Academia
drorzel | March 12, 2009The Female Science Professor has been having a hard semester, and recently caught some students cheating on an exam:
In the situation I had to deal with recently, I saw one student glancing repeatedly at another student's exam. I kept the two exams separate when they were handed in, compared the documents, saw the same strange but identical wrong answers on each one, and knew for sure that I had a Cheating Incident. I suppose if cheaters knew the answer to a question well enough to make a stab at it themselves, they wouldn't write down the word-for-word strange wrong answer of the person…
drorzel | March 12, 2009There's a really good article from Martin Rees in the latest issue of Seed, on the scientific challenges that won't be affected by the LHC:
The LHC hasn't yet provided its first results, the much-anticipated answers to questions we've been asking for so long. But they should surely come in 2009, bringing us closer to understanding the bedrock nature of particles, space, and timeâ--âtoward a unified theory of the basic forces. This would push forward a program that started with Newton (who showed that the force that made the apple fall was same one holding the planets in orbit), and continued…
drorzel | March 12, 2009Inside Higher Ed has an article on grade inflation this morning, which reminds me of my improbable research theory.
Academic scolds are always talking about grade inflation, saying that the average grade years ago used to be lower than it is now. Medical scolds are always talking about the obesity epidemic, saying that average weights used to be lower than they are now.
Has anyone ever considered that the two might be related? That is, might it be that the grade points per pound has remained constant over the years?
Using some government reports on weight, and totally bias free GPA trends…
catdynamics | March 11, 2009I originally thought this had to be a graduate student stunt
Watch Coin Dominoes and more funny videos on CollegeHumor
but then I realized i was being silly.
Graduate students don't have that much money.
Especially in the UK.
link
scientificactivist | March 11, 2009On Saturday, animal rights extremists torched the car of a scientist at UCLA--just one more incident in a long streak of violent threats and wanton destruction of property. LA Times columnist Tim Rutten gets it right when he states:
No sensible person dismisses the humane treatment of animals as inconsequential, but what the fanatics propose is not an advance in social ethics. To the contrary, it is an irrational intrusion into civil society, a tantrum masquerading as a movement. It is a kind of ethical pornography in which assertion stands in for ideas, and willfulness for argument, all for…
sciencewoman | March 11, 2009Even though it's spring break, I'm in my office today because I need access to some software and datasets that I don't have at home, and because, frankly, I work more efficiently and with less guilt at school than at home. (Unless I'm blogging, that is!)
I didn't ask very many colleagues about their spring break plans, maybe because the internet consensus was that spring break was a time to recuperate from teaching and get some research done, and those were basically my plans, too. (Plus taxes, whee!) I assumed my colleagues here at Mystery U would do some variation on the same themes.
So…
drorzel | March 11, 2009Via FriendFeed, Daniel Lemire offers a suggestion on "branding":
Stop saying you are "John from school X". Say that you are "John who works on problem Y". Don't rely on your employer to carry your message!
Of course, this is only the second of the three possible options. You could also be "the guy who works on Problem Y at school X." This is pretty much the state of play for my thesis advisor, who never had any trouble remembering problems or institutions, but often forgot names. He could describe a person's whole scientific career-- worked on this problem at this school, then moved to that…
clock | March 10, 2009The next edition of this fantastic carnival will be hosted by Zuska:
The first Diversity in Science carnival, created and hosted by DNLee of Urban Science Adventures as a Black History Month Celebration, was a great success. Thanks to everyone who contributed!
Now it's time for our second round, which will be hosted right here at Thus Spake Zuska. Naturally, since it is March, our focus this time around will be a Women's History Month Celebration! The theme is "Women Achievers in STEM - Past and Present" and we are asking you to profile a woman in some field of science - your own or maybe one…
drorzel | March 10, 2009The Gordon Research Conferences are a great program, if you're in a field that offers them. These are mostly in New England in the summer, and involve a lot more down time than most professional conferences, to allow for more informal interaction between attendees. At past Gordon conferences, I've played soccer with a Nobel laureate, and basketball with a number of Ivy League faculty.
I got an email announcement of the 2009 Atomic Physics Gordon Conference, to be held at the Tilton School in Tilton, NH June 28-July 3. This year's meeting is chaired by Tiku Majumder at Williams, and he's put…
catdynamics | March 9, 2009The Reality Check contemplates how (small) mid-year budget cuts are handled in practise
'cause, y'know, linking is good
khannula | March 6, 2009Earth is going to be here for the foreseeable future. Will there be geoscientists to help everyone else figure out how to deal with it?
The people who organize the Cutting Edge geoscience teaching workshops have another set of workshops, aimed at helping geoscience departments figure out how to grow and stay vibrant. This is particularly challenging for the geosciences, because we're on both sides of environmental issues. Our majors might end up looking for oil and gas or for ore deposits, or might monitor and clean up pollution. Our departments are also the place where college students learn…
drorzel | March 6, 2009Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau is bemused by his students' reaction to unusual numbers:
[I]t is fascinating how we condition people to be used to numbers in a certain range, and as soon as a number is either very big or very small it becomes disconcerting. On one level, I'm glad that they are able to do the conversion and that they at least realize that numbers need to be checked. I've had people happily measure the dimensions of an object in millimeters, get their conversion to meters wrong, and cheerfully tell me that their tiny metal cylinder has a volume of 27 cubic meters. At…
drorzel | March 6, 2009The much-promoted science blogging anthology is now complete, and available in paper or electronic format from Lulu. If you're dying to have dead-tree copies of the best science blog posts of last year, here's your chance.
drorzel | March 5, 2009I'm looking travel arrangements for this year's DAMOP meeting in Charlottesville, VA in May, and, boy, do the options suck.
Flying into Charlottesville itself involves at least one stop, and undoubtedly one of those ridiculous little prop planes that require me to spend the whole flight in something close to a fetal position. Driving would take better than eight hours, according to Google, which isn't something I'm fired up to do (it's better than a prop plane, though, and wouldn't take all that much longer once you figure in time sitting in airports).
Probably the best option is to fly into…
terrasig | March 4, 2009I just wanted to send out congratulations to my friends and colleagues in Charleston at the Medical College of South Carolina (MUSC) on the 2 March announcement of their receipt of NCI Cancer Center designation:
The Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Hollings Cancer Center has attained National Cancer Institute (NCI) designation, a distinction held by only 63 other cancer centers in the U.S. The Hollings Cancer Center (HCC) is the only institution in South Carolina with this prestigious status.
Andrew S. Kraft, MD, Director of the Hollings Cancer Center (HCC), said being named one of…
drorzel | March 4, 2009I spent a few hours Sunday afternoon interviewing students for positions in the Minerva House program, a student life initiative that I'm involved with. The interviews were don by a panel-- me and four students-- and we tried to mix in a few oddball interview questions with the serious stuff.
The most successful of these was "What are five things you can do with a straw?" One of the students kept trying to ask "If you could be any Pokemon, which would you be, and why?" but we're apparently not drawing from a nerdy enough pool of students, because most of them couldn't think of anything.
I…
drorzel | March 4, 2009I went to a panel discussion yesterday on teaching critical thinking skills. It was more of a panel presentation than a panel discussion-- the panelist-to-allotted-time ratio was too high to allow much discussion-- but it was interesting to see how different disciplines approach the task of teaching students to think critically, and support arguments with evidence.
I thought the best comment of the panel was from a chemist, who said that the best test of the development of critical thinking skills is involvement with undergraduate research. This is a big emphasis for us, and one of the things…
revere | March 4, 2009When I was in medical school it was common to get gifts from drug companies. Since many of us had very little money, the gifts were welcome. One company gave me a Littman stethoscope, at the time, the most advanced stethoscope around. The same model costs about $100 now. I was glad to get it, although I can't tell you the name of the company. I forgot the names as quickly as I pocketed their gifts. We all got lots of free samples, too, and they were often things like tranquilizers sent through the mail and left in the magazine bin in my apartment house common mailbox area. Yes, these folks…
terrasig | March 3, 2009Run, do not walk, to the most recent addition to the ScienceBlogs.com family, AoMFASR, the blog of geology professor, Dr Kim Hannula.
You people already had to bear with my fawning about Colorado but you'll now get real, natural history and geological sciences info from a scientist with expertise to share with you the glory of the American Southwest.
I think it's really gneiss that Sb invited Kim to join but I think she should be prepared not to take any schist from anyone. This blog network has its faults but a great many of us are alluvial fans.
catdynamics | March 2, 2009once, when the Net was young, I made the mistake of doing an image search for "Miranda",
in class.
It was a natural enough a mistake, a student had asked a question about the moons of Saturn and I recalled a recent NASA image which illustrated the point I wanted to make.
Try it.
the class got a bit of an eyeful for a brief second, and a good giggle while I rapidly narrowed the search and found what I was looking for
I, of course, being an adult and stuff, have "Safe Search Off" normally.
Although that was a class computer and had generic preferences set. To "Off" I gather.
I'm not squeamish…