jstemwedel

This is a blog post that I more or less composed in my mind early this morning when, at 5 AM, I awoke with a runny nose and started sneezing. Just like I have every morning at 5 AM for the past month and a half. I do not, as far as I can tell, have a cold. I do not experience the same runny nose…

About three weeks ago, I was in Washington, D.C. for the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting. I was invited to speak on a panel on Digital Science (with co-panelists Chris Impey, Moshe Pritzker, and Jean-Claude Bradley, who blogged about it), and later in the meeting I helped to facilitate some…

This week I had one of those rare moments between work projects to pause and take a look around. I mean that literally -- I actually took a look around in my office and noticed that I have accumulated some stuff in it that one might not be able to count on finding in your typical faculty office.…

Dr. Free-Ride: What was it we were going to talk about today? Elder offspring: The axolotl. Dr. Free-Ride: Can you please spell that? Elder offspring: A-X-O-L-O- ... wait. A-X-O-T-O-L. Wait! A-X-O-L-O-T-O-L. I think. Dr. Free-Ride: Hmm. I shall do some checking on the spelling. And what is it…

Economic recovery has not yet made its presence felt at public universities in California. (Indeed, at least in the California State University system, all things budgetary are going to be significantly worse in the next academic year, not better.) This means it's not a great time for purveyors of…

The title of John Tierney's recent column in the New York Times, "Daring to Discuss Women's Potential in Science", suggests that Tierney thinks there's something dangerous about even raising the subject: The House of Representatives has passed what I like to think of as Larry's Law. The official…

Even though I got my grades filed last Friday (hours before the midnight deadline), this week I kept encountering colleagues for whom the grading drama Would. Not. End. As you might imagine, this led to some discussions about what one should do when the grade-filing deadline approaches and you are…

It's June already, and we still have not finalized summer plans for the Free-Ride offspring. (Hey, my semester just ended, and it was only yesterday that I wrapped up the Large Administrative Task That Shall Not Be Named Now That It's Finally Done. I've been a little distracted.) Anyway, given…

Jet-lag and grading fatigue (plus being on the other coast for three days) mean that I haven't had much time lately to sit down with the sprogs and have a conversation about science. However, Casa Free-Ride presents me with clues which suggest that the Free-Ride offspring have been thinking about…

I want to apologize for the infrequency of my posting lately. Much of it can be laid at the feet of end-of-term grading, although today I've been occupied with a meeting of scientists at different career stages to which I was invited to speak about some topics I discuss here. (More about that…

When last we checked in with Snowflake Free-Ride, our intrepid white rabbit had not yet found the courage to venture all the way to the end of the drawbridge from her hutch. Well, on Tuesday, Snowflake got the bunny equivalent of a screened porch. This seems to have been enough to convince her to…

The Free-Ride offspring have been wary of extended conversations with me lately (maybe since most of them eventually come around to, "Surely you'd like to help your mother grade these papers!"). However, I was able to extract some pictorial evidence that each of them has been thinking about…

Since finals are nearly upon us here (and since I'm not quite ready to face the next stack of papers that needs grading), I got to wondering how other academics feel about when the final exam ought to be written and why. So, a quick poll: When do you finish writing your final exam?online survey A…

The Free-Ride offspring are pretty sure what I do for a living is grade papers. But seeing as how they're both students, I thought I'd ask what the view of things is like on the other side of the red pen. Dr. Free-Ride: When you come in and find me working on the weekend, what am I usually working…

We continue to get to know Snowflake Free-Ride, and she us. *Given her fondness for tossing her blue bowl around and spilling her alfalfa pellets, we got her what was advertised as an unspillable food dispenser. Snowflake seems pretty unconvinced that it's actually unspillable, although she hasn…

Yeah, still grading here. Yesterday I returned mass quantities of graded papers (with a free paperclip for every student!) and have another assignment to grade today ... just in time for two more assignments which come due tomorrow. And then, the final exam! Ever the optimist, this morning in the…

... to the elder Free-Ride offspring's trumpet teacher. While I am generally accepting of your choices as far as the pieces you are having my child learn how to play, I have a small bone to pick with you this evening. You see, May is what we in the college education biz call "grading season". It…

This week, the Free-Ride family welcomed a new member. Snowflake Free-Ride (who also goes by Notorious B.U.N.) is a 9-month old New Zealand White rabbit who we adopted on Tuesday. She is cute, fluffy, and big (nearly 5 kg). And, she seems to be adjusting to life at Casa Free-Ride. Indeed,…

DrugMonkey has a poll up asking for reader reports of the science career advice they have gotten firsthand. Here's the framing of the poll: It boils down to what I see as traditional scientific career counselling to the effect that there is something wrong or inadvisable about staying in the same…

Despite the crush of the closing weeks of the semester, I found a little time to follow the conversation about whether Earthicans ought to welcome a meeting with whatever extraterrestrial life might be out there to meet us, or whether we'd be better off hiding under the bed. Although the Free-Ride…

From the last poll you probably guessed that this one was coming. I expect my graduate students to be working:Market Research I'll be interested to see whether there's any correspondence between the hours demanded by PIs who read this blog and the hours demanded of graduate students who read this…

The issue came up in my "Ethics in Science" class today, so I figured it was worth mounting a quick (and obviously unscientific) poll: My graduate advisor expects or requires me to work:survey software Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Yesterday in my "Ethics in Science" class, we were discussing mentoring. Near the end of the class meeting, I noted that scientists in training have a resource nowadays that just wasn't available during my misspent scientific youth (back in the last millennium): the blogosphere. What does the…

As we creep toward the end of the spring semester, I noticed a story at Inside Higher Ed about a commencement address gone wrong: Connecticut College is having a painful examination of last year's student speech. The student newspaper, The College Voice, revealed that the student speaker's talk…

It has come to my attention that a number of people are risking catastrophic seismic activity today by exposing n00bs. This so-called "n00bquake" frightens me, and not just because I live in earthquake country. If the internet is flooded with n00bs today, the consequences could be tragic. We face…

Dr. Free-Ride: So, you know how sometimes you have nightmares? Younger Offspring: Yeah. Dr. Free-Ride: I had a nightmare the other night.* Younger Offspring: What was it? Dr. Free-Ride: Well, I was supposed to be picking up snakes with two sticks and moving them from one place to another. Younger…

I really don't know what to say about this news item, except that it had better mean that the California State University presumptively* views blogging on one's own time and bandwidth as fully compatible with a professorial appointment, regardless of the subject matter on which the blog is focused…

In recent days, there have been discussions of conditions for postdoctoral fellows, and about the ways that these conditions might make it challenging to tackle the problem of the "leaky pipeline" for women in science. For example, in comments at DrugMonkey's blog, bsci opines: Most people start a…

First, let me refer you to Sharon Astyk's excellent post on what has become of Earth Day. If I had the time or energy to pay much attention to Earth Day as a particular day of observance, I think I'd share Sharon's grumpiness. After all, paying attention to our impacts on our shared environment…

I'll confess that I am not one who spends much time reading the reviews of books posted on the websites of online booksellers. By the time I'm within a click of those reviews, I pretty much know what I want. However, a lot of people find them helpful, and the ability to post your own review of a…