Academia
drorzel | August 15, 2011Over in Twitter-land, Josh Rosenau re-tweeted a comment from Seattle_JC:
It is a bad sign when the promotion of science and science education has been reduced to a grassroots movement in this society.
It's a nice line, but it doesn't entirely make sense. When I hear the term "grass-roots movement," I think of something that has widespread popularity among the public at a low level, with that public support forcing political elites to take notice. Things like organized labor back in the day, or antiwar activism in the Vietnam era.
That's almost the opposite of how the term is used here. If we…
catdynamics | August 12, 2011Not infrequently, I get asked what it is I do, anyway, as a scientisty sort of person.
I blogged it, of course, but that was a "typical day" - during term time and filled with paperwork and class prep and general rushing about.
This morning I woke up and found the Sb Overlords had frontpaged this quote:
"I think I need to go back and think about adaptive load balancing block solving of sparse, nasty almost diagonal matrices; that and whether kinetic energy turbulence really affects sound wave propagation (duh, of course it does, but how much...)?"
Huh?
Ah, Particle Physics snark...
So, how…
drorzel | August 12, 2011I'm sending a little pedagogical paper off to a journal today, and spent a while yesterday re-formatting it to meet their standards. This was particularly annoying for the references, as I had to go find a bunch of information that I don't usually write down. Which seems like a good topic for a poll:
A citation in a list of references should include:
Please note that the writing of papers is a classical phenomenon, and thus you may choose only one of these options.
My default answer, for the record, is the first choice. This is because my grad school training involved writing exclusively for…
catdynamics | August 11, 2011Last year, Brad deLong did a most excellent dissection of the lecture, how it came to be, and why universities need to rethink the whole approach to learning concept before they get eaten by technology development providing even cheaper content delivery.
I've been meaning to editorialize on this for a while, and then Chad planning for start of classes prodded me into action, doubly so when Chad posted a link to jolly nice resource for active learning in physics at Learnification
Now, others have provided expositions on how to teach wellgreat...
So I guess it is up to me to risk the wrath of…
drorzel | August 11, 2011I continue to be distracted from the paper-writing that I really ought to be doing by thinking about my classes this fall, and Joss Ives isn't helping. By being very helpful-- he posted a nice list of resources for active teaching. His blog has a bunch of other interesting stuff, too.
For the specific Matter and Interactions curriculum that we're using, it's probably also worth noting that they have a complete set of video lectures linked from their resources page. Unfortunately, these are complete with the "going over the syllabus" stuff in the early lectures, so the early going is a little…
drorzel | August 11, 2011A well-known joke is "Rule 34" saying that anything that exists will have porn about it on the Internet. The introduction to this Inside Higher Ed piece about anti-law-school blogs reminds me that we probably need a higher-numbered rule stating that every field of human endeavor will also produce a bunch of blogs about how much it sucks.
It's an important principle to keep in mind when trying to learn about anything on the Internet.
drorzel | August 10, 2011There are two recent studies of gender disparities in science and technology (referred to by the faintly awful acronym "STEM") getting a lot of play over the last few days. As is often the case with social-science results, the data they have aren't quite the data you would really like to have, and I think it's worth poking at them a little, not to deny the validity of the results, but to point out the inherent limitations of the process.
The first is a study of lifetime earnings in various fields that includes this graph showing that women with a Ph.D. earn about the same amount as men with a…
drorzel | August 9, 2011An angle I had hoped to get to in last week's broader impacts post, but didn't have time for, was this piece questioning meet-the-scientist programs by Aimee Stern at Science 2.0:
Over the past several years, a growing number of trade associations, foundations and science and engineering companies have started major efforts to get scientists into schools and hopefully inspire students with what they do. The goal, of course, is to get kids interested in pursuing careers in scientific fields, by showing them just how cool science is.
But I wonder - no matter how well meaning, how much do these…
drorzel | August 9, 2011It's that time of year again, when I start thinking about my fall term classes. I would really prefer to put it off for another couple of weeks, and I will put off spending much time on class prep in favor of finishing up some paper-writing and other things, but when the calendar turns to August, I inevitably start thinking about what I'm going to be doing in September, no matter how much I'd like to be thinking about other things instead. This year is worse than most, because I'm planning to really shake things up with regard to the way I teach the intro mechanics course.
I've been doing…
neurotopia | August 8, 2011Life has an interesting symmetry to it. No I'm not talking about bilateral symmetry or any Endless Forms Most Beautiful. I've just completed my orientation for a 1 year position at my undergraduate alma mater, where I'll be replacing the person who got me into lab work. In fact this is being typed on his computer. Very, very strange. I believe I'll have to track this experience.
First off- tracking down my review copy that was supposed to arrive 2 months ago. Second, get that damn course management system up and running. Third, clean the lab. Ew.
drorzel | August 1, 2011When I came up for my reappointment review three years into my professorial career, I was given a list of required materials to submit, which included a "statement of teaching philosophy." The same thing had been required for my job application, and at that time, I wrote about techniques and methods that had seemed particularly useful to me as a student (I had basically no teaching experience when I was hired), so for my reappointment, I wrote a statement looking back at what I wrote when I applied and talking about how I tried to incorporate those things into my teaching.
I passed the review…
jdupuis | July 28, 2011No, the purpose of this post isn't to reveal the secrets of successful academic leadership. If I had those, believe you me I'd be writing this from my villa on the French Riviera.
However, I am heading off to the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians in Boston next week where I hope to be a least a little more enlightened and educated along that path.
Not surprisingly I've been watching the blogosphere these last few months for insightful posts and articles about academic leadership, in particular academic library leadership. I've found a few…
jdupuis | July 27, 2011As anyone who's a regular reader of my Friday Fun series will know, I'm a huge fan of The Cronk, that paragon of higher ed satire. In fact, you could call me the grand high poobah of Cronk fandom with the Cronk as the Sultan of Satire!
You can see some of my posts here, here and here and even more here.
I love the Cronk, you love the Cronk, we all love the Cronk. And now we all have a chance to put our money where our mouths are and kick a little cash towards the hard working gang that entertain and amuse us so regularly. They fine folk who produce the Cronk have published a print book…
catdynamics | July 26, 2011Sometimes correlation is causation:
"Laurie Leshin, deputy associate administrator of exploration systems for NASA, will join Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as dean of the School of Science. " (RPI news)
Coincidentally:
"...Jon Morse, director of the Science Mission Directorate's Astrophysics Division and Laurie's husband, also will be leaving government to join RPI as the associate vice president for research." (spacref.com)
That leaves Astrophysics without a director, as the 2012 appropriations are coming up.
This would not be a fun time to step into the position, with the threat of…
drorzel | July 26, 2011The Dean Dad asks a question on the minds of lots of faculty: how do you handle early-morning classes?
Wise and worldly readers, have you had good experiences with 8 a.m. classes? Does anybody know of any useful empirical studies done at the college level of the effects of 8 a.m. classes? Is this basically solvable with caffeine and nagging, or are we shooting ourselves in the collective foot here?
As I am emphatically not a morning person myself, I'm no fan of 8am classes either, but as Dean Dad notes, they're a necessary evil given the constraints of limited classroom space. I don't know…
drorzel | July 25, 2011Via Bee, we have the BlaBlaMeter, a website that purports to "unmask without mercy how much bullshit hides in any text." Like Bee, I couldn't resist throwing it some scientific text, but rather than pulling stuff off the arxiv, I went with the abstracts of the papers I published as a grad student, which I wrote up on the blog as part of the Metastable Xenone Project a few years ago. The abstracts, their scores, and some comments below:
Paper 1: Optical Control of Ultracold Collisions:
Near-resonant light is used to modify the collision dynamics of magneto-optically trapped metastable xenon…
jdupuis | July 25, 2011As I have in the past, I'd like to point out a librarian embedded in a faculty-focused blogging network.
Brian Mathews recently moved his blog, The Ubiquitous Librarian, to the Chronicle Blog Network run by, you guessed it, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The new URL for Brian's blog is here.
And a few recent posts:
Instructionally Adrift? Are instructors letting their students down?
A Future Space For Reference Services? An Inspiration From GALE
Why does my library use social media?
When talking about the library remember N3P3: an advocacy talking points framework for academic libraries…
catdynamics | July 22, 2011Associate Theorer?
Theorer-in-Chief?
Ok. I'm just jealous of the Astronomist!
drorzel | July 20, 2011Keeping the week's unofficial education theme, Kevin Drum posts about the latest "kids these days" study, namely the just-released NAEP Geography results. Kevin makes a decent point about the 12th grade questions being fairly sophisticated, but includes one comment that struck me as off base:
I gotta tell you: I went through the five sample questions for 12th graders, and they were pretty damn hard. This was not "identify France on a map" stuff. I ended up getting them all right, but I was half guessing on some of them.
He says that as if it's a bad thing, but it seems to me that it's really…