Academia
drorzel | October 20, 2006The New York Times today has a story about Web-based classes offering virtual labs, and whether they should count for AP credit:
As part of a broader audit of the thousands of high school courses that display its Advanced Placement trademark, the [College Board] has recruited panels of university professors and experts in Internet-based learning to scrutinize the quality of online laboratories used in Web-based A.P. science courses.
"Professors are saying that simulations can be really good, that they use them to supplement their own lab work, but that they'd be concerned about giving…
drorzel | October 20, 2006From Inside Higher Ed this morning, interesting new results on marriage and academic careers:
A year ago, a graduate student in economics at Cornell University released a study showing that men who are married are more likely to finish doctoral programs than are single men. When Inside Higher Ed wrote about the study, the graduate student, Joseph Price, received numerous questions from readers wanting to know just how far the marriage advantage took men in academe, and where it applied to women as well.
Price went back to his data and now is out with a new study. This one shows that married…
jstemwedel | October 19, 2006Things have been busy here, but there are some interesting stories I've been watching that I thought I should mention (as well as the usual fodder for rants, and a cartoon series that might be funny, if it's not just seriously twisted):
A few atoms of element 118 have been created and detected by Russian scientists and scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Labs -- without any fabrication this time, which is good. However, the unofficial name of the new element (ununoctium, which is Latin for "one-one-eight"), needs some work. Yeah, the atoms of 118 lasted less than a microsecond, but…
drorzel | October 19, 2006Inside Higher Ed has a story about the recent student elections at Penn State, which ended up with the winning candidates being belatedly rejected after making inappropriate comments:
Jay Bundy won a plurality of votes in last week's campus election and was poised to take over leadership of the University Park Undergraduate Association, recognized by university administrators as being the official voice of students. Soon after the election, Bundy and his running mate, Christopher Brink, both juniors, were told by the elections commission that they had won the vote count.
Later in the week,…
neurotopia | October 18, 2006I had grand plans in mind for blogging this conference. Then I got a virus and spent the last 2.5 days or so in bed. Lovely. Barely got to even meet Shelley and Jake. Forced to eat room service for meal after meal. Barf!
I'll put some stuff together for next week. In the meantime, I gotta skip town. They're onto me.
drorzel | October 17, 2006This post dates from all the way back in July of 2002, and contains a bunch of thoughts on the preparation of different types of scientific presentations. I've re-covered some of this ground in the previous post, but there's enough different material to justify a separate Classic Edition post.
Since posting this, I've given several more Public Lectures, and they're a lot of fun. I've also gotten a lot better at ad-libbing physics lectures with minimal notes, which may or may not be a Bad Thing.
The text of my 2002 post is below the fold.
Having been tiresomely political for the past few days…
drorzel | October 17, 2006Sean Carroll is offering more unsolicted advice (though it is in response to a comment, which makes it borderline solicited...), this time about choosing an undergraduate school. He breaks the options down into four categories, with two small errors that I'll correct in copying the list over here:
Liberal-Arts College (LAC), such as Williams or Union.
Specialized Technical School (STS), such as MIT or Caltech.
Elite Private University (EPU), such as Harvard or Stanford.
Large State School (LSS), such as UCLA or Michigan.
There. That's much better.
I should note two things up front: the…
scientificactivist | October 17, 2006One of the goals of modern structural biology is to integrate the two traditionally distinct subfields of structural molecular biology (determination of the structures of macromolecules at atomic resolution) and structural cell biology (general architecture of of the cell and the localization of subcellular structures within it). The end result--as my research advisor at Oxford, Prof. Iain Campbell, often points out--is to be able to make a "molecular movie", at atomic resolution, of the whole cell. (Such a video might look something like this video from XVIVO and Harvard University--…
jstemwedel | October 16, 2006I'm starting to wonder if some of my grinding fatigue can be laid at the feet of untenable choices.
Would you prefer:
Students who make a conscious choice never to come to your lectures (which means they haven't even seen one lecture and used it as a basis for the decision) yet faithfully do all the assigned reading and turn in the papers, or students who come to every single class meeting and participate enthusiastically but who never do the assigned reading (which shows in their papers)?
A department chair who holds the line on a reasonable upper limit for his department's class sizes but…
evolgen | October 16, 2006If you thought American colleges and universities were all about thugging it up and diagramming the Z-scheme, you'd be surprised to learn how big of a deal football is. Heck, if you were to visit some universities on Saturday afternoon in autumn, you'd be surprised to learn that you were on the grounds of an institute of higher learning. And it's not just the four year colleges and universities that can be called Football-U.
California has the best public university system of any state in the US. Multiple University of California schools are ranked as top national universities. On top of that…
scientificactivist | October 16, 2006I think I can finally call myself a legitimate scientist (whatever that means), since last week one of the papers I worked on during my undergrad at Texas A&M University was published in The Journal of Cell Biology (JCB). I'm the fourth author on the paper, meaning that I was only peripherally involved (and made a much smaller contribution than the first author, Dr. Brian Saunders, and my advisor, Dr. George Davis, among others). Regardless, this is my first appearance in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and since I (not surprisingly) find the subject of this paper incredibly…
catdynamics | October 16, 2006Astroprof ponders the imponderable.
Semester is clearly in full swing out there...
Read it and weep.
neurotopia | October 15, 2006Almost too cute for words. Poor SFN conference virgin Jake just got his cherry popped. I tried to warn him that this conference is nuts, but does anybody ever listen to me? NOOOOO.
This afternoon had a good run of posters relating to transgenic mouse models of Alzheimer's Disease. Got me thinking a bit about the utility of these models and what we're really testing with them. Ok ok, so I already thought about all this stuff before but I realized that I need to do a blog post on them. I'll collect my thoughts on the matter and get back to you, dear reader. In the meantime, I got to hit…
neurotopia | October 15, 2006Greetings and salutations from the 36th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience!!!! I'm gonna try and get back in the bloggin' business after some major life changes by writing about exciting news from the forefront. Unfortunately, the only thing I have to report so far is that Jake and Shelley and I had dinner last night and went clubbing, and poor Neurocontrarian ended up crashing on our floor after making out with some hottie.
Ahh, the scientific life. Gonna try and squeeze in an actual science post or two this afternoon, but as today I have to catch up with friends and…
drorzel | October 14, 2006The preceding comments about my alumni oganization were brought on by a bunch of factors-- the arrival of a Maryland alumni publication this week, the update-your-information questionnaire from the Society of Alumni, a visiting speaker last week who was two years behind me at Williams. Probably the biggest was the fact that this is Union's Homecoming, which also means I'm off to spend most of the afternoon on campus, watching football and rugby, and talking to whatever students, parents, and recent alumni I encounter.
This is one of those small-college things that I think is actually fairly…
drorzel | October 13, 2006"Imperialism"
"Colonialism"
I have a vague sense that these two terms are not interchangeable, but I can't for the life of me explain what the difference is. But there seems to be one, at least based on listening to colleagues from the other side of campus talk about their research.
So, what's the difference?
(Some context can be found on Kate's LiveJournal.)
jstemwedel | October 12, 2006It's no Puzzle Fantastica #1, but it's what I have at the moment.
In a comment on my post about what I think the point of a college education is (or is not), Caledonian left this tantalizing comment:
I've noticed a fascinating trend among those people who have responded to this post favorably. Hopefully additional responses will reveal whether this pattern is genuine or spurious.
Of course, Caledonian isn't going to bias the data by telling us what the pattern is (at least, not until the data is all in). But now I can't help poring over the comments to try to discern just what pattern (or…
catdynamics | October 12, 2006From Dr B herself
there is a wiki Academic Blog Portal
Go browse, add yourselves, or Colbert the site, or something.
drorzel | October 12, 2006There's an academic joke that says that the job of a university president is really pretty simple. To ensure happiness on campus, all he or she needs to do is make sure that there's sex for the undergraduates, food for the graduate students, and parking for the faculty.
It's certainly true that parking enforcement has been one of the most efficient departments on every campus I've been associated with. At Maryland, it was practically the only efficient thing there, but it was a fearsome oepration. I once parked my car in a faculty lot just long enough to run inside and drop a homework set in…
scientificactivist | October 10, 2006A new study from the Research Defence Society (RDS) indicates that medical doctors in the UK overwhelmingly support the role of animal research in contributing to important medical advances. The RDS questioned four hundred general practitioners from across the UK about their feelings on the importance and necessity of medical research, and the results can be found here.
The study found that 96% of general practitioners agree that "animal experiments have made an important contribution to many advances in medicine" and that 88% agree that "safety tests should be carried out on animals before…