Academia

The start of the new term brings not just new students and qualifying exams, but another round of introspection and soul-searching among the academic set. Which is a good thing for lazy bloggers, because it provokes lots of interesting articles to link to... First up is the always interesting Timothy Burke, who is concerned about last year's students: Right around September, a lot of last year's graduates from liberal arts colleges are discovering that they appear to be qualified for approximately none of the jobs that they might actually want to have. There are exceptions: students who have…

I've talked before about the tension between the desire to encourage students to major in physics and the tight job market in academia. Every time I talk about ways to draw more students into physics, it seems that somebody pops up to call me irresponsible for trying to lure them into a dead-end career track, saying that we don't really need more physics majors. Eugene Wallingford quotes the best concise response to this argument that I've heard: Another colleague spoke eloquently of why we need to work hard to convince young people to enter the sciences at the university level. He said…

OK, it's the time of the semester when I get a bazillion emails from students enrolled in my classes, and students trying to enroll in my classes, and assorted others. And, the emailers each choose a manner of address out of thin air, since usually they haven't met me yet and have no idea how I prefer to be addressed. The problem is, I'm not sure how I would prefer to be addressed! I am on record as feeling "How U doin?" is too informal an opening for email to one's professor, and as deeming beeyotch and its variants inappropriate. I am not "Mrs. Stemwedel" (since that's my mother). I'd be…

Gordon Watts reminds me that the start of a new academic year means more than just the arrivial of a new crop of freshmen. For grad students, it's qualifying exam season. For those not in the know, "qualifying exams" are a common feature of most Ph.D. programs. These are big, comprehensive tests that all students have to take at the end of the required course work. They usually come at either the end of the first year, or the start of the second year, and you have to pass the test in order to continue in the program. And, of course, the tests aren't exactly easy. As Gordon puts it: The common…

Jim Crow has published a perspective in Genetics on his favorite reviewers from 1952-1956 when he was associate editor of the journal. He prefaces it by writing: As far as I can ascertain, the editorial correspondence from that period is lost, so I am writing this from memory. Naturally, my recollections of events half a century ago are fallible, but I think I remember the essence. The identity of reviewers was confidential, so some of what follows is a breach of that confidence. I do not know whether there is a statute of limitations, but it seems reasonable that after half a century some…

Peer-reviewing a submitted article can be an interesting process. On one hand, you get a chance to glimpse the latest findings in the field before they even become public (outside of the data appearing in an abstract or on a conference poster). There is also the challenge of putting your mind to the grindstone; a reviewer has to stay sharp and think around corners, pick out where fuzzy language might be masking a methodological problem, or find points of contention in the data that the authors missed. Yet he or she must also remain both tough and fair, so that when and if a paper is…

New students will be showing up on college campuses all across the country in the next few weeks, which means it's time for the annual "kids these days" reflections on the character of the new freshmen. Apparently, they don't know all kinds of important stuff, but they don't drink as much as they used to: (Figure from The American Freshman - National Norms for 2005, sent to me in an all-faculty email. It's not clear to me whether "in the past year" refers to their first year in college, or their last year in high school, but I don't care enough to pay $25 to read the report...) Make of those…

Via Arcane Gazebo (who adds a category), an entertainingly snarky taxonomy of lab scientists: Weird and Whacky Consider the "mad scientist" of popular fiction, someone so obsessed with their subject that they forget to dress and show up to the lab in their pyjamas. Without wishing to indulge in stereotypes there are scientists who are highly creative and imaginative, it's just that you do wonder when the Mother Ship is going to come and collect them. On a good day they are self sufficient, enjoy thinking laterally and are great at finding ingenious ways of tackling a difficult piece of…

Mr. Thoughts from Kansas, Josh Rosenau, has joined the ScienceBlogs conglomerate operated by Seed Media Group. That gives us two blogs involved in thinking (Wilkins the philosopher has the other one), to go with our three evolution blogs (Evolution Blog, Evolving Thoughts, and evolgen). Josh is a graduate student, working on a PhD in Ecology and Evolution. By my count, we now how have six seven bloggers working on PhD's in the life sciences (Josh, Bora, Jake, Mike D, Shelley, Nick, and myself), along with two life sciences post docs (Alex and Evil Monkey), plus Wilkins who's a biologist by…

This announcement is a couple of days late, so please accept my apologies, although I can blame it in part on a lack of internet access. Anyways, as of 15:30 GMT last Thursday (August 17th), after enduring what was surely the longest transfer viva in the history of man (two and a half hours--hell, they should have gone ahead and given me my degree right then and there), I am now an official Oxford D.Phil. student. (The D.Phil. is Oxford's archaic equivalent of the Ph.D.) That means I can look forward to another 2+ years of hardcore science here in the Department of Biochemistry. Yes! So,…

Today is the One Year Anniversary of my Ph.D. The last couple weeks I've had what I thought might be Frodo-like anxiety aftereffects, and was briefly concerned that I might also have been pierced by a Morgul blade, bitten by a giant spider, and have Phantom Limb from where my finger was bitten off by an ugly CGI character. But I realized no, that wasn't the case (whew), any anxiety I've experienced (and my concomitant hiatus) is due to 1. my postdoctoral NRSA proposal 2. my hard drive crashing and the big number 3...... ... Evil Monkey is back in the monkey business!!! I submitted an…

Nature Reviews Genetics has published a terrible review of genetics blogging. And it's not just because they don't link to yours truly. The author links to Alex and Paul Zed, which means she knows about the ScienceBlogs empire network. I guess she didn't poke around long enough to find evolgen or Gene Expression. Maybe she saw them and wasn't sure if they were genetics blogs; it's not like the names give them away. The article sucks for the most part because it's an exercise in shoddy research. The author attributes Mendel's Garden to Hsien-Hsien Lei. Hsien hosted the second edition, but the…

I get a kick out of people who share the same name. Whether it be football players with the same name as musical legends or physicists and biologists causing confusion because of their names, I can't get enough. Thanks to Doc Hawks I can add another name to my list. It's population geneticist David Begun and anthropologist David Begun. This caused a bit of confusion on my part, as I was wondering why David Begun (the Drosophila population geneticists) had written a review of a book on primate evolution. Turns out it was the other David Begun (the anthropologist), with whom I was previously…

It has been known officially since 2002 that the sciences are hard, and, as much as we scientists love it when our friends and family tell us how smart and wonderful we must be since they could never understand what we do... is this elevated position going to cost us in the end? Big time? Addressing this issue, an article by Emma Brockes in yesterday's Guardian explores the plight of the physical sciences in the UK, taking a humorous look at the question of whether a lack of interest from students will spell their eventual demise: It is presumably never easy being a physics teacher, what…

That Julie and her challenges! A few days ago, Guy [Kawasaki] wrote a post called Everything You Wanted to Know About Getting a Job in Silicon Valley But Didn't Know Who to Ask. Having spent several years in the mid-90s being a contractor, meaning every six or eight weeks I was off on an interview with someone or another, I can tell you his post is spot-on. THE CHALLENGE... All you academics who have been through the job market, how would you amend his list for academics? I've looked at the tips. There are 15 of them! Tips 4, 5, 6, and 10 carry right over in a fairly straightforward way. I…

*Updating syllabi to reflect the coming semester's actual meeting days and assignment due dates? Really, really boring. The boredom further propagates when it requires updating a kazillion webpages, then uploading the updates to your site (one at a time, since Fetch thinks it's cute today to "lose" the connection when you use the feature that lets you set up the whole list of files to "Put" all at once). And don't get me started on the tedium of undoing the MS Word crappy formatting when you turn your word document into a webpage. I'm guessing there would be buckets of money (plus rose…

Inside Higher Ed has a short news story on a new report on textbook prices that finds the big publishers failing to offer low-cost books: In reviewing the catalogs of each of the publishers, the group looked for 22 frequently assigned textbooks, which had an average cost of $131.44 per book. Of the 22 textbooks, less than half had a comparable lower cost book. Two of the books were available in a low-frill format, while nine books were available as e-books. Of course, the publishers are a little upset, Bruce Hildebrand, executive director for higher education at the Association of American…

Over at Cognitive Daily, Dave Munger post about research into the effect of athletics on academics: Achievement can be measured in many ways -- grades, homework, attendance, standardized test scores, and enrollment in college. In all of these areas except standardized test scores, even after controlling for economic status, race, and other background variables, athletic participation was significantly correlated to academic achievement. Even after controlling for academic success in 8th and 10th grade, athletic participation was still associated with positive academic outcomes in 13 out of 21…

In light of my earlier post on academia and capitalism, occasional commenter Jake asks what I think about the newish move, described in this story from the Associated Press, to cut textbook prices by putting advertisements in them. So, I'll give you some key bits of the article with my thoughts interspersed. Textbook prices are soaring into the hundreds of dollars, but in some courses this fall, students won't pay a dime. The catch: Their textbooks will have ads for companies including FedEx Kinko's and Pura Vida coffee. Selling ad space keeps newspapers, magazines, Web sites and television…

Chatting with the chair of the philosophy department at one of the local community colleges: CC Dept. Chair: Yeah, so I'm scheduled to teach six classes this term. Me: Six?! While you're the chair?!! CC Dept. Chair: Yeah, six. We have big enrollments, the full-time faculty are fully scheduled, and I can't find enough part-timers to teach all the sections. Me: Good grief! So you have to teach them yourself? CC Dept. Chair: The enrollments are what will get us permission to hire another full-timer, so I can't not teach them. Me: Yikes! CC Dept. Chair: Also, I need to counteract the…