Academia
drorzel | August 15, 2006I'm in the process of putting together my tenure documents (I know I've been saying this for weeks. It's a long process, OK?). Most of these are really not appropriate for reproduction here, but I'll post a few of the things I'm writing, when it's reasonable to do so.
A major part of the tenure process is finding external reviewers for the research material. As most institutions don't really have enough people in a given sub-field to assess research in-house (especially at a small college), and as trusting such an assessment would be a little dodgy, the research review is traditionally…
jstemwedel | August 14, 2006Regular commenter and tireless gadfly Bill Hooker asks what my take is on the movement afoot to get academics to put pressure on (and perhaps completely boycott) scientific/technical/medical publisher and information portal Reed-Elsevier.
What's wrong with Reed-Elsevier? Among other things, they host "arms fairs" -- like book fairs, but with munitions and torture equipment (which means it's unlikely Scholastic will be hosting an arms fair at the local primary school).
But hey, are we expecting a company to be able to stay afloat on revenues from academic and technical publishing alone?
I'…
catdynamics | August 14, 2006Penn State has a contract with an on-line plagiarism service - Turnitin.com - which allows faculty to check whether papers etc were plagiarised from other sources; it compares text with an impressive range of other sources.
Interestingly, the information to faculty about the service comes with a firm admonition to not share the access to the facility with anyone other than other faculty, instructors and TAs.
The University finds it necessary to remind faculty not to cheat on the cheating service.
The concern is not just depriving the service of licensed income, but to prevent students from…
evolgen | August 14, 2006I can't speak for each and every one of the other biologist types in the house here at ScienceBlogs, but one comment on Chad's post on highfalutin particle physicists struck a chord with me. It all starts with this quote getting back at people who think their research is the be all and end all of all science:
One thing that bugs the heck out of me, is when I hear particle physicists talk about their field as if it is all of physics. I have a great love of particle physics, so I'm not dissing the field at all, nor arguing that it isn't more fundamental, but it rubs me the wrong way to…
clock | August 11, 2006There are several excellent book reviews in the latest American Scientist. Check them out for reviews of Dennett and Collins books, if nothing else, but the one that caught my eye was the review of Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University by William Clark, which I will, just because of this review, put on my Amazon wish list. It is a history of academia and how it got to be organized the way it does today.
tsmith | August 11, 2006Paleontologists X-ray fossil embryos
The article describes the cover story in this weeks' Nature, that PZ has already blogged about here. As the headline to the story suggests:
Paleontologists have created detailed three-dimensional images of evolution's first multicellular creatures in their embryonic stages, some so detailed that they reveal more about the development of long-extinct creatures than scientists know about their modern counterparts.
PZ has much more about the science and implications, and since that's his area I won't even try to elaborate, but what struck me was this quote…
drorzel | August 11, 2006As noted in a previous post, I'm teaching the senior seminar this fall, which means I'll be meeting weekly with our senior majors (13 of them!) to discuss topics of interest to them. Which will involve a fair amount of discussion of graduate school, because that's one of the options, whether people think it's a good idea or not.
These days, it seems like everybody has their own college rankings (the Washington Monthly just came out with a new version of theirs, for example), but very few people provide what's really important: realistic ratings of physics graduate programs. So let's see what…
drorzel | August 10, 2006The discussion surrounding the recent post about jobs continues to bubble along nicely, both in the original post, and the follow-up. I love it when a plan comes together.
There's been a lot of discussion of following the advice in the Katz letter and seeking non-academic careers, but Jeff F. (who I know from my post-doc days) puts his finger on a major problem with this plan: The faculty who advise students on career choices don't know, well, much of anything:
Unfortunately, I was mostly on my own in making the jump from academics to industry. I chose to do a postdoc on a project with my…
clock | August 10, 2006 This - "Apart From Being An Idiot, Horowitz Is Also An Unwiped Anal Orifice With Hemorrhoids" - is the worst and nastiest blog-post title I ever used. But I was furious. See why.... (first posted here on March 05, 2005, then republished here on December 10, 2005):
Chris is so nice. Way too nice. And naive. He actually contacted David Horowitz and offered to do a study that has a potential to PROVE Horowitz's claim that conservatives are discriminated against in the Academia. Read the whole episode here.
As you can see, my title is just an euphemistic version of what Horowitz called Chris!…
drorzel | August 9, 2006A while back, I noted that one student wrote on the all-important course evaluation form "He should wear more pink." I'm still not sure what that meant.
Given that the second most ridiculous comment in that class was "[student name] is the worst Warcraft player ever," I should probably point our majors to this interview with an addiction doctor (via Jake):
Having treated all types of addictions for more than 15 years, Orzack says there's little difference between drug use, excessive gambling and heavy game playing. And with millions of gamers hooked on mega-popular massively multiplayer…
jstemwedel | August 9, 2006Just this month, my department came into possession of five new faculty offices, owing to the fact that brand spanking new faculty offices were created in the old library building, and some of the faculty from other offices in this building are being moved into them.
Forget that our chair actually had to fight for these additional offices (armed with data on student-to-faculty ratios and such) with another department that still occupies much of this building. Forget that the offices we fought for are old, water-damaged, haven't been seriously cleaned in years, and are painted in such 1970s…
drorzel | August 9, 2006The latest jobs in science post has prompted a lot of responses, several of them arguing that we need to expand the definition of acceptable careers for Ph.D. scientists. For example, there's Nicholas Condon in comments:
When I hear this incessant handwringing about jobs in "science," it seems like it frequently comes from people with two characteristics: they seem to believe that the only viable destination for a Ph.D. scientist is a professorship, and they who work in subfields that are oversupplied (biology) or have very limited non-academic employment opportunitites (HEP) and they mistake…
jstemwedel | August 8, 2006Chad has an interesting post about the scientific job market, in which he notes that his own experience training for and finding a job in academic science has left him with an impression significantly rosier than some circulating through cyberspace. Chad's discussion of the ways your field (and subfield) can influence what your prospects and experiences will be like is a must-read for anyone prepared to talk themselves out of pursuing science on the basis of the aerial view of science as a whole.
Chad's assessment:
So what's the real situation? Probably somewhere between his hyper-…
drorzel | August 8, 2006Jonathan Katz's "Don't Become a Scientist" has bubbled to the surface again, turning up at P.P. Cook's Tangent Space a few days ago. I can't recall what, if anything, I said about this that last time it came around, but I'll make a few comments here, in light of the recent discussions about jobs in science.
As you can guess from the title, the piece is a long rant aimed at getting students not to go to graduate school in science. It's an unremitting tale of anecdotal woe:
American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobs for them. When something, or someone, is a glut…
drorzel | August 8, 2006Inside Higher Ed today offers another hand-wringing piece about the problem of college athletics, this time from the president of Augustana College in Illinois. It's a particularly maddening example of the form, doing a lovely job of running down NCAA Division I schools in comparison to Division III:
But I do worry that Division I sports is ill-serving far too many young people. And I challenge the NCAA to accelerate the reform movement promised in the recent past. What has happened to cries of turning down the volume in college sports? The media won't turn down the volume, so college…
drorzel | August 6, 2006Written on the whiteboard in the student lounge (which has been serving as a convenient surface for student grafitti for the whole summer) last week:
Little Known Fact: Prof. Orzel is actually an evil genius working on a gigantic laser which he plans to use to hold the world ransom for $1,000,000,000,000,000.
Sadly, it was erased (and replaced with more typical cryptic comments about students) before I could get a picture of it (and the various responses).
If I promise to give 1% of the money to the college endowment, do you think that would help my tenure case?
evolgen | August 3, 2006I am housed in a biology department. Wow, that came out a lot more impersonal than I intended. Let me try that again: My advisor's appointment is to the Biology Department at my university (not much better...eh). Being in a biology department means the faculty interests are very diverse (compared to, say, a biochemistry department, ecology and evolution department, or a neurobiology and behavior department), and so are the departmental seminars. This may seem like a bonus at first, but, in reality, it means that any given seminar will be fairly inaccessible to most people in the department.…
drorzel | August 3, 2006We're still a month away from the start of classes at most schools, but over at Learning Curves, Becky Hirta has some advice for new students. Some of this is university-specific ("Dress in layers. The University Center is never above 70 degrees; the math building is never below 80 degrees."), and other bits are matters of practical finance ("You don't need a shiny new computer. Save your money."), but the general advice is excellent.
There are a couple of things I especially want to highlight, starting with:
Often your instructors will tell you exactly what to do. Pay attention to these…