Education
clock | July 10, 2007
This post is perhaps not my best post, but is, by far, my most popular ever. Sick and tired of politics after the 2004 election I decided to start a science-only blog - Circadiana. After a couple of days of fiddling with the templae, on January 8, 2005, I posted the very first post, this one, at 2:53 AM and went to bed. When I woke up I was astonished as the Sitemeter was going wild! This post was linked by BoingBoing and later that day, by Andrew Sullivan. It has been linked by people ever since, as recently as a couple of days ago, although the post is a year and a half old.…
clock | July 4, 2007This post was a response to a decent (though not too exciting) study and the horrible media reporting on it. As the blogosphere focused on the press releases, I decided to look at the paper itself and see what it really says. It was first posted on August 09, 2005. Under the fold (reposted on July 12, 2006)...
I saw this on Pandagon first - a response to an article on NeuroImage about gender-specific voice recognition. Actually, it was not a response to the article itself (behind the subscription wall), but to the MSM reporting about the article. Soon, other bloggers chimed in, notably…
jstemwedel | June 29, 2007The June 25th issue of Chemical & Engineering News has two pieces that talk about ways people are using features of the "new internet" (or Web 2.0) to disseminate and explore chemistry online.
Celia Henry Arnaud's article "A New Science Channel" looks at efforts scientists and scientific organizations have made to harness YouTube as a tool of outreach. Organizations like the Museum of Science, Boston and AAAS have taken videos created for museum kiosks and meetings and posted them on YouTube in the hopes that they "go viral" and reach a broader audience. (As AAAS discovered, this can be…
revere | June 29, 2007The Republican wannabees are all making their pilgrimages to a single institution of Higher Learning, these days. Regent University. And why not. As Rudi Giuliani said the other day to the faculty and students there: "The Amount Of Influence You Have Is Really, Really Terrific." Regent University is Pat Robertson's place: Christian Leadership to Change the World. If you've never heard of Regent, and its amazing academic stature, it's probably because you haven't been perusing the rankings in the U.S. News and World Report evaluation of higher education. Well, maybe you have and just didn't…
pharyngula | June 29, 2007The Nevada System of Higher Education wants to arm their faculty. That's insane. We have rare instances of students going on a shooting spree; I don't see how turning the classroom into a firefight is going to stop that, and I also have a suspicion that any homicidal maniacs will henceforth simply put "shoot the professor" first on their to-do list. The other concern: how often has this happened at your university?
Dishevelled, out-of-breath student bursts into the room in the middle of class — he overslept.
Angry student storms into your office, red in the face and furious about his exam.…
sb admin | June 26, 2007By Peter Lurie, MD, MPH, Deputy Director, Public Citizenâs Health Research Group
Dr. Lurie is a contributor to Public Citizenâs drug newsletter, available at www.worstpills.org. He will present testimony on state doctor gift disclosure laws before the Senate Special Committee on Aging on Wednesday, June 27, 2007. This article originally appeared in the May 2007 issue of Public Citizenâs Health Letter.
The life of a doctor must be tough. To judge by most of their offices, doctors are unable to afford pens, mugs, refrigerator magnets, or pads of paper. Even lunch is beyond their reach, it…
jstemwedel | June 25, 2007There's an article in today's Inside Higher Ed on the building momentum in college chemistry courses to make the labs greener -- that is, to reduce the amount of hazardous materials necessary in the required student experiments. What grabbed me about the article is that it looks like the greening of the chem labs may not just be good for the environment -- it could be better for student learning, too.
First, consider a chemist's description of how to revamp laboratory experiments to make them greener. The article quotes Ken Doxsee, a chemistry professor at University of Oregon:
"We look at…
jstemwedel | June 23, 2007Zuska reminded me that today is the one-year anniversary of the suicide of Denice Denton, an accomplished electrical engineer, tireless advocate for the inclusion and advancement of women in science and, at the time of her death, the chancellor of UC-Santa Cruz.
I never met Denton, and a year ago my feelings about her were complicated. On one side was her clear public voice against unexamined acceptance of longstanding assumptions about gender difference; from an article dated 26 June, 2006 in Inside Higher Ed:
She was in the audience when Lawrence H. Summers made the controversial comments…
jstemwedel | June 22, 2007Another article from Inside Higher Ed that caught my eye:
The chancellor of the City University of New York [Matthew Goldstein] floated a unique approach this week to dealing with the long lamented problem of low enrollments in the sciences: Offer promising students conditional acceptances to top Ph.D. programs in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) as they start college. ...
In a speech Monday, Goldstein envisioned a national effort in which students identified for their aptitude in middle school would subsequently benefit from academic enrichment programs…
jstemwedel | June 22, 2007Recently Inside Higher Ed had an article about a study (PDF here) coming out of the University of California on the predictive power of the SAT with respect to grades in college courses. The study, by Saul Geiser and Maria Veronica Santelices at the UC-Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education, followed the performance (which is to say, grades) of students at all UC campuses for four years and found that "high school grades are consistently the strongest predictor of any factor of success through four years in college". Indeed, the study found high school grades a stronger predictor…
denialism | June 22, 2007Bible Belt Blogger brings us this excerpt from the Family Research Council's "Dear Praying Friends" letter:
Surgeon General Nominee under Fire - Dr. James Holsinger, President Bush's nominee for Surgeon General, has been harshly condemned by pro-homosexual activists for a 1991 paper he wrote for the Methodist Church describing male gay sex as unnatural and unhealthy. Sen. Barak Obama (D-IL) attacked Holsinger and President Bush saying, "...The Surgeon General's office is no place for bigotry...that would trump sound science." But Holsinger's work catalogued the obvious. The Center for Disease…
drorzel | June 21, 2007That's shocking mostly in a Claude-Rains-in-Casablanca sort of sense ("I am shocked--shocked!"), but there are a couple of stories in Inside Higher Ed this morning presenting new findings that seem like they ought to be really obvious.
The first is a new study of the University of California system that finds that different majors are different:
Among the 58,000 undergraduates on eight campuses who participated in the survey, students who majored in the social sciences and humanities reported higher levels of satisfaction with their undergraduate education over all as well as better skills in…
thusspakezuska | June 20, 2007I wasn't able to attend the WEPAN national conference this year, and I really missed going. So I was glad that Carol Muller of MentorNet wrote to the WEPAN listserv today with a mini-conference report/follow-up. She covered three topics: the plenary session tribute to Denice Denton; follow-up to a MentorNet panel discussion that mentioned NOGLSTP; and plans for MentorNet for the coming year. There's also a sneak preview for MentorNet at ASEE. Details after the jump.
Carol writes:
I am writing to provide requested and promised follow-up on 3 items which were part of our discussions at…
sporte | June 20, 2007Quoth Dr. Stemwedel, from Adventures in Science and Ethics.
In the case of Universities and four-yr colleges, I completely agree. If you're looking for job training, go to a community college.
This post is in response to one of the comments from the other day. This commenter expressed frustration at having a completed a bioinformatics training program that left him/her with a certificate but without the right skills to find a job.
tags: bioinformatics, education
He/she suggested that "the government must select candidates for teaching from industry"
This post is my answer.
In the U.S.,…
drorzel | June 20, 2007Today's Inside Higher Ed has a story about growing resistance to the US News rankings:
In the wake of meetings this week of the Annapolis Group -- an organization of liberal arts colleges -- critics of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings are expecting a significant increase in the number of institutions where presidents pledge not to participate in the "reputational" portion of the rankings or to use scores in their own promotional materials.
A majority of the approximately 80 presidents at the meeting said that they did not intend to participate in the U.S. News reputational…
jrosenhouse | June 10, 2007Woodward closed by gushing about Ralph Seelke, who is a biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Superior. His web page carries a large disclaimer that his views do not represent the views of the university. That's never a good sign. The site also has various pro-ID articles and links. He mentions three of his favorite books: Reason in the Balance and Darwin on Trial, both by Phillip Johnson, and The Creator and the Cosmos by Hugh Ross. Get the idea?
Woodward was very excited about Seelke's work on tryptophan, which he described as an experimental test of evolution. It was a bright…
sb admin | June 8, 2007Richard Stickler, the Asst. Secretary for MSHA, announced a new educational campaign to increase awareness about black lung disease. This latest initiative comes in response to surveillance data showing newly diagnosed cases of progressive massive fibrosis (PMF) among miners working in Lee County and Wise County, Virginia.  Stickler's "Control the Dust/Prevent Black Lung" campaign, which includes a personal letter sent to each and every underground coal mine operator in the country, is heavy on hand-holding with mine operators.  My question:
Mr. Stickler, where's the…
tfk | June 7, 2007The April 5, 2004 edition of the New Yorker had a fascinating article about height. (Incidentally, I highly recommend The Complete New Yorker.) It centers on a researcher named John Komlos, an anthropometric economist at the University of Munich, and work he's done to trace heights of different populations over time. In considering the effects of immigrants on a society and vice versa, it's worth considering what we really ought to consider intrinsic. As the author of the article notes, "height, like skin color, seems to vary with geography: we think of squat Peruvians, slender Masai,…
tsmith | June 7, 2007 My office in the epidemiology department is located within the hospital. Therefore, every day when I walk into work, I pass by a sign like the one on the left. Like most states, Iowa has a safe haven law--a law that allows parents to leave a newborn infant at a designated site, no questions asked, without any threat of prosecution. These sorts of laws were developed in response to cases where babies had been left on doorsteps, or thrown in trash dumpsters, etc. Safe Haven laws, in theory, should prevent those kinds of abuses--the parents abdicate responsibility for the infant, who can…
revere | June 5, 2007Many observers have known that politics has become an increasingly important part of CDC world. Now even the conventional media are noticing. From ABC News:.
The nation's first line of defense against these assaults, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is once again in the spotlight and facing questions about its handling of this latest medical alert. But an even larger question is often debated when it comes to the CDC -- the extent to which it is an agency influenced by politics.
For most government organizations, political influence is taken for granted. Yet the public is…