Academia
evolgen | April 11, 2007Those of us who work on non-human systems often grumble about the total disregard human geneticists (that's geneticists who study humans, not humans who are geneticists) have toward non-human research (that's research on non-humans, not non-humans doing research). I get the feeling that plant biologists have the same attitude toward non-plant researchers, and I imagine there is some unwritten chain of superiority wherein you must pay respect to the researchers working on a system "above" you and ignore the research done on a system "beneath" yours -- and, yes, I realize the higher and lower…
jstemwedel | April 10, 2007After I posted on the issue twice and Julie posted on it once (although she might blog further on it), I got a brainwave about what's at the core of our frustration with our students who ditch lots of classes.
At bottom, it's our feeling that we are not succeeding in our attempts to communicate with them -- about why being in class can help them succeed in a course, about the value that course could have beyond filling a necessary requirement for graduation, about the larger value a college education could have in their lives. We're trying to get all this across, but sometimes we wonder…
jstemwedel | April 9, 2007The responses to my earlier post on an admittedly nutty idea to get students to come to class seem, so far, to hold that the choice of whether or not to attend class ought to rest solely with the college student, and that he or she ought to live with the consequences of that choice. (Also, there was a fair bit of reminiscing about pointless class meetings that had been attended and about classes aced despite chronic absenteeism.)
I don't disagree that cultivating a sense of personal responsibility is a good thing (nor that poorly planned or poorly delivered lectures are bad). But how to…
jstemwedel | April 9, 2007Over sushi last night, Julie and I had one of those "kids today!" discussions so common among people teaching college students. The locus of our old-fart incomprehension was the reluctance of a significant number of students to actually attend class meetings, even when not attending class meetings has disasterous (and entirely predictable) consequences. (For example, some significant number of Julie's students are now at the point where it is numerically impossible for them to pass the course, and this is strongly correlated with their absenteeism -- not their writing skills.)
We didn't…
clock | April 9, 2007Do the survey for this week and let me and John know how you answered and why:
Most likely reason a scientist will leave research?
Can't find a permanent position
Desires to earn a higher salary
Sees no correlation between hard work and eventual success
Wants to make a greater impact on society
Feels love of science could be better expressed in another career
drorzel | April 5, 2007Inside Higher Ed today offers a column by Daniel Chambliss of Hamilton College, taking issue with the Spellings commission report on higher education, and its analogies comparinf education to manufacturing:
By the conclusion of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings' recently-convened Test of Leadership Summit on Higher Education, I finally understood why her proposals are so ... well, so ill-conceived. They rest on a faulty metaphor: the belief that education is essentially like manufacturing. High school students are "your raw material," as Rhode Island Gov. Donald Carcieri told us. We…
catdynamics | April 4, 2007bloomin' heck, it is snowing!
Actually it is not the snow, it is the 40 mph gusts of wind on top of the steady 20-25 mph brisk breeze that drove me into a spot with hot cocoa and free WiFi
(this entry brought to you by PANERA - large cups of hot chocolate and unlimited WiFi, at a college town near you)!
So, when I left of this trip, I very carefully took out all the gloves, scarves, hats and other woolly wam things.
'Cause its spring, y'know.
Silly me.
At least I though to take proper boots.
Actually, I've been pondering how reliant on always being "on" I've become.
In Ye Olde Days, making…
drorzel | April 4, 2007Eugene Wallingford talks about a great idea for a conference session:
At SIGCSE a couple of weeks ago, I attended an interesting pair of complementary panel sessions. I wrote about one, Ten Things I Wish They Would Have Told Me..., in near-real time. Its complement was a panel called "It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time". Here, courageous instructors got up in front of a large room full of their peers to do what for many is unthinkable: tell everyone about an idea they had that failed in practice. When the currency of your profession is creating good ideas, telling everyone about one of…
omnibrain | April 3, 2007I've been waiting for a long time for major press to finally come around and start telling people how Baby Einstein videos or listening to Mozart isn't going to make your baby into a genius. If you have a baby and are wondering whether a certain product will help your baby become smarter, there is a good rule to follow. If it's on TV it's not going to help and if it costs more than $10 it's not going to help either. I'm sure watching these videos are probably better than kids watching random flashing colors on a TV, but come on.
Here's a snippet of an article from USA Today (Which I'd…
catdynamics | April 2, 2007Bee at Backreaction points to a use for graph theory
The topology of the High School Romance/Sexual network is interesting.
I'm a little bit surprised by the structure, and assume that the disconnected branches are real, and not illustrating sub-structure of the main graph.
I would have expected more tree like connection between the main side branches, not a ring topology.
I also assume the left out the isolated points and points that connect only to other networks...
BUT, there is at least one flaw - if the structure is romance, rather than physical sexual connection, then the graphs ought…
voltagegate | April 2, 2007Tomorrow's NOVA is all about cuttlefish!
Kings of Camouflage, eh? It brings me back to freshmen zoology. My prof showed this incredible video of how cuttlefish communicate, both through color changes and signaling. That video was largely responsible for my decision to change my major: from English to biology.
I never found out what the video was, though I would love a copy. Anyone have any ideas?
catdynamics | April 1, 2007my student just got deployed
Lt Joe finished Officer Command School and is off as a platoon commander in "Task Force Commando", of the 10th Infantry (Light) Division.
Got e-mail from him in Kuwait over the weekend, he should be in-country by now.
Don't know his posting yet, probably Baghdad or area north of there towards Ramadi.
Possibly in one of the new "surge" outhouses that are embedded in the neighbourhoods. Or not, we'll find out soon enough.
So... seriously, what can we send him that'd actually be useful.
Apart from a steady stream of review articles on black hole entropy, extremal…
clock | March 31, 2007Alun Salt will be leading a session about the Peer-to-peer publishing and the creative process, i.e., publishing papers on blogs at the Classical Association conference at Birmingham so he has written a post on things he wants to say there - quite an excellent summary of pros and cons of the idea and clearing away some common misperceptions.
evolgen | March 30, 2007PRESS CENTER | UPDATED BRACKET
Early next week, the amorphous, indefinable entity that is Corporate will take on a man named Charles Robert Darwin in the third round of the Science Spring Showdown. That's right, we're down to sixteen teams, including the eleven seed Corporate and the seven seed Darwin. This match up of Chair Region powerhouses will be presented on evolgen. A preview of this potentially epic battle can be found below.
Some may say that Charles Darwin was a tentative man. They base this claim on the fact that Chuck waited twenty years from his first ideas on evolution by…
drorzel | March 30, 2007The Dean Dad takes up a critical and shamefully neglected question about the academy:
Which superhero would make the best dean at a community college and why?
It's not really my genre, but there are some good suggestions, including Batman ("His whimsical dilettante cover would make him non-threatening to members of the establishment but his secret identity allows him to be very effective in thwarting the forces of evil"), the Hulk ("Hulk respect process! RAAR!"), and Wonder Woman ("people tend to respect an authority figure who spends all day in star-spangled panties").
Batman's probably a…
voltagegate | March 30, 2007...and made me a better person. Well, sort of.
I started writing this after learning that several of my SciBlings (Janet, Chad, RPM, Razib, Mike) were countering Steve G's argument that science labs, as an addition to "theory" or "lecture" courses are more or less a waste of time and money. I'm a biology student, and know little of the financial aspects of labs, but I do consider myself an expert on having labs; I've had to take little else in the past few years.
My argument is almost identical to the others regarding the necessity and integrity of labs, but I will point out one thing: Gimbel…
evolgen | March 29, 2007Janet pointed me to a post at the Philosopher's Playground about doing away with laboratory courses in the science curriculum. Steve Gimbel, the philosopher doing the playing, teaches at Gettysburg College. He argues that the lab portions of science classes cause non-science majors to avoid those courses and not enroll in any science class not required for graduation. If science courses consisted of more theory and less labs (by theory he means lecture, and, by choosing that word, he indicates he doesn't have much experience in non-physics science courses where the lectures consist of more…
drorzel | March 29, 2007In addition to the argument that labs are pedagogically bad, which I don't buy, Steve Gimbel offers some more reasons to get rid of lab classes on sort of procedural grounds. There are a bunch of interrealted things here, but the argument boils down to two main points:
Labs are very time-consuming, and students would be more likely to take science classes if they didn't have to knock out a whole afternoon to take the lab.
Labs are very resource intensive, and faculty would offer more non-major classes if they didn't have to teach labs.
I don't really find these any more compelling than the…
drorzel | March 29, 2007Steve Gimbel at Philosopher's Playground is calling for the abolition of lab classes:>p>
As an undergrad I majored in both philosophy and physics and I have a confession my former physics profs will surely not like -- everything I know about physics, I learned from my theory classes. You see, science classes come in two flavors. There are theory classes where a prof stands in front of the room and lectures and then there are lab classes where for many hours, students walk in ill-prepared and tried to figure out which one of these things we've never seen before is a potentiometer, fumble…
jstemwedel | March 28, 2007Steve Gimbel has a provocative post that suggests the costs of undergraduate lab classes may outweigh the benefits. Quoth Steve:
[E]verything I know about physics, I learned from my theory classes. You see, science classes come in two flavors. There are theory classes where a prof stands in front of the room and lectures and then there are lab classes where for many hours, students walk in ill-prepared and tried to figure out which one of these things we've never seen before is a potentiometer, fumble their way through procedures that yield results that are not even close to what they were…