Academia
drorzel | November 7, 2006Two links from the always interesting Tim Burke, on "Free Speech Kabuki", and a humorous student response to it.
The former will sound familiar to most academics, the latter is the sort of thing that makes this job rewarding.
jstemwedel | November 6, 2006
ScienceBloggers meet in the three-dimensional world: (from left) Janet Stemwedel, John Lynch, Prof. Steve Steve, John Wilkins, David Ng, Ben Cohen.
I managed to get back home last night from the PSA meeting in Vancouver, although just barely. My co-symposiasts got a rental car and headed off to see mountains, an expedition I'd have joined were it not for my plane-missing paranoia. ("You realize that flying home from Vancouver is essentially a domestic flight, so you probably don't need to check in until about 90 minutes before flight time," the field trip organizer assured me. But I…
drorzel | November 6, 2006Having strongly stated my opinion that PowerPoint is not actively evil, but can be used to give good scientific presentations as well as soul-crushingly dull bullet-point talks, I feel like I ought to say something to back it up. Here, then, are some of the rules of thumb I use when putting together a good PowerPoint talk.
1) Know Your Audience. This is probably the most important rule in giving a talk, no matter what medium you plan to use. A talk aimed at an audience of undergraduate science majors is a very different thing than a research talk given at an international conference, or a…
drorzel | November 4, 2006Over at Effect Measure, Revere (or one of the Reveres, anyway, I'm not certain if they're plural or not) has posted another broadside against PowerPoint, calling it "the scourge of modern lecturing." This is something of a sensitive point for me, as I use PowerPoint for my lectures in the introductory classes. I've been using it this way for more than five years, and I like to think I've gotten to be pretty good at it. I fully expect this to be brought up in my tenure review, though, and to have to justify my use of PowerPoint in class.
Here's the thing: PowerPoint is a tool, nothing more. It…
drorzel | November 4, 2006For I'm not sure what reason, Scott Eric Kaufman is blogging a close reading of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn". I suspect this may be a new frontier in procrastination, but I'm not up on the latest developments in that field.
In the course of his reading, he helpfully updates one stanza into modern idiom:
What's the title of this thing anyway?
Is it about them? Them? Both?
It takes place where?
Which one of them are these? Who are they?
Where are they going and why are they in such a rush?
What is that? Guitar? Xylophone? Why so loud?
There's a lot of thought-provoking…
revere | November 3, 2006Well, not exactly. She's already been to college and is now a PhD candidate in neurosciences at the University of Michigan. More to the point, ScienceBlogs own Shelley Batts (maitresse of Retrospectacle) is one of the finalists for a $5000 Blogger scholarship and all she needs to win is for you all to vote for her.
Check out her blog Retrospectacle (if you don't already know it) to see some of the many reasons you should vote for her. And then go here [Update, 9/5/07: this site has moved to here] to vote for the most deserving (aka, Shelley Batts).
Do it now. It will get you in practice for…
retrospectacle | November 3, 2006A review I wrote with my mentor, Dr. Yehoash Raphael, hit advanced e-publication today in the journal Hearing Research. Check it out! Abstract below.........
Transdifferentiation and its applicability for inner ear therapy
During normal development, cells divide, then differentiate to adopt their individual form and function in an organism. Under most circumstances, mature cells cannot transdifferentiate, changing their fate to adopt a different form and function. Because differentiated cells cannot usually divide, the repair of injuries as well as regeneration largely depends on the…
revere | November 3, 2006I'm currently at a meeting in Europe and listening to -- really looking at -- scientific papers. I say "looking at" because they all are using PowerPoint, the scourge of modern day lecturing.
Don't get me wrong. I use PowerPoint, too. Everyone uses PowerPoint. It is so easy to make nice looking slides and modifying them at the last minute is also easy-- I have been known to do it on the fly while sitting on a panel waiting to give my own paper, we are almost forced to use them. In fact if you have 35 mm slides these days you are likely out of luck as the meetings no longer provide 35 mm…
clock | November 2, 2006This week's question in the Ask a ScienceBlogger series is:
What's the most underfunded scientific field that shouldn't be underfunded?
The first and obvious answer is, of course, "my field", whatever it is.
But then....
But then I thought about my own field of chronobiology and I think that its funding goes as overal funding goes. When there is a lot of money to go around, clock researchers get their fair share. When everyone is suffering, so does my field. After all, circadian field is deemed pretty "sexy" - it was a runner-up in the year-end popularity lists of the Science magazine at…
drorzel | November 1, 2006I didn't take any pictures, but Monday night, I went to a Balinese gamelan concert on campus, put on by a group of twenty-odd students from a couple of Asian music classes, aided by some visiting musicians from Bali. There were also dance performances by three students, and one visiting Balinese dancer (who is actually a student at Kansas State, if I heard the introduction correctly...).
I've never heard gamelan music before, so I'm not sure what it's supposed to sound like, but it seemed like the students did a very good job. There were also a couple of breaks during which they explained…
catdynamics | October 31, 2006Scholarships-Ar-US have nominated 10 student bloggers for a nice little scholarship.
Go vote (it is resistant to Chicago voting, must have a cookie and only lets you visit the voting page once, despite the stakes I imagine few people will take the time to flush their browser cookies and reset their DHCP to dishonestly vote multiple times)
Current leader is a kossack, read through the choices, or just take me word for it and vote for SciBling Shelley from Retrospectable
jstemwedel | October 31, 2006Yesterday, I recalled MIT's dismissal of one of its biology professors for fabrication and falsification, both "high crimes" in the world of science. Getting caught doing these is Very Bad for a scientist -- which makes the story of Luk Van Parijs all the more puzzling.
As the story unfolded a year ago, the details of the investigation suggested that at least some of Van Parijs lies may have been about details that didn't matter so much -- which means he was taking a very big risk for very little return. Here's what I wrote then:
The conduct of fired MIT biology professor Luk Van Parijs, as…
jstemwedel | October 30, 2006Just over a year ago, MIT fired an associate professor of biology for fabrication and falsification. While scientific misconduct always incurs my ire, one of the things that struck me when the sad story of Luk Van Parijs broke was how well all the other parties in the affair -- from the MIT administrators right down to the other members of the Van Parijs lab -- acquitted themselves in a difficult situation.
Here's what I wrote when the story broke last year:
Can you believe there's another story in the news about a scientist caught fabricating and falsifying data? Also, the sky is blue.…
drorzel | October 28, 2006Two nights before my college graduation, I was having a beer in one of the two bars in town, and one of the Deans was at the bar, holding forth. "Do you know," he said to me and a couple of other students, "there are five people in your class who aren't going to graduate because they don't have enough PE credits?"
"Really?" I said, "Who?"
He looked at me, and said "What's your name again?"
I always think of that when somebody brings up the subject of Phys. Ed. requirements, as the Dean Dad did a little while ago. Williams had both a Phys. Ed. requirement and a mandatory swim test (that…
drorzel | October 27, 2006I've had a tab open for a while containing an Inside Higher Ed article on a new approach to introducing science at Emory University:
David Lynn, who chairs the department of chemistry at Emory University, spoke about Emory's seminar program for entering freshmen. All Emory freshmen must take a seminar the first semester and the one for math and science teaches students how to think like a scientist.
The course consists of five modules. Each module is taught by a grad student who presents his own research, guiding students through the research process, from designing studies to defending…
catdynamics | October 26, 2006Interesting conversation at lunch today: topic was academic performance metrics and of course the dreaded citation index came up, with all its variants, flaws and systematics.
However, my attention was drawn to a citation metric which, on brief analysis, and testing, seems to be annoyingly reliable and robust. The H-score.
The H-score, takes all your papers, ranked by citation count; then you take the largest "k" such that the kth ranked paper has at least k citations.
So, you start off with a H-score of zero.
If your 5th highest cited paper has 5 citations but your 6th highest cited paper…
clock | October 26, 2006A short but good article by my schools' President (April 25, 2006, also here).
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James Oblinger, the new President of North Carolina State University (promoted from within after many years as the Dean of the School Of Agriculture And Life Sciences), has a good editorial in today's News and Observer:
Nurturing success in the sciences:
We've all heard the line from President Bush: We need more students to join the "nerd patrol." It's an overly simple solution for a complex problem that imperils the traditions of invention and innovation that…
jstemwedel | October 24, 2006There is a bunch of interesting stuff to read on the subject of teaching, learning, and being part of an academic department right now. Here are a few links I think deserve your attention:
Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study (PDF) whose results suggest that married grad students may do better than single grad students at completing their Ph.D.s, publishing while in school, and landing tenure-track jobs. Interestingly, the advantage is greater for married male graduate students than for married female graduate students, and domestic partnership seem to confer less advantage here than…
jstemwedel | October 23, 2006Adventures in Ethics and Science field operative RMD alerted me to a recent article in the New York Times (free registration required) about an ongoing debate on the use of online instruction for Advanced Placement science classes. The crux of the debate is not the value of online science classes per se, but whether such courses can accomplish the objectives of an AP science course if they don't include a traditional, hands-on laboratory component.
The debate is interesting for a few reasons. First, it gets to the question of what precisely an AP course is intended to do. Second, it…
drorzel | October 21, 2006Inside Higher Ed, in their "Quick Takes" points to a new study of teaching evaluations that they summarize thusly:
Students care more about teaching quality than professorial rank when evaluating professors, and professors who receive good evaluations from one group of students typically continue to do so in the future, and to have students who earn better grades than those in other courses, according to new research from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
None of that sounds all that shocking, and the abstract of the paper itself doesn't add much more detail. The key sentences would…