Academia
catdynamics | August 2, 2012In which we ask, what would you do if you could change your own personal history?
A Kind of Magic! - No, that is not a non-Higgs boson, it is the Astronomy Magazine competition to win a signed copy of Brian May's PhD thesis in astronomy.
"To enter the contest, submit a short essay (200 to 500 words) that describes what you would do — what would your subject be and why? — if you could magically go back to school and earn a doctoral degree in astronomy.
How would you change the astronomy world? What research subject would entice you? Planetary science? Cosmology? Galaxy investigations? And what…
tsmith | August 2, 2012Science denial, I fear, is here to stay. Almost half of Americans believe in creationism. Anti-vaccination sentiment is going strong, despite record pertussis outbreaks. Academics are even leaving their jobs, in part, because of the terrible anti-intellectual attitude in this country. It's depressing and demoralizing--so what does one do about it? Shawn Lawrence Otto's "Fool Me Twice" offers an analysis.
Otto's book is good stuff. He devotes the first quarter or so of the book to understanding how we got to where we are regarding science denial and anti-science attitudes. It's a nice…
catdynamics | July 31, 2012$3 million each for 9 theorists from Yuri Milner Foundation Fundamental Physics Prize
IAS big winner.
Milner Prize: Guth (MIT), Linde (Stanford); Arkani-Hamed, Maldacena, Seiberg and Witten (IAS); Kitaev (Caltech); Kontsevich (IASS); and, Sen (Chandra Institute).
String theory, inflation and quantum computing.
Heavy on IAS, the Techs and Russian expats.
All good choices.
Follows hard on the heels of the Simons Foundation Investigator awards.
Aleiner (Columbia); Brenner (Harvard); Glotzer (Michigan); Hastings (Duke); Hirata (Caltech); Kane (UPenn); Ooguri (Caltech); Pretorius (Princeton);…
jtoney | July 27, 2012This post was co-authored by Natasha Bahrami, a foreign policy researcher, and Ali Arab, Ph.D., an assistant professor of statistics at Georgetown University.
Last month, a young American woman was blocked from purchasing an Apple product at a local store in Alpharetta, Georgia. After overhearing her speaking Farsi, the second generation Iranian-American was informed that selling the product to her went against the company's policy. Apple's export compliance policy states that direct or indirect sales of Apple goods to any embargoed…
jdupuis | July 20, 2012Academics aren't exactly known for their sartorial splendor. And that may be the understatement of the year.
A fun article by Daniel J. Myers in Insider Higher Ed from a few weeks ago: Faculty Fashion
Here's a quote:
What message might academics be trying to send when they flout the dictates of fashion and good taste, and ignore the color-clash pain they inflict on others? Well, it flows from the same reason we drive beat-up cars (rust-buckets that are still only automobiles in the academic sense) and refuse to edge our lawns. These choices are rarely driven by financial necessity, but rather…
catdynamics | July 9, 2012time for all new linkedy links here at the new digs
Quantum Frontiers - a new blog from the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, with kickoff by John Preskill hisself.
Question of the day: explain quantum mechanics in five words
My attempt: Probability Amplitudes, Observables don't Commute
Good to know John still does khakis and chalk, but we gots to know: does he still have the diet pepsi?
Took me years to break the habit... not that I was overly impressionable as a tender young grad turkey taking QFT or anything.
Subtleties of the Crappy Job Market - for Scientists, that is.…
catdynamics | June 24, 2012Why do we need to spend any more effort on extra-solar planets?
We found some, they're there. Lumps of rocks, gasballs. We're done, right?
This, loosely paraphrased, was a serious question I got last week.
The context was a question of why I was spending serious effort on exoplanet research, rather than focusing exclusively on other subfields.
I've heard similar comments from physicists, some particle physicists are notoriously focused in their consideration of what counts as "real physics", but this came from an astronomer; and one that I know does stars, inside the galaxy, sometimes, not…
jtoney | June 19, 2012
Kean University Graduates 2012
At my Commencement Speech to the Class of 2012 at Carteret High School this Thursday, I will deliver something like this:
Class of 2012: You need to fail more …. take chances …. Reach.
Let me explain.
After hearing my bio, some of you might think of that person who has succeeded at anything. You may know someone like that. He can earn A’s without much studying, letter in a varsity sport without much sweat. Life seems easy, because he never faces defeat or failure. I am not that person. I am lucky enough to be a leader in higher education because I worked…
jdupuis | June 15, 2012I always thought Wolfgang Pauli's famous remark was the ultimate insult to scientists, but apparently I was wrong. Perhaps I was not even wrong given the plethora of scientific insults you can find out there.
In any case, many "thanks" to the Knoepfler Lab blog for their descriptive, specialized, perhaps overly ambitious but somewhat derivative middle-author list of insults. The moderate length list shows their solid commitment to being good science educators. They seem to be very good scientists to have come up with such a list, but their trainees don't seem as rude and insulting and…
drorzel | June 13, 2012I just realized that I forgot to do the annual congratulatory post for our graduates this year. I plead jet lag-- my flight back from DAMOP didn't get in until after midnight, and graduation was first thing Sunday morning. I didn't march in the procession for only the third time-- instead, I snuck around back to stand with the faculty and congratulate the graduates as they went by.
This has been a long and incredibly stressful year for reasons that I can't really go into, so I'm not that sorry to see it end. This is no reflection on this year's graduating physics majors and minor, though, to…
drorzel | June 12, 2012In which we look again at the question of why, despite the image of physicists as arrogant bastards, biologists turn out to be much less collegial than physicists.
------------
While I was away from the blog, there was a spate of discussion of science outreach and demands on faculty time, my feelings about which are a little too complicated to boil down to a blog post in the time I have available. I did notice one thing in Jeanne Garb's guest blog post at Nature Networks:
Yet, given the current system, most scientists are choosing to keep a closed-notebook policy because they fear getting…
jdupuis | June 12, 2012Welcome to the most recent installment in my very occasional series of interviews with people in the publishing/science blogging/computing communities. The latest is with Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ. PeerJ is a new startup in the scientific publishing industry, using a rather unique business model whereby authors will be able to pay one fee and they get a lifetime of publishing their articles in PeerJ.
Please see my post with the PeerJ press release for more details.
I recently had an opportunity to ask Peter and Jason some pre-announcement questions about PeerJ and I've included…
jdupuis | June 12, 2012I'm not one for posting publisher press releases on this blog (and embargoed ones at that!) but sometimes you just have to try something a little different. And this is such an occasion.
Below is the press release for a new science publishing startup called PeerJ. It is founded by Peter Binfield, formerly of Public Library of Science, and Jason Hoyt, formerly of Mendeley. The core idea is that scholars will be able to pay one fee (starting at $99) and be able to publish on the PeerJ platform for life. The truly interesting aspect of this is that PeerJ is peer reviewed. It's kind of like a…
tsmith | June 7, 2012ASM 2012 is almost upon us! Who's going? Who's presenting? Who wants to meet up and what are good days for it? Leave suggestions and pimp your own presentations below in the comments.
I will be convening a session on Sunday, June 17th on science communication, "Sound Bites to Superbugs".
Sound Bites to Superbugs: How to Communicate Risk to the Public and Physicians
3:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Convener:
TARA C. SMITH; University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
Invited Speakers:
ROBYN WILSON; The Ohio State University; Columbus, OHJOSH ROSENAU; National Center for Science Education, Oakland CA
JAMES HUGHES…
catdynamics | June 5, 2012there is a curious result in behavioural economics, which shows that paying people to do what they like to do, sometimes provides a disincentive for them to do it, and people correspondingly lower their effort to do the task.
The example I recently came across, from the 7 Rules of Behavioural Economics, or some such, was that if you pay people to have their friends for dinner, they entertain less.
But, enough about the decline of intradepartmental socialization...
The reason I thought of this, is that yesterday we congratulated a colleague on a nice result, and another colleague asked some…
drorzel | May 31, 2012In which I talk about the common complaint that we teach students physics that "isn't true," and the limits on that statement.
------------
Frequent commenter Ron sent me an email pointing to this post by David Reed on "What we “know” that t’aint so…. and insist on teaching to kids!":
he science we teach is pretty old. Mostly 19th century ideas about the world around us are taught as “facts” with little but anecdotal data to support it. We teach it via an ontology that replays the history of science, thus the newest and most powerful scientific understandings are viewed as “too advanced”. If…
drorzel | May 30, 2012In which we compare a couple of different systems for evaluating teachers, looking at what's involved in doing a fair assessment of a teacher's performance.
--------
Another casualty of the great blog upgrade, in the sense of a post that was delayed until the inspiration for it has been forgotten by most of the people who might want to talk about it, was this Grant Wiggins post on accountability systems:
[The Buckingham, Browne, and Nichols prep school where he taught in the 80's] had a state of the art teacher performance appraisal system back in the 80’s (we’ll need current or recent folks…
jdupuis | May 21, 2012Today is #OAMonday.
It marks the launch of a petition on the Whitehouse web site to "Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research."
Here is the text of the petition:
We petition the obama administration to:
Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.
We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would…
tsmith | May 17, 2012Received the official letter from the Provost--the Board of Regents approved my application for tenure and promotion to Associate Professor.
The process here started last summer. My dossier (with my course syllabi, statements on teaching/research/service, student and peer evaluations of my teaching, copies of academic papers and funded grant applications, my CV, and a few other random bits and pieces) was submitted last August. Letters quickly went out to external reviewers. Departmental review was held in November. Collegiate review finished in January. From there, my Dean had to approve,…
jdupuis | May 10, 2012I'd like to extend a huge science librarian blogosphere welcome to Information Culture, the newest blog over at Scientific American Blogs!
This past Sunday evening I got a cryptic DM from a certain Bora Zivkovic letting me know that I should watch the SciAm blog site first thing Monday morning. I was busy that morning but as soon as I got our of my meeting I rushed to Twitter and the Internet and lo! and behold!
Information Culture: Thoughts and analysis related to science information, data, publication and culture.
I'm always happy to see librarians invading faculty and researcher blogs…