Academia
drorzel | July 7, 2007Andre at Biocurious points out an interesting piece in Nature. They interviewed four prominent SF authors--Paul McAuley, Ken Macleod, Joan Slonczewski, and Peter Watts about biology in science fiction. The resulting article is a good read, with lots of interesting anecdotes and examples, and if you go to the supplementary information page for the article, you can get a longer version, including bits that were cut out of the print edition.
That is, of course, assuming that you are surfing the Web from an institution that happens to have a site license for Nature, or have a personal…
drorzel | July 6, 2007Inside Higher Ed reports today on a new brainstrom from the ETS
With criticism growing that standardized tests and grades fail to convey the full picture of applicants, the Educational Testing Service is preparing a standardized way for graduate schools to consider students' non-cognitive strengths and weaknesses.
Under the "Personal Potential Index," which was developed at the request of the advisory board for the Graduate Record Exam, three or four professors or supervisors would answer a series of questions about candidates' non-cognitive skills in various areas, as well as a more general…
drorzel | July 6, 2007"Ahhhh... summer at last. No more classes. No more committee meetings. Do you realize what this means?"
"Ummmmm.... no. What does it mean? What are we going to do this summer, Brain?"
"The same thing we do every summer.... Try to do PUBLISHABLE RESEARCH!!!"
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"Are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"I think so, Brain, but diffusion pump oil is all stinky and viscous, and won't the chickens get upset?"
"You are the very quantum of imbecility, Pinky."
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"The first step in our plan is to use a grating-locked diode laser to-- yes, Pinky?"
"Um, Brain?"
"Professor Brain."
"Um…
tfk | July 3, 2007For reasons which I may or may not reveal some day, I'm interested in picking your collective brains about the future of online scientific publishing.
My premises are as follows:
I do not read printed scientific journals any more – they waste space and are hard to search through when I'm looking for a specific paper, let alone a general concept.
You probably don't read print journals any more either.
If you do, neither you nor anyone else will still be reading print journals in, say, 5 years.
Electronic editions of journals are still not quite as useable as they ought to be for authors or…
drorzel | July 2, 2007It's really difficult to come up with new ways to frame crisis stories about the dwindling number of science majors in the US, but people keep finding them. The latest is from Marc Zimmer writing in Inside Higher Ed, who makes a number of biology analogies:
The numbers indicate that the American scientist population is not healthy, especially not in comparison to scientists in other countries. This will impact America's ability to retain its place in the global (scientific and technological) food chain. What could be responsible for this decline? My money is on the changing habitat of the…
sb admin | July 2, 2007The current way we fund astronomy research in this country is
horribly flawed. There must be a better way. Let me suggest one that I
believe that we should consider.
Now, yes, you are all going to be cynical and say, "Rob thinks it's
flawed because he's had trouble getting funding, and the main flaw is
that he doesn't have any funding." While it is true that I have been
burned by the system, and am admittedly bitter about that, I think that
there are rational arguments for my case.
Let us consider the boundary conditions. Let's assume that there is
some drive to continue to perform…
jstemwedel | June 30, 2007An earlier post tried to characterize the kind of harm it might do to an academic research lab if a recent graduate were to take her lab notebooks with her rather than leaving them with the lab group. This post generated a lot of discussion, largely because a number of commenters questioned the assumption that the lab group (and particularly the principal investigator) has a claim to the notebooks that outweighs the claim of the graduate researcher who actually did the research documented in her lab notebooks.
As I mentioned in my comments to the earlier post, in many cases there is an…
revere | June 29, 2007The Republican wannabees are all making their pilgrimages to a single institution of Higher Learning, these days. Regent University. And why not. As Rudi Giuliani said the other day to the faculty and students there: "The Amount Of Influence You Have Is Really, Really Terrific." Regent University is Pat Robertson's place: Christian Leadership to Change the World. If you've never heard of Regent, and its amazing academic stature, it's probably because you haven't been perusing the rankings in the U.S. News and World Report evaluation of higher education. Well, maybe you have and just didn't…
jstemwedel | June 28, 2007Yesterday, I helped give an ethics seminar for mostly undergraduate summer research interns at a large local center of scientific research. To prepare for this, I watched the video of the ethics seminar we led for the same program last year. One of the things that jumped out at me was the attempt I and my co-presenter made to come up with an apt analogy to explain the injury involved in taking your lab notebooks with you when you leave your graduate advisor's research group.
I'm not sure we actually landed on an apt analogy, and I'm hoping you can help.
First, before critiquing the…
clock | June 26, 2007Libraryman just gave a Presentation about it, and Danica likes it. Anyone using it yet?
jstemwedel | June 26, 2007 I recently read a book by regular Adventures in Ethics and Science commenter Solomon Rivlin. Scientific Misconduct and Its Cover-Up: Diary of a Whistleblower is an account of a university response to allegations of misconduct gone horribly wrong. I'm hesitant to describe it as the worst possible response -- there are surely folks who could concoct a scenario where administrative butt-covering maneuvers bring about the very collapse of civilization, or at least a bunch of explosions -- but the horror of the response described here is that it was real:
The events and personalities…
jstemwedel | June 26, 2007I want to share some of the items I've been reading elsewhere. Some of them strike me as having a very "summertime" feel to them, while others are just about the non-seasonal issues that are part of life.
At Cocktail Party Physics, there's a truly excellent post on rollercoasters, including some history behind the coolest way to make your stomach drop. (Last time I took the sprogs to The Tech, they had a station where you could design your own rollercoaster ride, putting together loops, corkscrews, and straight rises and falls, then experience it on a simulator. It frustrated the sprogs,…
drorzel | June 26, 2007Inside Higher Ed today offers an opinion piece about "assessment" which is the current buzzword in academia. It correctly identifies a split in academic attitudes toward internal ("for us"-- assessment of classes and programs within the academy) and external assessments ("for them"-- assessments to be used in comparing institutions, as called for by the Spellings commission), and speculates a bit about the reasons, including:
We know the "us" -- faculty members, students, department chairs, deans -- and we know how to talk about what goes on at our institution with each other. Even amid the…
drorzel | June 26, 2007Two news releases came across my EurekAlert feeds containing findings that I'm shocked-- shocked!-- to learn about. The first delivers the startling news that "A high percentage of young males appear willing to purchase alcohol for underage youth." They conducted a "shoulder tapping" study, in which young-looking students approached strangers outside liquor stores, and asked them to buy booze. Eight percent of the general population agreed, compared to nineteen percent of "casually dressed [males] entering the store alone who appeared to be 21 to 30 years old."
You might question whether 19%…
revere | June 25, 2007It is infuriating how stodgy biomedical sciences are in terms of information sharing. It's not clear how much of this is bred of inherent conservatism, the pressures of a very competitive field or just plain technobackwardness. But while mathematics and physics have had preprint servers for years, biomedicine has had nothing or virtually nothing (that last to cover myself in case I am forgetting something or just didn't know about it). What's a preprint server?
A preprint is a version of your scientific paper prior to its publication. Maybe it hasn't been submitted yet and you are circulating…
jstemwedel | June 25, 2007Chad got to this first (cursed time zones), but I want to say a bit about the Inside Higher Ed article on the tumult in the Philosophy Department at the College of William & Mary that concerns, at least in part, how involved junior faculty should be in major departmental decisions:
Should tenure-track faculty members who are not yet tenured vote on new hires?
Paul S. Davies, one of the professors who pressed to exclude the junior professors from voting, stressed that such a shift in the rules would protect them. "If you have junior people voting, they have tenure in the back of their…
jstemwedel | June 25, 2007There's an article in today's Inside Higher Ed on the building momentum in college chemistry courses to make the labs greener -- that is, to reduce the amount of hazardous materials necessary in the required student experiments. What grabbed me about the article is that it looks like the greening of the chem labs may not just be good for the environment -- it could be better for student learning, too.
First, consider a chemist's description of how to revamp laboratory experiments to make them greener. The article quotes Ken Doxsee, a chemistry professor at University of Oregon:
"We look at…
drorzel | June 25, 2007I mostly read science-oriented blogs these days, where I get to hear again and again about how awful the treatment of academic scientists is, and how physics departments are horrible Kafkaesque operations dedicated to crushing the souls of postdocs and junior faculty. Which makes the train wreck that is the Philosophy department at William and Mary particularly interesting to see:
The norm in academe is for junior faculty members to sit out departmental votes on tenure decisions. Such matters should be handled only by those who have already earned tenure, the theory goes.
When it comes to…
drorzel | June 25, 2007Scott Eric Kaufman must have a dissertation deadline coming up, because his procrastination is getting intense. He's just set up a text adventure game on his blog:
You are standing near the Moral High Ground. To your South are Theists (or Theorists). To your North are Atheists (or Anti-Theorists). To your East and West are scorched earth, battered egos and hurt feelings.
> e
The land has been salted with the blood of Deleuze. There is nothing for you here.
> w then
You can play by leaving instructions in the comments. Go help Scott avoid work.