Academia
catdynamics | February 18, 2007Crooked Timber poses an ethical issue: are anonymous comments fair game for consideration in admission if the committee can crack the anonymity?
I don't know, but I suspect that independent of the ethics, most committees would take the comments into account, and that most would not consider them definitive, they might tip the issue for marginal candidates.
But, this raises the more general issue of anonymity and psedonymous web presence - whether on student web sites, blogs or other forums.
Anonymity is common, some of the best known, and highest quality academic blogs are pseudonymous,…
omnibrain | February 18, 2007Here are a couple of my favorites starting with the original really really stupid text.
Check out the original site for many more, as well as some good commentary.
Via BoingBoing & Digg.
omnibrain | February 18, 2007From Jim Gibbon:
"How succinct can you be in describing your research? Most of us have probably tried to whittle our work down to a 2-minute or 30-second "elevator speech" we can use while mingling at conferences. Doing this not only helps us clarify our work to ourselves, but also smooths out a lot of the interactions we're bound to have down the road while chatting about our projects. I'd say it's pretty GTD: you invest time in thinking up front so you don't have to while you're in the middle of networking, interviewing, etc.
Well, I wondered how far we could push this, and to that end, I'm…
omnibrain | February 16, 2007James L. Sherley finally ended his 12 day hunger strike after he had a craving for a blooming onion from Outback Steakhouse. Sherley said "I've had this tremendous hankering for a blooming onion from day two and just couldn't hold out anymore!"
Ok... I'm lying Sherley decided that his hunger strike brought the desired attention to his struggle against the perceived issues of racism and his denial of tenure. MIT has released a statement with Sherley and will continue to look into the issues.
Here is the News article & MIT statement
drorzel | February 16, 2007Inside Higher Ed has a story today about a former Middlebury College president who is launching a non-profit organization to advocate a serious discussion about drinking age laws in the US. As he notes, real data on the topic are a little hard to come by:
What was striking about the research, McCardell said, was how little of it conclusively backs up claims about the positive impact of the 21-year-old drinking age. "This is by definition a very emotional issue, but what we need is an informed and dispassionate debate," he said. He said that the major flaw in analyses to date has been false…
omnibrain | February 15, 2007What happens when you're looking to fill your 1000 words and get your paycheck? You head over to your local university and write something topically interesting. This requires close to no work and an interview lasting probably less than 30 minutes. In the Jan. 19th Time article What Do Babies Know, Michael Brunton, has written about the current affairs of object permanence research in babies. It is a clearly written and interesting article for the general population who doesn't know anything about developmental psychology, except perhaps the few bits about Jean Piaget they learned in…
drorzel | February 15, 2007As usual, Scott Aaronson says it better than I did:
[M]ost of the commentary strikes me as missing a key point: that to give a degree to a bozo like this, provided he indeed did the work, can only reflect credit on the scientific enterprise. Will Ross now hit the creationist lecture circuit, trumpeting his infidel credentials to the skies? You better believe it. Will he use the legitimacy conferred by his degree to fight against everything the degree stands for? It can't be doubted.
But here's the wonderful thing about science: unlike the other side, we don't need loyalty oaths in order to…
drorzel | February 14, 2007Somebody at work had printed out a table of MCAT scores by major, compiled by the AIP. I couldn't find it on the web, but I found the original source, and made my own version of the relevant bit. This shows the average numerical scores on the three sections of the MCAT test for students majoring in biological and physical sciences (shortened to "biology" and "physics" for the table), for students who applied to med school, and students who got into med school:
The results are striking. Not only did the physics applicants do better than the biologists on the physics portion of the test, as…
evolgen | February 14, 2007In honor of all the snow being dropped on the Northeast US, I give you "Things that rock & things that suck." Cue the theme music...
Things that rock: Snowfall measured in feet.
Things that suck: Freezing rain.
Things that rock: Showing up to class/work on cross-country skis.
Things that suck: Cancelled classes.
Things that rock: Watching ill-prepared undergrads try to navigate an unplowed path or snow drift.
Things that suck: Navigating an unplowed path or snow drift.
Things that rock: Riding your bike in the snow.
Things that suck: Snow removal services that plow snow onto bike…
drorzel | February 14, 2007A couple of years ago, we undertook a grand revision of our General Education curriculum, the set of core liberal arts courses that all students are required to take in order to graduate. The old system was very specific, requiring a large-ish number of courses in very specific areas, and was biased toward Western culture in a way that really doesn't reflect the modern realities of academia-- students were required to take four courses in either American or European history and culture, or four courses in Classics, and that was it. Nobody was happy with this, so it needed changing.
In the…
drorzel | February 14, 2007Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee celebrates everybody's favorite annoying holiday with a look at two scholars of sex: the late Gershon Legman who coined "Make love, not war" back in 1963; and Blaise Cronin, who currently studies the more respectable sort of pornography at Indiana. Personally, I half think the real purpose may have been to give him the chance to write the sentence about Legman:
Any scholar publishing a book called Oragentialism: Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation may be said to have contributed something to the sum total of human happiness.
but there is a larger…
drorzel | February 13, 2007I'm having the sort of morning where I feel like lobbing a grenade at somebody, and the predictable outrage over yesterday's story about a creationist paleontologist is as good a target as any.
The issue here is whether it's appropriate for Marcus Ross to receive a Ph.D. for work in paleontology, given that he's a young-earth creationist. His scientific papers are all perfectly consistent with modern understanding, speaking of events taking place millions of years in the past, but he himself believes the earth is less than 10,000 years old, and was created as described in the Bible.
The usual…
purepedantry | February 13, 2007I'm sorry, but parents like this should be shot:
Helicopter parents -- so named because they hover over their children -- have reached the workplace. The same generation that turned parenting into a competitive sport, prepping 3-year-olds for preschool, then replacing the umbilical cord with a cellphone once they reached college, are pulling up their virtual Aeron chairs and "helping" them at the office.
Yes, we are still talking about a minority of parents. But a survey last year of 400 respondents by the career Web site Experience Inc. found that 25 percent said that their parents were…
drorzel | February 13, 2007The New York Times reports that Purdue has officially cleared Rusi Taleyarkhan of charges of scientific wrongdoing over his claim to have produced nuclear fusion on a tabletop through the magic of sonoluminescence. You might recall that these claims were made a couple of years ago, but nobody else has been able to replicate them.
Purdue has conducted some sort of inquiry into the matter, and declared that there was nothing dishonest about the results. The inquiry was not what you'd call a model of transparancey, though:
Purdue did not reveal what allegations the committee had considered. It…
evolgen | February 12, 2007Does anyone know anything about NESCent (the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina)? They're affiliated with Duke, UNC, and NC State (the Research Triangle universities), and they offer postdoctoral fellowships. One of my committee members suggested it as a possible location for a postdoc, but I'm concerned that any potential project would be way heavy on computational work. I'm just trying to get a feeling for the center from anyone familiar with the research going on there.
neurotopia | February 12, 2007It's official! In honor of Darwin Day celebrations everywhere, the Alliance for Science is having their first annual Evolution Essay contest! This year's question: Why would you want your doctor to have studied evolution?
Pop on over for contest details, if you're a high school student. First prize is $300, Second is $200, etc. Plus there are a lot of autographed books on evolution that you can win!!! Teachers, prompt your students. If yours wins you get $250 towards lab supplies! Students, submit something! For 1000 words you can buy a semester's worth of books in college, or make a…
omnibrain | February 11, 2007As an academic your currency is your reputation, and how often your papers get cited (well assuming they aren't citing you for making up data). The inevitable result of this are battles of ideas being fought out at conferences, in special issues of journals and in review articles. If you discover something interesting and the mechanisms are not clearly visible (as they usually are not - especially in something like psychology!) other scientists begin to attack you - especially if your new idea challenges theirs!
In the science of the brain there are a few debates that immediately come to…
omnibrain | February 11, 2007
If you want to join make sure you are:
- not opposed to alcohol.
- fond of IPCC reports (especially the pictures).
- mostly in agreement with the "truth."
- into badges.
- grieving for the slow and miserable death of the Hubble Space Telescope.
- possibly possessed of supernatural powers.
- not in the business of total world domination
- committed to the constant and diligent presentation of science stories, be it to editors, producers, directors, educators, relatives and/or friends of various ilk, in an effort to lessen the gap that is this thing we call public scientific literacy.
Check…
drorzel | February 10, 2007Piled Higher and Deepr nails it this week:
A Pofessor's Negation Field is the unexplained phenomenon whereby mere spatial proximity to an experimental set-up causes all working demonstrations to fail, despite the apparent laws of Physics or how many times it worked right before he/she walked in the room.
I haven't been on the faculty long enough to develop a really effective Negation Field, but my boss when I was a post-doc was the absolute king of this. I eventually stopped telling him when things were working well, because he'd invariably want to come see it, and then something would go…
jstemwedel | February 8, 2007Uttered by my dean as an intense, two hour long committee meeting was adjourning:
"There's a lot of untapped administrative talent in this room."
Help!