Academia
tfk | February 21, 2010Bora Zivkovic is telling the scientists here how to make social media work for them. His big point is that there's no longer a relevant difference between blogs and traditional media â the war between blogs and print journalists is over. The existence of quacks on blogs doesn't invalidate the enterprise of good bloggers, any more than Fox News invalidates TV journalism or the Washington Times invalidates the New York Times. In any media, you choose your sources based on their expertise and their track record.
He isn't mentioning this here, but that's the basic response to Matt Nisbet's…
jstemwedel | February 20, 2010MommyProf wonders whether some of the goings on in her department are ethical. She presents two cases. I'm going to look at them in reverse order.
Case 2: Faculty member is tenure-track and he and I have collaborated on a paper. He was supposed to work on the literature, and sends me a literature review. It reads a little strangely to me, and I check the properties and find that it was actually written by an undergraduate in one of his classes. I write back to him and ask if that undergrad should be an author on the paper, since it would be a fairly major contribution, and he says yes, he…
jstemwedel | February 15, 2010Abel has a thoughtful post on the horrific faculty meeting shooting at University of Alabama Huntsville this past Friday. New information seems to come out every few hours on the shooter, Dr. Amy Bishop, a biologist at the university who had been denied tenure, and I'm nowhere near ready to weigh in on the particulars of the case (at least, not with anything smarter than my viscera). But I do want to say just a little on a pair of questions Abel posed in his post:
Do you think that lack of collegiality is grounds for denial of tenure for a candidate that otherwise meets the basic…
terrasig | February 14, 2010Valued commenter wc just left us a link to one of the most insightful articles to date on Dr. Amy Bishop, the University of Alabama in Huntsville biology professor charged in the shooting deaths of three colleagues where two other professors and an administrative assistant were injured.
In today's Decatur Daily, staff writer Eric Fleischauer has an extended interview with UAH psychology professor Eric Seemann. You really should read the whole thing because it provides an inside view of Bishop's personality and relationships. But here is a critical passage:
Despite her excellent research…
terrasig | February 13, 2010First and foremost our condolences go to all our our colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and others in the Huntsville science community such as Twitter friend, @girlscientist, Dr. Chris Gunter.
As we are learning, yesterday's shooting occurred after UAH Assistant Professor of Biology, Dr. Amy Bishop, learned that she would not be awarded tenure. My sentiment is very much that of my colleague, DrugMonkey. Originally appointed as a faculty member in 2003, she had previously been an Instructor at Harvard University after earning her PhD in Medical Sciences there in 1998.
We…
jstemwedel | February 11, 2010Following DrugMonkey's lead, I'm going to play along on the meme proposed by Female Science Professor:
What tradition or other general characteristic of academia would you like to see eliminated completely?
According to the rules, which I just invented, the things to be eliminated have to be of a general nature. So, for example, the answer "my department chair" or "my university's moronic president" are unacceptable unless you want to eliminate the general concept of department chairs or university presidents.
The candidates for disposal can be anything to do with academia, from the most…
drorzel | February 10, 2010The never-ending discussion of whether the Web can or should replace books has shifted into the corners of blogdom that I follow again, with Kevin Drum arguing for more books, Henry Farrell arguing for shorter books, and Jim Henley agreeing with Henry, and expanding it to fiction. They're all at least partly right-- more shorter books would be a good thing.
I do want to pick up on one thing Kevin said, though. He writes:
This is, I grant, a purely personal reaction, but one of my occasional frustrations with the blogosphere is a sense that people sometimes think they can understand complex…
jstemwedel | February 10, 2010Five years ago today, I put up the first post on a blog that was mean to capture the overflow of discussions and ideas from my "Ethics in Science" class. Back then, I wasn't entirely sure that I'd manage to maintain the blog through the end of the semester.
It just goes to show you that you can't always tell which of the things you try will become sustainable practices (although maybe the ones that don't involve exercise equipment have better odds).
On the occasion of my fifth blogiversary, I'm reflecting on a question posed by BlogHer upon BlogHer's 5th anniversary:
What are five…
drorzel | February 9, 2010No substantive blogging for you today, as my alarm clock decided not to go off, causing me to oversleep by the hour that I usually spend on bloggy things. So that you're not left without blog-related entertainment, though, here's an appropriate poll topic:
How early do you have to set your alarm to get to work/class on time?(polling)
Of course, despite oversleeping by a full hour, I was still here twenty minutes before this morning's lab. And probably a good half-hour before the majority of my students. Their late arrival will do wonders for my mood.
catdynamics | February 7, 2010The Yorkshire Ranter analyses the Climate Research Unity coverage in your friendly neighbourhood grauniad.
Robert P. points us to an analysis of the crack itself - kinda blah. Basically trawling through a misconfigured server by a script kiddie.
drorzel | February 7, 2010My talk at Maryland last Thursday went pretty well-- the impending Snowpocalypse kept the audience down, as people tried to fit in enough work to compensate for the Friday shutdown, but the people who were there seemed to like it, and asked good questions. If you weren't there, but want to know what I talked about, here are the slides on SlideShare:
Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Weblogs Can Help
View more presentations from Chad Orzel.
This flattens out some of the more animation-dependent jokes, but gets you the basic idea. It is, of…
jstemwedel | February 5, 2010In my earlier post about the findings of the Penn State inquiry committee looking into allegations of research misconduct against Michael Mann, I mentioned that the one allegation that was found to merit further investigation may have broad implications for how the public understands what good scientific work looks like, and for how scientists themselves understand what good scientific work looks like.
Some of the commenters on that post seemed interested in discussing those implications. Others, not so much. As commenter Evan Harper notes:
It is clear that there are two discussions in…
catdynamics | February 4, 2010Penn State has released the preliminary conclusions of its inquiry into the purloined e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
Dr Free-Ride provides an excellent discussion
PSU story on the internal inquiry
Full report (pdf)
In the meantime, the Grauniad reports police questioned a UEA scientist about the original cracking of the CRU e-mail archive
There has been considerable external pressure on PSU on this issue, with protests planned by conservative student groups this friday on campus, weather prermitting...
The Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy…
jstemwedel | February 4, 2010Remember "ClimateGate", that well-publicized storm of controversy that erupted when numerous email messages from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) webserver at the University of East Anglia were stolen by hackers and widely distributed? One of the events set in motion by ClimateGate was a formal inquiry concerning allegations of research conduct against Dr. Michael E. Mann, a professor in the Department of Meteorology at The Pennsylvania State University.
The report (PDF) from that inquiry has been released, so we're going to have a look at it here.
This report contains a lot of discussion of…
jstemwedel | February 3, 2010Recently in my inbox, I found a request for advice unlike any I'd received before. Given the detail in the request, I don't trust myself to paraphrase it. As you'll see, I've redacted the names of the people, university, and government agency involved. I have, however, kept the rest of the query (including the original punctuation) intact.
In 2004 I denounced a music piracy case caused by a [U.S. government agency] contractor and [Research University X] computer scientist: Dr. [let's call him "Jolly Roger"]. This man used peer to peer technology to create CDs for third party distribution…
drorzel | February 3, 2010Yesterday's post on a variation of the "Twin Paradox" with both twins accelerating was very successful-- 337 people voted in the first poll question, as of a little before 9am, and the comments to the original post are full of lively discussion. That's awesome.
I wish I could take credit for it, but the problem posed is not original to me. It comes from a 1989 paper in the American Journal of Physics, which also includes the following illustration setting up the situation:
The article contains a full explanation, and also the following figure illustrating the result:
The correct answer is…
drorzel | February 2, 2010Tuesday is a heavy teaching day for me-- I'm in lab from 9-4, basically-- so here's something to occupy the time. Oh, no! It's a pop quiz:
Pop quizzes are:(survey software)
(In case the phrase is an American idiom, a "pop quiz" refers to a short test given in class with no advance warning.)
This was inspired by Dermot O'Brien at Inside Higher Ed, who reports on taking his first quiz as a science student. The general topic of quizzes is one that generates a fair bit of heat, though, so I thought I'd see what my readers think of it.
My quiz policy as of a year or so ago was to give many short…
jstemwedel | February 1, 2010I have, of late, received a number of emails asking advice on matters somewhere in the territory between ethics, etiquette, and effective communication with members of the tribe of science. While I'm no Ann Landers (as has been noted before), I'll do my best to answer these questions on the blog when I can, largely so my very insightful commentariat can chime in and make the resulting advice better than what I could generate on my own.
Today we have a question from a reader struggling with the question of how to address one letter to two doctors. He writes:
Hi Dr Free-Ride,
I'm not sure if…
jstemwedel | February 1, 2010Here are some of the thoughts and questions that stayed with me from this session. (Here are my tweets from the session and the session's wiki page.)
One of the things I found interesting about this session was that the session leaders' approach to the broad issue of promoting gender and ethnic diversity in science, engineering, technology, and M [mathematics here? I get the impression that sometimes the M in STEM is math and sometimes it's medicine, but I'm happy to set this taxonomic issue aside] was to look at particular initiatives, activities, or responses from smaller communities…
jstemwedel | January 29, 2010This, our first week of classes of the Spring semester, also marked the return of regular publication of the daily student newspaper. Since I'm not behind on grading yet (huzzah for the first week of classes!), I picked up yesterday's copy and read one of the front-page articles on my way to my office.
And dagnabbit if that article didn't angry up my blood.
The trouble is, I'm having a hard time figuring out where properly to direct that anger.
The article, which appeared below the fold, was titled "U.S. Health Secretary urges vaccinations". It drew from a January 26, 2010 conference call…