Academia
clock | July 20, 2006Natural scientists (unlike social scientists and humantities folk) are cautious, perhaps overcautious, about publishing data on blogs. So, it is really nice to see original research on a blog every once in a while. So, you should read this nifty little paper by Miss Prism. Rejected from Nature? Publish in samizdat - on your blog. (Hat-tip: Evolgen)
jstemwedel | July 19, 2006I've been having a great email exchange with another blogger about the current flare-up of the battle over women in academic science, and he brought to my attention a bothersome feature of this New York Times interview with Dr. Ben A. Barres:
Q. How does this bias [that men have an innate advantage in science over women] manifest itself?
A. It is very much harder for women to be successful, to get jobs, to get grants, especially big grants. And then, and this is a huge part of the problem, they don't get the resources they need to be successful. Right now, what's fundamentally missing and…
drorzel | July 19, 2006I'd be remiss in my academic-blogging duties if I failed to point out this Inside Higher Ed piece on teaching core courses. Like many articles published in academic magazines, it's aimed directly at English composition, but the main points can be extended to intro classes in other disciplines. In particular:
10. Don't compare students' attitudes to your own. A colleague of mine who taught business at a private university constantly made scathing comments about his students' seeming lack of effort. "I can't believe you guys don't know this stuff!" he would shout at them. Time and time again,…
neurotopia | July 17, 2006A new website in the fight against the ID movement's attempted takeover of the Kansas state science standards. Check it out. Nick Matzke has more here.
evolgen | July 17, 2006I haven't posted any comic strips in over a month, so I figured I was due for one. This one comes from the poorly drawn, but always insightful, Toothpaste for Dinner:
drorzel | July 16, 2006
In the lecture hall yesterday, from left to right: A dewar of liquid nitrogen, a tube of racquetballs, a squeaky dog toy, a handful of yellow balloons, a vase of flowers, an inflated red balloon, an insulated glove, and a 4-liter jug of liquid nitrogen.
The dewars, the vase, the glove, and the dog toy survived the day.
More details, and video, tomorrow.
jstemwedel | July 15, 2006After my post yesterday suggesting that women scientists may still have a harder time being accepted in academic research settings than their male counterparts, Greensmile brought my attention to a story in today's Boston Globe. It seems that almost a dozen professors at MIT believe they lost a prospective hire due to intimidation of the job candidate by another professor who happens also to be a Nobel laureate. Possibly it matters that the professor alleged to have intimidated the job candidate is male, and that the job candidate and the 11 professors who have written the letter of…
tsmith | July 15, 2006More interesting stories that I didn't get to this week...
Ewen is looking for volunteer producers for his radio show. If you're in his neck of the woods and would like to learn about science journalism, drop him a line.
Mike notes that MRSA is winning the war on drugs, due in part to dirty needles and a lack of needle exchange programs.
Orac discusses the latest Geiers drama (those would be the folks who've been most prominent in pushing the vaccination/autism link here in the U.S.) Turns out a court recently laid the smackdown on them, Kitzmiller-style.
More sequence information has been…
jstemwedel | July 14, 2006Here is the U.S., especially, we love to think the ivory tower is a meritocracy, and that the tribe of science is objective in all things -- including how it treats its members. A nice little pile of data runs counter to this picture, however. A quick roundup:
At Majikthise, Lindsay Beyerstein points us to the Nature profile of Ben Barres (subscription required). Barres had gender reassignment surgery (at age 42) in the middle of his career as a scientist -- so he has some first hand knowledge of what it's like to be a female scientist vs. what it's like to be a male scientist. Lindsay…
drorzel | July 13, 2006The Dean Dad, spinning off an article in the Chronicle, has some interesting thoughts on the economic benefits of colleges and universities:
Apropos of my minor obsession with the economic conditions in Northern Town, the Chronicle of Higher Ed has a story noting that the University of Rochester is now the largest employer in Rochester. A quick check on the always-reliable Wikipedia (I know, I know...) reveals that SUNY-Buffalo is the largest employer in Buffalo, and Syracuse University the largest employer in Syracuse. Binghamton University (a.k.a. SUNY-Binghamton) is the largest employer in…
clock | July 13, 2006. This is a post intwo parts - the second being a reaction to the responses that the first one engendered. They may be a little rambling, especially the first one, but I still think that there is quite a lot there to comment on.
Great Men and Science Education - Part 1
There is an interesting thread here about "faith" in science and the way science is taught. Why no science textbook is a "Bible" of a field. Here are some of my musings....
So much science teaching, not just in high school but also in college, is rote learning. Memorize Latin names for body parts, Krebs cycle, taxonomy of…
drorzel | July 12, 2006Over at Inside Higher Ed, there's an article by Laurence Musgrove on whether student writing has really gotten worse in recent years. He suggests a good mechanism for how faculty might be fooled into thinking so:
[...] I think the main difference between students then and now exists mostly in our heads, since in many cases what we are really doing is contrasting our students' experiences with our experiences in school. By that I mean, our expectations are pretty out of whack if we expect our students to be the kind of students we once were, because once upon a time we were the kind of…
evolgen | July 12, 2006The genome encodes all of the RNAs and contains sequences responsible for the transcription of those RNAs and the proper folding and wrapping of the cromosomes. The RNAs encoded by the genome are collectively known as the transcriptome. The transcripts that are translated into proteins represent the proteome or the ORFeome (depending on the context).
I'm fascinated by the growing list of "-omes" out there. Genomics and proteomics appear to be the most established "-omics" disciplines, but a new paper in PNAS has introduced me to an "-ome" with which I was previously not familiar: the…
revere | July 12, 2006In my salad days I had the privilege of team teaching with a brilliant neuroscientist at one of the world's most famous research institutions. In the fifties he had published, with a famous co-author, a foundational paper about peripheral information processing in vision. He was also a brilliant lecturer, giving without notes, spellbinding and seamless narratives full of impressive erudition. He had devoted graduate students and was married to a beautiful woman, a well-known personality on the local educational television station (this was before PBS). There was only one fly in the academic…
jstemwedel | July 10, 2006The problem with having eyes and ears everywhere is that sometimes they deliver sensory data that make you want to rip them out of your head or stuff them with cotton, respectively.
An eagle-eyed reader pointed me toward some eyebrow-raising comments on another blog, which would not be of much interest except they purport to transmit information obtained from one of the fine science departments at my university. So, to uphold the honor of my university, I have to wade into this.
First, a representative sampling of the comments from the poster in question. He writes:
I will leave this site…
jstemwedel | July 7, 2006Just one more follow up on the matter of how research universities will make do as federal funds for research dry up. Some have suggested that the answer will come from more collaboration between university labs and researchers in private industry.
Perhaps it will. But, a recent article in the Boston Globe about conflicts within the Broad Institute is suggestive of the kinds of clashes of philosophy that might make university-industry collaborations challenging. From the article:
Just over a year ago, Cambridge's prestigious Broad Institute started an idealistic medical-research project,…
jstemwedel | July 7, 2006Yesterday I blogged a bit about how the rollback of NIH research funding may impact scientists at research universities. In light of those comments, here's another news item worth your attention.
The Boston Globe reports that Yale University may be in some amount of trouble for accepting lots of federal research funds but then not accounting for its use in ways that satisfied the funders:
Federal authorities are investigating how Yale accounts for millions of dollars in government research grants, school officials said Monday.
Yale received three subpoenas last week from the U.S. Department…
neurotopia | July 7, 2006This is one of those "what the hell am I doing here" weeks where my job seems to be both 1) fully self-aware and 2) malevolent. I swear, it's coming after me with the all the intensity of a starving, rabid boar in a field of truffles.
First kick, to the knee-- the last paper from my disseration was turned down. I sort of expected this. The impact factor for the journal is only about 3.5, but it is THE niche publication for hard-core neuroanatomical studies. While the paper was all negative data, even negative data is important. Accordingly my experiments were very thorough and the…
jstemwedel | July 6, 2006From Inside Higer Ed, there are reports that the end of regular increases in NIH funding (such that there will soon be a double-digit decline in the purchasing power of the NIH budget) are stressing out university researchers and administrators:
At Case Western Reserve University, a decline in NIH funds contributed to a budget shortfall of $17 million below projections for the 2006 fiscal year. NIH funds are key at Case -- and at many institutions the NIH is the largest outside source of research support.
While NIH officials have touted the fact that the number of new competitive grants will…
clock | July 6, 2006When I posted this originally (here and here) I quoted a much longer excerpt from the cited Chronicle article than what is deemed appropriate, so this time I urge you to actually go and read it first and then come back to read my response.
From Dr.Munger's blog, an interesting article: Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual By MARK BAUERLEIN, The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 12, Page B6 (that link is now dead, but you can find a copy here):
Hmmmm, why was the poll conducted only in social science departments (e.g., sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, anthropology, perhaps…