Academia
evolgen | March 16, 20071st ROUND RESULTS | PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
The results are in from the first round in the Octopus Region of the Science Spring Showdown hosted at the World's Fair. By seed, there were three upsets, but the nine seed Internal Medicine knocking off eight seed Surgery was hardly a surprise (although the 107-76 score was a wider margin than many of the experts predicted). The win by 14 seeded Unipotent over the three seed, Totipotent, on the other hand, was quite a shocker, with many people attributing the victory to the definitive coaching style of the Unipotent's lead general,…
drorzel | March 16, 2007The Dean Dad posts lots of very interesting things that I end up not having time to link to-- you should be reading his blog every day, if you're interested in how academia operates. This one is too good to not link, though-- a discussion of Boards of Trustees and how they operate. I particualrly enjoyed this bit:
Boards are usually relatively small, and often dominated by a few strong personalities. Board members are typically not, um, experts in the innards of higher education, having earned their stripes in other fields of endeavor. Board service is usually only one of the obligations a…
evolgen | March 15, 2007
The advertising department over at the Nature Publishing Group isn't filled with the sharpest knives in the drawer -- as I've pointed out previously. They are responsible for the long vertical banners that run along the right column of their webpages (see the example to the right). Each of these banners pushes some journal, webpage, or "portal" that Nature is trying to pimp. The example shown here links to a page for you to request that your library purchase a subscription to the Nature journal Leukemia.
These advertisements cycle without any apparent rhyme or reason; I came across the…
evolgen | March 15, 2007This post is part of a series documenting Professor Steve Steve's recent visit to Philadelphia for the Drosophila Research Conference (aka, the Fly Meeting).
Professor Steve Steve had a wild Saturday night. He was quite happy to have met leaders in the fields of evo-devo, population genetics, and genomics. Of course, Steve Steve is a pioneer in popula-devo-geno-metrics, so everything that came up in discussion was old-hat to him. That said, it was definitely a night to remember. And a morning to forget.
Pictures of Steve Steve at the Sunday plenary session and on the drive home can be found…
evolgen | March 14, 2007It's March, and you know what that means: brackets. There are two ScienceBlogs brackets to keep your eye on:
The barkers at the World's Fair have put together a Science Showdown -- bracket style -- broken into four regions: Octopus (life sciences), Mortar and Pestle (chemistry), Chair (philosophy and science studies), and Orbit (physics). Showdowns between competing disciplines will be decided, in part, by reader participation, and the winners will advance to face off with other disciplines. Go here to share your opinion on the opening round.
A more traditional March bracket contest is…
catdynamics | March 14, 2007I feel slightly ambivalent about this, but New York Times "Select" content is now available free for students and faculty with valid university e-mail addresses
click here if your need to read Krugman hot off the presses exceeds your moral qualms about giving NYT the info and sustaining the silly business model represented by TimeSelect
drorzel | March 14, 2007The winners of the 2007 Intel Science Talent Search have been announced. First prize goes to physics, as is right and proper:
Mary Masterman, 17, of Oklahoma City, submitted a physics project to the Intel Science Talent Search describing the spectrograph system she built for $300 at home (commercial units can cost $20,000 to $100,000). Mary found that machining the parts and aligning the optics (lenses from a microscope and a camera) were particularly challenging. Her Littrow spectrograph splits light, like a prism, and uses a camera to record the resulting Raman spectra - a specific…
evolgen | March 13, 2007This post is part of a series documenting Professor Steve Steve's recent visit to Philadelphia for the Drosophila Research Conference (aka, the Fly Meeting).
After tracking down Steve Steve in the lobby of the hotel on Saturday, we picked up some food at the Reading Terminal Market -- a permanent sort-of-farmers-market next to the Philly Convention Center. The place was pretty packed, due in part to the Flower Show going on next door. Steve Steve was a little bummed that he didn't have time to check out any of the garden displays -- being an amateur horticulturalist and developer of the…
purepedantry | March 12, 2007David Ignatius has a great column about the underestimated power of American education. American-style education is being rapidly exported all over the world, and foreign students are lining up to attend American universities at both a graduate and undergraduate level. In some cases, these students stay. In some cases, they return, bringing the values they learned here to their home countries:
America's great universities are in fact becoming global. They are the brand names for excellence -- drawing in the brightest students and faculty and giving them unparalleled opportunities. This is…
omnibrain | March 8, 2007This weekend is visiting weekend for the accepted graduate students in the Cognitive, Brain and Cognition and Visual Cognition and Human Performance divisions of the Psych department at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. This is where a whole bunch of awkward prospective graduate students come out to Champaign and we try to convince them that even though there are no buildings over a few stories, no trees outside of campus (only soy and corn), no hills over 10 feet and the town smells a little funny when the Kraft plant is cooking up something or other, that they should come here…
drorzel | March 8, 2007Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake Young has an anti-tenure post that repeats one of the classic mistaken arguments:
1) Tenure supports bad teachers as much as it supports unproductive researchers. I can't tell you the number of bad lecturers that I have had over the years. It has to be like 90%. Science in particular is filled with a lot of very smart people, very few of whom have the slightest idea how to convey that miraculous intelligence to another scientists, much less a lay-person.
As it exists now there is no incentive to teach well after you receive tenure. Teaching duties are often…
catdynamics | March 7, 2007Chad has an interesting riff on tenure and academia and the "business model" for universities.
He touches some buttons.
Several things came together today for me, one was a website that required me to pick an occupation that "best fit" what I did. I reluctantly selected teacher, because I am not an administrator, certainly not an engineer and nothing else was even close.
But I am not a teacher, although I do "teach" classes. Nor am I that abomination of a neologism, the "educator". I do interact with students, I present material in a structured manner (I like to think). I guide students in…
purepedantry | March 7, 2007Steven Levitt from the Freakonomics blog has started a discussion about whether the tenure system is worth it. His argument is that the tenure system supports the mediocre and should be scrapped:
If there was ever a time when it made sense for economics professors to be given tenure, that time has surely passed. The same is likely true of other university disciplines, and probably even more true for high-school and elementary school teachers.
What does tenure do? It distorts people's effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career (and presumably work very hard early on as…
drorzel | March 7, 2007Here's the scenario: You are the sole executive authority of Hypothetical College, which has a faculty of three. It's performance evaluation time, and you have $1,500 in bonus money to distribute, in increments of $500 (that is, you can award $0, $500, $1,000, or $1,500 to each faculty member, but the total amount of all the awards can be no more than $1,500). To make this easier, all three of your faculty taught the same number of students, received the same student evaluation scores, and served on the same campus committees, so all you need to do is evaluate their scholarship.
Professor A…
drorzel | March 7, 2007Inside Higher Ed has an op-ed piece up urging faculty to abandon textbooks:
Here's a statement with which everyone can agree: College instructors cannot assume that students come to their classes in possession of basic knowledge. Now here's one sure to generate some controversy: In many cases textbooks deter the pursuit of knowledge more than they help it. The sciences may be different, but at least in the case of the humanities, most of us would be better off not assigning a textbook.
He goes on to make a strong case for abandoning history textbooks in favor of monographs, based on both the…
drorzel | March 6, 2007Over at the Freakonomics blog, Steven Levitt takes up the question of tenure in academia. As you might expect, it's bad from an economic perspective, and ought to be eliminated:
If there was ever a time when it made sense for economics professors to be given tenure, that time has surely passed. The same is likely true of other university disciplines, and probably even more true for high-school and elementary school teachers.
What does tenure do? It distorts people's effort so that they face strong incentives early in their career (and presumably work very hard early on as a consequence) and…
jstemwedel | March 5, 2007In a private communication, Sciencewoman asks:
Just out of curiosity, how have you been able to blog under your real name? Has your department been supportive? Are you post-tenure and immune from some of the pressures that the rest of us feel? Or is it that a philosophy department views outreach/education differently from a strict science department?
In the same communication, she also suggests that I might answer these question in a blog post, so I am.
Some of you will recall that I've written before about issues around using one's own name or a pseudonym as a blog author. In one of those…
omnibrain | March 5, 2007There's a funny post over at A Genteman's C today with this great quote from Ann Coulter:
...Professors are the most cosseted, pussified, subsidized group of people in the U.S. workforce. They have concocted a system to preemptively protect themselves for not doing their jobs, known as "tenure." They make a lot of money, have health plans that would make New York City municipal workers' jaws drop, and work -- at most -- fifteen hours a week.
What is she smoking?
evolgen | March 5, 2007A discussion of open access data using bird flu and other disease data as examples.
The recent scares over bird flu have led many researchers to investigate the epidemiology, genetics, and disease risks of the virus. The researchers are focused on both preventing the transmission of the virus into human populations and preparing for a potential pandemic. By analyzing DNA sequences from different viral strains, researchers can understand how the virus spreads within and between populations, how it changes over seasons, and what (if anything) we can do to predict its next evolutionary jump.…