Academia
drorzel | January 29, 2010I'm having a little trouble typing, because the temperature in my office at the moment is around 55 F, and my hands are getting really cold. This is because of "deferred maintenance," which means "we're saving money by not maintaining the air-handling systems in our academic buildings (among other things)." The budget has been tight every year since I got here, and this building is fairly old, so things don't work as well as they might.
The background noise while I'm typing is the sound of construction on the new Wold Building (webcam link). This is a multi-million-dollar new building…
jstemwedel | January 28, 2010... to the student in my "Ethics in Science" course.
Today was our second class meeting, which is essentially the first real class meeting -- the one in which, instead of just focusing on the overall arc of the course, and the assignments you'll be doing, and the mechanics of finding the information you need on the course website, there was actual content to discuss.
Owing to my sabbatical year, it's been two years since I taught this course. It's true that much of that sabbatical was devoted to thinking and writing about the subject matter of the course, but I'll admit that I had a moment…
jstemwedel | January 25, 2010(As before, I'm still not sure whether, in the metaphor, the factory is building monkeys or staffed by monkeys. Perhaps, really, we're in the business of making educated monkeys, and the problem is that our administration views this as akin to making widgets. Anyway, the point is: Explosions! Chaos! Shrieking! Brachiating along the pieces of wreckage!)
We had our beginning-of-the-semester faculty meeting today, and I have to conclude that our department is in an abusive relationship with the university (and system) administration.
Why I'm convinced of this is the simple fact that we have…
catdynamics | January 23, 2010
Andrew Lange RIP.
Andrew Lange - story at Cosmic Variance
Lange's "How DId the Universe Begin" Segre Distinguished Lecture at Berkeley Nov 2009.
Lange's 2004 KITP talk on "Future Directions in Cosmic Microwave Background Observations"
Audio/Web Cam
terrasig | January 22, 2010Here's a great, last-minute opportunity to interact one-on-one with a major player in the field of environmental and dietary influences on gene expression. From the Duke University Office of News and Communications:
Charles Darwin famously reasoned that genetic traits change over many generations through natural selection, but the new field of “epigenetics” is finding that nurture can change nature more directly. Duke Professor Randy Jirtle will discuss epigenetics and answer viewers’ questions during a live “Office Hours” webcast interview at noon (17:00 GMT) Friday, Jan. 22, on Duke’s…
drorzel | January 21, 2010I've mentioned before that I'm going to be giving an invited talk in the LaserFest session at the APS March Meeting. I finally got around to registering for the meeting, and booking my travel. $1,500 on the college credit card-- whee!
The March Meeting program is one of the more intimidating meeting programs I've ever seen-- there are 42 parallel sessions in every time block. Yikes. I thought DAMOP was getting to be a little too big to navigate, but this is ridiculous...
Speaking of DAMOP, I'll also be going to the 2010 DAMOP Meeting in Houston. I haven't booked my travel for that, yet,…
drorzel | January 21, 2010I'm getting considerably more email from people I don't know these days, which has me wondering about the ways people address one another. Hence, a poll:
You are writing an email to a person you have never met before, who you know to be employed by a college or university. What salutation do you use?(survey software)
All of the serious answers are risky:
1) Not all doctors are professors.
2) Not all professors are doctors.
3) Some misters and mizzes strongly prefer to be doctors or professors.
4) Many people react poorly to the automatic first-name basis.
5) Some dawgs you shouldn't "Hey."…
jstemwedel | January 20, 2010Back in December (or as we academics call it, Exam-Grading Season), esteemed commenter Ewan told us about a horrifying situation that was unfolding for him:
Probably not totally relevant, but frankly I'm still in a little shock.
Graded exams Friday evening before heading out for weekend. Noted some really strong efforts (take-home exam), some really lame, nothing special. Then: two word-for-word identical, typos-and-all, answers with *many* unique characteristics compared to all other answerers of that Q, even down to the same joke-aside-to-the-professor.
Ack, really? Check. Yep, really, and…
jstemwedel | January 19, 2010Session description: The conference timing may keep some attendees away in their hometowns participating in local MLK activities. Therefore, we are introducing a session to promote the principles of Dr King in the context of online science communication: promoting social justice and eliminating racism in areas ranging from healthcare to scientific career paths. We plan to take a different angle from the blogging about gender/race session: how do we cultivate emerging science writers from underrepresented groups to promote science, for example, in areas of health disparities (i.e., diabetes,…
drorzel | January 18, 2010A comment on the earlier poll asked about regular series of departmental talks, which the author called a department seminar. We have such a series of talks, bringing in roughly one outside speaker per week, but we call it a colloquium. This calls for a poll to settle the question:
An academic department has a talk by an outside speaker once a week. This is called:(surveys)
If you have a particular reason for preferring one or the other, please feel free to explain it in comments.
drorzel | January 18, 2010The always interesting Timothy Burke has a post on the economics of conference attendance, inspired by Brian Croxall's essay about why he didn't attend the MLA. The key problem for both of them is that the way the academic job market is structured inn the humanities forces job seekers to attend the MLA for "screening interviews," used to cut a long list of applicants down to the three or so who will be invited to campus.
This is almost a two cultures moment, because this isn't the situation in my part of academia. It's not that the job market is any better, but there isn't the same automatic…
catdynamics | January 17, 2010signs of the times at the MLA
There are, currently, 73 faculty level positions gossiped about on the Astrophysics Jobs Rumour Mill - this seems a bit low, even considering we are mid-season and not all jobs will be wiki'd yet.
As a non-random sample, I looked at the 2006-7 season and there were then 184 positions rumourmongered about.
IF that is representative, it is a fearsome statistic.
But, there aren't a lot of astro related jobs and Poisson noise is fractionally large.
Even then, I am sensing a > 3 σ fluctuation in the job market.
But, other faculties are larger, and provide more…
terrasig | January 14, 2010Hearty congratulations this morning to a group of early-career investigators who received this award yesterday in Washington, DC:
The Presidential Award for Early Career Scientists and Engineers was established in 1996 and is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. [emphasis mine] Awardees are selected on the basis of two criteria: pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology; and a commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education…
scientificactivist | January 11, 2010Chad Orzel, of Uncertain Principles, has a nice article today in Inside Higher Ed about the value of science blogging, both in his own career and in the scientific process in general. This is a view that I of course agree with and think is important, and Chad brings a unique perspective on the issue.
Go check out his article, but here's a taste:
As essential as this [communication] step is, it is in many ways the weakest link in the scientific process today. While there are more scientific papers published today than ever before, a combination of technical sophistication and scientific…
drorzel | January 11, 2010I've made a few references to book-related things that were in the pipeline in recent Obsessive Updates. The first of those has just gone live, an opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed on how the book came about and why more academic scientists should have blogs:
When I started my blog in 2002, I had no idea it would lead me to talking to my dog about physics. Let alone to writing a book about explaining physics to my dog.
I thought of the blog as a way to talk a bit about politics, pop culture, and academic science, and a place to let off a little steam as I went through the tenure process (I…
terrasig | January 10, 2010
Next weekend at ScienceOnline2010, I'll be co-moderating a session on encouraging scientists and science trainees from underrepresented groups to participate in social media. I will be working with Damond Nollan, a social media specialist and Web Services Manager at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). Damond is the author of the aptly-titled blog, In The Mind of Damond Nollan. The whys and hows are what we hope to discuss in the outline below.
The reason for calling this the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Session stems from the fact that this conference has been held for the last four…
drorzel | January 10, 2010Every year, John Brockman asks a big selection of smart people to answer some question or another, and posts it on the Internet to provoke discussion. This year's question is "How is the Internet changing the way you think?"
This always seems like a better idea than it ends up being in practice, because the whole thing is presented using Brockman's mad circa-1997 web design skills (at least, I hope he's doing it himself. If he's paying someone to put this together, he's being ripped off). On my large-ish desktop monitor, I have to hit "Page Down" five times to get from the top of the page to…
terrasig | January 6, 2010This quick post is in response to one by DrugMonkey a few days ago entitled, "Nope, I just get my regular salary..." Drug speaks of the realities of federal research grant-supported scientists at US universities and research institutes and how the apparent large dollar figure grants do not line the pockets or supplement the salary of principal investigators.
Yes, there are some caveats here in that many institutions now offer professors a base salary that can be increased by some percentage if they receive X grant dollars or % effort. This was started at some institutions by taking one's…
catdynamics | January 4, 2010The annual AAS meeting opened up with the award of the van Biesbroeck Prize of the society to Father Dr George Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory.
The van Biesbroeck Prize is for extraordinary service to astronomy, in particular his role organizing the Vatican Observatory Summer Schools, and the role he has played at the juncture of science and religion.
A topic that occasionally stirs sciencebloggers, and their readers, from torpor.
Dr Coyne gave a brief and gracious speech, but touched on what I thought was a bit of a strawman: he appealed, and I paraphrase, for people to…
drorzel | December 31, 2009A couple of days ago, the LHC Blog asked about the future funding of the arxiv pre-print server, currently hosted at Cornell. Cornell is looking to get some external funding, though:
Currently the plan is to ask the "heaviest user institutions" (other university library systems) to voluntarily contribute to support arXiv operational costs. The FAQ states that the library has already secured commitments from 11 of the 20 institutions that make the most use of the arXiv. (I've seen an unofficial list; these include many of the 'big name research institutes' around the world.) In return, besides…