Academia
scientificactivist | October 20, 2009Just as I was in the process of finishing my doctorate in August, I found out that my first first-author paper had been accepted for publication by The EMBO Journal. This was good news, because we were reporting some pretty fundamental findings in a relatively saturated field, and one of our competitors had managed to successfully stall the acceptance of this paper since March. Up until that point, witnessing this happen firsthand had been a somewhat frustrating and disillusioning experience for a young scientist, but I think that we were vindicated in the end. Anyway, this paper--and another…
scientificactivist | October 19, 2009Late last week, I received emails from two journals (The Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) and PLoS ONE) indicating that they are now incorporating interactive 3D images of molecular structures in their papers. The atomic coordinates of all published biomolecular structures have been available for some time at the Protein Data Bank. However, making sense of something as complex as a protein structure can require quite a bit of analysis. So, scientists go through great pains to represent important features of their structures in 2D images for publication. Ostensibly, this new functionality…
jdupuis | October 19, 2009As I mentioned in my previous post, I did a little Q&A about the new outsourcing arrangement that CISTI has negotiated with Infotrieve.
Q1. What's the effect on jobs at CISTI from this move?
As you may know, NRC-CISTI is transforming itself to be well positioned to serve the needs of Canadian knowledge workers now and in the future. This transformation is a major undertaking for the organization and will require a significant transition for NRC-CISTI's workforce.
NRC is working to mitigate the effect on employees by seeking to place as many of the affected employees as possible within…
drorzel | October 19, 2009Via Michael Nielsen on Twitter, a Wired article and a research group website for the Stanford Study of Writing. As the Wired piece reports, the group has done a large study of student writing, and finds that modern college students write more and are better writers than students in the past.
This is a little hard to square with my personal experience (he says, procrastinating from grading a depressingly large stack of student lab reports), and that of many of the commenters at Wired. There are enough caveats in the description of the study that these needn't be contradictory, though that's…
drorzel | October 19, 2009It's hard to say exactly why I found Edward Carr's article on polymaths so irritating, but I suspect it was this bit:
The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks--policy or science--the experts start to erect barricades. "Even in relatively soft fields, specialists tend to develop a specialised vocabulary which creates barriers to entry," Posner says with his economic hat pulled down over his head. "Specialists want to fend off the generalists. They may also want to convince themselves that what they are doing is really very…
drorzel | October 15, 2009I gave a guest lecture this morning in a colleague's sophomore seminar class about time. She's having them look at time from a variety of perspectives, and they just finished reading Longitude, so she asked me to talk about the physics of clocks and the measurement of time.
I've long considered using "A Brief History of Timekeeping" as the theme for a general education course-- there's a ton of interesting science in the notion of time and timekeeping. This was just a single class, though, so I didn't go into too much detail:
A Brief History of Timekeeping
View more presentations from Chad…
jdupuis | October 15, 2009As has been buzzing around the scitech library mailing lists lately (thanks, Joe!), the great news is that the STELLA! Science, Technology & Engineering Library Leaders in Action unconference is coming up in Denver in January 2010.
What is the STELLA Unconference?
This meeting is for any librarian interested in scientific, technical and engineering resources. The acronym stands for Science, Technology & Engineering Library Leaders in Action!
What is the STELLA Unconference?
This meeting is for any librarian interested in scientific, technical and engineering resources. The acronym…
catdynamics | October 14, 2009Recently, Pennsylvania became the last state in the union of these states of America to have a budget. State budget, that is, s for fiscal 2009-10. Some 101 days after the beginning of the fiscal year on July 1st 2009.
Thereby beating California.
However, the Pennsylvania State University (not to be mistaken for the State University of Pennsylvania, or the University of Pennsylvania) does not have a budget.
Oh, we're listed on the official Budget of the Comptroller.
Shade over $300 million, down a smidgen from last year, but not enough to jeopardize federal stimulus funding.
But, the money…
jdupuis | October 13, 2009A silly title to reflect some overhyped posturing found, guess where, on the Internet.
First up, Joe Murphy on librarians and their proper relationship to Twitter: "it's reprehensible for information professionals not to be on Twitter."
A loaded and diva-dramatic statement like that is a sure sign that Twitter has jumped the shark. Time to pull a Miley Cyrus, if you ask me. (Friendfeed discussion here, here and here)
On the other end of the spectrum, from Steven Bell over at ACRLog, on the use of social networks by librarians:
A passionate academic librarian would be so immersed in their…
drorzel | October 13, 2009The abbreviation here has a double meaning-- both "Open Access" and "Operator Algebra." In my Quantum Optics class yesterday, I was talking about how to describe "coherent states" in the photon number state formalism. Coherent states are the best quantum description of a classical light field-- something like a laser, which behaves very much as if it were a smoothly oscillating electromagnetic field with a well-defined frequency and phase.
Mathematically, one of the important features of a coherent state is that it is unchanged by the photon annihilation operator (in formal terms, it's an "…
drorzel | October 12, 2009Somebody should look to see if there's a correlation between the weather on the days of campus visits and the number of prospective students who apply/ enroll at a given school.
We had pretty decent weather-- cool but seasonal, sunny in the morning, clouding over in the afternoon-- for today's Open House. Last year, we had dreary rain at least one of the Open House days. I'd like to think that something as random and trivial as the weather wouldn't really influence a high school student's college decision, but then, I've heard stupider things...
drorzel | October 12, 2009It's Adopt-a-Physicist time again, and I've been "adopted" by three classes: Susan Kelly's class at Blind Brook High School in Rye, NY; Lisa Edwards's class at Hickory High School in Hickory, NC (insert your own Hoosiers joke); and Suprit Dharmi's class at Terrill Middle School in Scotch Plains, NJ. So here's a shout-out to all of them, and their students.
Amusingly, my fellow adoptees include at least one occasional commenter on this blog, and somebody I know from NIST. Small world.
drorzel | October 12, 2009The Digital Cuttlefish looks at the Archie comics, and waxes poetic:
Two paths play out in a comic book,
When Archie walks down memory lane
"The road not taken" is the hook;
So now, the writers take a look
And re-write Archie's life again,
This time with Betty as his bride;
Veronica the woman spurned,
Who once upon a time, with pride,
Was wed to Archie. Thus allied,
They lived while many seasons turned.
Why am I commenting on this, given that what little I know about Archie I learned from The Comics Curmudgeon and Chasing Amy? Because he goes on to talk about the Many-Worlds Interpretation…
terrasig | October 10, 2009
This month, DrugMonkey is hosting the Diversity in Science Blog Carnival, started by DN Lee of Urban Science Adventures! to celebrate the scientific contributions of individuals from underrepresented groups. To celebrate US Hispanic Heritage Month, DM asked for us "to write and submit your posts in honor of scientists whose ancestors came from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean and Central or South America."
One of the greatest rewards of being an academic scientist is watching remarkable people pass through your laboratory and classroom who then go on to do amazing things. Upon reading Drug's…
jdupuis | October 8, 2009On October 1, 2009 librarians and archivists at York University Libraries voted unanimously to adopt the following policy:
York University Open Access Policy for Librarians and Archivists
Librarians and archivists at York University recognize the importance of open access to content creators and researchers in fostering new ideas, creating knowledge and ensuring that it is available as widely as possible. In keeping with our long-standing support of the Open Access movement, York librarians and archivists move to adopt a policy which would ensure our research is disseminated as widely as…
terrasig | October 7, 2009Welcome visitors coming from a recommendation by Dr Carmen Drahl at C&ENtral Science, the blog of the American Chemical Society's Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN):
Terra Sig has a fantastic post about the chemistry prize. The money quote: "If I see electrons being pushed around, it's chemistry."
Thank you for the kind words, Dr Drahl. New readers, feel free to weigh in down in the comments as to your take on this year's Chemistry prize.
The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three amazing scientists who elucidated the chemical bond-by-chemical bond action of the…
jstemwedel | October 6, 2009Via Twitter, PalMD wondered if I'd seen this brief item on the New York Times Idea of the Day blog.
Writing in The Philosophers' Magazine, Brooke Lewis says tallies of full-time faculty at top American and British colleges show women make up less than a fifth of philosophy departments in Britain and little more than that in the United States. This suggests "that gender representation is far less balanced in philosophy than it is in many other humanities subjects."
Indeed, on quick examination, the gender balance among faculty in philosophy departments looks an awful lot like the gender…
catdynamics | October 6, 2009Nobel Prize in Physics, in case you hadn't heard, went to Kao for Fiber Optics and Boyle and Smith for developing the fundamental CCD technology.
Some people, naming no names, seem a little unhappy about this.
Well, ol' Alfred had his purpose when he endowed the Nobel Foundation with his ill gotten gains, and such things are somewhat binding.
Further, pushing the Swedish Academy on these things, to do the "right thing" and give the Prize to one of your pet subfields, however more "fundamental" it may be, tends to backfire.
Think of the Academy as a very proper and very small club, about…
drorzel | October 5, 2009As you may or may not have heard, there's a new Stargate franchise on the SyFy channel with John Scalzi as a creative consultant. It may have slipped by without you noticing, because John is too modest to hype it much...
Anyway, given the Scalzi connection, I checked out the pilot on Friday, and it was fine. I'm not a huge fan of the other series in the Stargate family, but they're reliably entertaining when nothing else is on, and this will probably fall into that category. I doubt I'll be re-arranging my social calendar for this, but it was pretty good.
The show did do one thing that really…
jstemwedel | October 3, 2009Oh joy, it's time to grade more papers!
At the moment, in fact, I have two batches of papers (approximately 400 words each, approximately 100 papers per batch) to grade, since I hadn't finished marking the earlier ones before the next ones came due. And of course, owing to the piles of smoking rubble that constitute our budget at the state universities right now, there are no funds at present for graders.
I've blogged before about my strategies for grading fairly and consistently without taking a million years to finish the job. I'm still more or less using these strategies. But today, I'm…