Academia
drorzel | July 18, 2007Everybody is all abuzz about Harry Potter these days, what with the release of the final book coming this weekend. Scott McLemee takes up the really important question, though: what do professional academics think about everybody's favorite boy wizard?
In the years since the author introduced her characters to the public, they have become beloved and meaningful; and not to children only. At present, the catalog of the Library of Congress records 21 volumes of criticism and interpretation on the novels, in six languages. A collection called Harry Potter and International Relations, for…
drorzel | July 18, 2007Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study of Ph.D. completion rates by discipline. The original data are available as PowerPoint files that I haven't looked at, but IHE provides a summary in tabular form. Because everything looks more scientific as a graph, I cranked them into Excel and after the requisite ten minutes spent undoing all of Excel's horrid default graph options, ended up with this:
There's really not a whole lot surprising here: Scientists and engineers finish their degrees faster (in a bit more than six years), and humanists take much longer (just under 50% have finished in ten…
clock | July 17, 2007The Purloined Bibliography:
My training in medieval history had acquainted me with the practice of identifying dependencies among manuscripts by tracing the repetition of errors. By analogy, I thought, if there were additional idiosyncratic errors on my Web site that also appeared in the book, each instance would be a discrete piece of evidence showing that the volume had lifted material from my work.
I found myself in the unusual position of hoping that I had made more mistakes. Could I find more evidence than just two bizarrely placed asterisks?
clock | July 17, 2007My SciBling Rob Knop is leaving the academic circus for a cool job: designing Universes or some such astronomical stuff on Second Life. Just as he is about to leave his University, though, he got a nice parting gift from the academic world for his work on the expansion of the Universe - the Gruber Prize in Cosmology. Please go and say Hello and Congratulations to Rob!
Related:
Farewell and Hail
Science blogger (and soon to be former academic) shares Gruber Prize.
Is getting tenure Mission Impossible?
Kudos for Rob
I have shilled
jstemwedel | July 17, 2007Congratulations to Rob Knop for sharing in this year's Gruber Prize in Cosmology!
The prize is sponsored by the Gruber Foundation and the International Astronomical Union (not always the favorite scientific organization in my household owing to the whole Pluto thing). Rob was a part of the Supernova Cosmology Project and a co-author of a 1999 paper (whose first author is Saul Perlmutter) that helped establish that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.
For those keeping track, the 2006 award went to John Mather and the COBE team, about whom I've blogged.
There's a bit of irony in…
drorzel | July 17, 2007Rob Knop is leaving academia to design galaxies for Second Life (or some such).
On his way out, he's getting a lovely parting gift: a share of the Gruber Prize in Cosmology.
Stop by and offer congratulations, or condolences, or both, as you feel appropriate.
drorzel | July 17, 2007The Paper of Record today features an interview with Eric Mazur of Harvard, a physicist who is probably best known for his pedagogical work. He talks aabout how typical science teaching sucks, and why we need to change it:
From what I've seen, students in science classrooms throughout the country depend on the rote memorization of facts. I want to change this. The students who score high do so because they've learned how to regurgitate information on tests. On the whole, they haven't understood the basic concepts behind the facts, which means they can't apply them in the laboratory. Or in…
clock | July 16, 2007There is a long and interesting comment thread on this article on The Scientist blog. What do you think?
(Hat-tip: Tanja)
sb admin | July 16, 2007Loved the teaching. Loved the science. Couldn't take the politics. Couldn't take the tenure stress. That about sums it up.
I am sending off today a signed offer letter for employment with Linden Lab, the folks who create and run Second Life. I will be an engineer or ops/developer or something... wait, hang on. Here we go, "Productions Operations Engineer" is the title listed in the offer letter. I will write more about this in the near future, and probably a lot more in the ongoing future. Let me say, though, that I'm very excited to be going to work for Linden. A lot of the rest of…
clock | July 15, 2007I missed this by weeks, but Dave asked a set of questions that I was pondering on, but found no time and energy to answer until now.
PZ, Janet, Martin, Chad and RPM responded (I am assuming some people outside SB did as well) and their responses (and their commenters') are very interesting.
1. What's your current scientific specialty?
Chronobiology, although I have not seen the inside of the lab for three years now. So, scientific publishing, education and communication - does that count?
2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course? If so, what was it?
Yes, I went to vet…
catdynamics | July 13, 2007The Female Science Professor lays it down:
...would you rather be a professor at:
1. A university that is located in a city/region in which you would love to live, but at which most of your faculty colleagues would be insane and/or unpleasant;
or
2. A university in a not-great place to live, but at which you would have interesting colleagues
drorzel | July 12, 2007Inside Higher Ed today features an opinion piece by a lecturer about the excruciating awkwardness of job interviews:
[T]he banal yet innocuous questions faculty members do ask -- "Where was I from?" "How did I get interested in this topic?" -- become loaded with a significance out of proportion to their actual content. Together, my answers formed me into a certain candidate shape, one which may or may not be the proper and notorious "fit" that search committees frequently resort to in making their final decision. And I realized that despite our hopes to be judged according to what we have…
tsmith | July 12, 2007Traveling yet again today (things finally calm down in September, I think). In the meantime, here are a few posts from elsewhere I've been meaning to highlight:
Some more background for those of you who may not be up to speed on HIV/AIDS: AJ Cann explains what we know (and don't know) about how HIV causes AIDS.
Speaking of HIV, ERV has 4 years to come up with an HIV vaccine, and another bad story about science in the media.
David asks if biologists have physics envy. I think I just have other-fields-of-biology envy, and want to do it all.
PZ has a very nice posts explaining the…
clock | July 12, 2007Four excellent, thought-provoking articles all in some way related to the idea of Open Science. One by Bill Hooker:
Competition in science: too much of a good thing
and three by Janet Stemwedel:
Clarity and obfuscation in scientific papers
Does thinking like a scientist lead to bad science writing?
OpenWetWare
drorzel | July 11, 2007There's a new Zogby Poll on political bias in academia that should warm whatever it is that David Horowitz uses as a heart:
As legislation is introduced in more than a dozen states across the country to counter political pressure and proselytizing on students in college classrooms, a majority of Americans believe the political bias of college professors is a serious problem, a new Zogby Interactive poll shows.
Nearly six in 10 - 58% - said they see it as a serious problem, with 39% saying it was a "very serious" problem.
That sounds pretty bad, but I suspect it's really a non-story. Why?…
omnibrain | July 10, 2007I'm excited to announce that I've been named an associate editor for a new high profile journal, Chocolate Pudding Letters Review. Read below for our first call for papers:
CALL FOR PAPERS!
We are now accepting papers for the 1st issue of CPLR! DO NOT MISS THIS OPPORTUNITY! Leading scientists anticipate that CPLR will become the premier outlet for major breakthroughs in the study of chocolate pudding (CP) and other viscous edible creations (VECs).
Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to, 1) theoretical reviews, 2) empirical works, 3) recipes, 4) novel…
drorzel | July 10, 2007From EurekAlert, we learn that corporate executives are a bunch of cheaters, when the incentives are right:
According to the authors, "Our results demonstrate two factors substantially increase the likelihood of financial misrepresentation: extremely low performance relative to average performance in the firm's industry, and high percentages of CEO compensation in stock options."
The study also determined that approximately 1 in 10 of the financial restatements examined by the authors was linked to fraud and illegal practices. Over five years, there was a 9% likelihood that a company…
omnibrain | July 10, 2007Everyone thinks the printing press led to increased literacy among the average man in the middle ages, but that just might not be the case. Dr Marco Mostert a historian from Utrecht University is instead suggesting that the availability of cheap paper was the main reason more reading material became available. While this isn't surprising the source of the new cheap paper is. It seems that, according to Dr. Mostert,
"These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books. In the 13th century, so it is thought, as…
jstemwedel | July 9, 2007David Ng at the World's Fair has some questions:
1. What's your current scientific specialty?
2. Were you originally pursuing a different academic course? If so, what was it?
3. Do you happen to wish you were involved in another scientific field? If so, what one?
I'll play:
1. Currently I'm not a scientist but rather a philosopher of science and an ethics teacher for future scientists. However, when I last was a practicing scientist, I was a physical chemist whose broad focus was the dynamics and thermodynamics of far-from-equilibrium systems.
Here's a narrower description of my work: I…