Academia
catdynamics | September 27, 2010We are now just 12 hours from the release of the National Research Council Data Based Assessment of Graduate Programs.
The tension is just overwhelming...
An interesting thing about the 2010 NRC rankings is the methodology, and a final version seems to have been settled upon.
As you know, Bob, the primary purpose of the new methodology is to make sure Princeton wins, and Harvard is suitably humbled provide a robust and objective ranking of US graduate programs, for the ages, which is not a subjective grossly lagging metric.
The complaints about the methodology have already started to bubble…
catdynamics | September 27, 2010
"Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down."
tsmith | September 27, 2010Mike and David Dobbs both have great posts up discussing "whither rewards for scientists who communicate to the public?" This ended up being one of the themes of my recent SciencePub talk in Columbus--what are the incentives--and disincentives--to scientists for bringing their work to the public at large, rather than simply publishing in journals?
David notes that there has been much discussion about scientific papers being over-valued. As an untenured professor, certainly I realize just how much papers matter for my career, and how little blogging/outreach does (or, how much it may even…
catdynamics | September 26, 2010 The National Research Council releases its data based ranking of US graduate programs on Tuesday September 28th.
NRC website with methodology and FAQ on rankings
The rankings are much perused and much abused, by anyone from prospective grads, to axe-wielding provosts.
The last rankings were done in 1995, and used the classic "reputational" method.
Basically NRC grandees called their old muckers back at the unis and asked them who was any good, starting, please, with Harvard, Princeton and Yale...
It worked, though the methodology was somewhat criticized and the results were most definitely…
catdynamics | September 25, 2010
Gonna be spending a lot of time and words on rankings in the next few days.
Interesting times and important people.
jdupuis | September 24, 2010It's time for the annual Mocking of the Thomson Reuters session.
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.
Check out my previous iterations of this amusing pastime: 2002, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009.
From a recent Globe and Mail article:
"We choose our citation…
drorzel | September 23, 2010One of the things I've been stressed about lately is next week, when I'm making a trip to the South, specifically Georgia and Alabama. As I mentioned here earlier, the original inspiration was a get-together with friends from college for the Florida-Alabama football game next Saturday, but it seems a shame to go all that way and not do something book-related, so I have arranged to give four talks in two days. Two of these are research colloquia, but the other two are public lectures that might be of interest to readers of this blog or How to Teach Physics to Your Dog:
First, on Wednesday,…
jgoldman | September 21, 2010We initially planned on doing these group blogcasts roughly once per month, but then, well, Pepsigate happened and blogs were moved, people were distracted, and so on. But the dust is finally starting to settle, so it was time for another. I should point out how awesome it is that this group blogcast spans three blog networks - Scienceblogs, Scientopia, and PLoS blogs - and is an example of the kind of collaboration the bloggers on the different networks can achieve!
We had initially decided to talk about field work, but there are, as expected, plenty of tangents: the work that we are…
catdynamics | September 20, 2010The intertoobz have exploded over the unfortunate Dr Henderson's bemoaning of the impending Bush tax increases, and the hardship of getting by in todays society for two income families
We watch in awe as netizens arise to dissect the issue, and munch popcorn as the show goes on:
Todd Henderson's original tirade
in which he shows some misunderstanding of what constitutes discretionary spending, financial planning and marginal tax rates.
He must have known for several years that Bush's tax increase was coming in 2011. Shouldn't live on the edge like that...
(Hm. He may have taken it down, or…
jgoldman | September 18, 2010
My Child's Play co-blogger Melody and I are the subjects of today's Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday program. Watch us chat with eachother for about an hour on how we became scientists and science bloggers, our thoughts on the state of psychology as a field, peer review and the journal system, how the study of language learning and comparative cognition may not be so different, and a smattering of other thoughts.
drorzel | September 16, 2010In a place I can't link to, I encountered the somewhat boggling statement that "Nature leans more in the direction of Popular Science than Critically Peer Reviewed [Journal]." Thus, a quick poll:
Nature is:online surveys
Context is for the weak.
jdupuis | September 15, 2010From this day forward, Scott Rosenberg is an honorary librarian.
One of the things that librarians talk about a lot is how to evaluate a random web page -- what signs and signals to look for that will give the unsuspecting student a clue as to whether or not they might want to use a particular web page in an assignment.
We talk a lot about the various W's -- who, what, why, when and all the rest. Who created the page, what does it say, does their appear to be any bias, is it current. There has been tons of literature on the subject and a very large number of online tutorials.
Scott…
catdynamics | September 13, 2010Later this month, the National Research Council will, finally, release the much awaited and much anticipated Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs.
Every 10 years, roughly, the NRC publishes graduate program rankings, the last having been come out in 1995...
The rankings will be released tuesday 28th September 2010.
Today the participating universities will be told how to get embargoed prior access to the data for their own institutions, so they can prepare for the public release, next week the actual embargoed data will be released to each institution.
4838 graduate program…
drorzel | September 10, 2010A simple one, that I'm sure all the faculty in the audience will recognize. What is the proper approach to meeting with a professor outside of class:
You email a professor asking to meet, and he responds "My office hours are from X:00-Y:00, or I'm free at Z:00." You:online survey
Even if we're talking about a quantum physics class, faculty are classical entities for all practical purposes, so you can only choose one answer.
drorzel | September 9, 2010Over at EphBlog, Stephen O'Grady has a post giving advice to the entering class at Williams. A bunch of this stuff is school-specific stuff that will only make sense to another member of the Cult of the Purple Cow, but there's some good general advice in there as well.
I particularly liked his story about the professor who saved his college career:
Looking back, it's borderline shocking that I recovered as much as I did academically, given how horrifying my grades were that first year. And, it must be said, my first semester as a sophomore. But while I accept full responsibility for getting…
drorzel | September 9, 2010Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton is surprised that people skim over boring bits of novels. While she explicitly excludes non-fiction from her discussion, this immediately made me think of Timothy Burke's How to Read in College, which offers tips to prospective humanities and social science majors on how to most effectively skim through huge reading assignments for the information that's really important.
I've mentioned this before, but I don't think I've done a science version. I've been doing more reading of journal articles lately than I have in a while, though, and it occurs to me that similar…
drorzel | September 8, 2010The New York Times has an article about the opening of a teacher-run school in The City. It sounds like an interesting experiment:
Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the seven continents or the governor of their state. He started wondering: What if I were in charge?
Three years later, Mr. Lee, at just 25, is getting a chance to find out. Today, Mr. Lee and five other teachers -- all veterans of Teach for America, a corps of college graduates who…
drorzel | September 6, 2010Today is Labor Day in the US, which is the traditional end-of-summer holiday. The top link in today's Links Dump is a survey of the history via Slate, headlined "Why Do We Get Labor Day Off?"
Of course, my reaction to that is "What do you mean, 'we'?" Today is also the first day of classes of the 2010-2011 academic year here at Union. Actually, it's the first half-day of classes, as we don't start until 1:50 today, but it doesn't make much difference to the poll question of the day:
Starting the new academic year on Labor Day is:survey software
This is particularly annoying, because…
jgoldman | September 4, 2010As I'm sure many of you did, I recorded Phil Plait's (twitter, blog) Bad Universe pilot last week, and it was so good that I watched it twice. And then two more times as I tried to figure out why it was so compelling. Why am so interested in picking apart these particular 44 minutes of TV awesomeness? Because at the end of the day, effective science teaching isn't so different from effective science programming, even down to the timing. In an hour of TV, you get about 44 minutes of programming. Likewise, in an hour-long lecture, you can probably only use about 75% of that time, about 44…
drorzel | September 4, 2010Speaking of teacher evaluation schemes, as we were, Doug Natelson draws my attention to a new proposal from Texas A&M:
[Frank] Ashley, the vice chancellor for academic affairs for the A&M System, has been put in charge of creating such a measure that he says would help administrators and the public better understand who, from a financial standpoint, is pulling their weight.
A several-inches thick document in the possession of A&M System officials contains three key pieces of information for every single faculty member in the 11-university system: their salary, how much external…