Academia
jstemwedel | March 2, 2009Times are tough all around these days. However, at schools like mine, a large public university with a population that includes a significant number of students who are older than traditional college age, are the first in their families to go to college, and/or were in economically precarious situations before the current economic crisis, the situation feels especially dire.
When I started teaching at San José State University in August of 2002, the U.S. had not yet gone to war in Iraq. By my third semester of teaching here, I was starting to lose students mid-semester because their…
clock | March 2, 2009Archy does an amazing detective job on who stole what from whom in the old literature on mammoths, going back all the way to Lyell!
Then, as much of that literature is very old, he provides us with a history and timeline of the ideas of copyright and plagiarism so we could have a better grasp on the sense of the time in which these old copy+paste jobs were done.
catdynamics | March 2, 2009is that I will agree to take on a major administrative role of some sort
and find that I actually like it...
actually, I fear that I would like it, yet not actually be any good at it
I suppose it wouldn't be so bad if I liked and were good at it
ok, so that isn't really my greatest fear: I mean it is not up there with a giant asteroid hitting the Earth, or a bankrupt financial institution losing $60 billion in a quarter and getting bailed out by the taxpayer or a giant pandemic with high mortality rates
but, on a personal, career scale; it is definitely way up there
jstemwedel | March 2, 2009Today at Inside Higher Education, there is a must-read essay about the impact that demands for ever-greater assessment has on faculty workload. Written by a member of the faculty at a large state university, the essay notes that faculty members, like other earthlings, have only 24 hours per day, many of which are taken up with crucial activities like research, teaching, and responding to student work. If new assessment tasks are to be added to faculty duties (as they routinely are, at least at universities like my own), it suggests that the administrators or committees adding them think…
drorzel | March 1, 2009A partial list of phrases I would like bound to a macro key, to save myself typing them over and over again as I mark up student lab reports (not all of these apply to the current crop of students):
Not only were you able to [verb] the [noun], you did [verb] the [noun]. Say that directly.
You are describing an experiment that you did a week ago. That makes it a little odd to talk about what you "hope to find" in your report.
Do not talk about the educational purpose of the lab. Pretend that you did this experiment on your own, because you wanted to learn something, and not because I made you…
jstemwedel | February 28, 2009You knew the California budget shortfall was going to have an impact on higher education in the state. But maybe you didn't know that the pain will not be distributed evenly. Last weekend, John Engell, a colleague of mine from San Jose State University (and currently chair of the Department of English & Comparative Literature), examined the pain that may be visited on our university in an opinion piece he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News:
Almost no one knows that this fall, San Jose State University will absorb one-third of all student enrollment cuts in the 23-campus California…
drorzel | February 28, 2009This week was Founder's Day at Union, one of the three big academic-procession events of the year (the others being Convocation in the fall, and Commencement in June), and this year's event had a clear theme about race and equality, with the keynote speech being given by James McPherson on Union's connection to the abolitionist movement in the early 1800's.
In addition to McPherson's talk, there was the official unveiling of a portrait of Moses Viney, an escaped slave who came to Schenectady and became a coachman and messenger for Eliphalet Nott, the towering figure of the College's early…
drorzel | February 28, 2009One of last year's physics majors is spending the year in rural Uganda working at a clinic/ school there. He's keeping a blog, which is intermittently updated by western standards, but remarkably up-to-date given where he is.
This week, he blogged about putting his physics education to use:
I have been doing a lot of electrical work the last two days. I connected a laboratory and rewired the whole system so that some safety switches would be in place and so that I would be the sole person with the knowledge and ability to decide who will have light. Actually, it is to break it up so that we…
drorzel | February 27, 2009Via email, Mike Steeves points me to an Ars Technica article about a Thomson Reuters report on the "decline in American science":
The US is beginning to lose its scientific dominance. That's
the message from Thomson Reuters, the people behind EndNote and impact factors.
According to a report in their publication ScienceWatch, the US' science
output is in a shallow decline at the same time that Asia is in the ascendancy.
If it sounds like you've heard that before, you've been
paying attention. Back in 2006 the National Science Foundation's biennial
Science and Engineering Indicators report…
drorzel | February 27, 2009The Dean Dad is annoyed with the New York Times, for an article about how the recession is affecting the humanities. The whole piece is worth a read, but he singles out a quote from the former president of my alma mater:
Some large state universities routinely turn away students who want to sign up for courses in the humanities, Francis C. Oakley, president emeritus and a professor of the history of ideas at Williams College, reported. At the University of Washington, for example, in recent years, as many as one-quarter of the students found they were unable to get into a humanities course.…
terrasig | February 27, 2009I've been scarce around these parts and hope to get a Friday Fermentable up before midnight. However, I just wanted to share the following on the last couple of days discussions about Nature Publishing Group's various pronouncements on the importance of science blogging, especially their mention in Nature Methods of ScienceOnline'09, an unconference I co-organized this year with founders and online science visionaries, Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker.
Bora has the main stories and DrugMonkey adds commentary and his own personal experiences.
But leave it to Anton Zuiker to capture the whole…
clock | February 26, 2009Another editorial about science blogging today, this time in Nature Methods: Lines of communication:
The public likes science stories it can easily relate to, and we have to admit that most science, including that published in Nature Methods, is unlikely to get more than a snore from nonscientists. In contrast, science stories that have a human interest or other emotionally charged angle require the concerted efforts of both journalists and scientists to ensure that the public understands the story well enough to make an informed personal decision. A failure in this regard can lead to a…
catdynamics | February 26, 2009FSP tells it like it is: where there is nothing for money, and the lads are expensive
pay cuts, btw, are globally a bad idea, even if they are tempting locally
they are massively deflationary, because the cut generally all goes to discretionary spending, - a university doing cross-the-board pay cuts of faculty and staff will trash the economy of most college towns
drorzel | February 26, 2009ScienceWoman offers a good discussion question:
You are in a room with a bunch of other female faculty/post-docs/grad students from your university. You know a few of them, but most of them are unfamiliar to you. The convener of the meeting asks each of you to introduce yourself by answering the following question: "What is one aspect of your professional life that you are good at?"
It's a good topic that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with gender or the academy, so I will shamelessly steal it re-pose it without that frame:
What is one thing in your professional life that you do…
clock | February 26, 2009In today's Nature you can read an editorial that says, right there in the title, It's good to blog:
Is blogging a part of science, journalism or public discourse? In fact it may be all of these -- an ambiguity that can sometimes leave scientists feeling uncertain about the rules of the game.
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The blogosphere differs from mass media and specialized media in many respects, but the same considerations apply in disseminating new scientific results there. Authors of papers in press have the right to correct misrepresentations and to point to results that will appear in a…
jstemwedel | February 25, 2009In last night's address to the joint session of Congress, President Obama said:
The third challenge we must address is the urgent need to expand the promise of education in America.
In a global economy where the most valuable skill you can sell is your knowledge, a good education is no longer just a pathway to opportunity - it is a pre-requisite.
Right now, three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma. And yet, just over half of our citizens have that level of education. We have one of the highest high school dropout rates of any…
drorzel | February 25, 2009Over at Dot Physics, Rhett is taking another whack at photons. If you recall, the last time he did this wasn't too successful, and this round fares no better:
So back to the photon. In my original post I made the claim that the photoelectric effect is not a great experiment to show photons. Maybe that is not how it came off, but that is what I meant. The photoelectric effect can be explained quite well with the classical electromagnetic waves model and a quantum nature of matter. Of course there is a quantum nature to light as well.
I think the biggest problem with the photon is that the…
clock | February 24, 2009SLEEP 2009:
23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, LLC (APSS) will be held June 6-11, 2009, at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle, Washington. The SLEEP meeting attracts the largest audience of sleep specialists in the nation. It is the only five and a half day meeting in the nation with scientific sessions and an exhibition hall focused solely on sleep medicine and sleep research.
Hmmm, always wanted to visit Seattle. And this sounds like a very bloggable conference. And I'd get to finally meet Archy....
clock | February 24, 2009The very first, inaugural, and absolutely amazing edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival is now up on Urban Science Adventures. Wow! Just wow! Totally amazing stuff.
And what a reminder of my White privilege - a couple of names there are familiar to me, as I have read their papers before, never ever stopping to think who they were or how they looked like! What a wake-up call!
For instance, I have read several papers by Chana Akins, as she works on Japanese quail. And I am somewhat familiar (being a history buff and obsessive reader of literature in my and related fields) with the work…
clock | February 24, 2009The 2009 Gordon Conference on Chronobiology is all molecular, and it is tough to get in anyway. It would be nice to go, but I don't see how I can get invited and/or funded.