Academia
sb admin | March 20, 2009Funny!
From Jimmy Fallon:
Last night, Michael Showalter (from Stella, Wet Hot American Summer, The State, your dreams) made a cameo on the show. He and our head writer, A.D. Miles, played a couple of Columbia grad students on spring break. Things got pretty scandalous!
Really funny... but totally off base. It's more like Girls Gone Wild... I promise!
-via everyday scientist-
omnibrain | March 20, 2009Funny!
From Jimmy Fallon:
Last night, Michael Showalter (from Stella, Wet Hot American Summer, The State, your dreams) made a cameo on the show. He and our head writer, A.D. Miles, played a couple of Columbia grad students on spring break. Things got pretty scandalous!
Really funny... but totally off base. It's more like Girls Gone Wild... I promise!
-via everyday scientist-
sb admin | March 20, 2009
Straight from XKCD...
I had this exact same reaction.
Now that we're on the topic. I don't like federal money going to pay bonuses but seriously... this money was promised long ago and it's already been given out. Using the tax code to take it back? Wow this is seriously a real cluster @#$!
drorzel | March 19, 2009The final exam for my modern physics class is this morning, which means I'll have a bunch of time to kill while I proctor the test. This will likely involve a lot of brainless time-wasting, but I need to be on hand both as a formal guard against cheating, but more importantly to answer questions about the test should any come up.
Our sections are small enough that I don't worry too much about cheating, but it's a much bigger worry at lots of other places, and there are all sorts of ways of dealing with it. So here's a possibly entertaining question to pass the time:
What's the most amusing…
drorzel | March 18, 2009Yesterday's bad graphic post spurred me to finally get around to doing the "Why Does Excel Suck So Much?" post I've been meaning to do for a while. I gripe about Excel a lot, as we're more or less forced to use it for data analysis in the intro labs (students who have taken the intro engineering course supposedly are taught how to work with Excel, and it's kind of difficult to buy a computer without it these days, so it eliminates the "I couldn't do anything with the data" excuse for not doing lab reports). This is a constant source of irritation, as the default settings are carefully chosen…
revere | March 18, 2009The Conflict of Interest talk these days is all about doctors and medical school lecturers who are in bed with Big Pharma, but the bed is pretty crowded. Researchers are there, too. Not that this hasn't been a topic of conversation. And not that researchers aren't conscious of it and frantically trying to distance themselves from it. But it's nice and warm under the covers and its a friendship with benefits, as the younger generation likes to put it:
As accusations of undisclosed financial conflicts among university researchers swirl, drug makers and academics are entering a new stage of…
khannula | March 17, 2009From the Association for Women Geoscientists' e-news:
The deadline for applications for the 2009 AWG Chrysalis Scholarship has been extended to March 31st.
The Chrysalis Scholarship provides degree-completion funding for women geoscience graduate students whose education has been interrupted for at least one year. The awards are intended to cover thesis/dissertation costs such as typing or drafting expenses, child-care, or anything necessary to assist a degree candidate during those critical, final days.
More information and instructions on how to apply are available on the AWG website at…
catdynamics | March 17, 2009I now know who to blame for this science blogging thing
I was a little bit bemused when I arrived at KITP and was told, by the way, that the program needed an official blogger, and that I, for my sins and in recompense, was it.
It is all Jennifer's fault,
she thinks it is all parties and cocktails over there at twisted physics, but then someone else ends up doing the work... though I must say the wine the other night was rather excellent...
anyway, go read her rationale and general guide to physics blogging, combined with podcast and video - you might even start your own blog
actually, the…
drorzel | March 17, 2009Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau offers a provocative comment on class and higher education:
Today (OK, yesterday, but I didn't really sleep on the plane, so it's still yesterday, or tomorrow is also today, or something) a friend offered (without necessarily endorsing) the theory that one reason why we try to get everyone to go to college is because it legitimizes a class system: If everybody gets the chance to try college, then their failure to attain economic success must be their own fault.
It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure I agree with it (though I'm not sure I agree with…
drorzel | March 16, 2009The NCAA men's basketball tournament bracket was announced yesterday, which has kicked off the usual round of people "predicting" the outcomes based on totally silly criteria like the Academic Progress Rate of the schools in question.
This is, of course, completely frivolous. What you really need is solid, relevant information. Like predictions based on the ranking of physics graduate programs:
(Click for a slightly larger image.)
The algorithm used to fill this in was simple:
The school with the higher-ranked physics program wins
Schools with no physics program ranking lose to schools…
jstemwedel | March 16, 2009I'm couching the question in terms of the academic milieu, but I suspect people in other types of organizations face a similar kind of choice.
Behind door #1:
The micro-manager from Hell is in a position such that you have to interact directly with him/her. Your good ideas, your empirical grip on what will work and what will not, your sensible estimate of the time and resources required to get it done, even your understanding of the goals to which your labors are supposed to be directed -- all get discounted (because they don't necessarily fit with the micro-manager from Hell's vision and/…
drorzel | March 16, 2009The Dean Dad takes a question from a reader on a topic of perpetual interest:
How do other teachers remember their students' names? I confess, I am AWFUL with names. My wife and I have gone to the same small church for 20 years and I still go blank on names of people we've been friends with for all that time. ("you know who I mean honey, the tall guy who always wears that corduroy jacket. His wife is in the choir. You mean Tom? yeah, Tom!")
This is a real difficulty for me in the classroom, even with a light teaching load. I have one class this semester (I am an adjunct) and only 32…
clock | March 15, 2009Daniel Lemire asks this question when observing a fallacy voiced in an editorial:
.....only a small fraction of the top 100 papers ranked by the number of citations (17 of 100) were published by single authors.....a published paper resulting from collaborative work has a higher chance of attracting more citations.
You can discuss the fallacy if you want, but I am much more interested in the next question that Daniel asks - are solo authors and groups of authors inherently attracted to different kinds of problems, or if solo vs. group dynamics make some projects more conducive for solo work…
drorzel | March 14, 2009One of my colleagues in biology just finished his Comparative Vertebrate anatomy course. For the final class projects, he has teams of students make little videos presenting the results of their research into some aspect of vertebrate anatomy. Such as, for example, this Sesame Street episode on flying snakes:
The full set of videos are available on Scott's YouTube page, labelled "2009 - CVA." The fake "Colbert Report" segment on polar bears even has a blooper reel.
If you're looking for a way to kill a few minutes in a biology-themed activity, you could do a lot worse than watching these.
tsmith | March 13, 2009For those of you following our "academic freedom" bill saga here in Iowa, you'll be pleased to know that today was the last day for the bill to make it out of subcommittee, which it appears it hasn't. Hector Avalos has an overview of the history of the bill, our response, and the results at The Panda's Thumb.
catdynamics | March 13, 2009"Astronomers are just as dumb as economists"
are not!
poopyhead!
and, anyway, at least we know how to spell asteroid... nah, nah.
from Economists Aren't More Stupid than Other Scientists
- wait: "Other Scientists"...?
Tee hee.
h/t CR
Oh, if we're going to be all serious and shit:
asteroids really truly do exist
we know asteroids hit in the past (cf The Moon)
we have seen significant planetesimal impacts in the current epoch (cf SL-9 on Jupiter)
we know asteroids will hit in the future
- aside: I spent an enjoyable dinner with an economist considering his rational estimate…
clock | March 13, 2009The unmovable movers! Or so says Bill Hooker:
For instance: I use Open Office in preference to Word because I'm willing to put up with a short learning curve and a few inconveniences, having (as they say here in the US) drunk the Open Kool-Aid. But I'm something of an exception. Faced with a single difficulty, one single function that doesn't work exactly like it did in Word, the vast majority of researchers will throw a tantrum and give up on the new application. After all, the Department pays the Word license, so it's there to be used, so who cares about monopolies and stifling free culture…
clock | March 12, 2009The Two Cultures in the 21st Century:
A full-day symposium sponsored by: Science & the City, ScienceDebate2008, Science Communication Consortium
At the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture on the importance to society of building a bridge between the sciences and humanities, this day-long symposium brings together leading scholars, scientists, politicians, authors, and representatives of the media to explore the persistence of the Two Cultures gap and how it can be overcome. More than 20 speakers will cover topics including science in politics, education, film and media,…
clock | March 12, 2009Wow! This is massive!
From Anesthesiology News:
Scott S. Reuben, MD, of Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., a pioneer in the area of multimodal analgesia, is said to have fabricated his results in at least 21, and perhaps many more, articles dating back to 1996. The confirmed articles were published in Anesthesiology, Anesthesia and Analgesia, the Journal of Clinical Anesthesia and other titles, which have retracted the papers or will soon do so, according to people familiar with the scandal (see list). The journals stressed that Dr. Reuben's co-authors on those papers have not…