Academia
catdynamics | October 25, 2011Less than a losing football coach, apparently:
DaveInTokyo investigates using UC public data
"UC Berkeley top 10 earners
Jeff Tedford HEAD COACH 5 $2,338,409.39
Michael J. Montgomery HEAD COACH 5 $1,606,588.82
Joanne Boyle HEAD COACH 5 $658,691.22
Teck Hua Ho PROFESSOR-ACAD YR-BUS/ECON/ENG $556,764.38
Anne Saunders Barbour ATHLETICS MANAGER 4 $470,017.06
Robert J. Birgeneau CHANCELLOR $428,712.84
Andrew M Isaacs ADJ PROF-ACAD YR-BUS/ECON/ENG $399,582.00"
From above:
George Akerlof, Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2001. 2007 salary (higher than 2009 so I used that):$266,359 - Salary rank at…
jdupuis | October 24, 2011For your reading and collection development pleasure!
Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy's future and…
jdupuis | October 19, 2011I've long been a believer in the power of blogs to drive and aggregate conversations at every level. Frivolous, for sure. But also serious and scholarly.
The rise of science blogs over the last few years has certainly demonstrated that. In librarianship as well, blogs are a powerful source of comment, theory and practical advice. I've always thought that the practical side of the library world was ripe to be the first field to truly leave journals behind and embrace blogging as a kind of replacement. It would be messy, sure, but it would be democratizing and re-invigorating.
The kinds of…
jdupuis | October 2, 2011It's time for my annual post taking issue with Thomson Reuters (TR) Nobel Prize predictions.
(2002, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009, 2010)
Because, yes, they're at it again.
Can the winners of the Nobel Prize be correctly predicted? Since 1989, Thomson Reuters has developed a list of likely winners in medicine, chemistry, physics, and economics. Those chosen are named Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates -- researchers likely to be in contention for Nobel honors based on the citation impact of their published research.
Reading this you would reasonably assume that TR thinks there is at least a…
jdupuis | October 1, 2011
10 Reasons Why Your (EDU) Boss Should Tweet
The digital scholar - which way to go?
Facebook is scaring me
#ArsenicLife Goes Longform, And History Gets Squished
Science Online: London 2011 - Keynote, Michael Nielsen - Video & Storify
Op-Ed: Stop Feeding Facebook, It's Time for Moderation
Bibliographies (CS scholars should post copies of articles on their websites)
Reading, Risk, and Reality: College Students and Reading for Pleasure
Access to scientific publications should be a fundamental right
Honor Your Campus Library
Academic Publishing and Zombies
Who killed videogames?…
drorzel | October 1, 2011I have been sufficiently out of it that I didn't realize the Nobel Prizes were due to be announced this coming week. Which means there's only a small amount of time to get my traditional betting pool set up...
So, here are the rules:
1) To enter, leave a comment to this post specifying the Prize category and the winner(s). For example, you might write "Physics, to Lee Smolin and Lubos Motl," or "Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, to Larry Summers and John Lott."
2) One entry per person per prize. That is, you can pick one and only one winner for the…
jdupuis | September 30, 2011w00t!
It's Ig Nobel Prize season again!
A brief description:
The Ig® Nobel Prizes
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.
"Last, but not least, there are the Ig Nobel awards. These come with little cash, but much cachet, and reward those research projects that 'first make people laugh, and then make them think'" -- Nature
The video of last night's ceremony is archived here.
Here are some highlights…
tfk | September 21, 2011Elaine Howard Ecklund has a new paper out, building on her survey of scientists' views on religion, research she reported in a book last year, and in a series of papers over the last few years. In this paper (press release for those of you who haven't got access to the journal), she looks specifically at how scientists perceive the relationship between science and religion.
As she reported in the book, 15% of scientists she and her colleagues interviewed reported seeing an inherent conflict between science and religion. Another 15% saw no conflict at all, while the remaining 70% saw some…
drorzel | September 12, 2011In typical fashion, no sooner do I declare a quasi-hiatus than somebody writes an article that I want to say something about. For weeks, coming up with blog posts was like pulling teeth, but now I'm not trying to do it, it's easy...
anyway, that's why there's the "quasi-" in "quasi-hiatus," and having been reasonably productive in the early bit of the weekend, I have a few moments to comment on this column by Ben Goldacre about bad statistics in neuroscience. It seems lots of researchers are not properly assessing the significance of their results when reporting differences between measured…
catdynamics | September 2, 2011at long last it is friday and before we rest, we ask
How now? oh Mighty iPod One?
Woosh goes the randomizer.
Woosh.
The Covering: Time - Pink Floyd
The Crossing: Louie, Louie - Toot and the Mayalls
The Crown: Vísur Skógarmúsar Ömmu - Thorbjorn Egner
The Root: Dammit Janet - Rocky Horror Picture Show
The Past: I Am Not A Robot - Marina and the Diamonds
The Future: Career Opportunities - Clash
The Questioner: You Woke Up My Neighbourhood - Billy Bragg
The House: I Left My Heart in Papworth General - Half Man, Half Biscuit
The Inside: Fais Dodo, Colas - Sien Diels
The Outcome: After the Snow…
drorzel | September 1, 2011While I was out in Denver, Joss Ives had a nice post asking what courses are essential in a physics degree?. This is an eternal topic of discussion in undergraduate education circles, and I don't really have a definitive answer. It's an excellent topic for a poll, though, so here you go:
Which of the following courses are essential for an undergraduate degree in physics?
"Essential" here means "it would be kind of ridiculous to award a physics degree to a student who hadn't had this class." A class that is nice to have, but could be picked up in graduate school if necessary does not count as…
catdynamics | August 31, 2011The class I'm teaching right now is "writing intensive" - so the homework is biased towards short essays and written discourse.
One of my standard assignments is to have the students pick a NASA mission: a past mission, and a current mission, and a future mission, and write a summary of the mission plan and/or accomplishments.
So, what do I do now?
Ask them to pick a planned future mission that has now been cancelled and write what it might have done if flown?
drorzel | August 31, 2011A currently popular explanation for the increasing price of higher education is that all those tuition dollars are being soaked up by bloated bureaucracy-- that is, that there are too many administrators for the number of faculty and students involved. While I like this better than the "tenured faculty are greedy and lazy" explanation you sometimes hear, I'm not sure it's any more valid. In part because proponents make it difficult to see if it's any more valid.
One of the major proponents of the administrative bloat idea is Benjamin Ginsberg, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, who is…
drorzel | August 24, 2011The new school year is upon us, so there's been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more or less since I've been aware of the cost of higher education. A lot of people have been referring to a "Student Loan Bubble," such as Dean Dad, who points to this graph from Daniel Indiviglio as an illustration:
That post is a week old, which is a hundred years in blog time, and I wish I'd gotten to it sooner, because it's a terrible graph. Indiviglio says:
This chart looks like a mistake, but it…
jdupuis | August 24, 2011Whoa. Now that was a intellectual reset button hitting if there ever was one.
From July 31 to August 5 I attended the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians (LIAL) in Boston. It was a one-week, intensive, immersive course not so much on how to be a leader but how to think like a leader and how to understand a little more about the leadership process.
Not solely aimed academic library leadership per se, but more broadly about leadership situated in an academic environment. In other words, it was about people who happen to be librarians leading…
drorzel | August 23, 2011A while back, I Links Dumped Josh Rosenau's Post Firing Bad Teachers Doesn't Create good Teachers, arguing that rather than just firing teachers who need some improvement, schools should look at, well, helping them improve. This produced a bunch of scoffing in a place I can't link to, basically taking the view that people are either good at what they do, or they're not, and if they're not, you just fire them and hire somebody else. I was too busy to respond at the time, but marked that doen as something to come back to. So I was psyched when I saw this paper in Science about a scientific…
drorzel | August 19, 2011Back in June, when I was headed to DAMOP, I got email telling me that they had an official Android app. I installed it, and in with the meeting program and maps and things was a "Social Media" section, that included an official hashtag: #apsdamop.
I posted a few things using it, but it rapidly became clear that there was only one other person at the meeting using it. I happen to know him, so when I ran into him later at the poster session, I commented on how we were the only people at the meeting using the official Twitter hashtag. Someone else nearby looked baffled, and we had to explain.…
drorzel | August 18, 2011I've moved on to the second of three academic writing projects I wanted to work on this summer (yes, I know I'm rapidly running out of summer...), which is a sort of review article on which I will be the only author. This creates an awkward situation in the introductory material, because it just feels wrong to use the first-person singular pronoun in an academic context. This is not a new problem for me-- my advisor pointed out that the only place I used "I" in my Ph.D. thesis was in the acknowledgements-- and other people have the same issue, so this seems like a perfect topic for a poll:…
drorzel | August 16, 2011Over at io9, they have a post on the finances of running a research lab at a major university. It's reasonably good as such things go, but very specific to the top level of research universities. As I am not at such an institution, I thought it might be worthwhile to post something about the finances of the sort of place I am at: a private small liberal arts college.
I'll follow the io9 article's format, but first, one important clarification:
Do you really do research at a small college? Yes, absolutely. At the upper level private liberal arts colleges, faculty are expected to be active…