Academia
drorzel | September 3, 2010Over at Confused at a Higher Level, Melissa offers an alphabetical list of essential supplies for a condensed matter experimentalist at a small college. This is a fun idea for back-to-school time, so I'll steal it, and offer the following alphabetical list of essentials for Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics at a small college, kind of a condensed version of the three part series I did a few weeks ago.
A is for Acousto-optic modulator This is a device that uses sound waves in a crystal to deflect light and shift its frequency. It's essential for rapid control of laser properties.
B is for…
drorzel | September 3, 2010Via Thoreau, a story at Free Range Kids about "zero tolerance" policy run amok, this time from someone who moved to the US as a kid and ran up against the modern school culture in a bad way:
Once again, I came from a culture where you were made fun of if you forgot your pocket knife on a school trip. Then I entered a post-Columbine/Zero Tolerance hell. I hadn't used or even removed my knife from my bag while in school, but I did use it to cut a twig on my way home from school one day, and was apparently seen by one of my classmates. The next day, I was called into the principal's office where…
jdupuis | September 2, 2010Peter Brantley has a provocative post up on his blog Shimenawa: Get in the goddamn wagon. It's basically a call to arms -- specifically for younger librarians to seize a greater role in discussing and shaping the future of libraries.
The problem is that a lot of the public, official discussion about the future is restricted to senior administrators -- a huge problem in the insanely hierarchical world of libraries:
I was intrigued when I saw an announcement for an ARL-CNI meeting, "Achieving Strategic Change in Research Libraries", to be held in mid October, because Lord knows this is a good…
drorzel | September 2, 2010Over at Inside Higher Ed, there's a list of "survival tips" for women entering grad school in the sciences. It's a pretty good and pretty typical list of advice-- you can find more or less the same advice posted somewhere every fall.
What's striking about it, though, is that if you stripped all the specific gender references out, it would still be a good list of advice, for students of either gender. Here's the list with gender-specific terms removed:
Be realistic about support from faculty. As a general matter, faculty of either gender want to see their students of either gender succeed.…
jdupuis | September 1, 2010The last little while has seen an amazing proliferation of science blogging communities. Scientopia, Guardian Science Blogs and PLoS Blogs are only the three most recent that I know of.
I think it's great -- the more the merrier I say. Of course, as networks take up more and more space in the science blogging ecosystem it seems to me that independent bloggers might feel isolated or under pressure or neglected some how. I don't think that will be a huge problem as independents will continue to thrive in niches large and small and will continue to draw audiences to what they have to say.…
drorzel | September 1, 2010There's been a lot of energy expended blogging and writing about the LA Times's investigation of teacher performance in Los Angeles, using "Value Added Modeling," which basically looks at how much a student's scores improved during a year with a given teacher. Slate rounds up a lot of reactions, in a slightly snarky form, and Kevin Drum has some reactions of his own, along with links to two posts from Kevin Carey, who blogs about this stuff regularly. Finally, Crooked Timber has a post about a recent study showing that value-added models aren't that great (as CT is one of the few political…
drorzel | September 1, 2010There's a new medical study of the effects of alcohol consumption that finds a surprising result:
Controlling only for age and gender, compared to moderate drinkers, abstainers had a more than 2 times increased mortality risk, heavy drinkers had 70% increased risk, and light drinkers had 23% increased risk. A model controlling for former problem drinking status, existing health problems, and key sociodemographic and social-behavioral factors, as well as for age and gender, substantially reduced the mortality effect for abstainers compared to moderate drinkers. However, even after adjusting…
drorzel | August 31, 2010Over in Discover-land, Razib has a couple of posts about the content of science blogs, based on an analysis of the content of the top science blogs according to Wikio. Razib's second post is sparked by a pointed question from the author of the original study:
I'm now curious to find out why there are no 'popular' blogs in certain subjects. Do working condensed matter physicists who want to engage with the public write about astrophysics? Or are astrophysicists the only physicists who want to blog for the public? Or does the public only read astrophysics blogs?
This is, of course, an obvious…
drorzel | August 27, 2010Via Thoreau, a paper from a physicist in Oregon that's pretty much a grenade lobbed into the always-explosive grade inflation discussion:
We use four years of introductory astronomy scores to analyze the ability of the current population to perform college level work and measure the amount of grade inflation across various majors. Using an objective grading scale, one that is independent of grading curves, we find that 29% of intro astronomy students fail to meet minimal standards for college level work. Of the remaining students, 41% achieve satisfactory work, 30% achieve mastery of the…
jdupuis | August 25, 2010The latest issue of ISTL has just been released and, as usual, it's filled with very interesting-looking articles.
The table of contents is below:
Metrics and Science Monograph Collections at the Marston Science Library, University of Florida by Michelle F. Leonard, Stephanie C. Haas, and Vernon N. Kisling, Ph.D, University of Florida
Zoo and Wildlife Libraries: An International Survey by Linda L. Coates and Kaitlyn Rose Tierney, San Diego Zoo
How Much Space Does a Library Need? Justifying Collections Space in an Electronic Age by Nancy J. Butkovich, The Pennsylvania State Universitty…
drorzel | August 25, 2010This one's pretty self-explanatory:
Classes for the new academic year start a week from Monday.survey software
You only get to pick one because that's the way it is. If you need me, I'll be over here scrambling frantically.
drorzel | August 23, 2010While I'm still trying not to think about the new academic term that starts in two weeks (yes, the first day of class is Labor Day, grumble mutter grump), it's beginning to impinge on my consciousness. Thus, this poll on a frequent and annoying phenomenon that recurs with every new academic term:
Students who miss the first day of class in a new academic term should be:online survey
You can choose one and only one answer in this poll. Attempts to submit multiple answers will be given a failing grade, and reported to the Dean as a violation of the Academic Honesty policy.
drorzel | August 20, 2010Johan Larson emails a suggestion for a post topic:
How many profs would it take to offer a good, but not necessarily excellent, undergraduate physics degree?
I can give you an empirical answer to this: Six.
I say that because in the course of my undergraduate physics degree at Williams, I took classes from only six different professors. Five-and-a-half, really, because one of those was half of a team-taught course. I had three-and-a-half classes with one professor, and two others for two classes each.
Of course, that's not a hard lower bound. Some have even suggested that the number could be…
drorzel | August 20, 2010It's nearly time for classes to resume, which means it's time for a zillion stories about Beloit College's annual Kids These Days List, listing off a bunch of things that this year's entering college class, who were mostly born in 1992, have always taken for granted. A sample:
1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.
2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.
3. "Go West, Young College Grad" has always implied "and don't stop until you get to Asia...and learn Chinese along the way."
4. Al Gore has always been animated.
5. Los Angelenos have always been trying…
drorzel | August 18, 2010Daniel Lemire has a new blog post arguing that working long hours is stupid. This collided with Bee's Backreaction post on what keeps physicists up at night, included in this morning's Links Dump.
This got me to thinking about academic work habits, which led to the following poll:
How long will you keep working, continuously, on a difficult problem?Market Research
A bonus follow-up question, that I won't bother putting in poll form, is: How long should your subordinates spend working, continuously, on a difficult problem?
drorzel | August 17, 2010At Inside Higher Ed this morning, they have a news squib about a new report blaming the high cost of college on "administrative bloat." Coincidentally, the Dean Dad has a post pre-emptively responding to this in the course of arguing with a different group:
In terms of administration, what would you cut? Should we stop trying to comply with the ADA? Should we stop evaluating faculty altogether, and just trust that everybody is perfect? Perhaps we should stop giving financial aid, since it requires so many staff. Who cares about accreditation? Who cares about IT? Who cares about payroll? (…
drorzel | August 16, 2010A couple of "kids these days are bad at math" stories crossed my feed reader last week, first a New York Times blog post about remedial math, then a Cocktail Party Physics post on confusion about equals signs. The first was brought to my attention via a locked LiveJournal post taking the obligatory "Who cares if kids know how to factor polynomials, anyway?" tack, which was obvious bait for me, given that I have in the past held forth on the importance of algebra for science students (both of these are, at some level, about algebra).
Of course, these articles aren't about science students, so…
tsmith | August 13, 2010PZ has some additional thoughts on the Bibleflugate retraction up at Pharyngula. Choice quote:
This is a serious concern, to my mind. Scientists are expected to be open and communicative about their work, explaining all the details about how we achieve our results. Yet then we hand that work over to a publisher (usually a for-profit organization), where it is subjected to an arcane process cloaked in mystery that they call peer review. And every once in a while, some strange fluke exposes the inherently arbitrary and chaotic nature of that process, everyone asks "how the hell did that get…
jdupuis | August 12, 2010I recently had an interesting online exchange with Andrew Colgoni, Science Fluencies Libraries at McMaster University in Hamilton, ON. (blog).
He's interested in how I somehow seem up-to-date on all the various cool conferences and happenings in the Science 2.0 space. While I'm not sure I have all the answers on this issue -- and that we all really need to find our own way in our professional development activities -- it is interesting to be able to provide some mid-career advice to an early-career librarian.
Here it is, a slightly edited version of our FriendFeed DM conversation:
Andrew:…
jdupuis | August 5, 2010Dorothea Salo asks the question over on The Book of Trogool.
What do you, scientists, want librarians to know about how you communicate with other scientists? Where do you feel uncertain about the process? Where do you think it's coming up short? Do you think the process should change, and if so, how and how not?
I'm aware that librarians get stuck in our own thought-bubbles just like everybody else--I myself am certainly no exception. Here's a stab at bursting the bubble.
Head on over and let her know!