drorzel | March 30, 2007The Dean Dad takes up a critical and shamefully neglected question about the academy:
Which superhero would make the best dean at a community college and why?
It's not really my genre, but there are some good suggestions, including Batman ("His whimsical dilettante cover would make him non-threatening to members of the establishment but his secret identity allows him to be very effective in thwarting the forces of evil"), the Hulk ("Hulk respect process! RAAR!"), and Wonder Woman ("people tend to respect an authority figure who spends all day in star-spangled panties").
Batman's probably a…
drorzel | March 30, 2007Weird ideas never die, they just go underground, and return with new names. "Cold Fusion" is now "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions," and was the subject of a day-long symposium at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society.
It's not clear how much credence to give this. It can't be entirely kookery, because this was a press release issued by the ACS, and national societies tend not to be completely wacky. Then again, though, I look at things like this:
The original cold fusion experiment in 1989 by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons was dismissed by some scientists as 'bad' science due…
drorzel | March 30, 2007The Hugo Award Nominees for 2007 have been officially announced. The one award I usually watch closely is Best Novel, and this year's nominees are:
Eifelheim, Michael Flynn (Tor)
His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik (Del Rey)
Glasshouse, Charles Stross (Ace)
Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge (Tor)
Blindsight, Peter Watts (Tor)
Kind of a mixed bag, really. I thought Rainbows End was terrific, and His Majesty's Dragon was good fun, and there's been really good buzz on Blindsight. Glasshouse frankly sounds pretty bad to me, though, and I'm not hugely enthused about Eifelheim.
In other Hugo news,…
drorzel | March 29, 2007
It's hard to be the Queen. This is actually from Tuesday night, and shows Queen Emmy the Mopey pining away for Kate, who was in Rochester for a trial. I meant to post it then, but I started to feel kind of light-headed not long after taking this, and opted to go to bed instead...
drorzel | March 29, 2007One final Steve Gimbel note. Toward the end of his anti-lab post, he writes:
If you want to see a science professor get angry, just tell them that they teach all those labs to get out of teaching real courses. You'll see faces get flush, veins pop out of heads and necks, and receive a high decibel screed about not understanding how time intensive it is to prepare labs and grade lab reports. They are incredibly touchy about this issue. Maybe it's because it's true, maybe it isn't; but either way, it does mean that there are fewer science classes taught.
This is, I hope, the dumbest thing I'll…
drorzel | March 29, 2007In addition to the argument that labs are pedagogically bad, which I don't buy, Steve Gimbel offers some more reasons to get rid of lab classes on sort of procedural grounds. There are a bunch of interrealted things here, but the argument boils down to two main points:
Labs are very time-consuming, and students would be more likely to take science classes if they didn't have to knock out a whole afternoon to take the lab.
Labs are very resource intensive, and faculty would offer more non-major classes if they didn't have to teach labs.
I don't really find these any more compelling than the…
drorzel | March 29, 2007Steve Gimbel at Philosopher's Playground is calling for the abolition of lab classes:>p>
As an undergrad I majored in both philosophy and physics and I have a confession my former physics profs will surely not like -- everything I know about physics, I learned from my theory classes. You see, science classes come in two flavors. There are theory classes where a prof stands in front of the room and lectures and then there are lab classes where for many hours, students walk in ill-prepared and tried to figure out which one of these things we've never seen before is a potentiometer, fumble…
drorzel | March 29, 2007Yes, the unofficial Admissions Policy Month continues here at Uncertain Principles. The problem really is that it's Admissions Season in academia, so all the navel-gazing academic journals are loaded with articles about it, which means that having wandered into talking about it, I can't get out without a major effort of will...
Today's worthwhile article is from Inside Higher Ed, where Alan Contreras puts the cost of higher education in perspective in a way that makes the class problem very clear:
In 1974, a year of attendance at the University of Oregon (the flagship university in my state)…
drorzel | March 28, 2007Via Dave Sez, a good Washington Post article about the post-Maryland career of Byron Mouton:
Five years have passed since Mouton helped Maryland win the national title the last time it was held in Atlanta, but the significance of that weekend still casts a shadow over his daily life in the American Basketball Association. Since he started for Maryland during its 2002 title run, Mouton has played for 13 professional teams in nine leagues. Still, even in Wilmington, fans regularly ask Mouton to talk about his old college teammates and sign Terrapins memorabilia.
In the consciousness of…
drorzel | March 28, 2007I can stop blogging about college admisions any time I want. Really.
In one of the previous posts, commenter AO noted a New York Review of Books article on class issues in college admissions. here's the article in question, a review of several recent books about how the current college admissions system favors the wealthy and privileged.
The article is long, fairly comprehensive, and densely written, but you already got that from "New York Review of Books." It's well worth a read.
drorzel | March 28, 2007A little while after dinner last night, I started to feel achy and chilled and kind of light-headed, so I retired to bed. Where I had really spectacular fever dreams about... blogging. Somehow, I had come up with the greatest blog post in human history, or some such. I can't recall what it was, but it seemed brilliant when I was shivering under three blankets.
I think, perhaps, I need to get out more. For now, I'm going back to bed.
drorzel | March 27, 2007Here's a project from a couple of weeks ago, that I forgot to post:
"Big deal," you say, "It's an ugly box."
Ah, but what's under the box?
This is the exhaust fan in our kitchen, which goes directly out through the back wall of the house. There's a little pull chain that turns the fan on and off, and also opens and closes a panel on the back of the house. It's pretty effective at clearing the kitchen of smoke on those occasions when I burn something, but really ugly, and drafty, too.
So, a few weeks back, I went to Lowe's and bought a bunch of pieces of wood, some weather stripping, and a…
drorzel | March 27, 2007This will probably cause some eye-rolling on the part of my local readers, but there's an interesting article in Inside Higher Ed on the real effect of merit scholarships, which is the term of art for "money given to students for reasons other than financial need." This is a hot topic, as the article notes:
The rapid growth in merit scholarships has been controversial: Many institutions (public and private) say that the awards allow them to better shape their classes and to attract talented applicants who might otherwise go elsewhere. Yields -- the percentage of accepted applicants who enroll…
drorzel | March 27, 2007There's a meeting now underway in London on Outstanding Questions for the Standard Cosmological Model, which is the term for the current Big Bang/ Inflation/ Dark Matter/ Dark Energy/ Accelerating Universe view of the history of the universe. Tommaso Dorigo is attending, and reports on the talks on his blog (and also a description of lively debate).
Some people would probably deride this whole meeting as a waste of time-- I know where I'd look if I were interested in finding an example-- but I think it's great that somebody's doing it. The ideas listed on the slide pictured in one of those…
drorzel | March 27, 2007It's weird how I get into ruts here. I'm not usually obsessed with the subject of college admissions, but it came up recently, and now there's just one article after another about it (because, of course, it's college admissions season). I'm getting a little tired of it, but not so tired that I want to pass up interesting articles.
The latest, via Inside Higher Ed is an Los Angeles Times article about UCLA's new process. They've moved to a "holistic" admissions process, which will no doubt cause many people to roll their eyes and say "Oh, those California hippies..." but this is actually the…
drorzel | March 27, 2007There's a story in the New York Times today about a new movie on the infamous Iowa grad school shootings:
On Nov. 1, 1991, outraged that his doctoral thesis had been passed over for an academic prize, a young physicist at the University of Iowa named Gang Lu opened fire at a physics department meeting. He killed five people and paralyzed another before taking his own life.
The shootings devastated Iowa City and shocked a nation not normally used to thinking of physics as a life-and-death pursuit. Now they have been transformed into a celluloid nightmare for the rest of us.
This case is the…
drorzel | March 26, 2007I was pretty beat after returning from Boston yesterday, so I ended up watching bits and pieces of the much-ballyhooed Planet Earth tv show on the Discovery Channel. I can't really assess it in detail, as I was flipping back and forth to the Dresden Files, but they certainly had some impressive footage of various animals doing interesting animal things.
They did one thing that bugged me, though: The voice-over in the actual program talkked explicitly about how unique the footage was. There were numerous mentions of the fact that nobody had ever filmed this or that thing before, or that some…
drorzel | March 26, 2007Inside Higher Ed provides another example of an essay receiving a perfect score on the SAT writing test:
In the 1930's, American businesses were locked in a fierce economic competition with Russian merchants for fear that their communist philosophies would dominate American markets. As a result, American competition drove the country into an economic depression and the only way to pull them out of it was through civil cooperation. American president Franklin Delenor Roosevelt advocated for civil unity despite the communist threat of success by quoting "the only thing we need to fear is itself…
drorzel | March 26, 2007Hoops commentary has fallen off dramatically lately, but it's not because my teams are out of the tournament. Or, rather, it's not just because my teams are out of the tournament. Mostly, it's because Kate and I were out of town for the weekend, on vacation in Boston, and I barely saw any of the games. I did see the tail end of the UCLA-Kansas game, and the last two mintues and overtime of UNC's epic collapse against Georgetown last night, but that's about it.
Anyway, the chalk-tastic tournament of 2007 has wound down to a fairly unappealing Final Four. I intensely dislike Florida, I've got…