Academia
evolgen | March 28, 2007PRESS CENTER | UPDATED BRACKET
The folks that brought you the Second Round of the Octopus Region of the Science Spring Showdown (part 1, part 2) will be bringing you one of the marquee match ups of the third round. Those folks are us, and the place is here at evolgen. We're down to sixteen teams (some would even call this collection of teams "sweet"), which means there are eight games that will be played on the internets over the course of the next week.
We'll be playing host to a game from the Chair Region between Darwin and Corporate. That's right, we're delving into the Philosophy of…
drorzel | March 28, 2007I can stop blogging about college admisions any time I want. Really.
In one of the previous posts, commenter AO noted a New York Review of Books article on class issues in college admissions. here's the article in question, a review of several recent books about how the current college admissions system favors the wealthy and privileged.
The article is long, fairly comprehensive, and densely written, but you already got that from "New York Review of Books." It's well worth a read.
drorzel | March 27, 2007It's weird how I get into ruts here. I'm not usually obsessed with the subject of college admissions, but it came up recently, and now there's just one article after another about it (because, of course, it's college admissions season). I'm getting a little tired of it, but not so tired that I want to pass up interesting articles.
The latest, via Inside Higher Ed is an Los Angeles Times article about UCLA's new process. They've moved to a "holistic" admissions process, which will no doubt cause many people to roll their eyes and say "Oh, those California hippies..." but this is actually the…
drorzel | March 26, 2007Inside Higher Ed provides another example of an essay receiving a perfect score on the SAT writing test:
In the 1930's, American businesses were locked in a fierce economic competition with Russian merchants for fear that their communist philosophies would dominate American markets. As a result, American competition drove the country into an economic depression and the only way to pull them out of it was through civil cooperation. American president Franklin Delenor Roosevelt advocated for civil unity despite the communist threat of success by quoting "the only thing we need to fear is itself…
drorzel | March 23, 2007Via Bookslut, there's an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about whether reading is really important:
Is it always a good thing to read an entire book? When I was a graduate student, it dawned on me that I often had the most intelligent things to say about books I'd only half- or quarter-read. I was surprised by my observation -- it didn't seem to make sense. But it just seemed to work out that professors preferred my insightful and trenchant comments on, say, the first part of Tristram Shandy than on the whole wandering thing.
In that way, a little knowledge can be a practical…
drorzel | March 22, 2007The term is over, and I've handed in my grades, about which the less said the better. Which means a minor vacation of sorts, as I clean up a last few things before making a push to get some research lab stuff done during our paltry one-week spring break next week, before the start of the next term's classes.
One of those clean-up tasks involves picking up my student course comments for the term, which ought to be interesting. I just hope I fare better than Professor Socrates, though:
Socrates is a real drag, I don't know how in hell he ever got tenure. He makes students feel bad by…
omnibrain | March 21, 2007I started a thread on the old Omni Brain asking what the coolest name in science was. These are a few we came up with:
James Intrilligator (Psychology - vision)
Ray Jackendoff (Psychology - language)
Dr Martin S. Angst (Neuroscience - Pain)
Dr Jules Angst (Psychiatry)
There are some great names out there yet to be discovered! Share your favorites?
evolgen | March 21, 2007SECOND ROUND PREVIEW | PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
Welcome back to our coverage of the second round of the Science Spring Showdown. We had two great games yesterday, and another one finished earlier today. The final game of the round, between HIV and Psychology, is just wrapping up now; we'll bring you the result as soon as that one goes final.
Tom Ribosome: Earlier today, Phylogenetics took on Unipotent in one of the more non-traditional match ups. Coming off of games against classic rivals, Taxonomy and Totipotent, no one was sure what to expect when the tree builders and fated cells…
drorzel | March 21, 2007There was an interesting collision of articles about college admissions in my RSS feeds the other day. Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily had a post about a proposal to make college admissions random. The idea is that we could reduce stress on students and parents by having colleges identify those students who meet their academic standards, and then select randomly from among them, rather than trying to find perfect matches.
At around the same time, Inside Higher Ed had an article about Davidson College's decision to eliminate student loans from their financial aid packages. Students who qualify…
evolgen | March 21, 2007SECOND ROUND PREVIEW | PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to our comprehensive coverage of the second round of the Science Spring Showdown. We had two great games yesterday, and we have two more match ups today. The game between Phylogenetics and Unipotent is just underway, and the final game of the round, between HIV and Psychology, is coming up this afternoon.
Jim Pipetman: Yesterday's first game, between the top seeded Invertebrates and the ninth seeded Surgeons, turned out like most of the experts predicted. The Surgeons came into the game bragging about…
drorzel | March 20, 2007One of the top players in college basketball this year was Texas freshman Kevin Durant, whose team lost over the weekend. Durant is 6'10", and averaged something like 30 points a game from January on, so the automatic assumption is that he's going to enter the NBA draft, where he would be one of the top couple of picks. Durant has made some comments that suggest he's thinking about coming back next year for another run at the NCAA's.
This has prompted the usual discussion about whether he should stay or go, with the usual suspects taking the usual sides. Some people speak of the wonders of…
drorzel | March 20, 2007Over at Backreaction, Sabine has posted a lengthy essay on the problems of treating scientific research in economic terms:
I vividly recall the first thing my supervisor told me when I was an undergrad: "You have to learn how to sell yourself." Since then I have repeatedly been given well meant career advises how to survive on the scientific marketplace (most of which I ignored, but I'm still around, so I guess I'm not doing too badly).
Many of my friends and colleagues in physics regard these marketplace tactics as an annoying but necessary part of the job. To begin with, this concerns me…
drorzel | March 20, 2007There have been a few good posts recently on topics that I've discussed here a fair bit. I don't really have anything new to say on either topic, though, nor do I have the energy to repeat myself, so I'll just post the links:
- Gordon Watts on the collapse of corporate research labs, based on this article from The Economist. The original article is fairly positive about the triumph of D over R, but Gordon is a little more skeptical, and I am as well.
- Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias on vouchers as union busting. Kevin also provides an illustrative example. It's rare to see things laid out so…
catdynamics | March 19, 2007Chad has news of newbies at Crooked Timber
Béreubé is back!
More Dangeral Than Ever.
Cool.
As long as he doesn't start blathering on and on about hockey again.
As is well known, that is a game for girls, in skirts, on grass.
And I can say that since I am approximately 2600 miles from downtown State College and almost as far from the Canadian border.
So Phbt.
drorzel | March 19, 2007Well, ok, he hasn't posted anything yet, but Michael Bérubé will be joining Crooked Timber. This is good news indeed for the academic blogging community. I didn't read his blog as regularly as it deserved the first time around, but he was one of the sharper writers out there, and it's good to see him returning to blogging.
clock | March 19, 2007Being constantly online and at the same time out of academia skewed my perspective, and I kinda expected that most of my old profs would not be so hot about publishing in online open-sorce journals (and even thinking that Science is still a place to go, oy vey!), but this is quite disheartening, especially for the medical (that woudl include biology, I presume) field:
Scientists Are Wary Of Online Journals
Scientists and researchers appreciate the speed by which online journals can distribute new findings to their colleagues and the academic world, but they fear non-traditional publication…
evolgen | March 18, 2007Dr. Wayne Grody is a molecular biologist at UCLA. But his part-time job sounds like a lot more fun: "technical advisor on a number of motion picture and television productions". He's the guy responsible for giving Eddie Murphy's Professor Klump character a ginormous research lab despite the fact that he worked at a small liberal arts college. To Grody's credit, however, he did try to plant thermal cyclers, which the director found "visually boring". But, according to Grody, scientists account for such a small proportion of TV viewers and movie-goers that scientific accuracy isn't much of a…
evolgen | March 17, 20071st ROUND RESULTS | PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
After the excitement of the first round action in the Octopus region, we can only hope that the second round is half as dynamic. The big upset last round saw Unipotent knocking off Totipotent. There has also been an interesting twist, as Internal Medicine was disqualified for a positive steroid test. That means Surgery advances to play the Invertebrates. In the other matches this round, we will see Genomics take on Photosynthesis, Unipotent challenge Phylogenetics, and HIV play Psychology.
#1 Invertebrates vs. #9 Internal Medicine #8…