Academia
sb admin | April 26, 2007I guess we should excuse Wiley now, because they've backed down from pointing their lawyers at Shelly
Potential cynic that I am, I have several residual thoughts on the issue.
Thought #1: I really want to believe what was in the apology letter sent to Shelly: it was a misunderstanding inadvertently caused by a junior member of the staff. I want to believe that had it been calmly brought to the attention of the Director of Publications by a single person (say, Shelley), that an apology letter would have been generated. But I'm having a hard time believing that. Perhaps I'm being unfair to…
evolgen | April 26, 2007Ever wonder what biobloggers are blogging about on their blogs? Here's what:
Razib posts part of a paper by Jerry Coyne and others (which I can't seem to track down) which questions the role cis regulatory elements play in adaptive phenotypic evolution. This all part of Coyne's war on evo-devo.
Another post at GNXP (this one by p-ter) describes a polymorphic deletion that is associated with resistance to retroviral infection. P-ter tries to throw me a bone by mentioning the relevance of Drosophila research, but ends up shooting himself in the foot (how's that for mixed metaphors?).
Orac's…
drorzel | April 26, 2007No, I'm not talking about the sort of thing where teams play cooperative, non-competetive games, and everybody gets a trophy at the end. I'm talking about academia, here, and specifically the recent flurry of colleges and universities offering child care support:
In the last week, both Stanford and Yale Universities have announced significant expansions of the help that they provide to new parents -- with Stanford unveiling a plan for junior faculty members and Yale one for graduate students.
Those moves follow this month’s announcement by Princeton University of substantially increased…
catdynamics | April 25, 2007In 2005, Jon Stewart, who, may I say, is a comic genius and one of the top two or three deliverers of media news to the US populace, was paid $1.5 million for his work.
In 2006, Mather and Smoot shared the physics Nobel Prize: 10 million SEK
At the current exchange rate that is almost exactly $1.5 million.
Mather is NASA's Chief Scientist and Senior Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope.
He is also a civil servant, in 2005 G-15 paygrade topped out around $120,000 per year. With adjustments Senior Executive Service can reach $168,000 I believe - which also requires more…
sb admin | April 25, 2007Fair use? If it benefits the progress of science or the dissemination of scientific knowledge, it really ought to be fair use, no matter what. But when it's cropping out a piece of a figure for an illustration in an article about a scientific result, with that result fully cited, it fully is fair use, even under the shrinking domain that remains within USA copyright law. Alas, when you are an individual graduate student, and the entity asserting that you're violating their copyright, knowledge that you are well within fair use is little comfort when you're faced the travesty that is our…
revere | April 25, 2007Yesterday a new medical journal was launched, Open Medicine. It's the product of Drs. John Hoey and Anne Marie Todkill, former editors of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, who were fired last year in a conflict over editorial independence. Their publisher, the Canadian Medical Association, tried to exert editorial direction and the editors resisted. It was, as they say, un scandale.
The editors have risen, souls and reputations intact. Moreover, OM will be joining the growing ranks of Open Access journals with open review policies:
Open Medicine is a new general medical journal. It…
clock | April 25, 2007If you have a moment, this is a useful study to participate in:
Do you blog? If yes, then please consider participating in an online survey from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. The study, Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation, is being conducted under the guidance of the Real Paul Jones. The study team is interested in hearing from all bloggers on their perceptions on digital preservation in relation to their own blogging activities, as well as the blogosphere in general. To hear more about this survey, please visit the study'…
voltagegate | April 25, 2007Man, this game sucks. They show you what amounts to be an extra depressing trailer of An Inconvenient Truth and then unleashes you on the world - to stop emitting so much CO2.
Usually when a game is set in a post-apocalyptic world, you at least get a gun or a blade (or a gunblade) and have to undermine the oppressive, corrupt regime that has risen in the absence of order. In Planet Green Game, in the face of utter destruction, you take your car in for an oil change.
Everyone knows that the only good educational game ever made was Oregon Trail. Sure, my oxen always drowned while pulling a…
drorzel | April 25, 2007I'm currently on a committee that's investigating whether to switch to an honor code system for academic honesty issues, and possibly social violations as well. This is about as much fun as it sounds like.
For those not up on the internal practices of academia, schools with honor codes require students to sign a pledge promising to behave in accordance with community standards, and are expected to hold to that on their own honor. This is a popular system among snooty private colleges-- Williams has an academic honor code, which is part of why I was tapped for this committee-- and a few larger…
drorzel | April 24, 2007From an all-campus email this morning:
A non-specific bomb threat was discovered overnight in [Building]. A note was discovered at 4:16 a.m. Following our emergency response plan, the Schenectady Police were immediately notified. A sweep of the building was conducted by the Schenectady Police, State Police and the Sheriff's Department and it was determined there was no immediate threat and the building was deemed safe to reopen for classes at 8 a.m.
However, in light of the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech, we have decided to cancel or move all classes scheduled to meet this morning in […
catdynamics | April 23, 2007it may be immodest, but there are a small number of things a hotel should do to achieve perfection...
Free broadband internet connection. Preferably Wi-Fi and Ethernet, but if only one can be done, then provide Wi-Fi. Suck the cost up in the room charge, don't split it out. Federal grants don't pay for hotel internet connections and breaking out the charges is annoying, it is also petty.
The more expensive hotels are the worst about this - I suspect they signed bad long term deals when having internet connections was a big deal and they are either stuck on inertia (already did this internet…
evolgen | April 23, 2007Because my browser consists of a growing forest of tabs containing stuff waiting to be blogged, and there is no way I can write a complete entry on each one, and I want to at least link to the relevant sites so that I can close those tabs, I give you a link dump with maximal run-on sentences:
Remember my post on the evolution of zombie populations? If so, you've got a good memory. If not, who cares? Anyway, there's an article in arXiv about ghosts, vampires and zombies. (Via Ortholog).
The evolution of snake venom genes. They make up part of the venome.
Jonathan Eisen on the Human…
tfk | April 23, 2007As we try to move towards paperless offices, one of the big challenges is finding the right way to file and organize PDFs of interesting papers, books, reports, proposals and what have you. ScienceSampler suggests using iTunes, and that's certainly not a bad idea. iTunes acquired the ability to handle PDFs in order to handle liner notes, and you can associate various forms of useful metadata with your PDFs.
My preferred solution, imperfect though it may be, is Yep (née kip), available only for Macs. Yep lets you tag and label your PDFs in various handy ways, and is even designed to…
drorzel | April 19, 2007It's Decision Season in academia.
Across the country, high-school students are losing sleep at night worrying about where to go to college next year. We've had our annual Accepted Students Open House days (the second was Monday, with the turnout significantly reduced by the bad weather), at which we meet with students who are considering coming to Union, show them around, and try to talk them into coming here next fall. Our chairman desevres a special award of merit for the effort he puts in-- in addition to going to the massive all-campus lunch, and talking to students there, he'll conduct…
jstemwedel | April 18, 2007I have some posts gestating on ethical issues in science, but I have to clear a bit more grading and committee work before I can do them justice. In the meantime, I want to pose a set of questions to those of you who teach labs and/or supervise laboratory research:
Have you been asked to adapt your laboratories for students or researchers with disabilities?
If so, what kinds of adaptations have you been able to implement?
What kinds of disabilities have provided the biggest challenge from the point of view of coming up with a good adaptation?
Are there instances in which your efforts to…
voltagegate | April 18, 2007Today is my one year blogiversary and I will be celebrating by helping the Sierra Student Coalition and other conservation groups on campus celebrate Earth Day 2007 a few days early, to coincide with our new president's inauguration.
The new pres has promised to sign the Talloires Declaration, declaring his dedication to promoting a sustainable campus.
The Bottom Line will have a table at the celebration, handing out our annual Earth Day edition of the paper. I should have pics of the event up later.
This also marks the day I will begin occasionally reposting substantial, non-timely posts…
purepedantry | April 17, 2007I have talked about funding a couple of times (here and here), and I get the impression from the comments about those posts that my views are at the minimum somewhat iconoclastic. Basically, while I would prefer the government to give more to research, at the moment I don't think that the primary issue is that the government isn't giving enough.
In this area, The Health Care Renewal Blog has a great post on the funding problems facing researchers in medical schools. Here's a clue -- they don't have to do with the government's but rather the medical school's priorities:
[Dr Goldman was asked…
jstemwedel | April 16, 2007Today was fully scheduled for me. Prepping for class, participating in a phone interview, teaching, midday meeting with my department chair and a dean to discuss developing an ethics module for an intro class in another department, more teaching, power-photocopying for this week's Socrates Cafe, then a dash to the car to get the sprogs in time for elder offspring's soccer practice.
It wasn't until about 20 minutes into my drive home that I heard the news about the shootings at Virginia Tech.
I'm still having trouble getting words to really wrap themselves around the immediate feeling of…
drorzel | April 14, 2007The NCUR meeting and associated activities (including a minor little adventure into San Francisco) have kept me really busy over the last few days. We're headed out early this afternoon, which means that we finally have a morning without any obligations. And, of course, there's a cold, steady rain falling after two days of spectacularly beautiful weather. So I'm blogging from the hotel while waiting for the shuttle to the airport.
The conference was a national meeting for undergraduates doing research, and the presentations included everything from art exhibitions to literature talks and…
jstemwedel | April 12, 2007I'm just back from a committee meeting at which the subject of grades and grade distributions came up, and it became clear to me that academics (even at the same institution, even in the same field) have wildly different philosophies about just what grades ought to mean.
There are the normal-distribution folks, who think grades ought to convey how you are doing relative to the other people taking the class. The average grade is a C, no matter whether that average corresponds to demonstrating coompetence on 40% of the content or 90% of the content. The grade you get is dependent on how many…