Academia
drorzel | June 16, 2011One of the odd things about going to conferences is the unpredictable difference between talks and papers. Sometimes, when you go to a talk, you just get an exact repetition of what's in the paper; other times, you get a new angle on it, or some different visual representations that make something that previously seemed dry and abstract really click. And, of course, sometimes you get new hot-off-the-apparatus results that haven't made it into print yet.
Maddeningly, there doesn't seem to be any way to know in advance which of these things you're going to get from the title and abstract. It…
tsmith | June 13, 2011Ah, classes are finally over. The last two summers I've taught a short, intense course in Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology, condensing a semester's worth of work into a week. It's a fun course to teach, but exhausting--after teaching, I head back home or to the office to finish last-minute preparation for the next day's talks and assignments, and by the time that's done, the nightly student homework is rolling into my email inbox for me to grade and comment on for the next morning. By Friday, I feel like a zombie who hasn't seen my family in a week.
But, it's now wrapped up for…
drorzel | June 12, 2011It was the sort of mid-June morning that global warming deniers dream of: cold and threatening rain. the rain held off until all the speakers had spoken, all the graduates had done their walk across the stage, and all the degrees had been passed out. That's as much as you can ask for, really.
through a quirk of teaching schedules, I actually knew fewer people in this graduating class than most others-- I didn't teach the big intro courses in their first year, so I didn't see the usual crop of would-be engineers. I've seen this year's physics graduates a lot, though-- I've had them all in…
jdupuis | June 9, 2011Yes, the TEDx whirlwind is coming to libraryland!
Later this month on Saturday, June 25th, TEDxLibrariansTO is coming to Toronto.
About TEDxLibrariansTO
Who inspires you?
We live in a time that is in need of inspiration. The aspirations of both individuals and society have always had a home within libraries and have traditionally found a voice through librarians.
The theme for TEDx LibrariansTO is Librarians as Thought Leaders. Come to the event and experience this incredible opportunity to hear librarians speak to the differences we make in the world and how we have, can and do lead and…
drorzel | June 8, 2011A few years ago, we switched to the Matter & Interactions curriculum for our introductory classes. This has not been without its hiccups, among them the fact that there has been a small decline in the conceptual learning gains measured by the Force Concept Inventory, the oldest and most widely used of the conceptual tests favored by the Physics Education Research community. We've spent some time discussing whether this is a temporary glitch, due to the transition, or something inherent in the curriculum. (Our numbers are small enough that these results remain at the level of plural…
drorzel | June 7, 2011Over at Dynamics of Cats, chief herding theorist Steinn has a post on what we know about how to teach physics:
To teach physics well, you provide an intensive, mathematically rigorous in-sequence series of classes.
You need at least two different parallel classes per term, each class a prerequisite for the succeeding class and coordinated syllabii for parallel and successive classes, providing an initial short review of the previous material.
You also need a parallel sequence of coordinated mathematics classes, such that the mathematics needed for a physics class are taught before it is…
jdupuis | June 2, 2011Yesterday York University Libraries was visited by a delegation of 39 academic librarians, mostly from The Netherlands but also a couple from Belgium. They are on a tour of many of the academic libraries of Southern Ontario, hoping to learn and share a bit about how libraries in different countries are handling the challenges of the future.
You can follow their progress on Twitter using the hashtag #nvbcan.
As I said, they were here yesterday. During the morning they got some presentations about the York Libraries in general and a tour of the Scott Library and its new Learning Commons. In…
drorzel | June 2, 2011This morning's Links Dump included a post from Mad Mike and an entire blog on improving academic posters. For those not in the sciences, one of the traditional means of communicating research results is at a poster session where tens to hundreds of researcher each prepare a poster (usually 3'x5' or thereabouts) about their project, hang them up, then stand by them to answer questions.
Mike and the Better Posters bloggers have some very good tips on graphic design for the benefit of the scientists "gamely trying to not look depressed at the complete lack of attention their posters are…
drorzel | June 1, 2011One of the interesting things about reading David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics was that it paints a very different picture of physics in the mid-1970's than what you usually see. Kaiser describes it as a very dark time for young physicists, career-wise. He doesn't go all that deeply into the facts and figures in the book, but there's plenty of quantitative evidence for this. The claim of the book is that this created a situation in which many younger physicists were pushed to the margins, and thus began to work on marginal topics like quantum foundations, which thus began be be…
tfk | May 31, 2011Peter Freed wants to you to know that Jonah Lehrer is Not a Neuroscientist. Lehrer doesn't claim to be, of course. He's a journalist and science writer who covers developments in neuroscience, and a good one at that.
Freed is concerned about how Lehrer handled a recent study on "the wisdom of crowds" in a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The wisdom of crowds is a long-standing and often-successful idea that you'll get a better prediction by aggregating the responses from a bunch of people posed with the same question than you'd get by simply asking a given expert, or even…
jdupuis | May 31, 2011Twitterers of the world.
We've all heard the questions. The murmurs. The doubts and whispers.
"Twitter is a waste of time," they say.
"People are just talking about what they ate for breakfast, or what their dog is doing."
"No good can come of it, no way to spend work time, turning us all into ADHD cases."
The mother of all social media doubter articles came out a little while back, The New York Time's Bill Keller on The Twitter Trap:
I don't mean to be a spoilsport, and I don't think I'm a Luddite. I edit a newspaper that has embraced new media with creative, prizewinning gusto. I get that…
drorzel | May 30, 2011(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Matthew Schlecht, a chemist by training who runs his own technical translation service, Word Alchemy Translation. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.--post-doc--academic-job track.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I am a free-lance technical translator working into English from Japanese, German, French, Spanish and occasionally Russian, in the areas of chemistry,…
jdupuis | May 29, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, is from August 14, 2007.
=======
This one of those very rare books, books that make you truly smarter and more…
drorzel | May 27, 2011Union operates on a trimester calendar, with three ten-week terms (September-November, January-March, April-June), rather than the two 14-15 week semesters used by most other colleges and universities. This has some advantages in terms of flexibility-- even science and engineering students get to take terms abroad, which is harder to swing in a semester system-- and some disadvantages in terms of scheduling-- we run much later than most other schools (the last day of classes is next Friday), which closes our students out of a lot of summer programs that begin in early June.
As you can imagine…
jdupuis | May 23, 2011A very nice article by Ian Brown in this past Saturday's Globe and Mail, Don't discard the librarians.
He very nicely summarizes the recent library/librarian angst that's been free-flowing around the media and blogosphere over the last little while.
The world of librarians was thrown into a tizzy this week - it doesn't take much these days - when the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board announced it will shut its school libraries and dump all but four of its library technicians.
*snip*
That was the tip of the iceberg. While Windsor defended its slash, top-level librarians attended a…
drorzel | May 19, 2011In keeping with this week's unofficial theme of wibbling about academia, there's an article at The Nation about the evils of graduate school that's prompted some discussion. Sean says more or less what I would, though maybe a little more nicely than I would.
I wouldn't bother to comment further, except this spurred Sean to solicit career advice for scientists looking to leave the academic track. Which reminded me that a couple of years ago, I did a bloggy Project for Non-Academic Science (name chosen to have the same acronym as a prestigious journal, because it amused me to do so), where I…
drorzel | May 19, 2011Via Twitter, Daniel Lemire has a mini-manifesto advocating "social media" alternatives for academic publishing, citing "disastrous consequences" of the "filter-then-publish" model in use by traditional journals. The problem is, as with most such things, I'm not convinced that social media style publication really fixes all these problems. For example, one of his points is:
The conventional system is legible: you can count and measure a scientist's production. The incentive is to produce more of what the elite wants. In a publish-then-filter system nobody cares about quantity: only the impact…
drorzel | May 17, 2011As I noted the other day, we're entering graduation season, one of the two month-long periods (the other being "back to school" time in August/September) when everybody pretends to care deeply about education. Accordingly, the people at the Pew Research Center have released a new report on the opinions of the general public and college presidents about various topics related to higher education. The totally neutral post title is copied from their report.
So, what do they find about general public attitudes? The usual confused muddle:
Cost and Value. A majority of Americans (57%) say the…
jdupuis | May 17, 2011So, here's the story. A week or so ago, McMaster University Librarian Jeff Trzeciak gave an invited presentation at Penn State, tasked by the organizers to be controversial.
To say the least, he succeeded. Perhaps the most controversial idea in the presentation was that he would basically no longer hire librarians for his organization, only subject PhDs and IT specialists.
As you can imagine, the library blogosphere and Friendfeedosphere has had a field day with this one.
You can see the slide in question here and get a bit of a background on the situation of librarians at McMaster here.…
jdupuis | May 16, 2011From the University of Toronto Academic Librarians' blog:
In response to McMaster University and their Library's recent treatment of their academic librarians and the notable gender imbalance at the May 17 conference at McMaster University (given that 80% of librarians are women), entitled "The Future of Academic Libraries" and which does not include McMaster University librarians, CAUT has produced a button which the UTFA Librarians Committee is urging all who support the role of academic librarianship to wear when attending the May 17th conference. For those from other universities who…