Academia
catdynamics | July 1, 2010The office of the Vice President for Research at the Pennsylvania State University has released the conclusions of its inquiry into the "climategate" allegations against Prof. Michael Mann.
After a cracker broke into the e-mail archives at the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, a prolonged and creative controversy broke out across the media and the blogosphere.
After substantial, and in some cases highly inappropriate, external pressure, Penn State promptly reviewed the issue. The VP for Research synthesized the claimed allegations into four formal charges of possible…
jstemwedel | July 1, 2010I've just gotten back from a conference, and I was blaming the travel and time zones for the fact that I feel like this:
However, from the looks of things, it seems there is some kind of zombie epidemic on ScienceBlogs today. (I suppose this means I need to talk to the IT guys about internet security issues, if I got zombified through my browsing. Assuming they're still taking help tickets from zombies. I wonder if being a zombie with tenure makes a difference ...)
Anyway, in the meantime I thought it might be useful to break out the workplace safety talk for new students. While I can't…
clock | July 1, 2010Last week, my SciBling Jason Goldman interviewed me for his blog. The questions were not so much about blogging, journalism, Open Access and PLoS (except a little bit at the end) but more about science - how I got into it, what are my grad school experiences, what I think about doing research on animals, and such stuff. Jason posted the interview here, on his blog, on Friday, and he also let me repost it here on my blog as well, under the fold:
Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we're starting a new series of seven-question interviews with people who are doing or have done animal…
jstemwedel | June 30, 2010Via Abi, I learn that Chemistry Blog has posted an interesting letter from a PI to his postdoc dated July 27, 1996. The letter, on official Caltech Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering letterhead, suggests that not all the stories one hears about the unreasonable work hours demanded of postdocs are exaggerated. Indeed, the most surprising thing about the letter is that it puts the PI's expectations in writing.
The letter reads:
Guido,
I would like to provide for you in written form what is expected from you as a member of the research group. In addition to the usual work-day…
jgoldman | June 29, 2010One of my scientific heroes, Richard Feynman, explains confusion and stupidity:
Albert Einstein said: "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called Research."
If you're going to be doing research, you better be comfortable with feeling stupid.
jstemwedel | June 29, 2010One of the most interesting sessions at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting was a panel of men and women who participated in the IGERT program as students and are now working in a variety of different careers. The point of the panel was to hear about the ways that they felt their experiences as IGERT trainees prepared them for their current positions, as well as to identify aspects of their current jobs where more preparation might have been helpful.
The session was moderated by Judy Giordan (President and Co-Founder, Visions in Education, Inc.). The IGERT alums who participated in the…
clock | June 25, 2010....by my SciBling, Jason Goldman at The Thoughtful Animal blog. But this time, it is very little about blogging or Open Access publishing or science journalism, except at the very end. This interview is more about my experience in the academia - how I got into grad school, how I survived it, how and why I left research, the How and Why questions of using animals in research, and more.
I know it's long, but I hope you read and comment - go ahead and click right here and read it right now! ;-)
drorzel | June 25, 2010Inside Higher Ed has a news squib about gender disparities in academic science, which points to a Nature story about a survey on job satisfaction (bad IHE, giving a false impression on the story!). The gender portion of the story is limited to a short section at the end of the article, and one graph:
The larger story is actually pretty positive, but I fear that as IHE did, too much attention will be focused on this one graph (which, by the way, is surprisingly badly done). There's a fairly narrow point about the presentation of this that I think is worth making (even though it will likely be…
jstemwedel | June 25, 2010The funding situation in the California State University system being what it is (scary-bad), departments at my fair university are also scrambling to adjust to a shift in the logic governing resource distribution. It used to be that resources followed enrollments -- that the more students you could pack into your classes, the more money your department would be given to educate students.
Now, in the era of enrollment caps (because the state can't put up its share of the cost for as many students as it used to), it's looking like resources will be driven by how many majors a department can…
drorzel | June 25, 2010Continuing with the uncomfortable questions, H asks a good one:
Union is one of the most expensive colleges in the country. What are students getting for their money? How does Union justify the increase in price over other schools with comparable academics and facilities?
See, now that's an uncomfortable question, especially on an institutional level.
Stripped down to the most basic level, and stated as bluntly as possible, students at an elite private liberal arts college are paying for three things: faculty/facilities, individual attention, and connections.
Faculty and facilities are the…
jgoldman | June 25, 2010Here at Thoughtful Animal headquarters, we're starting a new 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.
I've asked friend, scibling, and trusted advisor Bora Zivkovic (twitter, blog) if he would be our inaugural interviewee. In addition to his extensive blogging here at Scienceblogs, covering…
jstemwedel | June 24, 2010As mentioned in an earlier post, I was recently part of a panel on Digital Science at the NSF IGERT 2010 Project Meeting in Washington, D.C. The meeting itself brought together PIs, trainees, and project coordinators who are involved in a stunning array of interdisciplinary research programs. Since the IGERT program embraces mottos like "get out of the silos" and "think outside the box", my sense is that the Digital Science panel was meant to offer up some new-ish tools for accomplishing tasks that scientists might want to accomplish.
The panelists included Jean-Claude Bradley, who spoke…
drorzel | June 24, 2010Starting at the beginning of the uncomfortable questions left by readers, we have Tex asking:
If physics is the basic science that underlies almost every other science, why do American high schools usually teach it in the 3rd or 4th year, after biology and chemistry? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Physics first, then chemistry, then biology?
Physics is the final course in the standard American high school curriculum for two reasons, as far as I can tell: history and math. History is the less convincing of the two, as it amounts to "the courses are in that order because they've been in…
jgoldman | June 24, 2010Last week, I asked on twitter, and then on the blog, about peoples' preferences for listening to music while doing various types of sciencey work, and conducted an informal survey.
Today I'll give you the (entirely unscientific) results, and in a few days I'll share what research has to say about music and work productivity.
Fifty three scientists (or scientists-in-training) completed the survey. I had predicted that music would be preferred in general, but that as language demands of the task increased, music preference overall would decrease. Since I'm doing this at home and don't have SPSS…
drorzel | June 22, 2010I hate to keep highlighting silly articles in Inside Higher Ed, but they keep publishing silly articles, like Jeffrey DiLeo's argument that humanities journals cannot be ranked because they're all unique and precious flowers too specialized:
Another reason for the roaring silence regarding the ranking of humanities journals regards the high level of sub-disciplinary specialization. In philosophy, there are journals devoted to general areas of philosophy (e.g., logic, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, etc.), to sub-areas of general areas of philosophy (e.g., medical ethics, business ethics,…
clock | June 21, 2010Apparently, someone published a really curmudgeonly and regressive-thinking article about science publishing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, titled We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research. Commenters there are shredding it apart. But you should also see blog posts discussing it, by Female Science Professor, DrugMonkey, Orac and Geekmommyprof. If anything, they do not fisk it thoroughly enough ;-)
drorzel | June 21, 2010The Virtuosi has quickly become a staple of the daily Links Dumps here, but the recent series of posts on experimental physics deserve greater prominence, so here they are:
Life as an Experimenter- Day One
Life as an Experimenter- Day Two
Life as an Experimenter- Day Three
Life as an Experimenter- Reflections
The individual day posts provide an inside look at what it's like to do experimental condensed matter physics, specifically using beam time on an accelerator to do diffraction studies of materials. It's got everything you would like to see in such a story-- equipment failures, sleep…
terrasig | June 18, 2010Reuters Health Executive Editor and proprietor of the excellent Embargo Watch blog, Ivan Oransky, was kind to alert me to this topical paper that appeared in Monday's issue of Annals of Internal Medicine entitled, The Social Mission of Medical Education: Ranking the Schools.
To the credit of the Annals, the full text of the primary article is currently free. An accompanying editorial is behind the subscription wall.
The study was conducted led by Fitzhugh Mullan with Candice Chen, MD, Gretchen Kolsky, and Michael Spagnola from the Department of Health Policy at the George Washington…
jgoldman | June 17, 2010I'm interested in finding out what are peoples' music listening habits while working on various sciencey things. After a small survey and discussion on twitter, I thought I'd bring it to the blogosphere, as people seem to generally have opinions on the matter.
This is going to be far from scientific, but take the below survey, and I'll be back later with the results, as well as some data and thoughts based on the scientific literature.
Also, you can complete the survey even if not all questions apply to you. For example, if you are not a current or former research scientist, but are, for…
jstemwedel | June 17, 2010Chad has posted an interesting discussion of a study of students' academic performance and how it is correlated to their evaluations of the faculty teaching them. The study in question is Carrell, S., & West, J. (2010). Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors Journal of Political Economy, 118 (3), 409-432 (DOI 10.1086/653808) . Go read Chad's post for a detailed discussion of the methodology of the study, since it will likely answer your questions about my quick overview here. After the overview, I'm going to offer a few more thoughts…