Education

Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Friday Fermentable, the end-of-week fun feature of Terra Sigillata. As I was on vacation and sick last week, I did not accomplish my goals of wine and beer tasting to share with you specific recommendations this week. So, let us take this week to explain our philosophy: The mission statement for The Friday Fermentable is: 1. To celebrate the convergence of agriculture, biology, botany, chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, neuroscience, pharmaceutics, and the pharmacology of natural products and herbal medicines in the production of historically-…
I wrote this first in February 2005, then republished in December 2005. After War Churchill got fired last month, I think that this post is still relevant. I was asked the other day what I thought about the Ward Churchill affair. Frankly, I had not followed it at all (but you can) . Apparently, Wingers want to kill him, or at least get him fired, while Progressives are divided: some distance themselves from "an obscure nobody that Right-wing pulled out to push their agenda", while others assert that he is telling the truths that are unpalatable to those whose emotional health depends on…
From Financial Times: 'Social jet lag' causes fatigue and illness (also on MSNBC): Half the people in modern urban societies suffer from "social jet lag" because their body clocks are seriously out of step with their real lives, the Euroscience forum in Munich heard on Monday. The result was chronic fatigue and an increased susceptibility to disease, researches found. They concluded that employers should tell staff to wake up in their own time and come in to work when they feel ready to. Till Roenneberg, a circadian rhythm researcher at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, coined the…
I've gotten a few raised eyebrows this week as to why a modestly-compensated, mid-career cancer researcher would choose to (or could afford) to vacation in Aspen, Colorado. I'll have more to say about this, but just one example of why this is such a worthwhile place to visit comes from my 2 hours yesterday at a free Aspen Institute lecture listening to financier, venture philanthropist, and prostate cancer survivor, Michael Milken, talk about how to revolutionize the pace of scientific discovery and implementation of medical innovations. Many people remember Mr Milken incorrectly, or at…
The Dean Dad, spinning off an article in the Chronicle, has some interesting thoughts on the economic benefits of colleges and universities: Apropos of my minor obsession with the economic conditions in Northern Town, the Chronicle of Higher Ed has a story noting that the University of Rochester is now the largest employer in Rochester. A quick check on the always-reliable Wikipedia (I know, I know...) reveals that SUNY-Buffalo is the largest employer in Buffalo, and Syracuse University the largest employer in Syracuse. Binghamton University (a.k.a. SUNY-Binghamton) is the largest employer in…
This 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... 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 Feministing, Blondesense,…
Christopher Patti, an attorney with the University of California, emailed me to correct my brief post on yesterday's ruling in CLS v Southern Illinois. Here I am, the guy who always tells people not to rely on media reports about court rulings because they so often get them wrong, and what do I do? Exactly what I tell others not to do. He was kind enough to point me to the actual court ruling, which shows that my brief description of the case was inaccurate. The case did not deal only with the question of whether universities had to recognize religious student groups, but whether they had to…
For several years, various media outlets have asked my opinion about herbal medicine and dietary supplement issues. I've generally written several pages of responses only to find a few key quotes mined from my paragraphs of wisdom (in my mind). No problem at all; I just have trouble with churning out sound bites. So, I'd like to share with you stuff that never makes it to the so-called mainstream media. This is a repost of classic Terra Sigillata that first appeared on the old site on 8 May 2006. Recently, I was asked by a US television network to comment on the value of the release of…
As I mentioned here, it looks like there is additional rumbling over Ohio's education standards. Sunday's Columbus Dispatch has more information on the topic, and something just isn't right: Colleen Grady, a board member from the Cleveland suburb of Strongsville, wants to add guidelines to the state science standards for teaching on such topics as evolution, global warming, stem-cell research and cloning. Grady said she views her proposal as a compromise to ensure that differing views are considered when teaching such hot-button issues. "We would provide a template so schools would be…
Today is the 150th birthday of Nikola Tesla. Here is an attempt to put in one place as much as can be found about the celebrations of his birthday and birth-year, the information about Tesla, the mentions in the media and on blogs, etc. I will keep updating this post throughout the day so, please, if you know of something I missed, or if you have seen (or written yourself) a blogpost related to Tesla, please let me know by e-mail or in the comments so I can check it out and perhaps include it in this post. Tesla's birthday in the media A good article in Globe and Mail: "Lighting up the…
Sharon Begley has another wonderful column today in the WSJ. She focuses on the so called "violence gene" as an example of the hopelessly complicated relationship between genetics and real life. In the late 1980s, a number of men in several generations of a large Dutch family were found to carry a mutation in the MAOA gene that made it inactive. They all had a long rap sheet of rape, attempted murder and arson. MAOA became known as the "violence gene," headlines warned of "a violence in the blood," and there was talk of screening everyone to identify carriers. The link between MAOA and…
When I posted this originally (here and here) I quoted a much longer excerpt from the cited Chronicle article than what is deemed appropriate, so this time I urge you to actually go and read it first and then come back to read my response. From Dr.Munger's blog, an interesting article: Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual By MARK BAUERLEIN, The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 12, Page B6 (that link is now dead, but you can find a copy here): Hmmmm, why was the poll conducted only in social science departments (e.g., sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, anthropology, perhaps…
Last week, I received some delusional e-mail from Phil Skell, who claims that modern biology has no use for evolutionary theory. This will raise hysterical screeches from its true-believers. But, instead they should take a deep breath and tell us how the theory is relevant to the modern biology. For examples let them tell the relevance of the theory to learning…the discovery and function of hormones…[long list of scientific disciplines truncated] Dr Skell is a sad case. He apparently repeats his mantra that biology has no need of evolution everywhere he goes, and has never bothered to…
This post was first written on October 28, 2004 on Science And Politics, then it was republished on December 05, 2005 on The Magic School Bus. The Village vs. The University - all in your mind. Eric at Total Information Awareness wrote two excellent posts on something that touches me personally, yet has much broader consequences on the country as a whole: the well-organized and well-funded assault of the Right on the University (check some links in the comments section, too): Freedom Fighters and Academic Freedom Fighters. There were a couple of other articles on the same topic, e.g.,The…
Discovery News makes me wonder whether they will be reporting all new theories that come up, no matter how odd they are or how little evidence they have. This one argues that people are en masse becoming less mature. To whit: The theory's creator is Bruce Charlton, a professor in the School of Biology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of Medical Hypotheses, which will feature a paper outlining his theory in an upcoming issue. Charlton explained to Discovery News that humans have an inherent attraction to physical youth, since it can be…
Yet another Bio-Link blog post. The San Francisco bay area has experienced phenomenal growth in both the number of biotech companies and the need to find employees. But, no matter how many attractions entice potential employees to move to the Bay Area, they still face the problem of finding a place to live. Housing prices are, well, a bit startling to anyone from just about any other part of the country. This presents a dilemma for local companies. If there aren't enough trained people nearby, and you can't get people from elsewhere, what do you do? The City College of San Francisco may…
As my own department faces budget shortfalls and considers increasingly extreme measures to improve the situation, I thought it would be appropriate to bring back this post from the archives. The following post explores the results and interpretation of a recent study that found that university scientists are turning their laboratory results into profits more than previously thought. (13 April 2006) According to a study released earlier this week, more scientists are commercializing their work that previous measures indicated. In a study funded by the pro-entrepreneurship Kauffman…
Maybe this will also help with this week's "Ask a Sciencebloggers question." Most institutions will likely ask for a teaching philosophy, especially when an academic is up for tenure promotion. Although mine was written in 2003, and my interests have expanded significantly, here it is below: To Whom It May Concern: My teaching philosophy is largely grounded in the belief that effective education is a major cornerstone in the development of individuals within a society. Whether this pertains specifically to junior/senior scientists about to embark on new research initiatives or generally…
I recently completed a long trip out-of-town, giving a presentation at a Bio-Link conference in Berkeley, and teaching a couple of bioinformatics classes at the University of Texas, through the National Science Foundation's Chautauqua program. The Human Subjects Protection Course Before I left town, I had to take a class on how to treat human subjects. It seems strange, in some ways, to be doing this now, several years after completing graduate school, but my experimental subjects have generally been plants, protozoans, and bacteria; with a few rabbits, rats, and mice thrown in as antibody…
I go for a walk, and watch some soccer, only to find out that Thursday, the South Carolina Education Oversight Committee passed 'standards' that force students to "summarize ways that scientists use data from a variety of sources to investigate and critically analyze aspects of evolutionary theory." I have to hand it to the creationists: pushing this during the summer, when university faculties are off doing science, is probably the right time to do something like this. Too bad it will make the kids of South Carolina ignorant and stupid. Teaching the basics of evolutionary biology is hard…