Academia
drorzel | August 5, 2010This Slate story on the number of Americans who can't swim was kind of surprising to me:
In a 1994 CDC study, 37 percent of American adults said they couldn't swim 24 yards, the length of a typical gymnasium lap pool. A 2008 study conducted by researchers at the University of Memphis found that almost 54 percent of children between 12 and 18 can do no more than splash around the shallow end of a pool. The difference between the two studies is somewhat surprising, as the CDC study suggested that children tend to be better swimmers than adults.
Having grown up in a town that features a large-…
drorzel | August 4, 2010On the reader request thread, commenter Brad had several questions; one led to yesterday's post about superconductors, another is a critical issue in pedagogy:
Finally, why did all of my stat[istical] mech[anics] courses suck?
Statistical Mechanics is the branch of physics that deals with building up macroscopic thermal properties of materials from a microscopic model of gas atoms with particular energy states. It's an important and powerful branch of physics dealing with things like the melting and freezing of various substances, and why entropy always increases, and things like that. It's…
tfk | August 2, 2010T. Ryan Gregory asks this important question: Who is a scientist? It's a followup to a post titled: "Graduate students are not professional scientists. Discuss," which â briefly â argued that grad students are scientists in training, not yet scientists-full-stop. In the later post, he explains:
Here are the criteria I threw out off-handedly for the purpose of discussing the NYT story about science blogs [this one -Josh]:
- Does scientific research for a living,
- Publishes research in peer-reviewed journals,
- Is funded by granting agencies to do it,
- Does not just write about it, or…
drorzel | August 2, 2010Avi Steiner emailed me with a set of questions that are too good not to turn into a blog post:
Being a math/science major at a small liberal arts college, I unfortunately never get the "full" experience of a math/science talk. Since I do plan on eventually attending grad school, I thought it might be beneficial to get an idea as to what the aforementioned "full" experience is. Therefore, I present to you and your readers the following questions:
1. At what point in a group's/individual's research will they choose to give a talk?
2. What sort of questions are asked?
3. Are there any recurring…
drorzel | July 30, 2010The New York Times today has a story with the provocative title Getting Into Med School Without Hard Sciences, about a program at Mount Sinai that allows students to go to med school without taking the three things most dreaded by pre-meds: physics, organic chemistry, and the MCAT:
[I]t came as a total shock to Elizabeth Adler when she discovered, through a singer in her favorite a cappella group at Brown University, that one of the nation's top medical schools admits a small number of students every year who have skipped all three requirements.
Until then, despite being the daughter of a…
jgoldman | July 30, 2010Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we are conducting series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal research of all kinds - biomedical, behavioral, cognitive, and so forth. Interested in how animal research is conducted, or why animal research is important? Think you might want to do some animal research of your own someday? This is the interview series for you.
Dr. Zen Faulkes (website, twitter) is Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Texas-Pan American, where he studies the evolution of behavior and nervous systems, particularly the…
jstemwedel | July 29, 2010At Uncertain Principles, Chad opines that "research methods" look different on the science-y side of campus than they do for his colleagues in the humanities and social sciences:
When the college revised the general education requirements a few years ago, one of the new courses created had as one of its key goals to teach students the difference between primary and secondary sources. Which, again, left me feeling like it didn't really fit our program-- as far as I'm concerned, the "primary source" in physics is the universe. If you did the experiment yourself, then your data constitute a…
drorzel | July 29, 2010I was initially puzzled by the headline "Research-Assignment Handouts Give Students Meager Guidance, Survey Finds," and the opening sentences didn't help much:
Most research-assignment handouts given to undergraduates fail to guide the students toward a comprehensive strategy for completing the work, according to two researchers at the University of Washington who are studying how students conduct research and find information.
My initial reaction was "If I could give them a comprehensive strategy for completing the work, it wouldn't be research." Then I noticed the last three words, and…
drorzel | July 29, 2010My initial reaction to the financial meltdown caused by the housing bubble was "Are our business leaders really that stupid?" Things like this news squib from Inside Higher Ed make me suspect the answer is "yes, they are that stupid":
Business schools -- including such prestigious ones as those of Columbia and Harvard Universities -- are adding courses on social media to the M.B.A. curriculum, Business Week reported. The rapid growth of social media has many companies wanting to know more about how to use various tools, creating an opening for new M.B.A.'s who want to make themselves more…
drorzel | July 27, 2010We have a summer student seminar series in the science and engineering departments here, running two days a week at lunchtime with three students each day giving 15 minute presentations on their summer research projects to other students and faculty.
The student talks are split almost 50/50 overall on whether to provide an outline at the start of the talk or not. About half of the students put up a slide listing the component parts of their talk ("First, I'll give some motivation for the experiment, then I'll talk about the apparatus, then..."), and about half jump right into the talk,…
drorzel | July 27, 2010Via Inside Higher Ed this YouTube video is pretty much a distillation of faculty reaction nationwide to higher education's response to the world economic crisis:
The IHE link gives a little more context to the video, and some of the reaction to it. The arguments here are not all well-founded-- science and engineering will necessarily receive more funding than the liberal arts because teaching and research in science and engineering are vastly more expensive than in the humanities, and many of those central administrative salaries are going to support multicultural and mental health programs…
jdupuis | July 26, 2010Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I pay quite close attention to the InsideHigherEd web magazine. They cover lots of library issues and issues that are relevant to libraries, their blog network is pretty good with solid coverage of higher education issues and Joshua Kim's instructional technology blog covers a lot of ground, much of which is of interest for the library community.
Unfortunately, they've never had a very good blog by a librarian. Until now. (They did make an attempt at a library blog about a year ago. We will not speak of it anymore.)
Go check out the brand…
drorzel | July 26, 2010A few years ago, we ended up trading some classroom space in the Physics part of the building to Psychology, which was renovated into lab space for two of their new(ish) hires. This turned out to be a huge boon not only for the department (the lab space we got in the swap is really very nice), but for our majors. Most of the psychology experiments on campus use student volunteers, and pay a small amount to boost participation. Since the new psych labs were right next to the physics student lounge, our majors were taking part in four or five studies each, and racking up the study participation…
drorzel | July 23, 2010The Dean Dad is worried about remedial math:
In a discussion this week with someone who spends most of her time working with students who are struggling mightily in developmental math, I heard an argument I hadn't given much thought previously: students who have passed algebra and even pre-calc in high school frequently crash and burn when they hit our developmental math, because the high schools let them use calculators and we don't.
[...][P]art of me wonders if we're sacrificing too much on the altar of pencil and paper. It's great to be able to do addition in your head and long division on…
drorzel | July 22, 2010Over at A Most Curious Planet, Alexandra Jellicoe offers a story with the provocative headline Is Science Sexist?, which spins off an anecdote from astronomy:
I was listening to Radio 4 a few months ago and the discussion about gender intelligence lodged in the deeper recesses of my brain unthought-of until recently when I went to see Jocelyn Bell Burnell talking of her 'Eureka' moment. She discovered the existence of neutron stars called Pulsar's in 1967 and I think she can safely be considered one of England's most pioneering and gifted scientists. I was struck by her comments that she…
catdynamics | July 22, 2010Where do you rank in the constellation of stellar astronomers?
The Astronomy Blog is inspired!
This is brilliant.
Brilliant, but a little bit scary.
The Astronomy Blogger ranked astronomers on a H-R diagram:
that is log(google Hits) vs log(refereed Research papers)
Below I shamelessly plagiarize copy fair use an edited version of the key figure.
click to embiggen
Yes, I cruelly edited out the Really Interesting Names at the top and left - you'll just have to click through to the Astronomy Blog to read them, won't you...
That is Me! in blue... just under 100 papers, and google says "…
catdynamics | July 22, 2010but they don't know it yet
feeling a bit bolshie today:
freedom is just another word
for nothing left to sell!
how dare they buy our products
and still they don't respect us!
mood music for the afternoon
drorzel | July 19, 2010I had planned to spend some time this weekend trying to make sense of this new result on topological insulators, and maybe even write up the relevant paper for ResearchBlogging. Family life intervened, though, and I didn't have the time. I get enough of it to understand the basics of what's going on, but there's a whole lot I don't understand about topological insulators generally, so I'd need to do a bunch of reference chasing to get to something I can understand well enough to work back up to this week's Nature paper.
And, to put it bluntly, there just isn't that much reward for the work…
terrasig | July 18, 2010This is not good. Not good at all.
On Friday, Paul Goldberg of The Cancer Letter reported on an investigation into Duke cancer researcher, Anil Potti, MD, and claims made that he was a Rhodes Scholar - in Australia. The misrepresentation was made on grant applications to NIH and the American Cancer Society.
The Cancer Letter, a $375/year go-to newsletter on cancer research, funding, and drug development, has made this issue free at this PDF link.
News & Observer higher education reporter, Eric Ferreri, has a nice overview of the situation. Potti has been placed on administrative leave by…