Academia
jstemwedel | June 15, 2007The comments on post about final exams seem to be bringing out related questions about all the stuff that happens (or doesn't) in a course before the final exam. They're important questions that deserve their own post.
What's the point of homework assignments?
To give you practice solving problems or grappling with texts on your own?
To push you to extend your proficiency (say, by working out how to solve problems that are interestingly different than the ones you've seen solved in class)?
To shift part of the pool of points that will determine your grade onto an activity where you have…
drorzel | June 15, 2007Inside Higher Ed has an opinion piece today in which a a provost and a professor talk about service, which is the catch-all category of faculty activities that aren't teaching and research. As the title of the piece says, this is a particularly unloved area:
Yet this is the area that is least discussed in graduate school, for which no training is typically provided, and that the interview process rarely brings up. Furthermore, while tenure and promotion evaluations pay homage to the trinity of "Teaching, Scholarship and Service," service surely gets the least amount of attention. It is very…
tsmith | June 15, 2007As y'all know, a frequent topic of conversation here is communicating science to the public. While many of us do it directly via sites such as this one, the bulk of science writing that the public will read is done by the pros--people writing for the magazines and newspapers, among other outlets. Often, their stories include interviews with research scientists. However, we're not always so easy to get in touch with, and we blow reporters off altogether--apparently, pretty frequently.
On a listserv I subscribe to, there recently was a discussion amongst writers regarding how to get…
jstemwedel | June 14, 2007While our exams were weeks ago, I know that some folks (especially high school students) are just finishing up. So these observations sent to me by a reader may be timely:
I believe that if students are passing their classes with a B and above they should not have to take final exams.
Most students drop letter grades when taking an exam that is an accumulation of material that they have to dig out of the crevices of their brain from 5 to 6 months ago. I cannot remember what I had for breakfast last week; how can we expect our students to try and remember what they learned in January by the…
drorzel | June 14, 2007According to Inside Higher Ed, a new report about the Virginia Tech shooter puts the blame on college lawyers:
"Throughout our meetings and in every breakout session, we heard differing interpretations and confusion about legal restrictions on the ability to share information about a person who may be a threat to self or to others," states the Report to the President on Issues Raised by the Virginia Tech Tragedy, released Wednesday and compiled by the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Justice. Fears of violating state privacy laws, statutes designed to prevent…
clock | June 13, 2007"Fine in practice, but how does it work in theory?"
This headline (in a French paper, of course), prompted Sally Green to pen a fine, fine post - an Obligatory Reading of the Day - about class, education, the psychology of class, the difference between academia and the real world, the difference between theory and practice, and the difference between the people who fight for the equality of opportunity and the people who oppose it (and their rhetoric).
sb admin | June 13, 2007Anybody who's been reading my blog for a while knows that I'm aware of, very concerned about, and even active in the plight of women and minorities in science. See, for example:
"Be nice to Shelly! She's cute and she likes birds!"
The Myth of the Meritocracy
A tale of egregious scientific male misbehavior
Intrinsic ability and women in science
Unconscious bias... even when we're conscious of it
Women in Physics : why do people do nothing? (This post was taken down at the request of my chair. You can find excerpts of the original post here and here. If you're clever, you might even be able…
drorzel | June 13, 2007As regular readers of this blog know, I'm a college basketball junkie. As far as I'm concerned, the NBA is just a giant methadone program to easy me into the summer, when there aren't any sports worth watching on tv. I'm a big fan of NCAA basketball, but I'm starting to think about how I can manage to watch it without funneling any money to the NCAA, who become more loathesome with every passing day.
The latest incident involves the ejection of a credentialed reporter for reporting on the game on his paper's blog:
Should the National Collegiate Athletic Association be able to demand that…
jstemwedel | June 12, 2007I haven't abandoned you, dear readers, I've just been attending to some tasks in the three-dimensional world. In the meantime, I want to recommend some great posts on other blogs. While some may leave you feeling reasonably good about doings in the world of science, I'm afraid others may break your heart. That doesn't mean you shouldn't read them.
At ChemBark, Paul Bracher muses on the ethics of doing science on someone else's dime. He notes that when the context in which you're doing the science is academic, your obligations extend to students as well as the entity funding your research…
jstemwedel | June 7, 2007In the June 4, 2007 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (which is behind a paywall accessible only to ACS members and those with institutional subscriptions, I'm afraid) there's an article on how college and university labs may be impacted by the interim final regulation on chemical security issued recently by the Department of Homeland Security.
In a nutshell, that impact looks like it could involve thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single university to comply with the rules, even if the chemicals they use fall into those specified by DHS as being at the…
omnibrain | June 7, 2007Ahh Press Releases.... Don't you just love it when someone who doesn't really give a shit comes up with extremely inane or obvious titles?
This time around the titles are come from good ol' EurekAlert.
Our first title falls under the duh category:
"Brain holds clues to bipolar disorder"
Ohh.... Reaalllly? As opposed to what?!
Our second title falls under the "my cousins uncles brothers step-sisters boss's foot surgeons dogs breeders groomers friend" category.
"Lack of sun does not explain low vitamin D in elderly who are overweight"
I feel like they're forgetting another way of classifying…
jstemwedel | June 6, 2007In my last post, I examined the efforts of Elizabeth Goodwin's genetics graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to deal responsibly with their worries that their advisor was falsifying data. I also reported that, even though they did everything you'd want responsible whistleblowers to do, it exacted a serious price from them. As the Science article on the case [1] noted,
Although the university handled the case by the book, the graduate students caught in the middle have found that for all the talk about honesty's place in science, little good has come to them. Three of…
jstemwedel | June 5, 2007One of the big ideas behind this blog is that honest conduct and communication are essential to the project of building scientific knowledge. An upshot of this is that people seriously engaged in the project of building scientific knowledge ought to view those who engage in falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, and other departures from honest conduct and communication as enemies of the endeavor. In other words, to the extent that scientists are really committed to doing good science, they also have a duty to call out the bad behavior of other scientists.
Sometimes you can exert the…
drorzel | June 5, 2007Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study of RateMyProfessors showing that the ratings correlate well with "official" evaluations:
What if RateMyProfessors.com -- the site that professors love to hate -- is more accurate than they think? Or what if officially sanctioned student evaluations of faculty members -- which many professors like to contrast with RateMyProfessors.com -- are just as dubious as RateMyProfessors?
Those are questions raised by a new study by two professors at the University of Maine who compared the ratings on RateMyProfessors.com of 426 Maine instructors with the formal…
drorzel | June 4, 2007Steinn links to a post by the "Incoherent Ponderer" that was pretty much guaranteed to raise my blood pressure. It's an analysis of "Ph.D. Pedigree", spinning off earlier arguments at Cosmic Variance and elsewhere in which the Ponderer argued that there's a hiring bias in favor of "big name" Ph.D. programs.
The analysis in this case consists of tallying up the Ph.D. institutions of the faculty at the Top 50 research universities, and coming to the shocking conclusion that:
Top 10 universities contribute 59% of US PhD hires, those ranked 11-20 provide another 18%, the next ten ranked 21-30…
catdynamics | June 4, 2007The Incoherent Ponderer does a quick'n'dirty analysis of physics department rankings and how their graduates place.
Shit scary stuff.
Don't just look at the absolute numbers, look at the percentages...
catdynamics | June 4, 2007Prof Frank Douglas is resigning from MIT over the James Sherley tenure case...!
Something tells me this story is not over yet.
clock | June 4, 2007Graduate of the University of Belgrade (Serbia), City University (UK) and UNC-Chapel Hill (USA), with a Masters from University of Belgrade, Danica Radovanovic is currently in Belgrade without a job and she is looking for one either in Serbia, in Western/Northern Europe or in the USA.
Danica is the tireless Serbian pioneer in all things online: blogging, open source, Linux, science blogging, open science, social networking software, online publishing, eZine editing, etc. She is the force behind putting Serbian science online and making it open. She has done research on Internet use in…
jstemwedel | May 31, 2007I want to lay this at Julie's feet, or maybe John Lynch's, but I'm starting to think the LOLcats are taking over! My kids speak to each other in LOL dialect, and I've been mentally captioning ... well, everything.
My internal dialogue from part of commencement transcribed below. If you know a good deprogrammer, please email me!
On noes! Where da sientistz?
Lookin for LOLrus bukkit?
Grapplin wid invizible labware?
Mebbe invizible sience grads?!
O hai!
Weer in ur stadium, makin u proud.
Bukkitz iz kool, but nowlij iz teh bestest!
Thx k bai!
clock | May 31, 2007In the May 18th issue of Science there is a revew paper by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. An expanded version of it also appeared recently in Edge and many science bloggers are discussing it these days.
Enrique has the best one-sentence summary of the article:
The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns what children know prior to their exposure to science.
The article divides that "what children know prior to their exposure to science" into two categories: the intuitive grasp of the world (i.e., conclusions they come up with on their own) and the learned…