Academia
catdynamics | March 28, 2011A rather radical proposal from Texas came across my desk recently, courtesy of the Texas Exes...
A Modest Proposal for Texas Higher Ed:
"... The UT System Board of Regents ... has hired consultants who have publicly stated the fundamental view that academic research is not valuable and that tenured faculty could be replaced by lower-cost lecturers. These consultants propose a formula that excludes research in valuing faculty. They only want to look at any immediate financial value of research that can be proven on a current basis.
...
these same consultants also believe that tenured faculty…
catdynamics | March 28, 2011"How to Survive from Tsunami" by Murata et al, is vol 32 of the Advanced Series on Ocean Engineering from World Scientific Books
Chapter 2 has the introductory phenomenology and basic physics, and the how-to-survive bit.
In view of recent events, WorldSci is putting it up on their website for free:
Knowledge for Tsunami Survival (pdf)
Obviously WorldSci would be grateful if you became interested enough to buy the whole book...(ToC pdf)
- it actually looks quite interesting.
jdupuis | March 23, 2011My Stealth Librarianship Manifesto post from last month continues to gather comments and page views, albeit at a slower rate than before. Of course, that's very gratifiying to see. If you haven't checked in on the post in a while, there are probably a couple of new comments with librarians' stories that you might want to check out.
To keep the idea going, I've decided to have occasional posts highlighting "stealthy librarian" posts and articles I see around the web. These are posts that highlight facutly/librarian collaboration in teaching or research, librarians integrated with business…
tfk | March 21, 2011Mike the Mad Biologist weighs in on a debate Brad Delong has been curating, about the status of economics as a science. Noting that examples from biology are being introduced as comparisons for economics, Mike writes:
It really does matter: if economists are going to use biology as a model for their discipline, we need them to understand ours, to help improve theirs. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Upon which, he administers a firm but gentle smackdown to Russ Roberts. Read it, enjoy it.
catdynamics | March 18, 2011The weekend is almost here, and wot a week it was.
So, we go to the local topical issue at hand: what prospects, eh?
Woosh goes the iPod.
Woosh.
The Covering: Oh Well - Fiona Apple
The Crossing: Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
The Crown: Losing Sleep - Edwyn Collins
The Root: VCR - The XX
The Past: On Melancholy Hill - Gorillaz
The Future: Wake Up Nation - Paul Weller
The Questioner: My Perfect Cousin - Undertones
The House: Ó Blessuð Vertu Sumarsól - Íslandstónar
The Inside: Deportees - Billy Bragg
The Outcome: Travelin' Band - Creedence Clearwater Revival
"What you did to me made me…
jdupuis | March 18, 2011Yeah, we've all had this kind of week.
Thanks to The Cronk for humourously saving my soul this week: University Performs Fastest Soulectomy on Record.
Doctors have finally verified claims that the College of Madison performed the fastest soulectomy in higher education history.
"We couldn't believe the soulectomy could be completed in less than two days," said Dr. Rachel O'Quinn. "But all evidence points to verification."
*snip*
"The department was far more dysfunctional than Dr. Mecum anticipated and she had to act fast," explained the medical examiners. "The women professors in her…
jdupuis | March 17, 2011In all of our organizations fostering innovation is an important goal. But how do you turn the innovation fawcett on? Somehow it seems so much easier to turn it off.
Of course, it's all about institutional culture. The way problems and solutions are framed. The way management/leadership/peer culture frames, encourages and rewards ideas.
Sometimes it just the way we ask questions about new ideas.
A nice articles from Tony Golsby-Smith at the Harvard Business Review blog site: Three Questions that Will Kill Innovation.
They're mostly aimed at commercial organizations but can easily be re-…
drorzel | March 17, 2011The 2011 NCAA Men's Basketball Championship officially started Tuesday, with the first of the "First Four" games, formerly known as the "play-in" game. It gets going in earnest today, though, which means that once this posts, I'll be shutting the Internet down and working like crazy for a few hours, so I can justify moving everything into the living room and working at a slower pace through a long, glorious afternoon of hoops overload. I may or may not post periodic updates on Twitter (mirrored to Facebook), so if you want live-ish sort-of-blogging follow me there.
As always, the run-up to…
catdynamics | March 15, 2011On may way to the office this morning, the young man striding off to class in front of me, was in animated discussion on his phone about the desirability of getting a "tactical sight" for his handgun, and the need to pick up some more bullets.
Beretta tactical sight - for speed of acquisition!
In the wake of recent incidents, including some verbal threats made not a million miles from my office, and in anticipation of some revised legal considerations, namely that students carrying guns openly will likely be permitted on a number of campuses, we have been offered appropriate training:
"The…
drorzel | March 15, 2011It's NCAA tournament time, which is time for everybody to break out the moralizing stories about the pernicious aspects of college athletics that they've been sitting on since the football season ended. The Associated Press (via the New York Times) clocks in with a particularly discreditable entry, a story on a study of racial disparities in graduation rates in major college baskeball:
An annual report by the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found a 2 percent overall graduation rate increase to 66 percent for Division I players, but showed the rates…
jgoldman | March 15, 2011
Welcome to part 3 of the Science Blogging 101 series. You can find part 1 here, in which I discussed my own experiences with blogging, and part 2 here, which I discussed some of the big questions regarding audience, purpose, and so forth.
How do you balance blogging with the rest of your work? Do you see it as an extension or part of what you already do in keeping up with the literature or do you just enjoy blogging?
Well, I certainly enjoy blogging, otherwise I wouldn't do it. That said, blogging about research is a fantastic way to keep up on the literature. I read through (or, at least…
drorzel | March 14, 2011Even though the really important Final Four has already been decided, the Division 1 NCAA basketball championship starts this week, which means it's time to fill out your championship brackets. And so, as usual, I present the guaranteed-can't-miss-sure-thing method of picking the winner based on the rankings of Ph.D. programs in physics (excerpt displayed; click for the full bracket):
OK, maybe there are a few bugs yet to be worked out with this method...
catdynamics | March 13, 2011there are two questions denizens of academia ought to always ask themselves:
could your children attend your own institution of higher education?
even if they did not get the insider's discount?
and,
could you, if you were in school now, with the circumstances of your childhood, attend your own institution of higher education?
even if you did not get an academic scholarship?
Well, could you?
I could not have.
drorzel | March 11, 2011One thing that I thought of while writing yesterday's mammoth post about scientific thinking and stereotypes was the notion of stereotype threat, the psychological phenomenon where students who are reminded of negative stereotypes right before a test tend to score worse than they do when taking the test without the negative reminder. This is a hot topic in education research at the moment, and it seems like EurekAlert throws me about one press release a week relating to the topic (or, at least, it seemed that way before I got too bust to keep up with EurekAlert).
I ended up not throwing it in…
jdupuis | March 10, 2011If you're in the Greater Toronto Area next Tuesday, please drop by and see Michael talk. I'm thrilled that my library is co-sponsoring such a fantastic event!
Presented by:
Janusz A. Kozinski - Dean, Faculty of Science and Engineering
The Division of Natural Science
The Steacie Science and Engineering Library
Location: Paul A. Delaney Gallery, 320 Bethune College
Date: Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Time: 12:30 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Refreshments will be served courtesy of Steacie Science and Engineering Library
Prof. Nielsen will describe an evolution in how scientific discoveries are made driven by…
drorzel | March 9, 2011As a sort of follow-on from yesterday's post, thinking about the issues involved reminded me of a couple of browser tabs that I've had open for a while, namely this story about an education session at the AAAS meeting, and this Inside Higher Ed article on "Teaching Ambiguity". From the IHE piece:
Tidy may be comforting, but it is also banal, boring, conventional and unrealistic. That's why I have been asking faculty to infuse their classes with the element of surprise. By surprise I do not mean mysteriously taking a rabbit out of a hat, but rather incorporating experimental, untidy open-ended…
jdupuis | March 9, 2011This is about the symposium upcoming at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, The Future of the Academic Library. The symposium is co-presented by Library Journal and McMaster.
It was announced on Twitter this past Sunday and there was a bit of a Twitter-storm about the conference as quite a few people (myself included) thought the program participants a bit problematic, to say the least.
But I'll let my University of Windsor colleague Mita Willliams take it from here. With her permission, I'm reposting the letter she wrote yesterday to President Deane.
I am writing this letter to you…
jdupuis | March 7, 2011And I mean zombie vampire in the best way, as a comment on how hard it seems to be to kill my Stealth Librarianship Manifesto. It's even been translated into French! (Merci, Marléne!)
For a post I mostly wrote in an hour of white hot typing from midnight to 1 a.m. some weeknight when I should have been sleeping it sure has some legs.
There have been three posts about the manifesto fairly recently, mostly more critical than complimentary but with a lot of input that I really value.
Let's take a look.
Identity crisis? No. Or why I think we need to move beyond "stealth librarianship." by…
omnibrain | February 28, 2011There's a great blog called ionpsych being run by Dan Simons (of Invisible Gorilla fame). The posts are all by graduate students in a science writing for public consumption class. I'm glad people are starting to teach us overly technical scientists how to communicate in graduate school. I'm not aware of any other class out there dedicated to teaching psychology and neuroscience students how to best communicate their ideas to the world.
Anyway, here's one of my favorite posts from Audrey Lustig:
How do people judge fashion design? Fashion experts are notorious for using vague criteria,…