Academia
evolgen | May 17, 2007I'm working on a few graphs for a presentation. In a previous incarnation, I distinguished two partitions of my data using the colors red and green. This made sense intuitively (the red ones had something broken, and the green ones were a-ok), but I realized that people with red-green colorblindness would not be able to distinguish the different graphs. I switched the color scheme to white and gray, which should enable everyone to distinguish the two groups.
I also have a second way of partitioning the data, and I don't want to use the same color scheme for both. I initially used blue and…
evolgen | May 17, 2007Keith Robison, at Omics! Omics!, asks and answers the question, "What math courses should a biologist take in college?" His answer: a good statistics course is a must (one where you learn about experimental design and Bayesian statistics), and a survey course that covers topics like graph theory and matrix math would provide a nice introduction to important topics (that course probably doesn't exist at most colleges). He also advocates taking a programming class and turning math education into something more stimulating rather than rote drilling (easier said than done).
This being a blog, I,…
omnibrain | May 17, 2007A great abstract I found via improbable research blog:
How to write consistently boring scientific literature
Kaj Sand-Jensen (ksandjensen@bi.ku.dk), Freshwater Biological Laboratory, Univ. of Copenhagen, Helsingørsgade 51, DK-3400 Hillerød, Denmark.
Abstract
Although scientists typically insist that their research is very exciting and adventurous when they talk to laymen and prospective students, the allure of this enthusiasm is too often lost in the predictable, stilted structure and language of their scientific publications. I present here, a top-10 list of recommendations for how to…
jstemwedel | May 16, 2007My recent post on the feasibility (or not) of professionalizing peer review, and of trying to make replication of new results part of the process, prompted quite a discussion in the comments. Lots of people noted that replication is hard (and indeed, this is something I've noted before), and few were convinced that full-time reviewers would have the expertise or the objectivity to do a better job at reviewing scientific manuscripts than the reviewers working under the existing system.
To the extent that building a body of reliable scientific knowledge matters, though, we have to take a hard…
drorzel | May 16, 2007Miriam Burstein points out the historical antecedents of the "Atheist Two-Step" discussed by Adam Kotsko and Brandon at Siris. This also ties in nicely with Fred Clark on sectarian atheists, as previously mentioned.
Also, speaking of historical screeds by Protestant preachers, Jerry Fallwell is dead. I really don't have anything to say about that, other than that I'm sorry for his family and friends.
catdynamics | May 15, 2007A correspondent points me to an interesting point made on rateyourstudents.blogspot.com
The issue is the "students as customers" but with some interesting points...
The argument is that each particular student expects individual service, whereas the university as an institution really deals with the students collectively.
In particular, the university as part of its business has to maintain standards, part of its brand value is to sustain its reputation and the added value of its diplomas. This is the crude market value of the broader goal of university to educate and create a liberally…
jstemwedel | May 15, 2007Today is our last day of classes before final exams, and it's looking like this semester is notably different from the nine semesters that came before it:
As well as I can ascertain, none of my students have committed plagiarism in any of their assignments for me!
Yes, that should be the normal state of affairs, but we are painfully aware of the gap between "is" and "ought", are we not? Some semesters, I've had to deal with multiple plagiarists. This term, no cheating-related paperwork for me.
Thank you, students, for restoring some of my faith in humanity. Be sure to eat healthy food, get…
drorzel | May 15, 2007The recent discussion over the academic tenure system has sort of wound down, or at least, those parts of it that I feel I can contribute to have wound down. I really ought to note the posts by Bill Hooker and the Incoherent Ponderer, who correctly note that the biggest problem with the academic system is not so much what happens to assistant professors (save for a handful of insitutions with deeply insane policies, most people who come up for tenure reviews pass), but what happens a step before that. The big drop-off isn't between assistant professors and associate professors, it's between…
jstemwedel | May 14, 2007When my "Ethics in Science" class was discussing scientific communication (especially via peer reviewed journals), we talked about what peer review tries to accomplish -- subjecting a report of a scientific finding to the critical scrutiny of other trained scientists, who evaluate the quality of the scientific arguments presented in the manuscript, and how well they fit with the existing knowledge or arguments in the relevant scientific field.
We also talked about the challenges of getting peer review to function ideally and the limits of what peer review can accomplish (something I also…
evolgen | May 14, 2007Paul Erdos was an extremely prolific and mobile mathematician who has left a legacy in academia in the form of the Erdos Number -- a count of your "academic distance" from Erdos. Anyone who published a paper with Erdos has an Erdos number of one (Erdos, himself, had a number of zero), people who published with anyone with an Erdos number of one have an Erdos number of two, and so on. It's a point of pride for a mathematician or other researcher to have a small Erdos number.
There is no widely recognized equivalent of the Erdos number for the life sciences. Given the diversity in the field, it…
catdynamics | May 13, 2007The debate over the tenure process that Rob kicked up at Galactic Interactions continues with Chad worrying about senior academic complacence and the Incoherent Ponderer pondering some more
the latter makes a good point - the big hurdle is moving from postdoc to tenure track, that is anecdotally where most of the involuntary attrition takes place (a lot of people who stop after PhD seem to do it by choice, they've had a taste and decided to do something else, thank you).
Once on the tenure track, the odds are better; the real issue seems to be the process, not the outcome.
It is a brutal…
drorzel | May 13, 2007When I was an undergraduate, we had more or less annual alcohol crackdowns on campus. My sophomore year, it was a series of "open container" stings, with cops hiding in the bushes outside various dorms, and leaping out to arrest anyone who walked outside with an empty keg cup. My classmates and I were outraged.
My junior year, there were a couple of arrests for underage drinking, and a significant tightening of the alcohol policy. My classmates and I were outraged.
My senior year, the police got hold of a college-approved party plan for a couple of freshman entires that included kegs of beer…
jstemwedel | May 12, 2007In part I of the interview, my mother described what it was like to be propelled by her dream of being an astronomer from being at home with four children to being in an undergraduate physics classroom and finding a serious mentor.
Part II: Out of the comfort zone and into the graduate program:
Were you encouraged by the folks at Rutgers-Newark with whom you were taking physics coursework to move on to graduate work?
As I was nearing the point of exhausting the undergraduate physics curriculum, and with no graduate physics program offered on that campus, my professors all encouraged me to…
voltagegate | May 12, 2007James (I should say Dr. James...) deserves some grats; he has officially finished his "PhD journey."
Go over to Direction Not Destination and give him some props.
jstemwedel | May 12, 2007In honor of Mother's Day, I want to celebrate the ways that mothers have blazed trails, knocked down barriers, and challenged expectations of what their daughters' lives can be.
When we're young, we don't always appreciate how important our parents (or other adults in our circle) can be as role models. Part of this, I think, is that a kid's world is smaller in some important ways. What you know of the world you know through school, through friends, through cartoons, and through your family. Lots of aspects of the wider world don't really pop up in your consciousness until you have to…
drorzel | May 12, 2007Mark Trodden gave a nice outline of the tenure process over at Cosmic Variance, laying out the general criteria used by most colleges and universities:
The typical criteria in physics are:
Excellence in research, as demonstrated through peer-reviewed publications and (by far the most important thing) letters of recommendation solicited from a selection of external referees, a few chosen by the candidate and many others not.
Funding of one's research at some level.
Competence in teaching, as demonstrated through peer review, innovations in teaching and, to a lesser extent, student evaluations…
jstemwedel | May 11, 2007It has recently transpired that I will be teaching (and before that, designing and constructing) a brand new ethics module in the large introduction to engineering class at my university that all the freshman who are majoring in any of the multitude of engineering disciplines must take. I'm jazzed, of course, that the College of Engineering thinks that it's worth cultivating in their students the idea that ethics is an integral part of being a good engineer (and a good engineering student), so much so that they are devoting two weeks in the fifteen week term to this. And, I want to do a…
jstemwedel | May 11, 2007I would like to rejoice that it is Friday. And yet, as the end of the semester draws nigh, the press of Tasks That Cannot Be Deferred Any Longer is sucking a good bit of the Friday-ness out of this Friday.
So, I suppose this post is the cyber-equivalent of an itemized primal scream:
When the review sheet for a final exam has, at the bottom, in letters that are bolded, a clear statement of the day, date, and time of the final exam, what should I make of the fact that students have been emailing me to ask for the day, date, and time of the final exam? (By the way, this same information is…
drorzel | May 11, 2007As a newly minted Associate Professor, I sort of feel like I ought to say something about the recent tenure discussions. These were kicked off by Rob Knop's recent despairing post (though it should be noted that Rob's been worried about this for a while), and most of the discussion has taken place at Cosmic Variance, with the discussion expanding into comments about academia in general, via Sean's illustrative example.
Really, though, my chief reaction to most of this has been "Thank God we didn't have academic blogs back when I was an undergraduate."
As Mark Trodden notes, the discussion has…
jstemwedel | May 8, 2007Since many of you were kind enough to suggest questions to ask of Margaret Spellings at SJSU's Founders Day "The Future of Higher Education" panel last Friday, I thought I should report back on that session.
First, the bad (but utterly predictable) news: while Margaret Spellings gave the keynote address, she didn't stick around for the panel discussion afterwards -- so she wasn't there for the question and answer period. However, the panel of experts certainly had something to say about the Spellings Commission report on higher education.
It was striking, as CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed…