Academia
omnibrain | March 2, 2007F'n hilarious!
MISSOULA, MT--University of Montana wildlife biologist and Herbert R. Braithwaite Foundation research grant recipient Dr. James Neuthom has spent his entire $275,000 grant--intended for the study of whirling disease on rainbow trout--on such items as a 15-foot sailboat, scented stationery, and several dozen boxes of chocolate, according to documents he submitted to the foundation Tuesday.
Neuthom spent $7,000 on a trip with Hamilton to Lake Tahoe, which contains no trout.
Neuthom is now seeking additional Braithwaite Foundation funds to continue his desperate attempt to win the…
drorzel | March 2, 2007Inside Higher Ed's regular "Quick Takes" feature is chock full of weirdness today.
From the "I Thought Mormons Were Nice" file:
The Utah Legislature has passed legislation allowing students at public colleges and universities to request that they share rooms only with students who don’t carry concealed weapons,
The Salt Lake Tribune. But lawmakers rejected a proposal to allow faculty members to bar guns from their offices or classrooms. The legislation follows a legal dispute in which the University of Utah asserted its right to bar guns from campus — despite Utah’s ban on state entities…
omnibrain | March 1, 2007Ahhh the life of the grad students. The Simpsons have it soooo right.
Ok.. I don't actually grade any papers or have a pony tail...but hahahah...
I have a feeling this is going to be more like my entry into teaching:
(HT: Jennifer and David for the video links)
omnibrain | February 28, 2007I haven't taken my TA orientation program yet - and I'm sure they cover this in that class - but it looks like you can get into a little bit of trouble for cutting a student's tongue out.
An Italian teacher has been suspended by her school in Milan after cutting off the tongue of a lively 7-year-old child with a pair of scissors, daily Corriere della Sera reported Tuesday.
The boy has since had his tongue stitched back but is afraid to go back to school. His parents say he suffers nightmares and runs away whenever he sees a knife. They are now suing the school for damages.
Only suspended?…
revere | February 28, 2007Sometimes my flu obsessed readers think no one is paying attention but it isn't true. Beneath the surface of a spasmodically and superficially interested mainstream media, various institutions are worrying and grappling with the enormity of the consequences of a pandemic. Colleges and universities have the special problem of large and dense communities of mobile and active young adults, the ones in the cross-hairs of the current pandemic candidate, influenza A/H5N1. Many, probably most, colleges and universities have not done much. But a significant number have. The University of Minnesota is…
omnibrain | February 27, 2007There's been a bit o' lively chatter around the blogosphere about the present tenure system for teachers. One of the clear arguments is that bad teachers should be able to be fired more easily so our children get a better education. Seems nice right? But would it work? Here's one reaction from Uncertain Principles.
And here's another from my mother the teacher:
I think firing incompetent teachers would improve the state of public education; however, making it easier to fire teachers wouldn't necessarily get rid of the incompetent teachers. In my experience the teachers that…
purepedantry | February 27, 2007Bill Gates, writing in the Washington Post, makes two concrete appeals to help maintain American competitiveness:
Two steps are critical. First, we must demand strong schools so that young Americans enter the workforce with the math, science and problem-solving skills they need to succeed in the knowledge economy. We must also make it easier for foreign-born scientists and engineers to work for U.S. companies.
Education has always been the gateway to a better life in this country, and our primary and secondary schools were long considered the world's best. But on an international math test in…
scientificactivist | February 26, 2007A couple of current American Rhodes Scholars ruffled a few feathers today after writing an unabashedly critical account of their Oxford experiences for their undergraduate alma mater's paper, The Harvard Crimson. Melissa Dell and Swati Mylavarapu write:
Take it from two veterans, the glitter and prestige of big name scholarships may be less appealing under closer inspection.
This admission may be shocking, since to many, being a "Rhodes scholar" foretells a future of success and celebrity. After all, William J. Clinton, Kris Kristofferson, and David H. Souter '61 are just a few former Rhodes…
sb admin | February 26, 2007I don't know if it was intended for me, but somebody printed out and stacked with my airline reservations a scan of a letter by Smith & Smith (from Arlington, Virginia), from the 2006 issue of Physics Today (letters to the editor). The scan also included a number of penned comments written by a highly cynical and annoyed person commenting on the letter.
The letter is objecting to an earlier article about the "pipeline problem" in physics, where at higher and higher levels, women represent a smaller and smaller fraction of physicists. The conclusion of their letter reads:
Once society…
retrospectacle | February 26, 2007Everybody's talking about the firing of incompentent teachers today, and how difficult it can be due to union rigamarole.
Take this flow chart for example, which outlines the steps that must be taken to fire a bad teacher in New York City. It was so huge that it wouldn't fit on the page (below is just a snippet), so check out the file for the whole convoluted thing.
A good point was made here:
For current wages and under current working conditions, there's no ready supply of good teachers to replace those who would be fired if we made firing teachers easier. The California Basic Educational…
omnibrain | February 25, 2007I've pretty much ignored all the academic fraud cases lately since I don't know what good can come from getting upset/annoyed/whatever about asshole scientists who screw it up for the rest of us. But lately I haven't been able to ignore them anymore - they are really starting to affect both my day to day life as well as how I read actual science.
Day to Day:
At Illinois we had a married couple who while perhaps not committing academic fraud (although that has been questioned) were committing actual monetary fraud by essentially double charging their respective grants for things like travel…
drorzel | February 24, 2007OVer at the Whatever, Senor BaconCat has two long posts on the glamorous life of a successful SF writer: one breaking down his income from SF writing in detail, and the other talking about why he's talking about money. The comment threads are also lively and interesting in their own right. It's particularly funny to see the number of people who are shocked at how low the income is-- $67,000 is a pretty respectable salary in the world of people who don't play around on the Internet all that often, and it's probably in the ninety-somethingth percentile for fiction writers.
Of course, I'm amused…
omnibrain | February 23, 2007Do you have a great memory? Go compete at the The 10th Annual Memory Championship! It will be held on Saturday, March 10, 2007 in New York City at the Con Edison Building. You can also watch it live on HDNet If you have HD ;) Hey all you guys can come over to my place! Actually I don't think I could watch it... sounds more boring than a spelling bee.
In anycase... how does this contest work?
There is a pre-qualifying round of four events in which the top seven scoring "Mental Athletes (MAs)" advance to the Championship Round. The memorization categories are: Names and Faces, Speed…
jstemwedel | February 22, 2007Following up on my query about what it would take for a Young Earth Creationist "to write a doctoral dissertation in geosciences that is both 'impeccable' in the scientific case it presents and intellectually honest," I'm going to say something about the place of belief in the production of scientific knowledge. Indeed, this is an issue I've dealt with before (and it's at least part of the subtext of the demarcation problem), but for some reason the Marcus Ross case is one where drawing the lines seems trickier.
First, for the sake of argument, I want to set aside all questions of Marcus…
clock | February 22, 2007Trying to push an anti-free-speech bill in Arizona:
The Arizona bill, if enacted, could take self-censorship in schools to a new level.
"This is yet another bill that is seeking to restrict the free exchange of ideas on campus, and, frankly, this is probably the most extreme form we've seen yet," Fitzgerald said. Unlike its cousins in other states, it lays out specific penalties when a teacher or professor advocates "one side of a social, political or cultural issue that is a matter of partisan controversy."
And where MSM has to retain a dignified tone, the blogs can move in and trash the…
drorzel | February 22, 2007My father taught sixth grade in the public schools for thirty-odd years, and always griped about the teacher training workshops that they were periodically subjected to, in which some expert would be brought in to talk about the wonders of the latest fad in pedagogy, while all the teachers in the school struggled to stay awake.
I'm sure he'll be amused to know that the same thing happens at the college level, where Laurence Musgrave is cranky about faculty development workshops on teaching with technology. This bit ought to sound familiar to, well, anybody in academia:
[O]ne of the reasons I'…
tsmith | February 22, 2007 As I mentioned, I spent the latter part of last week and the weekend in San Francisco at the annual AAAS meeting. Unlike most meetings I attend, this one wasn't a research-heavy meeting, so instead I went to hear more about science education (and of course, how to improve it), as well as to find out the latest in anti-science circles from those on the front lines. My old friend Professor Steve Steve tagged along as well, meeting new friends and old and discussing evolution and challenges to its teaching. Much more after the jump.
Of course, no trip to San Francisco would be complete…
jstemwedel | February 21, 2007By now, you may have heard (via Pharyngula, or Sandwalk, or the New York Times) about Marcus Ross, who was recently granted a Ph.D. in geosciences by the University of Rhode Island. To earn that degree, he wrote a dissertation (which his dissertation advisor described as "impeccable") about the abundance and spread of marine reptiles called mosasaurs which disappeared about 65 million years ago.
Curiously, the newly-minted Dr. Ross is open about his view that the Earth is at most 10,000 years old.
There have been interesting discussions in the comments on the linked posts about what…
tsmith | February 20, 2007So, I'm back from AAAS, and starting to catch up on everything. The conference flew by, and I still have a few posts in the wings on the evolution symposium that took place on Friday, as well as some other tidbits from sessions I attended. Overall, I thought the conference was very good from a networking perspective. In addition to those I already mentioned (Janet, John, and Jeremy), I also ran into Chris Mooney and Ewen Callaway at a reception Saturday night, and met up with Eugenie Scott and several other NCSE folks during various sessions (more on that in the aforemetioned upcoming…
jstemwedel | February 19, 2007Yesterday, while transporting the sprogs to Science Scouts aquatic training maneuvers, I caught a few minutes of a City Arts & Lectures interview with Lewis Black. In the part of the interview I heard, Black discussed his efforts (over the course of eight years) to make it as a playwright, and he revealed a couple ways in which that career path might not be so different from that of the scientist:
1. How government grants might not work the way you want them to.
Black shared his view that the National Endowment for the Arts grants to support playwrights, while well-intentioned, probably…