Academia
clock | February 24, 2009XI Congress of the European Biological Rhythms Society, organized in association with the Japanese Society for Chronobiology
Hmmmm, Strasbourg in August. Fun for the family to do stuff while I chat with fellow chronobiologists, and just a short flight away from Belgrade.... Have to investigate if there's a way for me to go....
And the program looks interesting...
drorzel | February 24, 2009the results from yesterday's poll on reporting exam scores were pretty strongly divided. 47% favored giving histograms, or some very detailed breakdown, while 33% were in favor of statistical measures only (mean, standard deviation, extrema, that sort of thing). 19% were in favor of giving no collective information at all.
My own usual practice is to give the high score, low score, and class mean, and that's it. This has as much to do with student psychology as anything else.
I provide the high score to prevent students with low scores from thinking "Oh, this was just impossible, so nobody…
drorzel | February 24, 2009Tallying up the results of yesterday's poll about formula sheets (as of 8:00 Tuesday morning, 39 total comments), people were overwhelmingly in favor of formula sheets. 72% of respondents reported being allowed to use formula sheets as students, and 69% were in favor of allowing formula sheets as faculty. A substantial number of the "no" responses were in favor of providing important formulae on the test paper.
This is more or less in accord with my own preferences. My general practice is to allow students to make up their own formula sheets in intermediate classes. In the introductory…
terrasig | February 23, 2009Over the weekend, Comrade PhysioProf at DrugMonkey posted on the details of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus funds distribution for the US National Institutes of Health.
For some unusual reason, the letter that was sent to NIH investigators and posted on the NIH website has now been removed and replaced today by the statement:
The announcement from the Acting NIH Director will be issued later today.
We are making every effort to get this vital information to you as soon as possible.
This page was last reviewed on February 23, 2009.
From the DrugMonkey post and an article…
drorzel | February 23, 2009No, this isn't a mistake-- I'm doing two quasi-polls on academic issues today, because I care what you think...
I'm handing back last Thursday's exams today. The scores on the test were about what I expect, given the material. As I'm looking at the scores, trying to assess the class as a whole, I'm curious about the issue of score reporting, so I'll throw this out to the general readership:
What information do you think students should be given about exam scores?
You can answer this from either a faculty or a student perspective (please indicate which).
My general practice is to hand back…
drorzel | February 23, 2009In the basement, across the hall from my lab, there are three plastic-covered collages made up of formula sheets from long-ago exams. One of my colleagues let the students in a Physics for Pre-Meds class write whatever they wanted on one sheet of paper to bring into the final, and made art from the collected pages after the test.
I was thinking about this last night as I graded last Thursday's exams, looking at the formula sheets I collected from the students. The range of things that people decide to immortalize on paper is pretty impressive.
Of course, such sheets are not universally loved…
scientificactivist | February 22, 2009If I ran an agricultural biotech company and I wanted to go out of my way to alienate my supporters and lend credence to my conspiracy theory-peddling critics, I think that this is exactly how I would go about doing so. From The New York Times:
Biotechnology companies are keeping university scientists from fully researching the effectiveness and environmental impact of the industry's genetically modified crops, according to an unusual complaint issued by a group of those scientists.
"No truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions," the scientists wrote in a…
drorzel | February 20, 2009I left off last time with a brief introduction to uncertainty, followed by two classes worth of background, both mathematical and Mathematica.
Class 15 picked up the physics again, starting with an explanation of the connection between the Fourier theorem and uncertainty, namely that any attempt to construct a wavefunction that has both particle and wave propertied will necessarily involve some uncertainty in both position and momentum. This is basically Chapter 2 of the book-in-progress, with a bit more math.
After that, I start laying out quantum mechanics in a more formal way, stating…
drorzel | February 19, 2009A few days ago, Bee put up a post titled Do We Need Science Journalists?, linking back to Bora's enormous manifesto from the first bit of the Horgan-Johnson bloggingheads kerfuffle. My first reaction was "Oh, God, not again..." but her post did make me think of one thing, which is illustrated by Peter Woit's latest (no doubt a kerfuffle-in-the-making).
Bee quotes Bora urging bloggers to keep twirling, twirling, twirling toward the better day when scientists communicate to the general public, without all the hype and exaggeration:
Perhaps if we remove those middle-men and have scientists and…
terrasig | February 19, 2009The complicity of revered academic institutions in the promotion of pseudoscience today takes another step forward.
The University of the Sciences in Philadelphia (USP), known formerly as the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science (PCP&S), will bestow an honorary Doctor(ate) of Science on John A Borneman, III, to celebrate their Founders' Day.
From the university press release:
Borneman has spent his lifetime committed to the development and regulation of homeopathic medicine within the United States. He is the third of four generations of "John Bornemans" to attend the Philadelphia…
scientificactivist | February 13, 2009Today, a court in Oxford found animal rights extremist Mel Broughton guilty of conspiracy to commit arson and sentenced him to ten years in prison for his crime. Broughton was arrested in 2007, after being linked to a failed arson attempt at Oxford's Templeton College (which followed a successful attack of Queen's College the previous year).
I have written at length about the animal rightists' campaign of fear and intimidation against Oxford University (check out previous entries for more)--a campaign that escalated in 2005, when the ALF declared that nothing owned by the university is off…
drorzel | February 13, 2009I've been a Grumpy Blogger this week, what with one thing and another (some of my general malaise has finally resolved into a cold, which I suspect explains a lot). I'm headed to Boskone for the weekend, though, so let's end the week on a positive note. I'm declaring this a Happy News Open Thread: if you've got something positive to report, leave it in the comments.
some happy thoughts to get things started:
Two of Union's librarians (one of whom is a regular in our lunchtime basketball games) have won an award from the American Library Association. Congratulations, Bruce and Gail!
One of…
catdynamics | February 11, 2009Ok - lets move beyond anonymous confessions.
Which universities have gone public with the problems, and what are the public facts.
I'll aggregate links below.
Arizona State University - hard times and - mandatory unpaid furlough specifics - and budget reductions
University of Arizona mandatory furloughs
University of California - minor adjustments; enrollment cuts and senior administrator pay freeze
Emory University - cuts
University of Florida - Faculty Senate Budget blog...
University of Idaho - program prioritization, 41 degree programs up for closure
Kansas system cuts
University of…
jstemwedel | February 11, 2009(Written for the inaugural edition of the Diversity in Science blog carnival, with big thanks to DNLee for launching it.)
Back in the spring and autumn of 1992, I was a chemistry graduate student starting to believe that I might actually get enough of my experiments to work to get my Ph.D. As such, I did what senior graduate students in my department were supposed to do: I began preparing myself to interview with employers who came to my campus (an assortment of industry companies and national labs), and I made regular visits to my department's large job announcement binder (familiarly…
catdynamics | February 11, 2009The Female Science Professor explains the whole grant thing to graduate students.
I really like the "SimGrant" suggestion - would make a very spiffy module for the Sims go to Uni package, or so I infer.
scientificactivist | February 10, 2009Evolution is an established scientific idea, the unifying theme of biology, and an important field of study. "Darwinism", on the other hand, is a term used misleadingly by creationists to attack ideas they can't counter on fact alone and misguidedly by journalists unwittingly assisting this process. With that in mind, the recent essay by Carl Safina in The New York Times entitled "Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live" seems a bit irrelevant:
By propounding "Darwinism," even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one "…
scientificactivist | February 10, 2009Last fall, most of the Oxford Biochemistry Department moved into a fancy-schmancy new building (imaginatively named "New Biochemistry"). A few of us stayed behind (have you ever tried to move a 6-magnet NMR facility?), and--to be totally honest--I can't say that I'm too disappointed about this. Granted, the new building is notable enough to warrant a recent write-up in Nature due to its open design and various art installations. On the other hand, I think that most of the faculty, postdocs, and students in the department are probably more interested in doing serious science, so this is…
drorzel | February 10, 2009Like a lot of physics departments, we offer an upper-level lab class, aimed at juniors and seniors. There are a lot of ways to approach this sort of course, but one sensible way to think about it is in terms of giving students essential skills and experiences. That is, i's a course in which they learn to do the things that no physics major should graduate without doing.
I'm sure that other disciplines do something similar, so I thought I might throw this out there as a general question:
What are the essential skills and experiences a student ought to have before graduating with a degree in…
catdynamics | February 9, 2009ok folks, how bad is it getting out there?
I'm hearing lots of anecdotes: pay freezes galore, hiring freezes in places, whispers of mandatory cross-the-board paycuts if budgets are as projected, firing of non-tenured staff and class size cramming planned, and, ad hoc committees forming to consider closure of departments and dismissal of tenured staff en masse.
Truth?
drorzel | February 8, 2009Williams has long held a dominant position in a number of categories of blogging: Dan Drezner on economics and politics, Marc Lynch on the Middle East, Ethan Zuckerman on the developing world and really cool conferences, Derek Catsam on history and Red Sox fandom, yours truly on canine physics. And I'm sure I'm forgetting several people.
The number of blogging fields with prominent Eph contributions has increased this week, with the entire Williams math department making the jump into blogging. It's a bold move, but math blogging has always been more respectable than other types.
At this…