Education
grrlscientist | January 29, 2007
Wood Duck drake, Aix sponsa.
Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Arthur Morris, Birds as Art.
Birds in Science
The ancestors of modern birds are thought to have been small, feathered, dinosaurs, the theropods. One of these small feathered dinosaurs is Microraptor gui, a feathered dromaosaur that lived 125 million years ago in what is now China. According to the evidence, Microraptor gui was one of the earliest gliders. But unlike modern birds, it appears to have utilized four wings, like a biplane, because it had long and asymmetric flight feathers on both its…
thusspakezuska | January 29, 2007Thanks for all your initial interest and inquiries about the course. I thought maybe I'd better do a "going over the syllabus and answering some questions" post as a result. So here it is!
Books: The books needed for the course are posted on the syllabus. PLEASE NOTE THIS ADDITION TO WEEK 1 READING: Beyond Bias and Barriers:Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering, NSF Report, Summary, pp. 1-10 (available free to read online; must pay to download).
I know the books are expensive, so not everybody can afford to buy them. If you have access to a university…
pharyngula | January 26, 2007Sara at Orcinus has an excellent article on the UC/Calvary Chapel Christian School lawsuit, in which a Christian private school is suing the University of California system to require them to accept their dreck for credit. She's right that the universities need to stand up for standards, but I do have some problems with her opening statement: it ignores some complexities.
I've been saying for a long while now that the power to end the Intelligent Design fiasco, firmly and finally and with but a single word, rests in the manicured hands of the chancellors of America's top universities. The…
clock | January 24, 2007Most of our anti-Creationist battles are over efforts to infuse Christian religion into K-12 education. One common battlefield is the courtroom where our side has (so far, until/unless the benches get filled with more clones of Priscilla Owen) won. But another place where we can stop them is the college admission office.
Sara Robinson of the Orcinus blog (which everybody should read daily) revisits, in more detail than I ever saw on any science blogs at the time this first started, the legal battle between the University of California and the Calvary Chapel Christian School over what…
drorzel | January 24, 2007We've been running a search to fill a tenure-track faculty position for next year, and I've spent more time than I care to recall reading folders and interviewing candidates. Now that the process is nearing completion, I'd like to do a quick post offering advice for those thinking about applying for a tenure-track position at a small liberal arts college. Yes, this is too late to do any good for people thinking of applying for the current job, but then, we wouldn't want anybody to get an unfair advantage by reading my blog.
The following statements are entirely my own opinion, and should not…
nisbetmc | January 19, 2007While many schools pour hundreds of millions of dollars into athletics, more signs today that among the elite universities, stem cell research is at the center of competition. As I wrote last week, it's going to be difficult for Red State schools across the country to keep up in the national rankings as they are left behind in funding and support for research in regenerative biology by private institutions like Harvard, and public universities such as the UC schools, and after this fall, the SUNY system. From today's Boston Globe:
The Harvard University corporation will devote $50 million…
bushwells | January 18, 2007Last Sunday, my son, who is home for his rapidly waning semester break, and I met a couple of friends in New York City where we enjoyed breakfast at good enough to eat followed by a visit to the nearby American Museum of Natural History. We dedicated ourselves to the fossil halls on the fourth floor of the museum. The halls were teeming with families. While we stopped in front of one of the big cladograms, we overheard a young father matter-of-factly telling his young children that "birds evolved from dinosaurs" as he gestured toward the dino family tree. Even if the museum was…
nisbetmc | January 15, 2007The same week Harvard unveiled its plans for a 250 acre Life Sciences campus, Scotland's University of Edinburgh announced a $115 million dollar Stem Cell Research Institute to be directed by Ian Wilmut. At universities across Europe, Asia, the US, and Canada, there's a race to be at the forefront of life sciences research.
Indeed, in the recent Chronicle of Higher Ed rankings of US universities, those schools with advanced medical and life sciences research dominated the top twenty. At public universities like UCSF, Berkeley, the other UC flagships, and the University of Wisconsin, their…
nisbetmc | January 14, 2007
There's a reason why Harvard continues to dominate institutional rankings. While some universities spend $100s of millions of dollars on their athletic programs and athletic facilities, Harvard sinks its $30 billion endowment into a 250 acre life sciences campus. From the news wires:
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) - Harvard University unveiled plans on Thursday for a multibillion-dollar campus expansion that aims to turn America's oldest university into one of the world's top hubs for stem-cell research and other life sciences. The plan, years in the making, will give a radical new…
drorzel | January 14, 2007An article from the Chronicle of Higher Education has landed in my inbox, describing efforts to recruit students to conservative groups:
Ryan J. Sorba stands before a table covered with mini-cupcakes and whoopie pies, calling out to students as they pass. A sign lists the prices: $6 for customers under 18; $3 for 19-year-olds; $1 for 20-year-olds; 25 cents for 21- to 39-year-olds; and free to those 40 and over.
"Don't get screwed by Social Security, support private accounts," says Mr. Sorba, a conservative activist who has come here to Bentley College's Student Union to help recruit new…
mixingmemory | January 13, 2007Originally posted on the old blog on 3/12/2006
My contribution to Darwin Day was pretty weak for a staunch supporter of science. Sure, I think the name is a bad idea, and want to rename it "Evolution Day," or at least something other than Darwin Day (I thought about maybe suggesting "Variation Appreciation Day," or "Hug a Mutation Day"). But objections to the name aside, I felt kind of guilty about making such a substanceless contribution to a day with what I believe are noble purposes, especially after reading (via Clark) that 53% of Americans reject evolution entirely. So I'm going to try…
pharyngula | January 13, 2007…and he's as much of a fool as you'd expect. Paszkiewicz is theteacher who told his students they deserved to go to hell if they didn't believe in Jesus, among other things, and he has now written a letter to his regional newspaper.
The letter is about as you'd expect. It's a long-winded example of quote-mining the founding fathers to support his continued claim that America is a Christian nation, and also that the courts are being used to strip Christians of their freedom. It's awfully silly stuff.
All I can say is that I don't care that the Jefferson and Washington held religious views—they…
pharyngula | January 11, 2007I reported on this survey of people's attitudes towards evolution, in which the US was second to the worst. We beat Turkey. The point was to emphasize the poor shape of US education, but it unfairly made fun of Turkey … imagine, though, how awful it would be to be in their shoes. This week's issue of Nature has a letter from several Turkish scientists describing their plight and what they are doing to fight it; I've put it below the fold.
Turks fighting back against anti-evolution forcesMehmet Somel, Rahsan Nazli Ozturkler Somel and Aykut Kence
Sir:
Your recent Special Report "Anti-…
clock | January 11, 2007Why Doesn't The Immune System Attack The Small Intestine? New Study Provides Unexpected Answer:
Answering one of the oldest questions in human physiology, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have discovered why the body's immune system - perpetually on guard against foreign microbes like bacteria -- doesn't attack tissues in the small intestine that harbor millions of bacteria cells. In a study in the February issue of Nature Immunology, and which is currently available on the journal's Web site as an advanced online publication, investigators led by Shannon Turley, PhD, of Dana-…
drorzel | January 11, 2007There's been lots of news from the AAS meeting in Seattle this week, but the best from my perspective is that high school physics enrollments have neevr been higher:
Presenting new data that encourage this outlook, [Michael] Neuschatz [senior research associate at AIP's Statistical Research Center] will show that enrollment in high school physics classes is up and likely to continue increasing. The data show more than 30 percent of high school seniors have taken physics classes, more than ever before. This percentage has been rising steadily since the mid-1980s.
In addition, the percentage…
clock | January 10, 2007We're Sorry This Is Late ... We Really Meant To Post It Sooner: Research Into Procrastination Shows Surprising Findings:
A University of Calgary professor in the Haskayne School of Business has recently published his magnum opus on the subject of procrastination -- and it's only taken him 10 years. Joking aside, Dr. Piers Steel is probably the world's foremost expert on the subject of putting off until tomorrow what should be done today. His comprehensive analysis of procrastination research, published in the recent edition of the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin,…
nisbetmc | January 8, 2007
After spending the past three years on the faculty at Ohio State, I remain ambivalent about the vast commercialization and big time money pouring into college athletics. Of course, it will all be on stage tonight as OSU takes on Florida in the BCS championship game.
As USA Today spotlighted last Friday in a front page cover story, Ohio State outspends every university in the country on athletics, and football obviously is the cash cow. One can raise eyebrows about the $2 million-a-year salary for Jim Tressel, express doubts about whether you want the football coach to the be national face…
evolgen | January 3, 2007But where is halfway?
The Scientist has published an article by Mary Woolley, president of Research!America, on communicating science to the general public. The basic premise is that scientific literacy must increase, and scientists must perform the outreach in order to increase the science literacy of the average American. But what is the basal level of understanding that scientists can expect from the general public? To where are we expected to increase the scientific literacy? In other words, how much ground must we cover?
From the example Woolley gives, the prospects look bleak:
Consider…
tsmith | January 3, 2007It's a new year, and it will be a busy one here in Iowa when it comes to evolutionary biology. I want to highlight two upcoming events: Iowa City's first annual Darwin Day celebration featuring a lecture by Massimo Pigliucci, and an upcoming symposium on evolution and intelligent design, featuring John Haught and Wesley Elsberry. These events will be held in February and March, respectively; more information on both of them after the jump.
Event Number One: Iowa City's First Annual Darwin Day Celebration
About: A celebration of science in general and biology specifically, with events…
pharyngula | January 2, 2007The definitive book on the history of the creationism movement is The Creationists(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Ron Numbers (and I have to remember to get a copy of the new expanded edition). Numbers has an interview in Salon which starts off well, but as it goes on, my respect for the guy starts sinking, sinking, sinking. He's another hamster on the exercise wheel, spinning around the same old ineffective arguments that get us nowhere, and he can't even follow through on his own chain of logic.
Here's that reasonable beginning.
Given the overwhelming scientific support for evolution, how do you…