Academia
tfk | October 1, 2007Last year (just before I joined the fold) the Scienceblogs gang teamed up with a company called DonorsChoose to help out teachers with good ideas about how to make science education better.
DonorsChoose is a website that lets teachers post proposals for funding, and lets potential donors search through those projects for ideas that seem to match their own sense of what's needed.
This year, we're doing the Blogger Challenge again. If you click through the little thermometer link in the sidebar, or this link right here, you can pick one of the projects I've chosen and help fund any of the…
clock | October 1, 2007Yes, I'll be there this Friday. Come by and say Hello if you are in the building or close at lunchtime.
drorzel | October 1, 2007I missed the New York Times article about Rutgers professor William Dowling, who is campaiging against college sports, and has written a jeremiad on the subject and gotten it published by-- slight irony alert-- Penn State University Press.
There are a lot of things to dislike about big-time college sports, starting with the rank hypocrisy of the NCAA, and continuing on through the lack of a meaningful championship in college football. I have to say, though, that Dowling kind of puts me off the book when he describes it to the Times:
"I wanted this book to be a monument," Dr. Dowling, 62, said…
jstemwedel | September 27, 2007Somehow, the Florida State University Office of Athletic Academic Support Services had in its employ a "Learning Specialist" who seemed to think it was part of his or her job to help a bunch of student athletes cheat.
As reported by the Orlando Sentinel:
A months long Florida State University investigation into the FSU Office of Athletic Academic Support Services has determined that two faculty members during the 2006-07 school year "perpetrated academic dishonesty" among 23 FSU athletes, 21 of whom are still enrolled at the university.
University president T.K. Wetherell today shared with…
retrospectacle | September 27, 2007This year I am in charge of the UM Neuroscience program's Spring Symposia, which is where students nominate and invite interesting scientists to come give a talk on their work. The students also get to have dinner and hang out with the speakers informally (read: bar). I've been mulling over names, and thought it would be interesting to see what the blogosphere thought!
So, if you could invite *anyone,* who would it be? (And, if you know them personally, shooting me an email would be REALLY appreciated!)
clock | September 26, 2007Back in July, the House of Representatives passed a bill that requires all the NIH-funded research to be made freely available to the public within at most 12 months subsequent to publication.
The equivalent bill has passed the Senate Appropriations Committee earlier this summer and will be up for vote in the Senate very soon! In advance of this important vote, The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued a Call for action:
As the Senate considers Appropriations measures for the 2008 fiscal year this fall, please take a moment to remind your Senators of your strong support for public access…
jstemwedel | September 26, 2007This is a question that occurred to me earlier this month when I had occasion to observe an undergraduate laboratory course: If something goes wrong in the lab, do you tell the lab instructor? The "something wrong" could range from breaking a piece of glassware, to getting a stick with a syringe (of non-biohazardous material), to getting a stick with a syringe (of biohazardous or radioactive material), to spilling a nasty reagent. Of course, it could include other mishaps not enumerated here.
I'm not as interested in hearing when students should tell the lab instructor about a mishap, but…
jstemwedel | September 26, 2007Sean, Chad, and Steinn ponder the lameness of academics in self-reporting their "guilty pleasures".
Quoth Sean:
I immediately felt bad that I couldn't come up with a more salacious, or at least quirky and eccentric, guilty pleasure. I chose going to Vegas, a very unique and daring pastime that is shared by millions of people every week. I was sure that, once the roundup appeared in print, I would be shown up as the milquetoast I truly am, my pretensions to edgy hipness once again roundly flogged for the enjoyment of others.
But no. As it turns out, compared to my colleagues I'm some sort of…
catdynamics | September 26, 2007Carnival of Education #137 is up
at Global Citizenship in a Virtual World
catdynamics | September 25, 2007What are your true, academic, pleasures?
Sean is disgusted at the lameness of academic guilty pleasures
Chad gets in on the action also...
I'm not into guilt, and there are real academic pleasures; emotional states that come with the job.
We should revel in them.
The rarest and greatest pleasure: the rush of comprehending in an instant, finally, a very very hard previously unsolved problem.
Realising later that there are some technical details to work out, does not detract from that momentary pleasure. Sometimes the details can become a life's work.
Observing something new, interesting and…
jstemwedel | September 25, 2007
You may have noticed a lull in my postings here. I've been laboring to put the finishing touches on my dossier for my sixth year review. This dossier is the document on which a succession of committees will be basing their decisions as to whether San José State University will be tenuring me and promoting me to associate professor, or whether they will be thanking me for my service and sending me on my way.
It's an awful lot of responsibility to put in the clutches of a three-ring binder, don't you think?
I should explain a little bit about the "retention, tenure, and promotion" (or RTP)…
tsmith | September 25, 2007So, after all the kvetching the Discovery Institute did over the Guillermo Gonzalez tenure denial case, why aren't they rushing to the defense of one Steve Bitterman, a community college professor at Southwest Community College here in Iowa. The case is still developing, but what is known is that Bitterman was fired last week--apparently for teaching that Genesis isn't literal:
A community college instructor in Red Oak claims he was fired after he told his students that the biblical story of Adam and Eve should not be literally interpreted.
Steve Bitterman, 60, said officials at Southwestern…
drorzel | September 25, 2007Sean Carroll is disappointed with academia, at least as revealed through the Chronicle of Higher Ed's article on guilty pleasures of academics:
As it turns out, compared to my colleagues I’m some sort of cross between Hunter S. Thompson and Caligula. Get a load of some of these guilty pleasures: Sudoku. Riding a bike. And then, without hint of sarcasm: Landscape restoration. Gee, I hope your Mom never finds out about that.
But the award goes to Prof. McCloskey, who in a candid examination of the dark hedonistic corners of her soul, managed to include this sentence:
Nothing pleases me…
catdynamics | September 21, 2007The Female Science Professor contemplates those who pass over good projects
This is something to read and internalise.
That means you.
drorzel | September 21, 2007It's job-hunting season in academia, which also means it's talking-about-the-job-market season. After writing the previous post, I noticed a post on the same topic by Steve Hsu, who was interviewed for a Chronicle of Higher Education article (temporary free link, look quickly!) about the lousy job market in science. Steve has most of the relevant bits in his post, including this graph about the job situation in physics:
Of course, being a contrary sort, I'd like to quibble a bit with the graph and its presentation in the article.
The article makes a point of noting that:
In physics nearly 70…
drorzel | September 21, 2007In the neverending debates about the current state of physics-- see, for example, Bee's thoughtful post about The trouble With Physics, you will frequently hear it said that the academic job market in physics sucks. But what, exactly, does that mean in quantitative terms?
It's job hunting season in academia now-- still a little early in the season, maybe, but most places that are looking to make a tenure-track hire are probably accepting applications already. So I did a little poking around the Physics Today job listings to see what the numbers look like. This is the central clearing house…
drorzel | September 20, 2007I'm in a Department of Physics and Astronomy, so several of my colleagues are astronomers. We also have a rather nice on-campus observatory, used for student research projects.
Unfortunately, the combination means that we have a running argument with the rest of the campus regarding lights. The rather nice observatory is basically useless if there are big bright lights on all around it all the time, but various other groups want to have bright lights on all the time: Athletics wants the lights on the football field on so they can run night practices and intramurals; Campus Safety wants more…
drorzel | September 19, 2007Wednesday was a Day of Meetings for me, starting at 8am, which means I didn't have time to type up a bunch of blog posts and schedule them as usual. Having just clawed my way out of Meetingville, though, let me take a few minutes to throw up another Academia post, before the topic gets too stale.
Steinn has been thinking about the differences between the European and US educational systems (first post, second post), and he brought up an idea that I hadn't encountered before: "Looping". The idea, as described by Steinn::
When I were a lad, in elementary school you had teacher - call it a "…
tsmith | September 19, 2007You'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 powerful new tools and techniques -- such as rapid gene sequencers and giant telescopes -- that have accelerated the pace of discovery beyond the imagination of previous generations.
But for many of today's graduate students, the future could not look much bleaker.
They see long periods of training…