stores. Hricko, an associate professor at USC's Keck School of Medicine, with first-hand experience working with families who live near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, paints the…
jrosenhouse | February 1, 2008Via Mark Chu-Carroll I just read this article, from the USA Today, about a mathematician at the University of Pennsylvania who believes that fractions have no place in the elementary and middle school mathematics curriculum:
A few years ago, Dennis DeTurck, an award-winning professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, stood at an outdoor podium on campus and proclaimed, "Down with fractions!"
“Fractions have had their day, being useful for by-hand calculation,” DeTurck said as part of a 60-second lecture series. “But in this digital age, they're as obsolete as Roman numerals…
cmooney | February 1, 2008The entirely volunteer ScienceDebate2008 effort--owned by no one, and by everyone--continues to defy expecations.
Consider the "Science 57," a list of organizations and institutions that now endorse the effort:
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
American Economics Group, Inc.
The American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Annual Reviews
Arizona State University
The Aspen Institute
Association for Women in Science (AWIS)
Astrophysical Journal
The Biophysical Society
The Carnegie Institution of Washington
Center for Inquiry
Center for Science Writings,…
gregladen | February 1, 2008An increasingly large number of K through 12 students (in the tens of thousands or more) are getting some or all of their education on line. Typically, the on line resources are provided by private corporate vendors contracting to individuals or in some cases school districts, and the target audience tends to be middle school or high school.
School districts and teachers (including unions) are typically reticent to support this shift. While such groups may be resisting online offerings because it constitutes direct competition, they also have valid complaints that online learning, like…
cortex | January 30, 2008I've got a new article on the psychology of back pain in the February issue of Best Life (the one with Jeff Gordon on the cover):
I've put the entire article below the fold:
Dr. Marc Sopher, a family physician in Exeter, New Hampshire, is drenched in sweat. He's just run eight miles on a humid summer morning and played a game of tennis. (He's going for a bike ride later, after he sees his patients.) His short hair is salted with whiteâ¯Sopher is 46â¯but he has the taut body of a young athlete. Whenever he moves, you can see his muscles flex and twitch. He shakes my hand, ushers me into his…
pharyngula | January 29, 2008Steven Schafersman is the president of Texas Citizens for Science, and he sent along a status report for Texas — it's not all bad news, and of course it's always good to see a strong, active organization defending science in the state. I've put the full report below.
ICR
I talked to many individuals in Austin. I had several good conversations with THECB Commissioner Raymund Paredes. He is really a good guy and we got along well. He understands Austin politics, and is now completely knowledgeable about Creationism in general and ICR in particular, and since we traded several email messages…
clock | January 28, 2008Karen James, better known online as 'nunatak', is part of the team that is trying to build a replica of H.M.S. Beagle in time for next year's bicenntenial celebration of Charles Darwin's life and work. Karen is the director of science at The Beagle Project and one of the two Beagle Bloggers. She came to the Science Blogging Conference last weekend and co-moderated the delightful session on Real-time blogging in the marine sciences. I thought it would be cool to do a little friendly, chatty interview with Karen, so I sent her a few questions and here is what she said:
Hi, Karen. Welcome to…
kevin z | January 26, 2008Arrgh! Hello thar ye Deep-Sea scurvy. My name is Kevin Zelnio and it is my great pleasure to be a part of the Deep Sea News team and a member of the ScienceBlogs network. I've read DSN for a while, before I knew what a blog was. I always thought it was a news website for the deep-sea. The inclusion of 'News' into the title of the blog is important. Craig and Peter feel like they have an obligation to report on the happenings of the deep-sea, often before they are made known in more traditional media outlets, and without regard to any specific scientific discipline. They have set strict…
jstemwedel | January 25, 2008PZ tagged me with a teaching meme. The question is "Why do you teach and why is academic freedom critical to that effort?"
Unlike PZ, I knew I had a thing for teaching long before I had a clue what discipline I would end up pursuing. (My first official paycheck for a teaching gig was issued in 1985.) But at this stage of my life, my reasons for teaching are a bit more complex than "I like it," "I'm good at it," and "It's a requirement of my job to do so."
They're complex enough, in fact, that I'm going to subvert the question a little and talk about why I teach the two main courses I…
jstemwedel | January 24, 2008Via Bint Alshamsa, this is a version of a "social class awareness experience" used in the residence halls (and possibly also classrooms?) at Indiana State University by Will Barratt et al. In the classroom, students are asked to take a step forward for each of the statements that describe them; they don't talk about the exercise (and how they feel about it) until after they've gone through the whole list.
Doing this online, I'm bolding the statements which describe my background. Also, I'm including a second list that Lauren added based on the suggestions Bint's commenters made as to other…
drorzel | January 23, 2008
Downloading by Students Overstated :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
The MPAA inflated numbers for student downloading by a factor of three. Gee, and they seemed so honest...
(tags: academia movies computing stupid internet)
blogs | The A.V. Club
Nathan Rabin's Year of Flops
(tags: blogs movies review)
Seismic images show dinosaur-killing meteor made bigger splash
"According to Sean Gulick, a research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences and principal investigator for the…
terrasig | January 23, 2008Plenty of e-ink has already been spilled regarding the panel on "Changing Minds Through Science Communication: a panel on Framing Science," from this past weekend's NC Science Blogging Conference (see Larry Moran, Rick MacPherson, Molly Keener, and Ryan Somma for examples). The panel was the least "unconference" session of the meeting, beginning with 10 min presentations from ocean conservationist and marine biology bloggers Jennifer Jacquet and Sheril Kirshenbaum followed by Chris Mooney, Sheril's co-blogger, freelance writer, and author of The Republican War on Science and Storm World.…