Academia
catdynamics | December 7, 2010A lot of people have asked me to link to and comment on the SUNY Albany cuts and some of the reactions to it by some online academics...
To cut a long story short, the SUNY system took another round of cuts, and the President of SUNY Albany decided to cut whole programs rather than keep trimming around the edges.
Classics, French, Italian, Russian, and Theatre
cut by directive, at short notice and with little open consultation.
Gregory Petsko wrote a high profile defence of the humanities, from a science perspective, and the Dangeral Professor hisself pitches his penny's worth in, while…
drorzel | December 1, 2010The JCC, where SteelyKid goes to day care, is having a book sale, so the lobby has been full of books for sale the last few days as we've headed out. Getting SteelyKid away from the books is pretty difficult, as you would expect from our daughter.
We've mostly avoided getting anything, but yesterday, I caved and bought the Curious George board book with pull-out flaps that she latched onto. Why? This page:
The book is a collection of pages showing various places George goes to be curious, and has pull-out tabs showing a person associated with the place, and a thing associated with the place…
jdupuis | November 24, 2010A portentous-sounding title for a not-so-portentous post, full of half-baked thoughts and idle musings.
I was just thinking about the recent Jounal of Electronic Publishing issue on Reimagining the University Press and without actually reading very much of the issue in question (ignorance is so liberating sometimes...) the most pressing question in my mind was:
So what exactly do we need university presses for anyways?
And I got to thinking some more and figured that there are probably tons of people in university presses thinking to themselves,
So what exactly do we need academic libraries…
drorzel | November 23, 2010I've probably gotten a dozen pointers to Gregory Petsko's open letter in support of the humanities, addressed to the President of SUNY-Albany, over the last couple of weeks (the link is to a reposting of the letter at Inside Higher Ed; it was originally on Petsko's own blog). I haven't linked to it or commented on it here, mostly because while I'm broadly sympathetic with his position, after the second use of "[Famous Writer] said [interesting thing] which I'm sure your department of [humanities field] could tell you about, if you hadn't eliminated them," my reaction had shifted significantly…
jdupuis | November 23, 2010A terrific new edition of The Journal of Electronic Publishing (v13i2), focusing on the future of university presses and, by extension, of scholarly publishing as a whole.
A lot of terrific-looking articles:
Editor's Note for Reimagining the University Press by Phil Pochoda
Reimagining the University Press: A Checklist for Scholarly Publishers by Peter J. Doughtery
Reimagining the University Press by Kate Wittenberg
Stage Five Book Publishing by Joseph J. Esposito
Next-Generation University Publishing: A Perspective from California by Daniel Greenstein
What Might Be in Store for Universities…
drorzel | November 22, 2010I'm giving the final exam in my introductory E&M class this morning, which means spending a couple of hours sitting in a room full of students taking a test and doing my best not to fall asleep. As far as I'm concerned, getting rid of exam proctoring is the best argument for an honor code system-- I'm less worried about cheating than I am annoyed at wasting my time.
Anyway, here's a thematically appropriate poll to pass the time:
Which of the following activities are less fun than proctoring an exam (check all that apply)online survey
PollDaddy handles multiple-selection polls in a…
jdupuis | November 18, 2010Via my York University Computer Science & Engineering colleague Andrew Eckford, two contrasting blog posts by two different Harvard computer science profs. One has decided to leave academia for greener pastures at Google and the other has decided to stay.
First, Matt Welsh on leaving.
There is one simple reason that I'm leaving academia: I simply love work I'm doing at Google. I get to hack all day, working on problems that are orders of magnitude larger and more interesting than I can work on at any university. That is really hard to beat, and is worth more to me than having "Prof." in…
catdynamics | November 11, 2010Do you know how many theoretical astrophysics tenure track positions there are each year?
About 5.
I am also interested in string theory...
catdynamics | November 11, 2010
Something went wrong with the GRE test in october.
Again.
Here is the official word from ETS
The GRE test administered in China, on Oct 23rd, was an old test.
GRE is offering free retakes next week or reimbursment.
This will seriously mess up grad school applicants from China, and not at a good time, with a lot of universities worried about funding and overcommittment on grad students recruitment (although I should note that some universities are taking opportunity and ramping up recruitment, for now, or deciding to gamble and plan on the funding situation improving).
So... is this a minor…
catdynamics | November 11, 2010No, I don't think that is a good idea...
Xtra Normal: make your own, use carefully...
One Professor's Fantasy
So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities
Ok, Eng Lit is just weird, but I get it.
drorzel | November 10, 2010We've just recently completed pre-registration for Winter term classes, so I've been thinking a bit about why students do and do not sign up for things. Thus, a poll:
You are a college student considering an elective class in your major, and you see it has a lab. Your reaction is:survey software
Feel free to replace "English" with the non-lab-science major of your choice when answering.
drorzel | November 8, 2010The American Institute of Physics has a statistics division that produces lots of interesting analyses of issues relevant to the discipline. A couple of them were released just recently, including one on the job status of new Ph.D.'s (PDF). The key graph from the report is this one:
The text of the report talks up the recent decrease in the number of post-doc jobs and increase in potentially permanent positions, but the long term trend looks pretty flat to me-- averaged over the thirty years of data, it looks like a bit more than half of new Ph.D.'s have always taken post-doc positions, and…
drorzel | November 2, 2010Today's a lab day in my main class for the term, with a fairly involved experiment to measure the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron. This is going to be all kinds of fun, because 1) I can't get into the room to set anything up until an hour before the start of class, and 2) SteelyKid is home sick, which means I can't go in to pull stuff together until about an hour before the start of class. Whee!
Today's a day to (attempt to) accentuate the positive, though, so let's use this as a jumping-off point for a more upbeat topic, namely:
What's the best lab you ever did in a lab science class?…
drorzel | November 1, 2010In last weekend's post about arguments from innate differences, I suggested that I might be willing to illustrate my position with adorable toddler pictures. On thinking more about it, I'm a little hesitant to write about this at length, because it could easily topple over into arrogant-physicist territory. But then, it's an excuse to post adorable toddler pictures, so...
So, let me put a short disclaimer up front: I'm not attempting to claim that I have suddenly uncovered a unique and obvious flaw in innate-difference arguments, by virtue of my Big Physicist Brain. I am well aware that the…
drorzel | October 27, 2010I'm spending a good chunk of the morning grading the exam that I gave yesterday, so here's a poll on what you might call exam philosophy. Our classes are small, so the bulk of our exams are free-response problems, and we tend to break those problems into sub-parts (1a, 1b, 1c, etc.). There are two approaches to writing these questions that I have seen: one is to use the sub-parts to break a single problem into steps, thus leading students through the question; the other is to write questions where the sub-parts are independent, so that a student who has no clue how to answer part a can still…
jdupuis | October 27, 2010A week or two ago, in a comment on the Blogging Groups and Ethics post, I lamented that I always seem to be reading the same librarianish blogs, not mixing it up too much. I wished that we might have a blogging community to assemble around, or at least a good aggregator.
Well, Bora Zivkovic challenged me in the comments to at very least aggregate scitech librarian blogs for the ScienceBlogging.org site.
It's taken me a while, but I've done it.
Using the list I previously created for the List of Science & Technology Librarian Blogs I created a Friendfeed group which Bora has since…
drorzel | October 24, 2010In yesterday's post about the experience of science, I mentioned that I had both a specific complaint about the article by Alexandra Jellicoe (which I explained in the post) and a general complaint about the class in which the article falls. I want to attempt to explain the latter problem, partly because I think it will be useful, but mostly because it's stuck in my head, and I need to at least type out the explanation before I can move on to other things.
The article in question doesn't contain all of the elements I'll mention below, but I think it clearly falls into a class of articles that…
drorzel | October 23, 2010Some time back, I took issue with an article about "masculine" and "feminine" approaches to science that struck me as a little off. The author of the original post, Alexandra Jellicoe, has a new post on the same topic that she pointed out in comments to my original post.
I have two major problems with this article. One of them is a problem I have with the whole genre (as it were), and I'll save that for another time, because it will be difficult to write. The bigger and more immediate problem that I have, though, is that I don't recognize Jellicoe's description of science. She writes:
The…
jdupuis | October 22, 2010As I mentioned a few days ago, the kind librarians of Brock University in St. Catherines, ON invited me to give a talk as part of their Open Access Week suite of events.
I've included my slides for the presentation below. There was a small but engaged group of mostly librarians that turned up.
Please don't let the high number of slides deter you from zipping through the presentation. A good chunk of the slides only have a couple of words on them and another good chunk are screen shots of xkcd strips.
The slides are in our IR here and on Google Docs here.
I'd like to thank Barbara…
jdupuis | October 22, 2010Ah, The Cronk News. Always good for a laugh at academia's expense!
I like this one from a few weeks ago, an amusing take on the whole town vs. gown issue: Townies Make Preemptive Strike On College
Town/Gown relations in Norwich, CT deteriorated in record time this year when students returned to campus. For over fifty years, tensions between "townies" and college students have centered around student vandalism of locals' mailboxes, cars and homes. But this year, the townies took matters into their own hands.
"I was sound asleep and heard screaming and yelling," said Patrick Minchoff, a…