Academia
drorzel | September 16, 2009Alternate title: Notes Toward a Taxonomy of Bad Meetings.
The Meta-Meeting: Your organization faces problems X, Y, and Z. Therefore, you are planning an all-day workshop on addressing X, Y, and Z. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: To have a meeting about how to organize the workshop to address X, Y, and Z, without talking about how to address X, Y, and Z.
The Required-By-Statute Meeting: Your organization needs to change the official written procedure for Process A, to match the way you have actually been doing Process A for the last N years. Everybody is happy with how Process A…
terrasig | September 16, 2009If you are in the area, this looks really good:
Award-winning author Gary Taubes will speak at next week's Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) Research Conference:
"Why We Get Fat: Adiposity 101 and the Alternative Hypothesis of Obesity"
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
12:00 noon to 1:00 pm
North Pavilion
Lower Level Lecture Hall
Gary Taubes is the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control and Disease (Knopf, 2007). He studied applied physics as an undergraduate at Harvard and has an MS degree in engineering from Stanford University…
khannula | September 15, 2009This is a repost from my old blog, from a year and a half ago. But it's time for academic positions to be advertised - if they haven't been frozen due to budget cuts. So, some old advice on getting a job, while my own job is keeping me especially busy.
So. You want a job, do you? At an undergraduate college? Ok, then. Let me tell you what I know.
(This is based on being on six different search committees at two different schools - one private small liberal arts college (SLAC), and one public liberal arts college. However, I haven't been part of a search in the past seven years - my…
terrasig | September 15, 2009As I've been more than swamped as of late, I wanted to offer up some of insightful posts my colleagues around the blogosphere (I can just get in about 20 of the my most recent feeds from Google Reader while making the coffee, although putting the laptop on the range top is probably a bad idea.).
Dear Freshman - FSP's take on a nine New York Times essays on advice for the incoming college student
What To Expect When You're Clueless - Two students with comparable records are applying for grad school. Which of the two faculty reactions do you have in response to Student 2?
Regular programming…
catdynamics | September 13, 2009More State Universities are going to furloughs...
And the funding agencies may agree to let faculty take salary from grants for furloughs.
This is not a good thing, furloughs are rational if sharp cuts are a short term necessity, because they avoid long term job losses and they can be implemented rapidly.
Furloughs are also not paycuts - they preserve the benefits and retirement at the base level, and are done with the intent of salaries going back to previous level without having to go through an increase.
This is a rather important distinction, in the short term at least, if situations…
jstemwedel | September 10, 2009Over at Uncertain Principles, Chad ponders faculty "service" in higher education. For those outside the ivy-covered bubble of academe, "service" usually means "committee work" or something like it.
The usual concern is that, although committees are necessary to accomplish significant bits of the work of a college or university, no one likes serving on them and every faculty member has some task that would be a better use of his or her time than being on a committee. And, because "service" is frequently a piece of the faculty member's job performance that is regularly evaluated (for…
jdupuis | September 10, 2009I've always thought the born-digital, high-quality review articles (called "lectures") that Morgan & Claypool publish as part of their Synthesis product are one of the best products out there. They really get publishing scholarly and professional materials in the digital age.
One of their most interesting lecture series is the Synthesis Lectures on Engineers, Technology and Society.
Three new lectures in that series look to be perfect texts for a broad range of Engineering & Society-type course. In fact, I think a pretty good course along those lines could use nothing but the…
drorzel | September 10, 2009A couple of things that I'm not excited to blog about, but sort of feel like I ought to say something about:
1) The Washington Monthly article about StraighterLine, an online program that lets you take college courses for $99/mo. The article is all breathless excitement about the revolutionary transformative power of technology, but it leaves me cold.
The stories of working people putting themselves through accelerated degree programs through self-study are inspiring, and all, but there's nothing really new here. There has never really been any question about whether hard-working and…
drorzel | September 9, 2009The Dean Dad and the Tenured Radical are having a really good discussion of service responsibilities, or as TR puts it, the "Just Say No" problem:
The Just Say No (to everyone but me) issue is a problem that, frankly, untenured people, adjuncts and visitors are not responsible for managing; and that achieving tenure can make worse, not better. If you belong to the untenured masses, it is not unreasonable -- nor does it represent a failure of maturity -- to choose a senior colleague, even better the department or program chair, to help you manage the demands on your time. How many advisees is…
catdynamics | September 8, 2009Ok, here we go again... someone thinks it is funny to compare economics with astronomy...
Worse, than that, it is Chad hisself, hovering near one of the antipodes of the blogosphere.
It was of course Krugman who started it, but Sean had to go stir it up, didn't he?
Then Dave's got to go Pontificate and all, so how can I not?
Why, some of my best friends are economists...
So, is economics really like astronomy?
No!
Well, except for our mutual affinity for unreasonably large numbers, mesoscale problems and models that are mostly too messy to actually solve for realistic situations.…
sciencewoman | September 8, 2009Those following along on Twitter know that late August became my #weeksofdoom in which I triumphed over three major deadlines on top of the beginning of classes and starting Minnow in a new school. (Hence, the unexpectedly long bloggy absence).
Now that the weeks of doom* are over, I'm finally trying to settle into a productive but sane rhythm for the semester. It was such a blessing to have a long weekend to just hang out and play with Minnow (we tented in the backyard and baked an apple pie), and for the first time this semester, I feel mostly prepared for my new prep EDDA class tomorrow.…
drorzel | September 8, 2009Like every other blogger with a political opinion, I read Paul Krugman's essay on economics last week, and tagged it for Saturday's Links Dump. And while I appreciate Eric Weinstein calling me out as part of the "high end blogosphere," I'm not sure I have much to say about it that is useful. But, since he asked...
Twitter's interface makes it almost impossible to go back and figure out what the hell was going on even a few days ago, but going through Eric's feed, the crux of the matter seems to be that he takes issue with Krugman's claim that "the economics profession went astray because…
khannula | September 7, 2009The economy might be scary, but I've seen ads for academic jobs already. And for geoscience grad students, the first conference is only a little more than a month away. So I'm going to revise and repost a series that I wrote on my old blog, about getting a job at a predominantly undergrad institutions.
Disclaimer: I've taught at two undergrad-only colleges: one private liberal arts college on the East Coast, and one public liberal arts college in the Rockies. (I was also a student at a private liberal arts college. That made me want to teach at one, but it didn't teach me much about…
drorzel | September 4, 2009Physics Buzz has a nice article about Paul Erdos and the Erdos Number Project (mine is 6), which ends with a good question:
I for one, am wondering: who would be the Paul ErdÅs of the physics world?
It's a tough question, complicated further by the existence of really gigantic collaborations in experimental high-energy physics, where author lists can run to hundreds of people. The 511 collaborators that Erdos can boast is more impressive in math than in some fields of physics.
For something really equivalent in spirit to Erdos, you would need to look for a physicist who had a long and…
jstemwedel | September 3, 2009To whom it may concern,
I can deal with the third story classrooms, really I can. Running up and down stairs to get to and from class helps give me the exercise I wouldn't get otherwise because I'm grading papers instead of hitting the gym.
And, I can live with the back-to-back class meetings in third story classrooms located in different buildings across campus from each other. That's just more physical exercise, plus a chance to live by my resolution not to view other people primarily as obstacles. I appreciate the opportunity for personal growth.
I even understand the wisdom of filling…
jdupuis | September 3, 2009Keywords of a Librarian is the title of a new blog by academic librarian Mary W. George. What's very interesting about the blog is where it's being hosted.
It's part of InsideHigherEd's BlogU community so Mary George is a fellow academic library blogger embedded within a faculty blogging community. This is a great development as I think it's incredibly important to raise librarians' profile within the broader faculty/academic community; so having regular blog posts bring our perspectives and concerns to that audience is great. A hearty congratulations to Mary on her new post!
She's taking…
drorzel | September 3, 2009The building where my office is is on a small hill off toward one edge of campus, and to get to the Campus Center, you used to be able to go out the main door, and go either left down a gently curving path to the other academic buildings, or right, where the sidewalk runs along the top of a slightly steep bank over to a driveway that then runs down to the loading dock at the Campus Center. Most people would choose the left-hand path, and most of those who took the right-hand path would cut down the bank rather than walk all the way out to the driveway.
I say "used to" because there's a new…
terrasig | September 3, 2009In the United States, this is currently National HBCU Week (presidential proclamation here) and yesterday marked the end of the annual academic conference on HBCUs ("Seizing the Capacity to Thrive!") in Washington, DC. HBCUs span from Michigan and Ohio to Texas, Florida, and the US Virgin Islands - see here for the complete list and links to HBCUs.
Don't feel bad if you've never heard of HBCUs - as noted in my repost from last year, I didn't until I went to college. I've updated the post here and and added a few new morsels of knowledge stemming from my own continuing education about the…
jstemwedel | September 2, 2009In my university mailbox yesterday I received a memo detailing measures to help prevent the spread of flu (whether seasonal or novel H1N1).
The memo had the usual good advice: recognize flu symptoms, stay home if you have them so as not to spread it to everyone else, cover your coughs and sneezes, wash your hands, don't touch your eyes, nose, and mouth.
It also had some information that may not seem so obvious. For example, you ought to stay home at least 24 hours after you no longer have a fever (of 100 oF/38 oC), and that using a medication that reduces fever masks whether you still have…
jstemwedel | September 1, 2009I guess I suspected that this might be a problem, but it really sank in when a close colleague told me the other day that he was freaked out by it. And I'd hate to have you hear it from anyone else but me.
I'm a decaf drinker.
Yeah, I know. Nowadays you can't count on a philosopher to smoke like a chimney, or to be drunk off her ass at work, or even to wear a beret.
But just as we can count on gravity to keep pulling matter toward the center of the earth, you'd think you could count on a philosopher to be hopped up on caffeine, preferably delivered via strong coffee in a café where…