Academia
drorzel | May 7, 2007I was buried in work last week in part because of the annual Steinmetz Symposium, in which we cancel a day of classes and have students report on their undergraduate research projects. Both of my students were giving talks, and there was all sorts of running around involved in the preparation.
One of my students was very fired up to switch from PowerPoint on the PC to KeyNote on the Mac for this talk, and who am I to get in the way of constructive enthusiasm? His talk was the best I've heard him give, which is saying something. Of course, I would've been happier with a different opening joke…
purepedantry | May 7, 2007The Economist has an interesting article about reforming academia in Europe to make it more transparent and competitive. Resistance is to be expected. Money quote:
Unleashing universities' "full potential", and "mobilising the brainpower of Europe" are at the heart of the commission's plans to create a knowledge-based European economy. And change is indeed coming -- but by accident. The trigger is a modest but worthy scheme called the Bologna process, which is designed to make it easier to compare courses between countries, and to move between them. So a Belgian student who spends a year in…
drorzel | May 6, 2007It's common in math and computer science for people to prove important theorems sort of in passing, on the way to some other result. At least, it looks that way to an outsider-- Fermat's Theorem and the Poincare Conjecture are the high-profile examples that come to mind.
In that spirit, Scott Aaronson helpfully distills all of academic research into two paragraphs in the course of making a handy Frequently Asked Questions list for people who might want to hire him:
I know I'm not supposed to say this in an interview, but I don't have a vision. I have this annoying open problem, that…
voltagegate | May 4, 2007David at the World's Fair has been unceremoniously sucked into Facebook. After wrestling with Its vast networking powers (as well as Its opioid addictive properties), he has brought the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique to Facebook.
If you're on Facebook, join. If you're not, join Facebook and then join.
jstemwedel | May 3, 2007I have a couple posts brewing, but they will be delayed by my pile of scut work. Meanwhile, I have a new post at WAAGNFNP with my thoughts about why the (unionized) faculty in my university system took such a long time to feel ready to strike. It's something you can read while you dodge your own stack of scut work.
clock | May 2, 2007Spiked and Pfizer are asking:
'What's the Greatest Innovation?' is a survey of key thinkers in science, technology and medicine, conducted by spiked in collaboration with the research-based pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Contributors were asked to identify what they see as the greatest innovation in their field. More than a hundred experts and authorities have responded already, including half-a-dozen Nobel laureates.
The survey will roll through May and June, and the discussion will go live at an event in central London on Wednesday 6 June
What is the difference between innovation and…
clock | May 2, 2007Rob identifies some old pernicious frames, makes suggestions how to counter them and offers more modern ways to frame the question of copyright in this three-part post:
Empty Rhetoric: 'Intellectual Property Is Property!'
Copyright and scientific papers
Copyright is Censorship
neurotopia | May 1, 2007Lots of talk today about the joys of undergraduate research sparked by a recent study (the results of which can be found here). Chad has a post or two that I like on the matter. I thought I would throw my personal two cents in the ring as well, since undergraduate research has factored heavily into my career choices.
When I got to college at a small liberal arts school in Illinois, I was unsure what career plans were. I had some vague interest in being a lawyer or potentially some sort of psychologist, but nothing tickled my fancy. My thoughts turned to science in my first year, and I went…
clock | May 1, 2007Jake, Chad, Rob, Janet, Chad again and Chad again. have already written everything important about today's Buzz topic - the undergraduate research. What I will do is add a few examples and you draw conclusions why this worked (or not) for each one of them.
A Self-Starter
Kevin Messenger loved snakes all his life. He did his own research in high school, a standard survey of herps in the Sandhills area of North Carolina. He presented that at a meeting of the Herps society while a high-school senior. He went to college to NCSU because he wanted to work with Hal Heathwole. He got his own…
drorzel | May 1, 2007So, looking at the SRI studies of undergraduate research and its effects, it seems like the solution to a lot of problems. Involvement in research has been shown to increase student interest in science careers and increase the likelihood of graduate school, regardless of the race and gender of the student or the race and gender of the faculty mentor.
While this is undeniably really good news, suggesting that we don't actually need to radically re-invent the way we deal with students in order to change the demographics of science, it's almost too good to be true. There's got to be a catch,…
drorzel | May 1, 2007I wrote yesterday's post about the undergraduate research study very quickly, basically just to note the existence of the survey. It's sparked some good discussion, though, and I'd like to take another post or two to expand on what I think it means.
Of course, the beneficial effect of undergraduate research seems almost obvious if you stop to think about it a bit. Undergraduate research works to attract students from all different backgrounds into science for a very simple reason: doing research is nothing at all like the typical science class.
OK, I can really only speak for physics, here,…
jstemwedel | April 30, 2007Jake, Chad, and Rob have posted about a newly published study about the benefits of research experiences for undergraduates. The quick version is that involvement in research (at least in science/technology/engineering/mathematics disciplines) seems to boost the student's enthusiasm for the subject and confidence, not to mention nearly doubling the chances that the student will pursue a Ph.D.
I'm going to chime in with some observations of my own:
1. Making knowledge is different from learning knowledge.
One of the important things undergraduate research can do is give a student insight to…
jstemwedel | April 30, 2007This Friday, as part of my university's sesquicentennial celebration, there's going to be a two hour session on "The Future of Higher Education". The keynote speaker will be Margaret Spellings, the U.S. Secrtetary of Education. There will also be a "panel discussion with national experts", after which they will entertain questions from the audience.
So, what questions about the future of higher education would you like me to ask?
In case you're stuck for ideas, here's a potential prompt: Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education has been hailed as a way to bring No Child Left…
drorzel | April 30, 2007Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake notes an article in Science about a survey of undergraduate research. The actual article is behind a paywall, but you can get access to the survey reports from SRI directly, which is even better.
The study finds a large number of benefits from undergraduate research, from increased confidence to improved knowledge of graduate school. Students who have done research are about twice as likely to pursue a Ph.D. as those who haven't, and the more research they do, the more likely they are to pursue careers in science.
The conclusion is strikingly simple, and I'll copy…
retrospectacle | April 30, 2007So, as I mentioned before, Dr. Irene Pepperberg is in Ann Arbor to deliver a lecture at the annual Neuroscience Spring Symposia today. Also giving talks is Dr. Steven Finkbeiner from UCSF (on neurodegeneration in Huntington's) and Dr. Clifford Saper from Harvard/Deaconess (on hypothalamic regulation of sleep and circadian rhythms). But last night was the 'student dinner' with Dr. Pepperberg, and guess who flew in for the occasion? Why none other that Dr. Steve Steve himself!
Now, before dinner, Dr. Steve Steve needed to catch up on the goings-on in the blogosphere, especially some weird…
evolgen | April 28, 2007In a round-up of some of the coverage of Shelley's run-in with Wiley, Scientific American's Nikhil Swaminathan wrote the following:
Anyway, on Tuesday, over at the ScienceBlog Retrospectacle, neuroscience PhD student Shelley Batts (who based on her pictures alone seems to be both attractive and avian-friendly) posted an analysis of a study appearing in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, which suggested that the antioxidants properties in fruits were boosted by alcohol.
So, Nik wants to hit that shit. This is, like, two steps away from passing Shelley a note in homeroom that…
jstemwedel | April 27, 2007I haven't mentioned it here before, but I'm currently working on a project to launch an online dialogue at my university (using a weblog, of course) to engage different members of the campus community with the question of what they think the college experience here ought to be, and how we can make that happen. The project team has a bunch of great people on it, and we thought we had anticipated all the "stake holders" at the university from whom we ought to seek "buy-in".
As we were poised to execute the project, we discovered that we had forgotten one:
The Institutional Review Board.
Yes…
revere | April 27, 2007I will admit to having a soft spot in my heart for one of the NIH institutes, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. NIEHS is on a separate campus in Research Triangle Park, NC, away from the main NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. It is separated in other ways, too, having a decidedly more public health focus than the other institutes. Its mission, like other NIH institutes, is to ferret out the basic causes of illness, in NIEHS's case, environmentally caused or influenced illness. Its interest in cancer caused by industrial chemicals, asthma from air pollution, reproductive and…
purepedantry | April 27, 2007I had the great pleasure of working in labs as an undergrad. Most of my classmates now did as well. Part of the good experience was the ability to really narrow down what type of science I was most interested in; part of it was the more mercenary goal of getting the experience that was necessary to get into graduate school.
Anyway, Science has just published a large survey of undergraduate researchers including their demographic characteristics along with what they are looking for in research (sadly it is behind a subscription wall). Particularly, the survey looks at what factors in…
tfk | April 26, 2007My Scibling Shelley has gotten into and out of a bit of fuss while I've been incommunicado. She posted about a paper discussing the role of alcohol in protecting antioxidants in fruit. As so many of us have done, she posted a graph and table from the original paper to illustrate her description of the study. Wiley Interscience complained, but has, thankfully, buckled to their obvious wrongness.
To me and most observers, what Shelley did is an obvious instance of "fair use," as described by U.S. law:
the fair use of a copyrighted work … for purposes such as criticism, comment, news…