Education
clock | January 1, 2007Update: Deadline for submissions is January 2nd at noon EST.
Wow! I posted the call for suggestions on Friday night, it is a weekend and a holiday, the traffic is down to a half, yet I got so many suggestions already, both in the comments and via e-mail! I am also very happy to see how many people are suggesting not just their own but other people's posts. This is going to be heckuva job for me! All science bloggers are my friends and I will have to dissappoint so many of them in the end. I wish I could collect 500 posts instead of just 50.
As I stated in the original post, I am looking…
pharyngula | December 29, 2006Captain Fishsticks is one of our local conservative nutjobs who haunts the pages of the St Paul Pioneer Press—he's a free market freak who wants to privatize everything, especially the schools, and yet everything he writes reveals a painful ignorance of anything academic. This week he's written a response to an article that left him distraught: Peter Pitman advocated more and better science education for Minnesotans, especially on the subject of climate change. Fishsticks, to whom all education is a zero-sum game because every time he has to learn another phone number a whole 'nother column…
sarahdasher | December 28, 2006
This time around, we're talking to Shelley Batts of Retrospectacle.
What's your name?
Shelley Alyssa Batts. I feel like you should now be asking me my favorite color and then the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow.
What do you do when you're not blogging?
Working on my doctoral thesis, re-submitting my NRSA grant, playing tennis, pilates, logic puzzles, PS2 (GTA Vice City!), teaching my African Grey (Pepper) Bond movie themes and disturbing movie quotes. I also enjoy a good beer or six.
What is your blog called?
Retrospectacle
What's up with that name?
I don't know. I think I thought…
sarahdasher | December 27, 2006
This time around, we're talking to Bora Zivkovic of A Blog Around The Clock.
What's your name?
Bora Zivkovic, better known online as "Coturnix" (the Latin name of the genus of my favourite lab animal model).
What do you do when you're not blogging?
I am a stay-at-home Dad and also an adjunct biology teacher in adult college education. I am also writing my dissertation incredibly slowly. Sometimes I sleep, too.
What is your blog called?
A Blog Around the Clock
What's up with that name?
I am a chronobiologist so I often write about circadian clocks. I also write all the time and post at…
oracknows | December 26, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 21, 2006.
I know I'm a bit of a stickler, a curmudgeon, if you will, when it comes to medicine. Call me crazy, but…
sarahdasher | December 26, 2006
This time around, we're talking to Mark Chu-Carroll of Good Math/Bad Math.
What's your name?
Mark Chu-Carroll
What do you do when you're not blogging?
Chase my children around.... (I've got a 6 year-old girl and a 3 1/2 year-old boy.) Cook. Chase my children some more. Make bizarrely elaborate paper airplanes. Shout at my children. Play Irish music on the wooden flute. Work. Break up fights between my children. Work. Suzuki violin with my daughter (my son isn't big enough yet). Collapse from exhaustion.
What is your blog called?
Good Math/Bad Math
What's up with that name?
When I first…
sarahdasher | December 25, 2006
This time around, we're talking to Jake Young of Pure Pedantry.
What's your name?
I have many names: Satan, Asmodai, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, He Who Must Not Be Named, He Who Steals Paper Clips and Other Tiny Metal Things, etc. But my favorite is "James Jacob Young" or "Jake" for short.
What do you do when you're not blogging?
I enjoy longs walks on the beach, cooking, cleaning, and talking about my feelings. No, really...OK, that's a lie. Actually, I like running, watching cultish television, movies, kicking ass and taking names, teaching, and writing.
What is your blog called…
catdynamics | December 24, 2006More repeats from Ye Olde Blogge
So you want to be an astrophysicist?
You've suffered through 3-4 years of undergrad, and you're ready for more.
You picked the places to apply to (or have you...?), and you're ready for the paperwork.
So what do you do. First you apply to the departments. As a rule, go directly to the department web site you are applying to and read carefully (ie do not go to the Graduate School at the University, until/if the department indicates you should), then do as they say.
Application deadlines should be around christmas, either just before or after. Most places move…
sarahdasher | December 22, 2006
This time around, we're talking to Janet D. Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science.
What's your name?
Janet D. Stemwedel. But you can call me Dr. Free-Ride, since that's the pseudonym I used when I launched my blog. (It came from a discussion with my ethics in science class about whether I was a free-rider for having earned a chemistry Ph.D. paid for in part with public funds -- as science Ph.D.s in the U.S. are -- without paying the public back by being a practicing chemist.)
What do you do when you're not blogging?
I teach philosophy at San Jose State University. I hang out with…
evolgen | December 22, 2006
Eugenie Scott and Glenn Branch are two of the leaders in the movement to keep the science in science classrooms in American public schools. Both Scott and Branch hold administrative position at the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), and they've displayed great commitment to maintaining the scientific integrity of American primary and secondary education. Of recent note is their new book Not in Our Classrooms, which offers an introduction to modern creationism and science education in the United States.
Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church…
catdynamics | December 20, 2006More re-runs from Ye Olde Blogge
So, now you're at university, and you're headed for grad school ...
(the following is horribly UScentric, 'cause that's where I am right now, the general principles are broadly applicable, the actual getting into grad school procedure bit in future post will be both US and THEM centric), now what?
Well, each cohort in the US is about 4+ million people, about 4000 of those major in physics. Since participation in the further education in the US is almost 50%, that is 4000 out of about 2 million, or 0.2% of undergraduates (specifically, about 1.2 million…
clock | December 20, 2006OK, everyone is doing this (Janet was the last one I saw), so I'll do it, too. Instead of writing a creative year in review, just copy the first sentence of the first blogpost of each month in 2006. Until June 9th I had three blogs, so I have to pick the first sentence from the first post on each! Since then, this is the only one. Here are mine (I skipped quick shout-outs to carnivals and such):
January
I am obviously using the extended holidays to recharge my blogging batteries.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute which funds a number of researchers in the field, has made, a couple of years…
catdynamics | December 19, 2006Part 2 of Ye Olde Blog So You Want To Be an Astrophysicist? series.
Lightly re-edited.
Should you do astronomy as an undergrad? (the following is in part shamelessly cribbed from prof Charlton's freshman seminar for our majors):
Do you like stars and stuff? If not, you probably should look for an alternative, on the general principle that at this stage of life you should at least try to do things you actually like.
If you do, good for you. Now, do you have the aptitude?
Professional astrophysics/astronomy is not about looking at stars (except at occasional star parties, for outreach or as a…
oracknows | December 18, 2006You may recall how I've criticized the infiltration of woo into medical school and medical education in general. Such an infiltration threatens the scientific basis behind the hard-won success of so much of modern medicine over the last century. Unfortunately, woo isn't the only threat to scientific medicine. Now, there is a growing movement that insists that doctors should ask you about your spiritual life and make religious practices a part of medicine, as Dr. Richard P. Sloan described in an editorial in the L.A. Times that I can't believe I missed:
HOW WOULD you like your doctor, at your…
bushwells | December 14, 2006Peter Doherty (no, not that Babyshambles creature, but the Nobel Laureate) laments the use of pop music to teach science in the Australian school system. That and other mushy encroachments in the Queensland science curriculum, as reported in Pop songs are weird science would make it appear that like the US, science education in Oz is going to hell in a relativistic handbasket. Or is it? Is the use of song in science that egregious?
According to many primary and secondary school science educators, it's challenging to grasp the imagination of young students. If they haven't been "…
retrospectacle | December 8, 2006
Well, its been a long time coming, and further delayed by grants, labwork, and Irene's hand injury. But, Irene and I finally got on the phone last weekend and chatted a bit about her work, her birds, and her uncertain future in the field. Irene Pepperberg is someone who I've admired since early undergrad, and she's been a bit of a role model for me. During grad school interviews, I tried to track her down and interview with her at the University of Arizona (who lied and told me she was there, despite her moving to MIT). I would have loved to have worked with her, although now I realize that…
bushwells | December 7, 2006
I'm a card-carrying member of the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and as such receive the glossy production, On Wisconsin, quarterly. Usually, the mag offers light reading and occasional updates on faculty, staff and fellow former classmates. However, an article published in the Summer 2006 volume, Putting Faith in Science (in pdf format) resulted in a flurry of letters from alumni to the editor in the Fall 2006 issue. Dismayingly, quite a few supported Intelligent Design. Granted, these are just a few creatio-cranks out of a large number of alums, but still, these were an embarrassing…
apalazzo | December 6, 2006From today's Boston Globe:
Harvard has whittled down hundreds of nominees for its next president to a small list, including internal candidates and presidents of some of the nation's top universities, according to a source familiar with the process.
The source would not give a specific number, but said the university is considering a smaller group than the 30 names that the presidential search committee presented to Harvard's Board of Overseers on Sunday.
So who's on the list?
On the list of 30 candidates presented to the overseers were three Harvard leaders who worked for Summers: provost…
mikethemadbiologist | December 2, 2006The UK really doesn't deserve this: first, they're dragged into Iraq, and now, they're being invaded by creationists. Even though the Department for Education and Skills has called creationism "not appropriate to support the science curriculum", many science teachers may be using Discovery Institute designed 'science' curricula. From the Guardian:
Dozens of schools are using creationist teaching materials condemned by the government as "not appropriate to support the science curriculum", the Guardian has learned.
The packs promote the creationist alternative to Darwinian evolution called…
nisbetmc | December 1, 2006This semester in the sophomore-level course I teach on "Communication and Society," we spent several weeks examining the many ways that Americans are using the Internet to alter the nature of community, civic engagement, and social relationships.
For many college students, having grown 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. One of the goals of the course was to encourage students to think systematically and rigorously about the many changes introduced by…