Academia
drorzel | May 6, 2010Tomorrow is the annual Steinmetz Symposium at Union, where students who have done some sort of research present their results. Which means that today there are a lot of students fretting about having to give a public presentation tomorrow.
Just to remind them that there are worse things than giving a research talk to a fairly sympathetic audience, here's a poll about scary things:
Which of these things frightens you the most?Market Research
So, you see, it could be a lot worse...
jdupuis | May 4, 2010That's the title of the short article I have in our most recent York Libraries Faculty Newsletter. It's a rejigged version for faculty of the two posts I did a while back on the blog I use for IL sessions, here and here. I'll be doing a more formal report on the IL blog at an upcoming conference, but that's for another post.
A lot of the newsletter is of local interest only, but there are a couple of articles that will have a broader appeal:
Information Literacy and Peer Tutors in the Classroom
Research Study on Perceptions of IL
It's also worth pointing out the short profile of Toni…
drorzel | May 4, 2010As James Nicoll is fond of saying, context is for the weak. So here's a context-free poll regarding the reporting of election results:
Releasing a rank-ordered list of candidates with vote totals after a contested election is:online survey
If you'd like to explain what context you might imagine this to have in the comments, that could be fun to see.
jdupuis | April 30, 2010From The Cronk of Higher Education, New First Year Experience Class: How To Not Be An Asshole, this is very funny.
The six-week class is comprised of five modules:
So You're Drunk: A Guide To Quietly Stumbling Home
Street Signs Are Not Dorm Room Decorations
Streaking: A Fast-Track To Suspension
Noises Neighbors Hate To Hear After 10 pm
Nine Reasons the Police Will Handcuff You
Current students expressed skepticism about the offering.
"I think it's retarded," remarked Marco Miller, a current first year student. "Sometimes, when I'm mad, I just want to pee on a statue or throw bottles at…
jstemwedel | April 29, 2010From the last poll you probably guessed that this one was coming.
I expect my graduate students to be working:Market Research
I'll be interested to see whether there's any correspondence between the hours demanded by PIs who read this blog and the hours demanded of graduate students who read this blog.
Once again, feel free to discuss the issue of appropriate student workload and/or humane management of graduate students in the comments.
catdynamics | April 29, 2010What Chuck Norris can never do.
The question whose answer is 42
Who the jams are and why we must kick them out
The axioms of physics
Whether Hissing Sid was guilty
Whether P=NP
How 7/3 arises in Navier-Stokes theory
The bin you can never choose from
Whether to be or not to be
W'
Our place in the universe
The chemistry of Cold Dark Matter
What evil is
How magnetic fields reconnect
The emergence of consciousness
What life is
Where the aliens are
The Nine Billion Names of God
Whether any given program will halt
But I ain't telling.
Do you know?
jstemwedel | April 29, 2010The issue came up in my "Ethics in Science" class today, so I figured it was worth mounting a quick (and obviously unscientific) poll:
My graduate advisor expects or requires me to work:survey software
Feel free to discuss in the comments.
jstemwedel | April 28, 2010Yesterday in my "Ethics in Science" class, we were discussing mentoring. Near the end of the class meeting, I noted that scientists in training have a resource nowadays that just wasn't available during my misspent scientific youth (back in the last millennium): the blogosphere.
What does the blogosphere have to do with mentoring?
For one thing, it can give you a glimpse of the lives of people who are working out how how to become grown-up scientists, or how to combine a scientific career with a life outside of that career. The wide array of scientists at different career stages working out…
jstemwedel | April 27, 2010As we creep toward the end of the spring semester, I noticed a story at Inside Higher Ed about a commencement address gone wrong:
Connecticut College is having a painful examination of last year's student speech.
The student newspaper, The College Voice, revealed that the student speaker's talk featured considerable material that came from a 2008 commencement address at Duke University by the author Barbara Kingsolver -- a talk that turns up on some lists of the best commencement talks ever. While the college has known about the plagiarism for months, the incident was not revealed until this…
jstemwedel | April 22, 2010I really don't know what to say about this news item, except that it had better mean that the California State University presumptively* views blogging on one's own time and bandwidth as fully compatible with a professorial appointment, regardless of the subject matter on which the blog is focused or the views expressed by the academic doing the blogging.
Otherwise, there is a pretty messed up double-standard in place.
______
*Obviously, violating FERPA, HIPAA, or other laws or regulations would count against that presumption.
jstemwedel | April 22, 2010In recent days, there have been discussions of conditions for postdoctoral fellows, and about the ways that these conditions might make it challenging to tackle the problem of the "leaky pipeline" for women in science.
For example, in comments at DrugMonkey's blog, bsci opines:
Most people start a postdoc between the age of 25 and 30. Even in the academic world, a substantial portion of people are married by that age and a smaller, but non-trivial, proportion have children. How these people are supported on post-doc stipends is definitely an issue even in the first years of postdochood.
When…
revere | April 21, 2010Yesterday we posted on our strong support for open access publishing of tax payer supported research. We are taxpayer supported scientists (at least our NIH grants are) and we consider our work to be the property of the public, who paid for it. Whenever possible (which is most of the time) we do publish in freely accessible journals. Making data freely accessible is more controversial, but we also support this, perhaps with a reasonable grace period to allow scientists to have priority for data they expended effort to collect and with reasonable safeguards for confidentiality and privacy when…
jstemwedel | April 21, 2010I'll confess that I am not one who spends much time reading the reviews of books posted on the websites of online booksellers. By the time I'm within a click of those reviews, I pretty much know what I want. However, a lot of people find them helpful, and the ability to post your own review of a book (or a film, or a product, or a business) online seems to give consumers more of a voice rather than leaving it to "professional" reviewers or tastemakers.
Who, after all, knows whether those professional reviewers' first loyalties are to the public?
But, unsurprisingly, it turns out that…
jdupuis | April 20, 2010That's the topic for the most recent Schubmehl-Prein Prize for Best Essay on Social Impact of Computing.
The Schubmehl-Prein Prize for best analysis of the social impact of a particular aspect of computing technology will be awarded to a student who is a high school junior in academic year 2009-2010. The first-place award is $1,000, the second-place award is $500, and the third-place award is $250. Winning entries are traditionally published in the Association for Computing Machinery's Computers and Society online magazine.
The winners of the 2009 contest are published in the most recent…
jstemwedel | April 20, 2010I think I've mentioned once or twice that the California State University system (of which my fair campus is a part) has been experiencing a bit of a budget crisis.
Well, while there may be glimmers of hope for a recovery in the rest of the economy, we seem to be on the cusp of things getting much, much worse.
In the coming academic year, we won't be using furloughs to try to save money. Instead, beyond employing laying of lots of lecturers (who, because they are classified as "temporary" employees, despite the fact that many of them have taught here for decades, aren't counted as being laid…
jstemwedel | April 19, 2010Over at the DrugMonkey blog, PhysioProf noted that a push to increase NIH postdoctoral fellowship stipend levels by 6% may have the effect of reducing the number of postdoctoral positions available.
To this, the postdoctoral masses responded with something along the lines of, "Hey, it's possible that there are too damn many postdocs already (and fighting for those rare tenure-track positions in a slightly less crowded field might be better)," and "Being able to pay my damn bills might significantly improve my quality of postdoctoral life." There were also the expected mentions of the fact…
terrasig | April 17, 2010I've often remarked that the beauty of this blog is that more people read here every day than I would reach in even the largest class I teach. Moreover, far more people read this blog than will ever read my peer-reviewed scientific publications. And that's even considering that we have very modest traffic numbers here for ScienceBlogs.com. Of course, Terra Sig readers are very discriminating - and good-looking, erudite, and probably even smell good, too.
This morning, my Twitter feed brought me a post from the blog, University of Venus, as referred to me by HASTAC Director of New Media…
jdupuis | April 15, 2010A month or so ago I posted on Scholarly Societies: Why Bother?, basically on the challenges that scholarly societies face in the digital age. I got a few good comments, getting a nice discussion going.
I also posed a few questions directly to scholarly societies but unfortunately didn't get any comments from any of the various societies themselves. I did find that a bit disappointing in that the public conversation seemed to be happening without them. Never a good thing in the digital age.
Today, however, Kevin Marvel of the American Astronomical Society added a comment to my original…
terrasig | April 14, 2010Down on the left sidebar you'll see a little gizmo for SiteMeter, a service that measures one's blog traffic and gives all sorts of tidbits about how readers got to the blog and a very general idea of where they are coming from. Most bloggers pay attention to the numbers of visitors but I have always been more interested in how readers get here and what posts they are reading.
One value of SiteMeter is to keep tabs on search terms that bring people here to learn of breaking stories. So, when I saw a bunch of hits starting yesterday with search terms like "hydrogen sulfide," I feared the…
drorzel | April 13, 2010I am currently on a committee looking to set some standards for technical writing in the introductory engineering sequence (which means the first two terms of physics, as they constitute 50-67% of the classes common to all first-year engineers). One of our jobs is to come up with a list of skills that we want to particularly emphasize in student writing in the first year.
I've already sent this query to my colleagues, who are the votes that really matter, but this seems like a worthy subject for a blog poll. If nothing else, it will be interesting to see if my wise and worldly readers prefer…