Academia
terrasig | January 4, 2009In preparing for the ScienceOnline'09 session on Gender in Science - Online and Offline, one planned discussion point will be how to enlist allies representing the dominant power structure to enhance equality and diversity in the STEM disciplines. No one ally can do it all but a combination of like-minded people can make a huge difference.
Here is a terrific example of an ally, written by superb higher ed reporter, Eric Ferreri, of the Raleigh (NC) News & Observer, on Dr Henry Friedman and CAPE, the Collegiate Athletic Pre-Medical Experience:
Georgia Beasley was practicing her jump shot…
clock | January 1, 2009
Academic Evolution is Gideon Burton's blog, intended as a playground for posting drafts and eliciting feedback while he is writing a book of the same title. You can see the rough outline of the proposed contents of the book here:
This blog is intended to become Academic Evolution, the book. My model is Chris Anderson, whose Long Tail blog helped bring about his seminal book of the same name. Similarly, I am beta testing my ideas, developing them in keeping with the principle of transparency and with the goal of inviting public review and collaboration. I'm smart enough to know others are…
drorzel | December 31, 2008Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau calls out unnamed ScienceBloggers for cognitive dissonance:
I think scientific training is of great intellectual and practical benefit to students with the interest and ability to pursue it. I would like to see more people choose to study science (whether at the undergraduate level or beyond). However, I am amused that otherwise intelligent and highly analytical people can simultaneously discuss the following ideas without displaying any awareness of the tensions: The competition for science faculty jobs is too intense, it's bad when people leave the…
drorzel | December 31, 2008I generally enjoy Gregg Easterbrook's football writing-- he gets a little repetitive, and the shtick is starting to overwhelm any insight, but he makes some good points, and is usually entertaining. For example, I really enjoyed his take on the Dallas Cowboys at the end of this week's column (schadenfreude is a powerful thing).
Easterbrook's problem is that he insists on using his football column as a platform from which to launch bizarre digressions in all sorts of directions. See, for example, this week's weird and pointless foray into cosmology. Or, better yet, his lengthy excursion into…
jstemwedel | December 30, 2008Some time ago, PhysioProf asserted that journal articles in the biomedical sciences listing two first authors are misrepresenting the reality of the involvement of those authors.
I'm of the opinion that authorship issues are pretty important. It's not just a matter of which scientists get to take credit for the scientific advance a particular paper reports, but also a matter of which scientists are shouldering the responsibility for what that paper communicates (plus being involved in the further discourse between scientists about the pertinent scientific questions, techniques and so forth…
jstemwedel | December 30, 2008If memory serves, today is the day that the meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association draws to a close. That meeting, always conveniently scheduled to fall in the interstices between Christmas and New Year's, and more often than not located in some East Coast city with nasty winter weather (this year, Philadelphia), is traditionally where philosophy departments from U.S. colleges and universities (as well as a few from elsewhere) conduct preliminary job interviews.
Except this year, apparently, a great many job searches have been frozen or canceled, owing to…
drorzel | December 30, 2008Inside Higher Ed has an article on athletics and admissions based on an investigative report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The report compares the SAT scores of football and basketball players to those of other students, but what it really highlights is the difference between science and journalism.
The basis of the report is pretty simple: the paper got the test score reports for 55 major colleges and universities, from data that they are required to file with the NCAA. They compared the average scores for football and basketball players to the scores of other athletes and students…
drorzel | December 30, 2008ScienceWoman has a post about plans and publications that opens with a comment about what makes a dissertation that struck me as odd:
Three papers, an introductory chapter and some broad conclusions. Those are the ingredients of a Ph.D. dissertation in it's simplest form.
[...]My first PhD paper was published in 2006, shortly after I defended. The second paper came out earlier this year. The third paper goes back to the editors on Monday, at the end of what hopefully is its last ever set of revisions. If all goes well, the editors give it their blessing and we move on to proofs and…
tfk | December 23, 2008Mike the Mad Biologist is, well, mad. In writing about Obama's science team, I commented that:
scientists often distinguish [technical challenges] from the challenges in testing our broad conceptual understanding of the laws of nature. While "test tube jockeys" often produce important results, there tends to be a certain skepticism of their work. Similarly, medical research is so focused on the practical application that scientists in other fields are dubious about regarding medical researchers as being engaged in the same sort of enterprise as a theoretical physicist or a landscape…
clock | December 21, 2008There was a good reason why the form and format, as well as the rhetoric of the scientific paper were instituted the way they were back in the early days of scientific journals. Science was trying to come on its own and to differentiate itself from philosophy, theology and lay literature about nature. It was essential to develop a style of writing that is impersonal, precise, sharply separating data from speculations, and that lends itself to replication of experiments.
The form and format of a scientific paper has evolved towards a very precise and very universal state that makes scientist-…
terrasig | December 21, 2008I wrote at length the other day about my visit and talk at the Key West Tropical Forest & Botanical Garden, noting that Duke students and their Key West High School mentees would be presenting the results of their 2008 projects yesterday afternoon. Well, we were sadly flying out about the time of the presentations but one of them captured all of the results.
In fact, one project chronicled all the projects dating back to 2002 - kind of like looking in a mirror's reflection of a mirror.
This project established the Science Corner for the garden website, hosted at Duke but linked on the…
drorzel | December 20, 2008I've said a number of harsh things here about the bad attitude of people who consider themselve Intellectuals toward math and science. After reading this New Yorker discussion about a Young Adult novel, I may need to change my stance a bit.
It's not that they're better than expected when it comes to math and science-- the subject never comes up. The mind-changing thing is their really appalling ignorance of and attitude toward YA books. It's really pretty amazing. And if somebody said things in public that were half as insulting to teenage girls as what they say about teenage boys, they'd be…
clock | December 19, 2008I did not know there were so many of them:
Student science publishing: an exploratory study of undergraduate science research journals and popular science magazines in the US and Europe:
Science magazines have an important role in disseminating scientific knowledge into the public sphere and in discussing the broader scope affected by scientific research such as technology, ethics and politics. Student-run science magazines afford opportunities for future scientists, communicators, politicians and others to practice communicating science. The ability to translate 'scientese' into a jargon-…
clock | December 19, 2008I get mail:
The National Academies want to identify the topics in science, engineering, and medicine that matter most to the public and that people have the greatest interest in learning more about. Once the topics have been selected, we plan to create a suite of educational materials (in both print and web formats) about each subject, with the goal of offering objective, reliable resources about complex topics.
We developed a 2-minute survey that we'd like to distribute to our key audiences. Readers of your blog are one of those key audiences and we would love to hear what topics matter…
terrasig | December 19, 2008As I mentioned in my intro post to our week in Key West, I was definitely going to make a visit to the Key West Tropical Forest & Botanical Garden. We took the then-PharmToddler there in November 2003 when this gem was just being relaunched after decades of negligence. According to Georgia Tasker at the Miami Herald:
It was begun in the Great Depression days of 1934 by the City of Key West, and built by the WPA at the same time as the city's aquarium. At one point, the garden contained an aviary, hand-made rock walls, green houses and 7,000 plants. It opened in 1936 and flourished for…
clock | December 18, 2008From EconPapers:
Scientific research has come to dominate many American universities. Even with growing external support, increasingly the costs of scientific research are being funded out of internal university funds. Our paper explains why this is occuring, presents estimates of the magnitudes of start-up cost packages being provided to scientists and engineers and then uses panel data to estimate the impact of the growing cost of science on student/faculty ratios, faculty salaries and undergraduate tuition.We find that universities whose own expenditures on research are growing the most…
clock | December 18, 2008Publish in Wikipedia or perish:
Wikipedia, meet RNA. Anyone submitting to a section of the journal RNA Biology will, in the future, be required to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. The journal will then peer review the page before publishing it in Wikipedia.
----------------------
The RNA wiki is a subset of a broader project, the WikiProject Molecular and Cellular Biology, which has marshalled hundreds of scientists to improve the content of biology articles in Wikipedia. It, in turn, is collaborating with the Novartis Research Foundation on GeneWiki 3, an effort to…
clock | December 18, 2008Probably not:
Rumors swirl, but a Swedish prosecutor will only confirm a "preliminary investigation" into allegations that pharma giant AstraZeneca fixed the Nobels for financial gain.
-------------------------
As for the Nobels, as scurrilous as the charges may sound, there is little evidence to support them. First off, AstraZeneca's ties to the anti-HPV vaccine are tenuous at best: In 2007 it purchased a company called MedImmune, which had developed the viruslike particle (VLP) technology licensed for use in Merck's Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix vaccines -- both designed to…
clock | December 17, 2008From The Scientist: Flagging fraud:
A team of French life sciences grad students has launched an online repository of fraudulent scientific papers, and is calling on researchers to report studies tainted by misconduct.
The website -- called Scientific Red Cards -- is still in a beta version, but once it's fully operational it should help the scientific community police the literature even when problems slip past journal editors, the students claim.
The database might also prevent researchers from citing papers that they don't even realize are fraudulent, said Claire Ribrault, a PhD student in…
catdynamics | December 17, 2008interesting discussion at infoproc and uncertain principles on teaching effectiveness at K-12 level
because... everybody!... linking is an intrinsic good!