Academia
omnibrain | January 24, 2007I posted this story a week or so ago about Nobel prize winners living longer. Some people didn't seem to believe the study and now it seems that even some Nobel Prize winners are questioning the results.
Winning the Nobel Prize can add almost a year and a half to a laureate's life, two British economists say. But though he's 81, Harvard physicist Roy J. Glauber, a 2005 Nobelist, isn't buying it.
So why doesn't Roy buy it?
But Glauber said the study might have been biased by the fact that many laureates aren't selected until they're quite old.
Glauber won his Nobel 40 years after publishing…
omnibrain | January 24, 2007Old fun: Music on an iPod | Newer fun: Watching porn on the iPod | Newest fun: Listening to lectures!
Apple Inc is letting NJIT Professors post their lectures, and other audio and video class information on its iTunes U website - where students can go and then download whatever material they want onto their computers, i-pods, mp3 players and even their cell phones.
NJIT Instructional Design Professor Blake Haggerty says if you know you'll be able to download a lecture, "you have the opportunity of really paying attention in class, and then reviewing afterwards what was said."
Ohh.. and don't…
drorzel | January 24, 2007We've been running a search to fill a tenure-track faculty position for next year, and I've spent more time than I care to recall reading folders and interviewing candidates. Now that the process is nearing completion, I'd like to do a quick post offering advice for those thinking about applying for a tenure-track position at a small liberal arts college. Yes, this is too late to do any good for people thinking of applying for the current job, but then, we wouldn't want anybody to get an unfair advantage by reading my blog.
The following statements are entirely my own opinion, and should not…
revere | January 23, 2007The University of California Regents (their Board of Trustees) is facing a thorny issue: should researchers in the University of California system be banned from taking research support from the tobacco industry? Two conflicting imperatives, one, unfettered freedom to pursue research wherever it leads; the other, the need for some constraints. Not anything goes, even in the hallowed halls of higher learning. Let me be clear. I think the chief executives of tobacco companies are aiding and abetting, if not committing, homicide, by promoting an addiction to a fatal product for money. I favor…
drorzel | January 23, 2007Inside Higher Ed has a report on a new frontier in administrative idiocy:
After passing a new online test on ethics required of all state employees, [a] tenured professor in the English department at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale received a notice from his university ethics officer and from the state inspector general that he was not in compliance with state ethics regulations, a failure that state officials said could result in punishment that included dismissal. The reason? He had completed the test too quickly.
Yes, that's right. Professors were asked to read a bunch of…
evolgen | January 22, 2007I got my motherboard replaced a couple of hours ago, so I now have my old forms of procrastination at my disposal -- blogging and blog reading.
I've got one link for you that is relevant to Gregg Easterbrook's anti-multi-author screed. This one comes from BioCurious; it's an article on attributing credit in multi-author papers. Enjoy.
jstemwedel | January 22, 2007In a post about curricular issues in genetics and biochemistry courses, Larry Moran raises some good questions:
It's almost a requirement these days that introductory genetics courses include a section on genetically modified crops. This invariably leads to tutorials, or labs, or essays, about whether GM-foods are a good thing or not. These discussions are usually lots of fun and the students enjoy this part of the course. Professors are convinced they are teaching ethics and that it's a good thing to show students that ethics is an important part of science.
In introductory biochemistry…
omnibrain | January 22, 2007
It's kinda an intense picture don't you think? I found this on a relatively generic article about Steven Pinker from the Toronto Star.
jstemwedel | January 18, 2007The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the University of California is getting serious about ethics -- by requiring all of its 230,000 to take an online ethics course.
Yeah, throwing coursework at the problem will solve it.*
Indeed, I'm not sure I'd even want to count this as "coursework" given the article's description of what the employees will be getting:
The course, which takes about 30 minutes, is designed to brief UC's 230,000 employees on the university's expectations about ethics, values and standards of conduct. ...
Although the course was developed to support an ethics policy…
evolgen | January 18, 2007Allow me to set the stage. I just emerged from the autoclave room with a cart full of hot, steamy, dirty vials and bottles of Drosophila media in tow (see image below the fold). The glassware had been the home for thousands of flies for a period of over a month. What started out as a mixture of agar, cornmeal, yeast, molasses was churned up and excreted into by tons of larvae. All this nastiness was then heated at high pressure, releasing all kinds of aromas that I have the pleasure of dragging around our building. I'm a real popular guy.
I had to push the cart from the autoclave room to the…
evolgen | January 16, 2007Gregg Easterbrook -- good sportswriter, crappy at pretty much everything else he does -- likes to take pot-shots at scientific research in his ESPN column "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" (TMQ). In this week's edition he tells us how he doesn't think scientific papers should have multiple authors and how he doesn't like the advertisements in the journal Science.
TMQ dislikes the modern convention of listing multiple people as "authors" of a work written by a single person; this is part of the overall cheapening of the written word. Several previous items have concerned the absurd number of…
omnibrain | January 16, 2007It seems that if you win the Nobel prize you can live for 2 more years! Screw exercise and eating right - I'm gonna win the NOBEL PRIZE!!!!!
Anyone have any good research ideas? Just think you can be responsible for me living TWO MORE YEARS!
The average life span for this group was just over 76 years. Winners of the Nobel Prize were found to live 1.4 years longer on average (77.2 years) than those who had "merely" been nominated for a prize (who lived on average for 75.8 years). When the survey was restricted to only comparing winners and nominees from the same country, the longevity gap…
omnibrain | January 16, 2007Thanks to Coturnix from a Blog Around the Clock:
Yes! It is finally here! What you have all been waiting for, impatiently, for three weeks! The Science Blogging Anthology is now for sale. Go to Lulu.com by clicking here (or click on the picture of the book to your right) and place your order! You can choose to buy a PDF to download (but do you really want to print out 336 pages!?) or order the book with its pretty cover - it takes only a couple of days to arrive at your doorstep.
I've ordered it? Have YOU!?
drorzel | January 16, 2007Inside Higher Ed had an article yesterday about a survey of student attitudes that they analyze in terms of gender differences, finding that women entering college are generally better prepared than their male counterparts, but men entering college are more confident in their abilities, particularly in math and science. As you might expect, this leads to a bit of discussion in the comments.
One thing I'd like to pull out of the bickering, though, is a "big picture" comment:
Ignore the gender differences for a minute and focus on the big picture. 9 out of 10 students (male & female)…
drorzel | January 14, 2007An article from the Chronicle of Higher Education has landed in my inbox, describing efforts to recruit students to conservative groups:
Ryan J. Sorba stands before a table covered with mini-cupcakes and whoopie pies, calling out to students as they pass. A sign lists the prices: $6 for customers under 18; $3 for 19-year-olds; $1 for 20-year-olds; 25 cents for 21- to 39-year-olds; and free to those 40 and over.
"Don't get screwed by Social Security, support private accounts," says Mr. Sorba, a conservative activist who has come here to Bentley College's Student Union to help recruit new…
jstemwedel | January 12, 2007You may have heard that the very dangerous professor is putting his blog on mothballs so he can play more hockey. But, it's not over until the WAAGNFNP Minister of Justice says it's over. And, she says (at comment 71 on this post) "We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball. Now Party!":
Le Blogue-WAAGNFNP Blowout Party
WAAGNFNP High Council Club
Saturday, Jan. 13th 8pm Eastern
Doors open at 7:30pm
I'll be bringing a bag of lemons, a bag of sugar, and a case of Absolute Citron, so make sure you have your USB shotglass handy.
jstemwedel | January 11, 2007At the AAS meeting in Seattle, Rob Knop risked his own well-being to get the details on a poster that was, shall we say, waaaay out of the mainstream. Quoth Rob:
Now, don't get me wrong. There will be a lot of posters with data or theory that turns out to be wrong, and there are a lot of posters that disagree with each other and debate and dispute the best interpretation of the data. That's the normal process of science. The nuts here... they think they're participating in the normal process of science, but they do not understand it well enough to realize that they are just cranks, nothing…
catdynamics | January 11, 2007Astroprof stuck it out till the bitter end at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.
Apparently it did not end well. The Convention Center staff took down everbodies' posters at lunch and piled belongings in the lobby.
It was a fun, and exhausting meeting, but I have to say it was not run tightly - sessions were a bit more higgledy-piggledy in content than normal, and parallel schedules had clashing content overlap to a higher extent then normal.
And they put the NASA advisory meeting in a tiny room with no mikes for the panel, while the ballroom was being used by an AGN…
drorzel | January 11, 2007There's been lots of news from the AAS meeting in Seattle this week, but the best from my perspective is that high school physics enrollments have neevr been higher:
Presenting new data that encourage this outlook, [Michael] Neuschatz [senior research associate at AIP's Statistical Research Center] will show that enrollment in high school physics classes is up and likely to continue increasing. The data show more than 30 percent of high school seniors have taken physics classes, more than ever before. This percentage has been rising steadily since the mid-1980s.
In addition, the percentage…
jstemwedel | January 10, 2007Chad has an interesting post explaining the timescale of a faculty search at his college. One of the rate-determining steps he notes in the process is the posting of the job (and its deadline for applications):
So, why does it take so long? Well, to start with, you need to post the job and set the deadline so as to obtain a reasonable pool of applicants. Academic job-hunting season traditionally begins in September or thereabouts, so jobs tend to be advertised on major academic sites during September, October, and November. If you post the ad and set the deadline too early, you won't get…