Academia
drorzel | May 27, 2009Tuesday night was the annual Sigma Xi induction banquet on campus (I'm currently the president of the local chapter, and have been scrambling to organize the whole thing in between all my other responsibilities these past few weeks). Sigma Xi, for those not familiar with it, is the scientific research honor society-- like Phi Beta Kappa for science nerds. We had thirty-odd students nominated for membership based on research they have done as undergraduates, and had a little banquet and induction ceremony to celebrate their accomplishments.
Tradition for this sort of thing calls for an after-…
drorzel | May 26, 2009We no longer do what is possibly my favorite lab in the intro mechanics class. We've switched to the Matter and Interactions curriculum, and thus no longer spend a bunch of time on projectile motion, meaning there's no longer room for the "target shooting" lab.
It's called that because the culmination of the lab used to be firing small plastic balls across the room and predicting where they would land. In order to make the prediction, of course, you need to know the velocity of the balls leaving the launcher, and making that measurement was the real meat of the lab. The way I used to do it,…
terrasig | May 24, 2009Award-winning investigative journalist friend, Barry Yeoman, passes along this morning a fantastic post from awesome local Durham, NC, blog, Bull City Rising.
Heh. Rising.
Now Men's Health magazine has given Durham another trumpeting tribute, having taken a long, hard look at one of the rankings that only such a periodical could bring.
Durham found itself in stiff competition -- one hundred other cities and metro areas, to be precise -- but stood tall to prevail, ranking sixth in the U.S. among...
...cities that don't need Viagra.
Just what we need: another reason for the University-That-…
jstemwedel | May 22, 2009You're coming to the close of your sabbatical year. Probably you didn't make quite as much progress on your research or writing project as you had hoped to, but you have enjoyed a much-needed break from the demands of teaching (and especially grading) and committee work. Whenever they see you, your colleagues comment on how well-rested you look.
And now, it's time to reestablish contact with reality.
You're on the phone with your department chair about your duties for the fall semester. Do you choose:
Option 1:
A full teaching load that includes a lower division course that you have never…
neurotopia | May 20, 2009Challenge grant review assignments went out today. You know, the ones so essential to revitalizing the economy? Not surprisingly the reviews are due back soon- June 5th.
To access the challenge grants you use eRA Commons. However, eRA commons is going to be offline for the next five days for a massive infrastructure upgrade. Which means if you don't get your review assignment downloaded tonight, you can't access it until May 26th.
Genius. Download your grant assignments now, if you're reading this.
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drorzel | May 19, 2009I'm leaving this afternoon for Charlottesville, VA and the 40th annual DAMOP conference. At this meeting, we will once again be confirming the prediction of the bosonic character of interesting talks. Bosons, as you know, are quantum particles that happily occupy the same state as other bosons, and as you can see from the meeting program, the most interesting sessions are bunched together in a few time slots on Wednesday and Thursday. Thus, interesting talks are clearly bosonic in nature.
(The same basic physics has been demonstrated dozens of times previously, at other meetings and…
terrasig | May 19, 2009
Although I saw this obituary over the weekend, I didn't get to posting it until today. I was reminded by a local friend, an outstanding young scientist in her own right, of the impact that Dr Schanberg had made on so, so many lives in science, medicine, and our larger community.
I only had the honor of meeting Dr Schanberg once, shortly after his cancer diagnosis, while we were at a Duke Cancer Patient Support Center fundraising dinner. His wife of over 50 years, Rachel, is founder and former director of the organization which they started following the loss of their own daughter.
Among…
catdynamics | May 18, 2009Atlas Hedged
Bankrupt Icelandic gazillionaires
and Woe Is Academia
Atlas Hedged
updating a classic for the modern age - recommended
Peek-a-boo - the Economist explains why Astronomers should have lots of new toys.
Check Out new SciBling "Confessions of A Science Librarian"
PhysioProf's Handy Dandy Guide to D00dly D00d's - how fuckin' not to fuck up in comments on some peoples' blogs
FSP explains why you should read the backlog of student e-mails before going to the last faculty meeting
- have to get into the right frame of mind.
Iceland:
Lára Hanna interviews Michael Hudson on where…
drorzel | May 18, 2009Confessions of a Science Librarian has joined ScienceBlogs. So, no more eating Chinese food in the stacks, and try to keep the noise down.
terrasig | May 15, 2009Well, it's mid-May at 36° North, the honeysuckles are blooming, my allergies are miserable, the air is damp, and that can only mean one thing: the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting is nearly upon us.
Held this year beginning on 29 May, the annual ASCO meeting coincides with all sorts of announcements of miracle cancer drugs and the sound of cash changing hands. Although being held in Orlando, Florida, this is far from a Mickey Mouse operation; in fact, the buzz of bullion here rivals that of the Walt Disney empire. With the abstracts released last night at 6 pm EDT,…
drorzel | May 15, 2009Speaking of conferences (as we were a little while ago), the Female Science Professor has a post on the phenomenon of logos in talk slides:
Do you put your institution's logo in your talks and on your posters at conferences? If you put a logo in your talk, do you put the logo on every slide or just on the title slide? Is institutional logo-ing more common on some continents than on others?
Logos on slides are one of those things that in principle, ought to be annoying. In practice, I'm usually just grateful that they're not using one of the godawful default slide layouts that come in…
revere | May 15, 2009It is clear that if you want to get a so-so paper published in a top tier journal, the best way to do it is to write about a breaking medical news event and get there first. We saw this with avian influenza and SARS and now it's being repeated with swine flu. The Scientist had a story yesterday about how The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and Science, two of the highest profile science journals in the world, pushed through some swine flu papers at record speed last week:
An international research team led by Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London published a report online today (May…
catdynamics | May 13, 2009Obama's commencement address at Arizona State University
"Now, before I begin, I'd like to clear the air about that little controversy everyone was talking about a few weeks back. I have to tell you, I really thought it was much ado about nothing, although I think we all learned an important lesson. I learned to never again pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA bracket. And your university President and Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.
In all seriousness, I come here not to dispute the suggestion that I haven't yet achieved enough in my life. I…
khannula | May 13, 2009Ok, you're probably thinking. Now she's really lost it. California's got earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, coastal erosion, oil, gold, sinking ground, a funky inland delta with levees in danger of failing, major water issues... and that's not even getting into the really cool stuff, like serpentinites and blueschists and pillow basalts and forearc basin sediments and granodiorites.
Yeah. California's got plenty of geology, and plenty of problems related to its geology. And college-bound high school kids don't study it, because very few high school earth science classes count for admission…
catdynamics | May 12, 2009ouch
Daily Show takes on ASU Commencement
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
M - Th 11p / 10c
Arizona State Snubs Obama
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Economic Crisis
Political Humor
classic
cruel but classic
Tom Hanks interview on antimatter later in the show is also good
Yes, CERN had some
Yes, they dropped it
Boom
drorzel | May 11, 2009Over at the Inverse Square blog, Tom Levenson announces that he's started Twittering in a post that contains, via Carl Zimmer, the best argument for why Twitter matters:
Carl laughs me out of my seat. He points out that he tweeted his visit to my class, and received in return a couple of requests to pass on hellos from blogospheric friends I haven't seen since January (hello back, Dave); that a growing audience exists to feed him almost real time reactions to questions; that whatever I might think there is a hierarchy of information, and if I ignore the swift and the short, then I lose my…
drorzel | May 11, 2009It's that time of year again in academia. The time when academics at other institutions write posts directed at graduates, reminding me that summer is starting for everybody else, while we have another four %$^*$ing weeks to go before the end of the term.
Grumble, mutter, grump. Stupid calendar.
jstemwedel | May 9, 2009At least, if you're a member of a philosophy department:
Spending the day with them is enough to get your mind working on interesting problems and productive ways to approach solving them -- and this is true even if while you're together you aren't really discussing philosophy per se. Just being with them puts you in the zone.
Yeah, I really like my department.
jstemwedel | May 8, 2009We have just stopped for lunch.
Out of ten agenda items, we have covered three.
I blame this, in part, on the fact that our faculty gets along so well and cares a lot about our shared work. Everyone has a great deal to say, and adds footnotes and friendly amendments to everyone else's points.
But, we need to get through the agenda.
Thus, as the person nominally running this meeting, I have told my colleagues that our post-lunch focus will be laser sharp, and that the talky folks should eat enough during the luncheon that they'll be sleepy (rather than talky) when we reconvene.
3:40 PM:…
terrasig | May 8, 2009I was having a lovely conversation this week with scribbler50, our beloved blogging bartender at Behind The Stick. Describing him as "just" a blogger does not do him justice; scribbler50 is a writer. If you haven't been over to Brother Scribb's crib, do yourself a favor and read a few of his essays. In fact, read the whole archives.
Scribb and I got into a discussion of wine connoisseurs sometimes being as pretentious and annoying as the single malt scotch drinkers about which he has written with piercing accuracy and humor. Thinking that perhaps he had offended me, he qualified the…