-
"In their essay "Why Bicyclists Hate Stop Signs," University of California physics professor Joel Fajans and Access transportation journal editor Melanie Curry write that requiring cyclists to follow the same complete-stop rules as motorists defies science.
"While car drivers simply sigh at the delay" of a stop sign, they write, "bicyclists have a whole lot more at stake when they reach a stop sign.""
-
"I agree with Alberts that there appears to be a paradigm shift out there, a generational change in the science world. Itâs not merely that science grad students and postdocs donât want to grow up to become their professors or advisers; itâs also that in many cases, they simply canât. The academic opportunities just arenât there; there has been a marked constriction of opportunity in the ivory towers. Furthermore, many students donât see a life of academic specialization as the best way to employ their scientific talents. They recognize that specializationâs disadvantages go hand in hand with its advantages. They want to do something more, to bring science to the rest of America."
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Let me state up front that this is not a topic I know anything about, but I have always had a curiosity for it, so let me just throw some thoughts out into the Internets and see if commenters or other bloggers can enlighten me or point me to the most informative sources on the topic. This is…
You've heard about the depressing state of funding today in biomedical science. That's only part of the reason why increasingly, graduate students and post-docs are looking outside of academia for jobs, as discussed recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Researchers today have access to…
Notes on sociopathy
"Sometimes, a day of interacting with the rest of the human race on the roads and streets leaves you convinced that the world would be a much nicer place if most newborn humans were tossed in a burlap sack with some stones and then deposited in the nearest pond.
But hereâs…
Jennifer Rohn describes a dirty secret of academia:
The career structure for scientific research in universities is broken, particularly in the life sciences, my own overcrowded field. In coffee rooms across the world, postdocs commiserate with each other amid rising anxiety about biology's dirty…
Fuck 'em. They want to be treated like peds when it suits them, and like actual motor vehicles when that's to their advantage too. I fucking hate cyclists for the most part at this point. Either follow the existing traffic laws or get off the fucking thing and walk, but don't expect me to read your mind about whether I should expect you to behave like a ped or a vehicle at any given moment.
Wow. As a bike commuter, folks like Jamie scare me. I follow the rules because it makes it much less likely that I'll be run over. The biggest issue on any type of commute seems to be paying attention - riding and driving defensively.
The second link is really interesting. The first signs I saw of this phenomenon where when I was a postdoc in the early 90s. None (and I mean none) of the graduate students I was working with wanted to pursue academic careers. Some went into contract research, a couple went into patent law, and at least one went into telecom. All were studying molecular spectroscopy as graduate students.