Education
oracknows | December 12, 2007Readers may have noticed (or maybe they haven't) that I haven't commented at all on the Guillermo Gonzalez case. As you may recall, Gonzalez is an astronomer at Iowa State University, as well as advocate of "intelligent design" creationism. In May 2007, ISU denied tenure to Gonzalez. Not surprisingly, the ID movement in general and its propagnda arm (Discovery Institute) in particular have done their best to try to portray Gonzalez as a martyr who was "persecuted" for his beliefs and denied his "academic freedom." Despite the attempts of the DI to milk it for all its PR value, as usual, the…
grrlscientist | December 10, 2007tags: science, public policy, politics, federal funding, research, reality-based government, 2008 American presidential elections, ScienceDebate2008
There are plenty of debates for presidential candidates on all sorts of topics, but have you noticed that none of these debates include any discussion about science and research? Sure, the candidates all are ready to whine about how there "aren't enough scientists and engineers out there", but that is purely a bullshit sentiment based on blatant lies -- as I and thousands of other un(der)employed Americans with PhDs in various scientific,…
denialism | December 6, 2007Well today is my thesis defense day. For those who are unfamiliar with the process, this is how it works at least at my university.
When you start out in a lab you do the experiments your boss tells you to do, with the goal of picking up a project. This usually involves taking up where another graduate student or post-doc left off, or reading the literature in your field and figuring out an important question to answer. Depending on how many years its been since your boss handled a pipette, he/she will suggest experiments that range from next to impossible to impossible. You spend a year…
tqa | December 6, 2007
With all of the renewed fuss the Discovery Institute is trying to stir up over the Gonzalez tenure thing, this seems like a really good time to talk about the role of money in the tenure process. I'm not going to do this because the money issue is one that the Discovery folks are frantically trying to distract attention from (they are) or because Gonzalez's inability to land external funds means that he'd be a very weak candidate for tenure even if he wasn't involved in ID (it does). I'm going to look at the role of money in the process because it's hugely important, for more reasons than…
drorzel | December 6, 2007Kevin Drum looks at the latest story about American students lagging the world in science test scores, and notes that this has been going on at least since he was in school. This leads him to wonder whether it's really as bad as all that:
I still wonder about this. If American kids are getting mediocre educations, and if they've been getting these mediocre educations for several decades now, shouldn't this have long since shown up in the business world, the tech world, and the financial world? And yet, it hasn't. So what's the deal? Makes me wonder if maybe American kids don't actually suck…
pharyngula | December 5, 2007The recent unpleasant affair at the Texas Education Agency, in which the director of the science curriculum, Chris Comer, was pressured to resign, was triggered by Comer forwarding an email announcing a talk by Barbara Forrest. Forrest is a philosopher of science, and one of our leading advocates in the ongoing fight for better science education in the face of the nonsense the creationists are promoting. She's also one of their critics the creationists most fear, so it's not surprising that her name would elicit knee-jerk panic.
Forrest has now issued a formal statement on the termination of…
tfk | December 4, 2007It's been days since the public became aware that Chris Comer, an award-winning science educator in the Texas Education Agency, was fired for daring to forward an email announcement of a talk about why intelligent design isn't science. Coverage of the story has hit the AP wires, the pages of USA Today, the New York Times, Nature's news blog and many other sources. The Times editorial page even weighed in with concern over Ms. Comer's firing.
The Disco. Inst., usually quick to complain about any academic personnel decision touching on ID in the least way, has remained totally silent.…
drorzel | December 4, 2007Over at Inside Higher Ed, they have a piece looking at the state of college football as we enter bowl season. This is dominated by two large tables of numbers, one good, and one bad.
The first table is the good one, as it explains why the college football "championship" is so messed up. It lists the 32 bowl games that will be played over the next month, and the per-team payout for each. The five major BCS bowls pay each team $17 million, which neatly explains why the college football elite are unwilling to put in a playoff-- in any real championship system, they might end up having to share…
jstemwedel | December 3, 2007A friend of mine in a philosophy department at an Ivy League school asked for my advice in helping students on the market for academic jobs prepare for their interviews:
One of the things our students asked us about was preparing for interviews at schools quite different than this one (e.g., state schools, liberal arts schools, satellite campus, etc.). In particular, they want to know what kinds of questions to be prepared for. The first question one student was asked last year, for example, was "Can you tell us what you think about the ideal teacher/student relationship?" This is not what…
pharyngula | November 29, 2007Texas Citizens for Science has posted a summary of the political pressures:
TEA has a new policy, one of neutrality between biological evolution and Intelligent Design Creationism. This new policy was put in place when Dr. Don McLeroy--an outspoken Creationist and activist for Intelligent Design Creationism and its marketing campaign--was appointed the new Chair of the State Board of Education (SBOE). By publicizing a lecture by a Louisiana State University professor of the philosophy of science that supported evolution--as required by the state's science standards--and opposed Intelligent…
pharyngula | November 29, 2007We now have a copy of the vile, biased e-mail that cost Chris Comer her job. It's unbelievably one-sided and horrible — I swear, it's like using your office network to harrass co-workers with explicit porn. It turns out that this offensive e-mail was from the NCSE, and referenced the Center for Inquiry; if only it had mentioned the ACLU, it would have achieved a hellish trifecta.
The mind-blowing e-mail is below the fold, to protect innocent eyes.
To: Glenn Branch
From: Glenn Branch
Subject: Barbara Forrest in Austin 11/2
Cc:
Bcc: [redacted]
Dear Austin-area friends of NCSE,
I thought that…
tfk | November 29, 2007Chris Comer's firing has been getting a lot of attention, and one question keeps getting asked: "What kind of soul-torturing electronic missive about an academic talk could be so dastardly as to result in someone getting fired merely for forwarding it?"
Read on only if you are prepared to enter a Lovecraftian world filled with squishy tentacles and phrases like "expert testimony":
Subject: Barbara Forrest in Austin 11/2
Dear Austin-area friends of NCSE,
I thought that you might like to know that Barbara Forrest will be speaking on "Inside Creationism's Trojan Horse" in Austin on November 2,…
terrasig | November 28, 2007...and we thank you.
If you look down yonder left, you'll see that my SiteMeter counter passed 100,000 visits earlier today.
To be precise, a visitor from the University of Edinburgh's Moray House Institute of Education dialed into ScienceBlogs' 'Last 24 Hours' channel at 2037 GMT and clicked on my post about yesterday's death of Dr Robert Cade, the renal physiologist who formulated Gatorade. (So that readers don't get nervous, SiteMeter doesn't track in any greater detail than that.).
So, a great many thanks to my Scottish reader for being #100,000. If I knew who you were and could be…
sb admin | November 27, 2007The chairman of the University of Kentucky's (UK) mining engineering department wrote in a recent op-ed of his strong oppposition to a new mine safety bill (HR 2768) which is making its way through Congress. The legislation will address long-standing health and safety hazards faced by miners such as disease-causing coal dust and silica, belt-air ventilation, flammable conveyor belts, among other things. In "New Mining Bill Premature," printed in the Lexington Herald-Leader, Professor Rick Honaker says it is "incomprehensible" that Congress is attempting to place new safety…
nisbetmc | November 27, 2007
This fall in the sophomore-level course I teach on "Communication and Society," we spent several weeks examining the many ways that individuals and groups are using the internet to alter the nature of community, civic engagement, and social relationships.
For college students who grew up online, it's easy to take for granted the virtual society we live in, seldom pausing to consider how it might be different from more traditional forms of community life. Therefore, one of the goals of the course was to encourage students to think systematically and rigorously about the many changes…
laelaps | November 25, 2007As I described in the introduction to my more poetic post "There is a grandeur in this view of life...," fossil hunting is one of the most exciting and rewarding activities I've even taken part in. It might not be easy work and it often does not bear petrified prizes, but a few scraps of bone, a tooth fragment, or a fossilized shell is still an amazing vestige of a distant past that no human has ever seen. Young Earth Creationists, on the other hand, contend that the world is only about 6,000 years old and that when the first humans were evicted from Eden they had to content with the mighty…
sciencewoman | November 24, 2007My post a few days ago has set people debating what the conventions are for addressing faculty at different universities. It seems that the form of address is highly dependent on where in the world you go to university.
Let me explain where I'm coming from in insisting that my students call me Dr. Woman rather Mrs. Woman. And then I'm going to ask for suggestions for next semester.
In my UG at an old-guard American university, everyone was Dr. lastname, except the really ancient and honorable profs who were Prof. lastname. In grad school, faculty were firstname or first + lastname.
The class…
loom | November 20, 2007The deja vu is hitting hard.
Two years ago a Pennsylvania court was hearing a challenge to introducing intelligent design into a public school in the town of Dover. At the time, I argued that people should look south to understand the stakes of the conflict. Down in Florida the state government seemed to be trying to have it both ways when it came to creationism. The chair of the state House Education Council introduced a bill that would allow students to sue their professors if they didn't consider intelligent in class. Governor Bush refused to comment on whether intelligent design should be…
oracknows | November 18, 2007Note: The Aggregator was updated on May 18, 2008.
Last week, almost on a whim, I decided to try to figure out just how much woo has infiltrated academic medicine by trying to come up with an estimate of just how many academic medical centers offer woo of some form or another in the form of centers of "integrative medicine" or "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM). I was shocked that the list numbered at least 39, with at least 12 offering reiki and five or six offering homeopathy. Dr. RW has expressed his support for this effort and at the same time given me an idea:
I knew such a…
gregladen | November 17, 2007According to research just out from the University of Nottingham, lowering the differential between high and low incomes can have a more positive effect on child wellbeing than simply growing the economy in countries that are already wealthy.
From the press release:
Poorer children fare less well than richer ones in each society. But a recent UNICEF report detailing 40 indicators of child wellbeing, said children in the UK and the USA fared worse than in any of the other rich countries.
The new research examines whether the damage is done by being poor, or by being poorer than others.
To…