Academia
drorzel | December 10, 2009Months ago, during the DonorsChoose fundraiser, I offered to answer questions from people who donated to the Challenge. I then promptly forgot to respond to the questions sent in. Mea maxima culpa. Here's a way-too-late response to a good question from "tcmJOE":
I've spent the past few years trying to explore physics and figure out what I would be interested in doing--I've settled more towards energy research, somewhere between CM and MatSci, but I've tried at a variety of different things in the along the way. So my question for you is: How did you end up in AMO? Were there any other fields…
terrasig | December 10, 2009
As I have said on occasion, the health care insurance reform debate seems to have underestimated the role of the clinically-trained pharmacist in improving care and cutting health care costs. Hands-on community-based drug management models have been operating around the US with far less fanfare than cut-rate prescriptions at Wal-Mart or CVS Caremark.
So I was delighted to learn via Phoenix pharmacist commenter, Michael Guzzo, that El Rio Community Health Center in Tucson, Arizona, was recognized this past summer with a 2009 Pinnacle Award from the American Pharmacists Association (APhA)…
drorzel | December 9, 2009Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber has a very good post about schools that appear to "beat the odds", getting good results with populations that don't typically do well in school. It does an excellent job of laying out the problems with the vast majority of attempts to determine which schools are "beating the odds," let alone what methods are best to use for this. It turns out to be a lot harder to measure than most people think-- I was particularly struck by this bit:
It gets worse, thanks to my colleague Doug Harris, in his paper, “High flying schools, student disadvantage, and the logic of…
terrasig | December 9, 2009By way of my substance abuse blogger colleague, The Discovering Alcoholic, I learned of yesterday's New York Times article by Sarah Kershaw on Dr. A. Thomas McLellan. McLellan is a psychologist and drug abuse researcher with over 400 peer-reviewed publications to his credit. He held an academic appointment at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and was scientific director of the Treatment Research Institute which he co-founded in 1992 with Jack Durell, MD, and other researchers from Penn's Center for the Studies of Addiction.
However, McLellan is not a career bureaucrat like…
jstemwedel | December 8, 2009In response to my post yesterday considering some of the difficulties in restaffing a course when its professor falls ill, Leigh commented:
Sometimes nothing can be done. Last winter I had to cancel my evolution course, which doubles as a laboratory in the philosophy of science, because of a serious illness. (I had already given the course in the fall; I voluntarily added the winter one because the fall course was doubly oversubscribed.) Fortunately this happened just after the course started, so the students were minimally lurchified. The course is quite idiosyncratic, with no actual…
drorzel | December 8, 2009There's been a bit of a kerfuffle in the SF blogosphere about what writers should be paid for short fiction, which has led to a lot of people posting lists of their short fiction and what they were paid for it (Scalzi has links to most of them). This naturally leads me to wonder what the analogous situation for non-fiction is (being that I am vastly more likely to be paid money for non-fiction pieces than fiction).
Of course, I can't claim a long list of sales that I can list as my contribution to the discussion. I've only had a handful of pieces printed in commercial outlets: two pieces (so…
sb admin | December 8, 2009From the American Geophysical Union's Twitter feed ( @theAGU ):
Looking for a geoblogger to discuss blogging at Communicating your Science workshop Sunday Dec. 13 morning #AGU09 Contact mjvinas@agu.org
(I'm not going. Have fun in San Francisco - I'll be at home, grading.)
jstemwedel | December 7, 2009In comments on my earlier post about what happens to a college course in progress when the professor teaching it dies, a lot of folks raised interesting questions about what would be the fair policy to adopt with respect to student grades. I think actually implementing whatever we might agree was a fair grading policy could be complicated by practical considerations, like whether the professor had left behind updated grade records that were accessible to his or her department, whether he or she had already written a final exam (and a guide to grading that final exam), etc.
It's an…
terrasig | December 7, 2009
An article by Paul Davidson in this morning's USA Today reminded me of another reason why we need health care reform in the United States, or at least a move away from employment-linked health coverage: temporary employees may soon comprise 25% of the national workforce.
An encouraging jobs report Friday underscored the growing prominence of temporary workers who some experts predict could constitute up to a quarter of the workforce in a few years.
A big reason employers shed a far-less-than-expected 11,000 jobs last month is that temporary staffing agencies found slots for 52,000…
drorzel | December 7, 2009It's that time of year again when I have to fill out my annual Faculty Activities Sheet, reporting on everything I did last academic year. Technically, I should've done this a while back, but it always slips into the December break.
This always takes much longer than it ought to, in large part because it's hard to remember exactly when certain significant things happened, which leads to a lot of searching of my email trying to determine when various things saw print, and which of the available categories it fits in. I probably really ought to keep a running tally of my activities as the year…
tsmith | December 6, 2009Recently, a bit of a kerfuffle has sprung up around the choice of entries included in The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, edited by Richard Dawkins. The book contains 83 examples of the "finest writing by scientists." However, DrHGG noted:
Of 83 texts Professor D has selected 3 written by women. That's about 3.6%. How hard could it be to find a handful more? Like 10%? It would still be a wiener fest.
She also notes that of those 3, one is even left out of the "Featured Writers" section, as it was co-written with her husband (who received all the credit).
Sheril brought this up on her…
terrasig | December 6, 2009I posed this question earlier today on Twitter and have already garnered a good number of responses.
STEM - science, technology, engineering, and mathematics - is the acronym used by educators, researchers, and funding agencies focused on fundamental science. The US National Science Foundation, the primarily US STEM funding agency, states:
As described in our strategic plan, NSF is the only federal agency whose mission includes support for all fields of fundamental science and engineering, except for medical sciences.
My reason for asking is that I was going to write a post that would…
terrasig | December 5, 2009Alright. I understand the prohibition on not taking photos of presenters' data.
However, prohibiting Twittering?
Use of cameras and all other recording devices (this includes digital, film, and cell phone cameras, as well as audio recordings) are strictly prohibited in all session rooms, in the Exhibit Hall, and in all poster and oral presentation sessions. Twittering (see above) and other forms of communication involving replication of data are strictly prohibited at the Annual Meeting or before publication, whether data presented are in the Exhibit Hall, poster area, poster sessions, or…
revere | December 5, 2009If you are a publishing scientist this will hit home. It's making the rounds of the science community, so you may have seen it, but if you haven't, it's hilarious. In fact it's still hilarious after the third and fourth times through. Warning: If you are sensitive about Hitler associated parodies, don't watch it; I take my cue from Mel Brooks on that subject [added: in light of a comment from a German speaker, please take this warning seriously. While the German dialog is irrelevant and it is the English subtitles that are funny, if hearing and understanding the German in this already much…
jstemwedel | December 4, 2009To amuse you while I attend to work that needs doing, I offer a picture of an object on my desk at work.
A couple of questions for you, dear readers:
1. What is this?
2. Why do I have it?
(I did not, in fact, get it for myself. It was given to me in a specific context. If necessary, I'll entertain yes-or-no questions in the comments to help you along.)
The first commenter who answers both questions correctly gets to assign me the topic of my next substantive post.
drorzel | December 3, 2009I spent an inordinate amount of time yesterday reading an economics paper, specifically the one about academic salaries and reputations mentioned on the Freakonomics blog. There's a pdf available from that post, if you'd like to read it for yourself.
The basic idea is that they looked at the publication records of several hundred full professors of economics, and publicly available salary data for many of the same faculty, and tried to correlate those with the "reputation" of the professors in question. They used a couple of indirect means to assign each faculty member a "reputation," mostly…
jstemwedel | December 2, 2009One is that my hands are tired from writing all those comments, which means I don't feel like typing.
Another is described in this brief video.
jstemwedel | December 1, 2009At the end of one of my class meetings today, one of the students noted that her professor for another of her courses this term died about a week ago.
Not that anyone said out loud that this semester is what killed him.
Anyway, a few other students asked her what was happening with that course to finish out the term. She said that the home department for the course was giving the students the benefit of the doubt and giving them all A's. (I don't know if this is for the final exam/project/whatever in that course, or for the final course grade. I suppose it depends on whether the deceased…
jstemwedel | November 30, 2009It's the last day of November. I have three more meetings with each of my classes before finals. I have oodles of grading to do before finals. I have one big administrative task and at least a dozen smaller ones to do before the end of the semester.
And, at the moment, I feel as though the weight of the semester is pressing down on me, like the stones used to press to death that one man so sentenced in the Salem witch trials.
I have always thought I preferred the semester system to the quarter system, as academic calendars go -- a longer calendar giving you a more reasonable amount of time…
drorzel | November 28, 2009The New York Times list of "Notable Books for 2009" has been released, which means it's time for my annual rant about how they've slighted science books. So, how did they do this year? Here are the science books on this year's list:
The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn By LOUISA GILDER
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science By RICHARD HOLMES
Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places By BILL STREEVER
The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America By STEVEN JOHNSON
The Strangest…