Academia
drorzel | December 8, 2006One of the weird features of the trimester calendar that Union runs on is that we get a six-week break between the Fall and Winter terms-- classes end before Thanksgiving, and resume after New Year's. This is neither as restful nor as useful as you might naively expect, but that's not the point of this post.
Some of our students do manage to make good use of the long break, most notably a group who are in New Orleans helping with the continuing volunteer clean-up effort in the areas devastated by Hurricaine Katrina. The Albany paper has set up a special section covering their trip, including…
clock | December 7, 2006A few days back, Alex posted about a new, easy way to calculate one's Hirsch Number ("H-Index"), a widely used measure of one's publications' worth. Yup, I did it for me and no, I am not telling you my number....
The site that published this, The Epidemiologic Enquiry, now that I had some time to take a longer look, has a bunch of other interesting things posted about scientific/medical publishing and the methods of epidemiological research. Worth a look.
clock | December 7, 2006Promoting Ethics in Science:
Increasingly, journals are appearing in front page scandals that expose undisclosed industry support of research and scientists who have faked results. Blackwell Publishing, trying to prevent such problems, recently released a comprehensive guide on publication ethics to the editors of its 805 academic journals. These principles provide practical advice to inform policies on a broad range of topics such as conflicts of interest. While the guidelines will not be mandatory, experts seem pleased and expect the move will help to clean up academic publishing.
jstemwedel | December 6, 2006It started when someone asked Dr. B. for advice about starting a Ph.D. program with three kids in tow. Since then, the question has been bouncing around the academic blogosphere, with posts you should read at Academom and Geeky Mom. Although this is absolutely the worst time in the semester for me to fire on all cyliders with this one, regular readers know that I've shared my own experiences in this area, so I can't stay completely out of it.
A brief recap of the current conversation:
Dr. B. notes the many ways graduate programs set things up that are easier for the childless than the child…
drorzel | December 5, 2006The Female Science Professor has a post talking about types of reference letters. Much of what she says is fairly specific to letters relating to prizes or promotions, but some of her comments are perfectly applicable to the junior faculty job search letters I've been reading by the bucketload lately.
Particularly worth noting are her categories of good letters:
OK to good letter of reference: clear statement of how well (or not) the reference writer knows the person in question, and opinion with examples regarding research quality or potential in the context of the field.
Best: The above,…
retrospectacle | December 4, 2006This generation of students will graduate with more student loans and debt than any previous to it (adjusted for inflation, of course). Rising school costs, living costs in college towns, and credit card debt may all be to blame. I came across a state-by-state interactive map over at USA Today, which breaks down the average debt accrued by students graduating from public and private universities.
Something I thought was strange: Iowa's private university grad debt is lower than its public grad debt. Wonder why....
Anyway, if you want to know a bit more, go here.
scientificactivist | December 3, 2006Via A Blog Around the Clock comes news that Daniel Rhoads, who writes the informative blog Migrations (and formerly A Concerned Scientist), has successfully defended his dissertation. So, after a few minor revisions, it looks like it won't be too long before we'll have to call him Dr. Rhoads.
In good blogger form, Daniel has published the first chapter of his dissertation online. The title of the chapter is "Integrin receptors and determinants of polarity in directed cell migration," and it looks like a nice overview of the subject. As someone who used to study cell migration in blood…
evolgen | November 30, 2006Dr. Joan Bushwell (not her real name) has hurled some poo at the -omicists. You know, those people who attach -omics to everything and act like they've come up with a brand new research discipline. I imagine them making the "guitar player changing chords" face (go to 1:09 in this video) when they coin a new "ome".
As one last hurrah for omeomics, Doc Bushwell coined the meme-ome. That would be a collection of all the memes floating around the blogosphere. Or is it all memes everywhere? Who knows? But it is the perfect congruence of two terms that have worn out there welcome.
And systems…
tsmith | November 30, 2006 Esther Lederberg dies at 83
Stanford University microbiologist Esther Miriam Zimmer Lederberg, a trailblazer for female scientists and the developer of laboratory techniques that helped a generation of researchers understand how genes function, has died at Stanford Hospital.
Professor Lederberg, who lived at Stanford, was 83 when she died Nov. 11 of pneumonia and congestive heart failure.
She discovered the lambda phage, a parasite of bacteria that became a key tool for the laboratory study of viruses and genetics, and was the co-developer with her husband [Nobel prize winner Joshua…
clock | November 30, 2006Is this the first such thing? A faculty position at UNC school of journalism. From the job ad:
This person should be highly skilled in writing and editing online news, in blogging and in developing news content for the web.
Apply if you think you can and want to do this.
drorzel | November 30, 2006Doug Natelson posted the second installment in his inside view of the hiring process for academic physics positions, this one describing the campus visit/ interview process. Again, the description is mostly accurate for a much larger department than ours, at a research insitution, but the basic idea is the same.
In our department, candidates making campus visits meet individually with each of the faculty for about half an hour, and also get tours of the campus and the department labs. Throw in a meeting with the Dean, and a colloquium talk, plus a meeting with students and dinner with a…
scientificactivist | November 29, 2006Anyone who has tried to replicate an experiment based on the description published in a paper knows that this can be difficult, frustrating, and often close to impossible. The protocols in the Methods section can be incomplete, even inaccurate, and sometimes lead the hopeful reader down a trail of never-ending references to previous papers, eventually arriving at a protocol only marginally related to what the reader actually set out to find.
One answer to this problem, in a few cases at least, might be a new video journal spearheaded by Moshe Pritsker, a postdoc at Harvard Medical School/…
evolgen | November 29, 2006If you're getting near finishing your PhD (within a couple of years or less), check out this article from PLoS Computational Biology. It offers ten suggestions to consider when searching for a post doc. The suggestions are not comp-bio specific, but I'd be interested in hearing if people have other ideas. I've definitely been thinking about post docs, but I have no concrete plans as of yet.
evolgen | November 29, 2006
A bunch of grad students at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) are organizing an online symposium in the Life Sciences. They've got a list of speakers and you can upload your own presentation. The conference runs from December 4-8, but I'm not sure how exactly this virtual conference works. If you're interested, check out their website and read what other people have to say.
(Via Public Rambling.)
catdynamics | November 29, 2006Acephalous is trying to measure meme speeds, but we are theorists, dammit, a model prediction is needed!
So what is the asymptotic speed of a free small meme in the wild web?
1, of course.
In natural units.
The derivation is left as a trivial exercise for the reader.
drorzel | November 29, 2006Recently, my post about my SAT Challenge entry has leaped into the Top Five Most Emailed list over on the right, for what reason I can't really say. That gives me two of the top five, though-- eat my dust, Myers. Now there's only that Deltoid character between me and world domination...
The other Most Emailed post is my PowerPoint advice, which reminds me that I'm a terrible person for not linking to Dave Munger's Casual Friday study of PowerPoint technique. In my defense, it was posted at the very busiest point of the term for me, and I forgot about it by the time I managed to dig myself…
catdynamics | November 29, 2006Archeologists think they have found the ruins of the Great Hall of King Harald I Fairhair (Haraldr Hárfagri) at Avaldsnes in west Norway.
It was the site of the halls of local chieftans and then the Kings of Norway for almost 3000 years until the settlement was burned by the Hansa Merchant League in 1398.
drorzel | November 29, 2006Two quick links from yesterday's Inside Higher Ed that a browser crash kept me from posting yesterday:
1) A story on a professor at Idaho who asks students to sign a waiver acknowledging that they may be offended by some of the material in his film studies class. There's a bit of discussion of whether this is a good idea or not, but the main effect on my end is to make me grateful that I'm not a humanities professor.
From talking to colleagues on the other side of campus, there's a whole bunch of stuff that they have to put up with that we don't in the sciences. It's rare to find a literature…
catdynamics | November 28, 2006Interesting IHE article on NCAA problems and how it is, apparently, all the faculties' fault
Of course.
An interesting point in the comments is that anything goes, as long as the football team wins (or basketball or whatevah).
But, in the nature of the game, precisely half the teams lose each time. Which seems to be a guaranteed recipe for frustration of collegieate athletics.
Now this is partly circumvented by, for example, in football having 3 games against lower division teams for "warm-up", with near 100% certainty of victory. In which case the average football team playing 12 games would…