Academia
bergman | September 6, 2007Now that I'm back in College Station, it's time to start getting applications ready for the great job search. I don't know how it is in other fields, but in math/physics, this generally involves three to four letters of recommendation, a CV, a research statement, sometimes a teaching statement and maybe an annotated bibliography. In high energy physics, we have the Theoretical Particle Physics Job Rumor Mill run by the now nonymous John Terning. In addition to listing offers and educated guesses at short lists, it also serves as a nice clearinghouse of positions. SPIRES, the APS, Physics…
neurotopia | September 5, 2007Ha ha, fooled you!
The Discovery Institute has just issued this on their blog, the inaccurately named Evolution News and Views:
According to CSC senior fellow and leading ID theorist William Dembski, what follows is:
"[A] big story, perhaps the biggest story yet of academic suppression relating to ID. Robert Marks is a world-class expert in the field of evolutionary computing, and yet the Baylor administration, without any consideration of the actual content of Marks's work at the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, decided to shut it down simply because there were anonymous complaints linking…
jstemwedel | September 4, 2007Since scientist-on-scientist communication is a longstanding topic of interest in these parts, I wanted to point out a recent (August 13, 2007) article in Chemical & Engineering News (behind a paywall, but definitely worth locating a library with a subscription) that offers tips for writing journal articles. It's quite a substantial article, drawing on advice from "dozens of scientists and engineers around the world in academia, industry, and government" -- which is to say, the people who read and write journal articles as part of their jobs.
It goes without saying that this crowd has…
jstemwedel | September 4, 2007My tenure dossier is due in 24 days.
My application for a sabbatical leave is due in 3 days.
Is it really possible to wrap your head around the possibility of a sabbatical, let alone map out the projects you might complete during such a leave, before the tenure dossier is wrapped up?
(Maybe they're just messing with me.)
evolgen | September 1, 2007Shelley's posted some pictures of nerd cakes. She calls 'em geek cakes, but I see no headless chickens. Anyway, I've got my own little nerd cake:
We had it made for a party we threw during recruitment weekend for our grad program this past spring. Sadly, the icer responsible for the art couldn't spell, so I put a sprig of something green on the cake for the missing "C" in Lamarck. And if you don't get it, see here.
clock | August 31, 2007In a commentary and a blog post, the editors of PLoS Medicine ask:
....is there still a reluctance to accept that anything useful can be learned from research without numbers?
An old question that tends to generate a lot of heat. Where do you stand on it, within medicine or within your own area of research?
jstemwedel | August 29, 2007Even though I've been frightfully busy this week, I've been following the news about the launch of PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine). I first saw it discussed in this post by Peter Suber, after which numerous ScienceBloggers piled on. If you have some time (and a cup of coffee), read Bora's comprehensive run-down of the blogosphere's reaction.
If you're in a hurry, here are three reasons I think PRISM's plans to "save" scientists and the public from Open Access are a bad idea.
While the PRISM website claims that a consequence of more Open Access…
evolgen | August 29, 2007
That's the poster for the upcoming football season at Penn State. It's purpose is both utilitarian (it's got the schedule of games printed on it) and motivational (it's supposed to get you all geeked up for the upcoming season). This year's poster is using the slogan "FIGHT ON!", and I bet someone in the athletic department thought they were real clever when they came up with that. It also sounds mighty familiar, almost as if I'd heard it before. Oh, yeah, it's the name of the USC fight song (see here). It's not as bad as Auburn printing "Roll Tide" on their poster or Ohio State printing "Go…
scientificactivist | August 28, 2007This is about the only appropriate response to the absurdity of the the anti-open access organization PRISM. A commenter on the last post pointed me to PISD, the Partnership for Integrity in Scientific Dis-semination:
The Partnership for Integrity in Scientific Dis-semination was established by a concerned group of biomedical scientists to combat the steady encroachment of Open Access (OA) publishing initiatives on the profit margins of traditional publishers. Major academic publishers such as Reed Elsevier, Blackwell Publishing, and Springer earn millions of dollars every year selling…
scientificactivist | August 28, 2007This is all over the blogosphere already, but since I occasionally blog about open access issues, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the controversy over a new anti-open access organization called PRISM. The go-to post on this topic is at A Blog Around the Clock, where Bora is collecting reactions from around the blogosphere. Peter Suber first alerted the net to this insidious organization over at Open Access News.
PRISM was apparently formed in response to the House's passage last month of mandatory public access to publications stemming from NIH-supported research. The press release…
scientificactivist | August 28, 2007Or, at least that's what I thought when I read this article from Saturday's Guardian:
Universities and medical schools have been criticised for increasing the number of animals used in research by more than 50% since 1996 while industry has reduced its procedures by 20% over the same period.
Campaigners say that a cultural inertia has meant that academics have been slow to adopt options such as tissue cultures or computer models. They argue there should be more funding to encourage researchers to find other options.
Gill Langley, director of the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research, said: "…
neurotopia | August 27, 2007Anger abound in the blogosphere at the PRISM organization, or Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine. As one could guess from reading the braintrust of a guy who worked with ENRON jailbird Jeff Skilling, SPECTRE PRISM is long on rhetoric and completely lacking in data.
When I say lacking, I mean zero. Zip. Zilch. Maybe I missed something, but a perusal of the website failed to yield a single survey or statistic to support PRISM's grandiose claims that...
Policies are being proposed that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly…
jstemwedel | August 27, 2007This is our third teaching day of the semester (which started last Thursday), so of course, WebCT's servers decided that it would be a good time to freak out. (The official description:
... experiencing network latency within our VA2 data center that may be affecting your Blackboard environment. This may result in increased latency and/or packet loss when trying to access your hosted Blackboard system.
But you can't tell me that this doesn't amount to the servers freaking out, especially as they are still "working with our Infrastructure team to determine the cause and to work towards a…
tsmith | August 27, 2007Yes, that's actually the argument made by the Orwellian group, PRISM ("Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine"):
Policies are being proposed that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing, putting at risk the integrity of scientific research by:
* undermining the peer review process by compromising the viability of non-profit and commercial journals that manage and fund it;
* opening the door to scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record;
* subjecting the…
evolgen | August 26, 2007Why should advisers encourage their students to publish? For the answer, read this post by TR Gregory.
Why is the publishing industry afraid of open access? I can't answer that question, but I can point you to the evidence for their fear: it's right here. Jonathan Eisen points out why PRISM, the anti-open access lobbying group, is total bullshit. The Open Reading Frame doesn't like it either.
jstemwedel | August 24, 2007One of the best things about Fridays on my campus is that hardly anyone is around. Not only does this make parking less of a headache, and interruption mid-task less probable, but it means that there's even less pressure to dress in a manner that asserts, "I am a responsible adult!"
I mean, I am a responsible adult, but must I prove it by wearing a suit?
I'm on a campus committee that meets every few weeks, on Fridays. This means that the other committee members are also likely to dress as if it were a Friday -- in jeans and T-shirts. Even dressed like graduate students, we get the job…
jstemwedel | August 24, 2007A reader made sure I saw this today. (Thank you, reader!)
From Brian May's website:
Yes. It's done, and after about 37 years, I am finally a doctor. The oral examination of my thesis, and of me, lasted about 3 hours, and then I retired with Prof Rowan-Robinson, for a few moments, for my two examiners to confer. After only a couple of minutes they called me back into the room and offered their hands in congratulations. Yes, my category was number 2. I understand pretty much nobody gets a 1st category - which is "This is perfect - here's your PhD."
Congratulations to Dr. May on a job well…
clock | August 23, 2007There are some die-hards in the comment thread of this post on Evolgen who assert that the only thing that makes one an author of something is the act of writing, i.e., using writing materials to commit language to paper. Preferably English language... Thus, in their minds, there is something fishy about multi-author scientific papers, i.e., only the individual who crafted the sentences of the paper should be considered an author of that paper.
But...
Leonardo painted Mona Lisa. Leonardo is the "Author" of Mona Lisa. People who named it, framed it, marketed it, hung it up in The Louvre and…
jstemwedel | August 23, 2007Regular readers of this blog know that I'm a Luddite who composes her posts on wax tablets before uploading them.* So it may seem curious that nearly every semester I teach at least one section of my Philosophy of Science course online.
What would possess me to do such a thing? The ability to make active student learning inescapable.
Let me first give you a bit of background on where Philosophy of Science fits into the curriculum at my university. As I described it a long time ago:
[A]t this university, th[e] philosophy of science course satisfies the upper division general education…
clock | August 21, 2007Maxine Clarke:
In printing the statement verbatim every week as we have done, making it clear when it originated, we have hitherto assumed that readers will excuse the wording in the interests of historical integrity. But feedback from readers of both sexes indicates that the phrase, even when cited as a product of its time, causes displeasure. Such signals have been occasional but persistent, and a response is required.
Suzanne Franks:
Who needs outright discrimination? It's so much more pleasant and civilized to discriminate while pretending to be inclusive. It's just one tiny step sideways…