Academia
drorzel | April 21, 2006When I teach introductory classes, I use a somewhat more complicated homework policy than most of my colleagues. As a result, my syllabus tends to run longer than theirs, by at least a page or two. I sometimes worry that this is excessive, but happily, Inside Higher Ed is here to prove me wrong:
By my second semester, I was getting more specific on paper. My attendance policy seemed clear to me -- as did my requirements for rewrites. I had even made up an in-depth course outline, which listed due dates for papers, late due dates for papers which included a 10 percent grade penalty, quiz dates…
drorzel | April 20, 2006The official letter from the department requesting the formation of an ad hoc committee for my tenure review was sent in yesterday. This is the official start of the process-- I'm still a little fuzzy on the timeline from here out, but by September, I'll have to provide the committee with a huge amount of teaching and research material, and then there's a long process of interviews with students and faculty, external review of my research, and a visit by someone who will be evaluating the lab that I've built.
This isn't the main reason why I haven't been blogging as much this week-- that's…
drorzel | April 18, 2006Reading this article reminds me that I forgot to talk about the poetry reading from a few weeks ago. In lieu of a regular colloquium talk one week this term, we co-hosted a poetry reading by George Drew, a local poet with a book of physics-themed poems.
There are some sample poems on that site, which give you an idea of the flavor of the thing (I don't think he read any of those specific poems, but they're fairly representative). They aren't so much poems about physics principles as they are poems about the history of physics-- lots of imaginary letters from one famous 20th Century physicist…
drorzel | April 13, 2006A slightly more serious topic, also noted via Inside Higher Ed: Money magazine has deeemd "College Professor" the second-best job in America. The fact that it trails "software engineer" makes me a little dubious about their methodology, but there you go-- I have the second-best job in the country.
Of course, looking at the detailed results, you really have to wonder what they were basing some of this on. In particular, 30+% job growth over the next ten years? Don't tell me they've bought into the "There's going to be a huge wave of retirements any day now..." myth...
They also appear to be…
drorzel | April 13, 2006Of special interest to Nathan, evidence that the process of dissertation writing is the same across disciplines:
> work on dissertation
You spend three hours reading five articles which have nothing to do with the dissertation.
> work on dissertation
You spend twenty minutes online reading about baseball.
> tear out hair
Taken. You find the Elvish sword.
(Today's a Lab Day, so you're mostly getting silly posts...)
drorzel | April 10, 2006Inside Higher Ed takes a look today at a new survey about how students choose colleges. They make an effort to make the results sound surprising, but it's really about what I'd expect:
A survey of 600 students who scored over 1100 on the SAT, half of whom scored at least 1300, found that campus visits, parents -- moms more than dads -- word of mouth, and college Web sites are more influential information sources for college-bound students than rankings, guidance counselors, and teachers.
The report, conducted by Lipman Hearne, a marketing firm with many colleges as clients, found that the…
drorzel | April 8, 2006It's kind of a dismal grey day today, so I find myself planning to spend a good chunk of the day working in the lab (which I haven't been able to do during the week, because of my teaching responsibilities). I have a student who's going to present a poster at DAMOP this year, and I need to do a few this weekend to make sure that he's got a reasonable chance of getting results.
As you might imagine, this has me thinking all sorts of sunny thoughts about the academic life, so here are a couple of links in that vein:
1) The Dean Dad has some thoughts on generational divides in the academy. As…
evolgen | April 6, 2006Andre at BioCurious has checked out the authorship of the Tiktaalik papers and concluded that the grad students got jobbed, PhD comics style:
Another thing I noticed is that only the supervisors are listed as authors on the two papers they published. I know there were many grad students also involved in the project because Daeschler showed a picture of someone fighting off a dust storm trying to get gear from a landing helicopter and he joked that that's what they're for. At least, I thought he was joking... Maybe it's a palaeontology thing, but if this was say, a particle physics paper, all…
evolgen | April 5, 2006I attended a seminar in the Math Department today. The topic was assembling genomes. Even though this is a computationally rigorous field, the speaker glazed over all the mathematically interesting details. Maybe he thought the mathematicians in the audience would be bored by the math. Because he was sponsored by the Math Department, however, he felt obligated to give a poor summary of genetics for all of the non-biologists in the audience. The mathematicians then proceeded to ask the speaker some interesting questions about biology, which was ironic considering there were at least 20…
drorzel | March 28, 2006There was an interesting article on Inside Higher Ed yesterday about the idea of "Affirmative Action for Men." The piece was a response to an op-ed by Jennifer Delahunty Britz, an admissions officer at Kenyon College, where she talked about gender preferences in admissions, using the classic op-ed device of talking about a particular student she had rejected:
Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they…
drorzel | March 24, 2006Reading Dylan Stiles's blog yesterday reminded me of a post I wrote last summer about how to approach student talks about synthetic chemistry. Since evil spammers have forced us to turn off comments to the old site, I'll reproduce the original below the fold:
Summer days are here again, which means the return of the
annual summer student research seminar. There's a local tradition
of having all the students doing on-campus research give 15-minute
talks to all the other summer students. In principle, I think this
is a very good idea, as it gives the students some practice at
public speaking,…
evolgen | March 23, 2006Alex Palazzo managed to piss off some people with his taxonomy of biomedical disciplines. We have also learned that there are different types of physics geeks and anthropologists. (By the way, don't ever call me a geek; geeks bite the heads off of chickens. I'm a nerd.) I previously attempted to classify evolutionary biologists and named them after the important names in their particular field. It was actually a satire of the creationist ploy to call people Darwinists, so laugh. Now I'm going to further divide up the evolutionary geneticists (already a sub-set of biologists) into a bunch…
drorzel | March 22, 2006Eszter at Crooked Timber points to some public speaking tips she wrote. Some of the advice is fairly specific to the academic conference setting, but it's all excellent.
In the Crooked Timber post, she emphasizes problems with people going over their allotted time, and mentions in passing session chairs who let them. This reminds me of one of my favorite physics conference anecdotes, reproduced after the cut:
At DAMOP a few years back, a certain guy who we'll call B., just to have a convenient name, was giving a talk in a session chaired by C., a guy from NIST (not me). The talk was..., well…
evolgen | March 6, 2006Dan Ely sounds a lot like Phil Skell. They both go to the evolutionary biologists at their respective universities and ask them ill-informed questions. They then misinterpret the answers and spread their misnomers throughout the anti-evolution community.
evolgen | February 28, 2006There's a fun article in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology on what distinguishes a good scientific meeting from a not so good one. The author advocates attending small meetings or workshops (under 100 people), which is tough for a young scientist. Small workshops are usually either not well advertised or difficult to get to. The only small meetings that I attend are local meetings, and the only workshops I go to are the workshops that are hosted at larger meetings. For a young scientist, large nation/international meetings allow for the most interaction with the most people in your…
evolgen | February 26, 2006My advisor received an email from a fairly prominent geneticist regarding some results published by Dobzhansky over fifty years ago. The geneticist had done some back of the envelope calculations and noticed some trends that had been overlooked for a half of a century. We happened to have the animals to replicate the experiments (and I was planning on doing some similar experiments) so my advisor had me perform the crosses. I ended up with a negative result -- I did not see the same trends that Dobzhanksy and colleagues observed. I guess you could say my negative result was a positive…
drorzel | February 25, 2006Thursday was "Founders Day" at Union, and there were two major speaking events on campus. The official Founders Day address was given at lunchtime by Rev. Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard Divinity School. That evening, there was a second talk, not officially associated with Founders Day, by Chuck D, of the rap group Public Enemy. At first glance, that seems like the sort of weird collision of speakers that you can only find on a college campus. The really strange thing, though, was that in an odd way, they both gave the same speech.
Gomes was pretty much…
drorzel | February 21, 2006Pretty much every academic on-line has already commented on the New York Times piece on student email today. As usual, Timothy Burke says most of what I'd like to say:
Much of the complaint recorded in the article also seems much ado about nothing. As Margaret Soltan observes, what's the big deal about answering the kid who wants to know about school supplies? It's almost kind of sweet that the student asks, actually. I get queries from junior high school kids who want me to do their homework for them, more or less: what does it cost me to be gentle and modestly accomodating in return? A few…
evolgen | February 15, 2006I was sitting in a small seminar today (about 20 people in a conference room) when someone walked in about 10 minutes late for the talk. This didn't bother the presenter, and I'm not even sure if everyone saw this person walk in (I was sitting particularly close to the door). It wasn't that she was walking into the seminar late that bothered me -- we all get caught up doing things only to realize that we nearly missed an appointment -- but how she walked in. I'm sure everyone has walked into a talk after it has begun, and, depending on whether it's a lab meeting, departmental seminar, or…
drorzel | February 8, 2006Kevin Drum reports receiving an email from a professor of physics denouncing the Advanced Placement test in Physics:
It is the very apotheosis of "a mile wide and an inch deep." They cover everything in the mighty Giancoli tome that sits unread on my bookshelf, all 1500 pages of it. They have seen not only Newtonian mechanics but also optics, sound, electromagnetic theory, Maxwell's equations, special relativity, quantum mechanics and even AC circuits. They don't understand any of it, but they've seen it all. They come into my class thinking, by and large, that objects move due to the force…