Academia
drorzel | February 12, 2013I found myself writing about the social skills of scientists today for the book-in-progress (something I've done here before), and how they're portrayed in the media, so of course I had to drop in a reference to "The Big Bang Theory." Jim Parsons's portrayal of Sheldon Cooper pretty much nails down one of the extremes of the "socially inept scientist" axis, the borderline autistic genius who can't comprehend normal social interactions, but still won't shut up. The other extreme, of course, is occupied by Paul Dirac, who famously almost never spoke.
"The Big Bang Theory" is an endless source…
jdupuis | February 9, 2013So here's the rather strange story.
Way back in 2010, librarian Dale Askey, then of Kansas State University, wrote a blog post critical of the humanities monograph publisher Edwin Mellen. Basically, he stated that the publishers' low quality did not justify their high prices. No big deal, really, librarians have lots of opinions about publishers and share them all the time around the water cooler, at conferences and online. But perhaps foreshadowing what was coming, Askey remarked in his post: "Given how closely Mellen guards its reputation against all critics, perhaps I should just put on my…
jdupuis | January 20, 2013The recent death of Aaron Swartz has provoked a lot of commentary on the web so I thought I would gather some of it here. This is by no means an attempt to be comprehensive as the amount of commentary has been truly vast. I've tried to gather enough so that someone working through even a small selection of the posts would get a good idea of all the dimensions of the story. I've also tried to perhaps give a bit of a library/academia slant in the selection.
As usual with these compilations, readers should feel free to suggest further readings in the comments especially those that add a…
jdupuis | January 17, 2013On January 10, 2013 Rick Anderson published a post at The Scholarly Kitchen published on six mistakes library staff are making when dealing with our vendors. Most of them were fairly standard stuff like don't be rude, don't waste people's time. That sort of thing. (Yes, sometimes I think that every time I link to a Scholarly Kitchen article, an open access journal loses its wings.)
The sixth, however, was a bit different.
Putting political library concerns above patron needs. I’ve saved for last the “mistake” that I know is likely to be the most controversial, but I think it must be said.…
jdupuis | December 31, 2012While it has not generally been my practice to do year end review posts, artificially trying to tie the various and disparate strands of my blogging habits together into some sort of coherent story, I think for this year it's worth doing. And that's because my blogging year did seem to have a coherent theme -- advocating for a fairer and more just scholarly publishing ecosystem.
In particular I spent an awful lot of time advocating for Open Access in one way, shape or form. Not that I haven't always done so, but with all the various events happening in the academic and library worlds this…
catdynamics | December 12, 2012
Dr Brad Barlow was nominated by his Astro 001 students for a great honour - whichever class collected the most money for this year's THON would get to designate a lecture style of their choice, and Brad won...
so he got to lecture as a character from a "classic christmas movie"[sic]
As you can see, he really got into character.
catdynamics | December 5, 2012On the purity of science careers; the waste of civilization and other assorted snippets... and a happy Feast of St Nikolaus
The Rise of the Science Politician - Matt B. continues provocative Conversations.
There is an interesting thread on this on The Astronomers fb.
On The Inevitability of Kardashev Civilizations - the Astro Wright continues to lay the ground work for some fun speculation
Waste Heat: Parametrizing Alien Civilizations - the Astro Wright series continues with a reformulation of the Drake Equation appropriate to K3 civs.
What Do We Want Graduate School To Be? - astrobites…
drorzel | November 29, 2012In the comments to yesterday's post about college admissions, Joseph Yoon quoted my statement that "I'm somewhat sympathetic to claims that Asians have a difficult position in higher education," and shot back with:
I wonder if you will feel more strongly about this in 10 years when your kids are near college. Will you advise them to not check the Asian box if it decreases their chances?
As a general matter, I try to avoid responding to comments when my initial reaction is "Oh, go fuck yourself." But I'll make an exception here, because I think it goes to a more general issue about college…
jdupuis | November 29, 2012Like the old saying goes, information wants to be free. In particular, the consumers of information would prefer for the most part not to have to directly pay for the information they are consuming. The information itself, if I may anthropomorphize for a moment, also wants to circulate as freely as possible, to be as consumed as widely as possible, to be as highly regarded as possible. That way it gets to be the information that "wins" the best-used-most-used information sweepstakes.
This seems to me to be a first principle for scholarly communications. Both the users of the information and…
drorzel | November 28, 2012In which the skewing of a data plot in Ron Unz's epic investigation of college admissions makes me more skeptical of his overall claim, thanks to the misleading tricks employed.
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Steve Hsu has a new post on a favorite topic of his, bias against Asians in higher ed admissions. This is based on a giant article by Ron Unz that I don't have time to read, and illustrated with the graphic that's the "featured image" for this post (which I will also reproduce below for the convenience of RSS readers).
What does this show? There's a tangle of colored lines representing the fraction of…
jdupuis | November 28, 2012Or, more precisely, a university designed by libertarians.
Over the last number of months, I've featured a fair bit of apocalyptic MOOC Disruptionism in my regular Around the Web posts. Recently, the libertarian think tank, The Cato Institute (Wikipedia) via their Cato Unbound site, has put online a series of essays discussing just how the traditional academic system can be radically reworked and rethought via a highly commercialized online academy. It's interesting because they've also included some responses questioning their assumptions and the overall MOOC triumphalism that's floating…
jdupuis | November 23, 2012
College, Reinvented: The Finalists
Napster, Udacity, and the Academy
Is the death of newspapers the end of good citizenship?
MOOCs and the Future of the University
Survival of the Fittest in the New Music Industry
The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever
How Dead Is the Book Business?
Beyond Literacy and Beyond ‘Beyond Literacy’
Conservatives and the Higher Ed 'Bubble'
Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics, or What's Really Up With Automated Essay Scoring
Our Napster is Udacity: Quality Doesn’t Beat Access
University of the future: A thousand year old industry on…
catdynamics | November 16, 2012In which we dunk and pie our professors...
Much has been written about student morale and the problems of student-faculty relations and the implicit expectations faculty have of the students.
Over the last couple of weeks I have had occasion to test some of the more radical proposals to improve the interactions of our students with the faculty.
It started two weeks ago last wednesday: we were summoned to the coffee room with the promise of sweets.
Instead we were faced with a bizarre array of students and staff dressed in native costumes who, after some tribal dancing and handing out of…
catdynamics | November 15, 2012Visiting Astrobiology Chair in DC: research and engagement.
Applications and nominations are open for the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology.
"Established in the Fall of 2011, the Blumberg Astrobiology Chair is a distinguished senior position at the Library’s Kluge Center.
The incumbent conducts research at the intersection between the science of astrobiology and its humanistic aspects, particularly its societal implications, using the collections and services of the Library. The incumbent is expected to be in residence at the Kluge Center for a period of up to…
drorzel | November 15, 2012Everybody and their siblings have been linking to this Minute Physics video, an "open letter" to President Obama complaining about the way that most high school and even intro college physics classes don't teach anything remotely modern:
I'm not entirely sure where the date of 1865 comes from, but it's true, the standard intro physics sequence doesn't really touch what's normally called "modern physics," a term which is itself laughably out of date, as it generally refers to special relativity and quantum mechanics as it stood around 1935. We don't teach really new stuff until about the 300…
jdupuis | November 13, 2012Yes, I've fallen behind a bit on my MOOC due to conferences and other general insanity, but after doing the last week this week I vow to catch up a bit retroactively and do weeks 3, 4 & 5.
My weeks 1 and 2 posts are here and here.
Distributed Research: new models of inquiry (Nov 12- 18)
Introduction - Week Six
Distributed research, or more generally, open science, reflect the next logical progression of the internet’s influence on higher education. Early 2000’s saw the development of open content. Since 2008, teaching in open online courses has gained prominence. Distributed research labs…
jtoney | November 12, 2012This article was co-authored with Felice Vazquez, Esq., Special Counsel to the President, Kean University.
What, really, do our children learn in school?
While standardized tests and teacher accountability are the buzzwords of the day, our schools may be missing one of the most important lessons our children must master in order to reach their highest potential: how to get along.
After all, the playground and cafeteria can be more challenging -- and interesting -- than the traditional classroom. These are places where children learn how to understand each other's emotions and motivations,…
drorzel | November 9, 2012In which I use my double license as a physicist and a science fiction fan to engage in some half-assed futurism spinning off Chris Hayes's much-discussed book.
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I don't read a lot of political books, because I tend to find them frustrating. They're usually surprisingly ephemeral, trying to spin Deep Meaning out of a collection of recent events that are highly dependent on short-term context. They also tend to be much better at identifying problems than suggesting plausible solutions, coming off like that famous Sidney Harris cartoon with a bunch of equations on the left side of a…
catdynamics | October 30, 2012Schrödinger's Qu'ran - a 2012 thought experiment - in The Conversation, Matthew Bailes updates a classic paradox...
"...a physicist could extend this thought experiment to write a php script that would randomly download one of the Bible, Qur’an or even a classical quantum mechanics textbook to the iPad..."
On the Dispositive Null in the Literature - on an unrelated subject, the AstroWright expounds on a subtle issue.
Trendy Companions - more AstroWright
What do we want graduate school to be?
When do we want it?
Real Soon Now!
I will have a report on a definitive solution to the whole climate…
jdupuis | October 22, 2012It seems that Brock University in St. Catherine's, Ontario really likes me. Two years ago, the Library kindly invited me to speak during their Open Access Week festivities. And this year the Physics Department has also very kindly invited me to be part of their Seminar Series, also to talk about Getting Your Science Online, this time during OA Week mostly by happy coincidence.
It's tomorrow, Tuesday October 23, 2012 in room H313 at 12:30.
Here's the abstract I've provided:
Physicist and Reinventing Discovery author Michael Nielsen has said that due to the World Wide Web, “[t]he process of…