Education
pharyngula | January 17, 2008I have mixed feelings about this article in Inside Higher Ed on the issue of approving an ICR degree program in Texas. On the one hand, it's clear that the Texas bureaucracy is being cautious and thorough and working its way through their official protocols. Raymund Paredes, the commissioner of higher education, has raised concerns about the proposed program—online graduate degrees in he sciences are problematic because they lack the laboratory component; the proposed curriculum is not equivalent to other graduate programs in Texas; they haven't documented that the ICR is a research…
thusspakezuska | January 15, 2008I thought things would settle down a bit after I got back home, but it appears my life is still more or less consumed with endless amounts of paperwork relating to my mother's finances, change of addresses needing to be made, dealing with the insurance companies. I am sure this will all settle down into a normal routine of monthly paperwork soon, but right now it's still an issue a minute. I seriously do not know how people deal with this when they have full time employment.
This all means I have little time/energy to spare for good blog posts still, so I thought I'd just offer up to you…
kcontreary | January 8, 2008From my hometown paper, the one and only New Orleans Times Picayune.
Deion Dedeaux sensed that sixth grade at Martin Behrman Elementary in New Orleans would be full of possibilities. A new school. A chance to improve his grades. A teacher who seemed like a father.
And no girls.
"You know girls," Deion said. "They like to talk. I just knew it was going to be better this way."
Apparently the national trend in single-sex public education is taking root in New Orleans, already home to a large parochial single-sex education community. Nationwide, single-sex public school programs or…
laelaps | January 7, 2008 It may not be a new paper, but this afternoon I came across an article by Mark Hafner published in the Journal of Mammalogy called "Field Research in Mammalogy: An Enterprise in Peril" that definitely struck a chord with me. When I decided to enter into the ecology & evolution major at Rutgers, I assumed that I would eventually be introduced to some field work and be able to focus on vertebrate zoology, but much to my dismay no such program seemed to exist. Much of the learning involved taxonomy in the lab, which (don't get me wrong) is important, but field studies seemed to be entirely…
catdynamics | January 7, 2008After thinking occasionally about it, for months, and talking to a couple of friends and neighbours, by golly, I think I've got it... It is all about the OWL levels, really.
There are three aspects to the problem of US education: the structure, the pedagogy and the content. I will pontificate on some and touch upon all.
Now UPDATED - I concede a major point... - I rather naughtily moved the date up. This originally came out on Jan 4 at 8 am. I want it higher on my page now that SciBlogs frontpaged it.
First of all, the "No Child Left Behind" act must be abolished.
Last time I read it, my…
oracknows | January 7, 2008Pity the investigators at the CDC studying whether thimerosal, the mercury-containing preservative pilloried by the antivaccination movement as the cause of autism and everything that is evil in medicine. Three months ago, they published a high profile article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled Early Thimerosal Exposure and Neuropsychological Outcomes at 7 to 10 Years, which, as had so many large studies before it, failed to find any correlation between thimerosal-containing vaccines (TCVs) and neuropsychological problems in children. True, it didn't specifically look at autism (…
gregladen | December 26, 2007You already know about the controversy in South Carolina. Now is your opportunity to put in your two cents.
Kansas City dot Com, which is NOT a South Carolina newspaper, has a short article on the story:
The debate over how to teach the origin of species in public high schools could resurface in January, when the South Carolina Board of Education meets.
The divided state panel withheld its endorsement of two biology textbooks this month when board member Charles W. McKinney pointed to dozens of questions raised in critiques by Horace D. Skipper, a retired Clemson University professor.
And,…
gregladen | December 22, 2007Two years ago, the S.C. state school board introduced creationist-friendly language into its science standards, mainly on the urging of Republican State Senator Mike Fair. This was part of the Wedge Strategy, and involved including language to "critically analyze" evolutionary theory. They were highly criticised at the time.
In January, the board will consider the use of two textbooks in sate schools. Board Member Charles McKinney is brining into the discussion criticisms brought up by Clemson Universtiy Professor Horace Skipper. One of the books is by Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine.…
gregladen | December 20, 2007Red Hat Profitable; Solar-powered laptop for Tanzania; Happy Birthday Perl; NetBSD 4.0 released
Red Hat 3Q Profit Up 12 Percent from PhysOrg.com
(AP) -- Open-source software provider Red Hat Inc. said Thursday that its third quarter profit rose 12 percent as a surge in subscriptions helped offset increased spending on marketing and research.
[...]
Penn State student team develops solar-powered laptop for Tanzanian students
University Park, Pa. -- For a team of Penn State engineering students, the challenge wasn't getting laptops to Tanzanian students, but how to power those machines.…
pharyngula | December 19, 2007Textbook selection by the South Carolina State Board of Education has been held up because of baseless objections by creationist reviewers. Does this sound familiar? It's what triggered the Dover trial — clueless school board members rejecting standard biology textbooks because they wanted something more…biblical.
During October and November, the texts approved by the state Evaluation Committee were sent out for public review to 28 sites - mostly colleges and universities with teacher education programs. It was during this period of time, that Ms. Kristin Maguire (or one of her colleagues)…
jstemwedel | December 19, 2007In the 20/27 December 2007 issue of Nature, there's a fascinating commentary by Cambridge University neuroscientists Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir. Entitled "Professor's little helper," this commentary explores, among other things, how "cognitive-enhancing drugs" are starting to find their way into the lifestyles of professors and students on university campuses, a development which raises some interesting ethical questions.
The questions are sufficiently rich here that this post will just serve as my first attempt to get some of the important issues on the table and to open it up…
drorzel | December 19, 2007A former Michigan law professor is suing the university because he was denied tenure:
The professor, Peter Hammer, won a majority of votes of the faculty of the law school in his case. But the 18-12 margin was two shy of the two-thirds requirement to win tenure, so he lost his job, and now is a professor of law at Wayne State University. He says he was the first male faculty member rejected by the faculty for tenure in 40 years.
Like lots of tenure disputes, this one has many facets -- debates on Hammer's scholarship, disputes on deadlines and technical parts of the tenure and grievance…
pharyngula | December 17, 2007Texas Citizens for Science has come up with the site visit report for the ICR. It's funky stuff: it seems they had creationist-sympathizers review the program, and they issued a pile of fluff and let them slide on their content.
The PDF file contains (1) the Report of Evaluation of the ICR by the THECB Site Visit Team and (2) the ICR Initial Response to the Report of Evaluation. The latter Response contains ICR's Strategic Plan and Budgeting Process Timeline for their new Dallas institution.
The on-site evaluation committee of the THECB visited ICR on November 8, 2007. The on-site visiting…
pharyngula | December 17, 2007So that's what the ICR is up to
If you've been wondering what's up with that attempt by the Institute for Creation Research to get accredited by the state of Texas, Texas Citizens for Science has dug up some suggestive information: the ICS is trying to trade up from their past worthless accreditation by an evangelical accreditation board, and they're hoping to tap into some secular legitimacy.
The story is below the fold.
ICR is listed as accredited by TRACS on the U.S. Department of Education Database of Accredited Programs and Institutions. Information about this database is at
http://www.…
retrospectacle | December 17, 2007Along with Shelley, I am a graduate student in the Neuroscience Program at UM. The last three years my labmates and I have made a trilogy of satirical neuroscience posters poking mild fun at the mystical art of brain science. Shelley has kindly invited me to write on said trilogy. Also in any spare time remaining I punish myself with some rather difficult neural engineering experiments. (Tim Marzullo)
Episode 1: Spurious Correlations
You know the experience. To quote Allen Ginsburg, "everybody's serious but me." You walk around the massive meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, with 30,000…
oracknows | December 17, 2007Regular readers of this blog know that I have been becoming increasingly disturbed by what I see as the infiltration of non-evidenced-based "alternative" medicine into academic medical centers. Indeed, about a month ago, I went so far as to count the number of medical schools that offer some form of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) in their curricula. (What a fantastic marketing term for what are in the vast majority of cases therapies without a plausible scientific basis or compelling clinical evidence for efficacy above that of a placebo!) The end result was the Academic Woo…
mikethemadbiologist | December 15, 2007At least, that's what the latest CBO data suggest. Paul Krugman summarizes the change in after-tax income between 2003-2005:
Here's what the numbers say about percentage gains in after-tax income from 2003 to 2005:
Bottom quintile: 2%
Next quintile: 2.4%
Middle quintile: 3.9%
Fourth quintile: 3.7%
Top quintile: 16%
Top 10%: 20.9%
Top 5%: 27.7%
Top 1%: 43.5%
It was a boom, all right -- but only for a few people.
Once you get to the top fifth it gets very interesting. Compare the top quintile increase of 16% to the top tenth increase of 20.9%. When you consider that the top quintile contains…
pharyngula | December 13, 2007Hector Avalos sent me his response to the Discovery Institute's 'shocking' revelation that people had been discussing Guillermo Gonzalez's affiliation with Intelligent Design creationism before they denied him tenure. It's a classic pointless objection: of course they were, and of course his openly expressed, unscientific beliefs which were stated as a representative of ISU were a serious consideration. It does not speak well of the Discovery Institute that they had to cobble together quote-mines from the email to try and make a non-case for a non-issue.
THE DI AND THE SMOKING GUN THAT WASN'…
jstemwedel | December 12, 2007In light of the ongoing flap about Iowa State University's decision to deny tenure to Guillermo Gonzalez, I thought it might be worth looking at an actual university policy on tenure -- the policy in place at my university -- and considering the sorts of judgments required by policies like this. The take-home message is that tenure can't be taken as a "sure thing" if only you produce a certain number of publications.
First, it's worth pointing out that each college and university has its own policy on tenure, and my sense is that the policy at my university is rather more explicit than most…
gregladen | December 12, 2007 want us to believe that their "theory" is part of science, but of course, it is really a form of creationism, and has no place in Texas schools. This position is shared by more than 100 professors in Texas, who have weighted in on this debate:
"Intelligent design is a religious idea that deserves no place in the science classroom," said assistant professor Daniel Bolnick from his lab on the University of Texas campus. "I really just want to communicate to the state board that we're keeping an eye on the quality of evolution education, and that there's no justification for watering it down…