Academia
drorzel | July 6, 2009One of the major problems contributing to the dire situation described in Unscientific America is that the incentives of academia don't align very well with the public interest. Academic scientists are rewarded-- with tenure, promotion, and salary increases-- for producing technical, scholarly articles, and not for writing for a general audience. There is very little institutionalized reward within academia for science popularization.
An extreme example of this is the failure of Carl Sagan's nomination to the National Academy of Sciences:
According to sources within the academy, Sagan was…
drorzel | July 6, 2009There's another round of "science blogs will make traditional journalism obsolete!" going on in connection with last week's World Conference of Science Journalists-- see Mad Mike, for example. This wouldn't be interesting except that it happened to collide with my reading Unscientific America, and it struck me that the book is, in many ways, one of the best arguments you could construct for the superiority of the traditional publishing process to doing everything with blogs.
As I said in my review of the book, there's really nothing in Unscientific America that will come as a surprise to…
drorzel | July 6, 2009Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future is the new book by Chris and Sheril of The Intersection (formerly on ScienceBlogs, now at Discover), and they were kind enough to include me on the list of people getting review copies. It turned up on Friday (after I'd already started Newton and the Counterfeiter). I read it this afternoon, partly at lunch with SteelyKid (who, alas, was woken up by somebody else's ill-mannered child), but mostly in the back yard on a surprisingly pleasant afternoon. It's a quick read-- only 132 pages of text, plus 65 pages of (unmarked)…
drorzel | July 5, 2009This is a rare weekend in which I've completed two serious books-- the aforementioned Newton and the Couterfeiter and Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's Unscientific America (a review copy showed up Friday, thanks guys), about which more later. They're very different books, but both excellent in their own way.
While they have very different subjects, though, they have one unfortunate element in common, one of the most pernicious ideas in non-fiction publishing: the un-noted endnote. Both books are exhaustively researched and contain many pages of notes at the end of the text-- just under…
jdupuis | July 2, 2009Via Lance Fortnow's Twitter post, it's interesting to see Communications of the ACM editor Moshe Y. Vardi on Open Access:
First, a point of precision. Open-access experts distinguish between "Gold OA," described earlier, and "Green OA," which allows for open access self-archiving of material (deposit by authors) that may have been published as non-open access. ACM Copyright Policy allows for self-archiving, so ACM is a Green-OA publisher. Still, why doesn't ACM become a Gold-OA publisher?
*snip*
As for ACM's stand on the open-access issue, I'd describe it as "clopen," somewhere between open…
terrasig | July 1, 2009
Dear PharmGirl,
We wanted to make this note public today because a great many of our blog friends know of your dedication as a physician, wife, and a mother.
Yesterday you finished an association with an academic medical institution where you have been for half your life. From young women with breast cancer to old men in the V.A. Hospital, literally thousands have been touched by your gifts of intelligence, remarkable clinical judgment, and, perhaps most importantly, compassion. The recognition from your patients was abundant and we were privy to the personal notes of just how much you…
drorzel | June 30, 2009Over at Confused on a Higher Level, Melissa has been thinking about undergraduate research:
As a member of the Physics and Astronomy Division of the Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR), over the past few months I've gotten several e-mails about the effort by CUR, the Society of Physics Students, the American Astronomical Society, and the American Physical Society Committee on Education to adopt a statement on undergraduate research. The CUR statement reads as follows, "We call upon this nation's physics and astronomy departments to provide, as an element of best practice, all…
drorzel | June 30, 2009Firday's quick and sarcastic post came about because I thought the Dean Dad and his commenters had some interesting points in regard to high school math requirements, but we were spending the afternoon driving to Whitney Point so I could give a graduation speech. I didn't have time for a more detailed response.
Now that we're back in town... well, I still don't have time, because SteelyKid has picked up a bit of coxsackie virus, meaning that nobody in Chateau Steelypips is happy. But I did want to offer at least a partial response to some of the comments both here and elsewhere.
To start off…
catdynamics | June 29, 2009This is going to hurt...
Not a lot of people know it, but the Pennsylvania State University is not the State University of Pennsylvania - along with Pitt, Temple and Lincoln, we have long existed in a mixed state, oscillating gently between the private and state eigenstates, maximizing uncertainty.
Now we get bitten - not only is PA's governor proposing a 13% cut in our state contributed budget (which is less than 1% of our actual budget, but cuts hurt on the margin), but the gov is claiming the stimulus funding does not apply to these four, only the State University.
I somehow don't think…
drorzel | June 29, 2009I'm not entirely sure why I keep responding to this, but Bruce Charlton left another comment about the supposed dullness of modern science that has me wondering about academic:
The key point is that a few decades ago an average scientist would start working on the problem of his choice in his mid- to late-twenties - now it is more likely to be early forties or never.
In the UK most people got a 'tenured' university lectureship straight after their PhD (or before) - created a lot of 'dead wood' but also gave people time and security to be ambitious.
Longer time spent as a doctoral student plus…
drorzel | June 27, 2009The following is the (approximate) text of the speech I gave Friday night at the Whitney Point High School graduation. Or, at least, this is what I typed out for myself Thursday night-- what actually comes out of my mouth on Friday might be completely different. That's why they do these things live, after all...
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When I agreed to speak here, one of the first things I thought of as I tried to decide what to say was my own college graduation, where the speaker began by noting that nobody ever remembers anything said by a graduation speaker. We all thought that was pretty…
jdupuis | June 26, 2009Digital Natives will move markets and transform industries, education, and global politics. the changes they bring about as they move into the workforce could have an immendsely positive effect on the world we live in. By and large, the digital revolution has already made this world a better place. And Digital Natives have every chance of propelling society further forward in myriad ways -- if we let them. (p. 7)
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser is a fine and useful book. Every page is brimming with facts and analysis…
drorzel | June 26, 2009The Dean Dad slaps his forehead and asks a question:
We have anecdotal evidence that suggests that students who actually take math for all four years of high school do better in math here than those who don't. We also have anecdotal evidence that bears crap in the woods. Why the hell do the high schools only require two years of math?
Silly Dean Dad-- math is too hard. It would be completely unreasonable to make kids take more math, and anyway, it's perfectly ok to know nothing about math.
(That's sarcasm, by the way. Click on the link.)
The comments to the original post are well worth…
drorzel | June 25, 2009Over at Skulls in the Stars, gg has a very good response to the polemic about the dullness of modern science that I talked about a few days ago. He takes issue with the claim that modern science is "dull" compared to some past Golden Age, and does a good job of it-- go read it.
I think he makes some very good points, but my own main problem with the piece is a different sort of thing. Fundamentally, the article strikes me as a "Fans are slans" argument dressed up ina lot of science-y jargon. And "fans are slans" arguments drive me nuts.
The basic argument is laid out in a comment by Bruce…
drorzel | June 24, 2009Via a comment by Christina Pikas, there's a post at the Scholarly Kitchen about a new study quantifying the use of the arxiv:
Employing a summer intern, Ingoldsby conducted an arXiv search of nearly 5,000 journal articles published by the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society. Their methodology was painstakingly robust, looking for title variations and having all unsuccessful searches repeated by a trained physicist.
The percentage of articles found for each journal in their studied varied greatly. While fields such as elementary particle physics and astrophysics…
khannula | June 23, 2009The American Geological Institute's latest Geoscience Workforce Currents says that undergrad enrollments are up 8% this year:
Eight per cent actually isn't that much - one or two students, in most of the geology departments that I know. We've got nearly twice as many students registered for my sophomore mapping class this year as we did two years ago (29 vs 15). And that makes me wonder - are there big differences between different types of schools (public versus private; undergrad vs research university) or between different areas of the country?
And is this a blip, resulting from last…
drorzel | June 21, 2009Via Steve Hsu, a lengthy rant by Bruce Charlton about the dullness of modern scientists:
Question: why are so many leading modern scientists so dull and lacking in scientific ambition? Answer: because the science selection process ruthlessly weeds-out interesting and imaginative people. At each level in education, training and career progression there is a tendency to exclude smart and creative people by preferring Conscientious and Agreeable people. The progressive lengthening of scientific training and the reduced independence of career scientists have tended to deter vocational '…
khannula | June 20, 2009The call for posts for the July Accretionary Wedge, hosted by volcanista's Magmalicious Blog, is up!
So July's topic is about your inspiration to enter geoscience. Was it a fantastic mentor? Watching your geologist parents growing up? A great teacher, or an exciting intro field trip? How did it happen?
The deadline for posts is July 10. Go to volcanista's announcement and leave her a permalink there when you've got something to add.
(Yes, I am shamelessly posting the same thing here and at the Accretionary Wedge blog. But ignore that, and go read volcanista's call for posts instead.)
drorzel | June 19, 2009The smart-people blogosphere is all abuzz about questions from the French college entrance exams, with comments from Matt Yglesias, Dana Goldstein, and Kevin Drum, among others. The general tone of the commentary is summed up by Goldstein's question:
Could you ever imagine the SAT or ACT asking students to write an essay on such complex, intellectual topics?
The answer is "Sure. The answers would suck, but you could ask them."
And that's the important thing, here. What matters is not whether you ask ostentatiously intellectual questions of your students, but whether the answers they give are…