Academia
drorzel | December 17, 2008Steve Hsu has a nice post on teaching, following up on the Malcolm Gladwell piece that everyone is talking about. Steve took the time to track down the Brookings Institute report mentioned in the piece, and highlights two graphs:
The top figure shows that certification has no impact on teaching effectiveness. The second shows that effectiveness measured in the years 1 and 2 is predictive of effectiveness in the subsequent year. In this case effectiveness is defined by the average change in percentile ranking of students in the teacher's class. Good teachers help their students to improve…
drorzel | December 15, 2008Day four of the power outage, with the added angry-making twist that the people across the street from us have their power back. Staring across the road at their warm, shiny lights, I could feel the beginning of the sort of rage that fuels torch-and-pitchfork mobs storming medieval castles. Only, you know, there was just me, so I retreated back to the hotel room for another uncomfortable night.
I spent most of the day in my office on campus, which, mirabile dictu never lost power. This is a first-- normally, the power in our building goes out at the faintest hint of a power line falling…
neurotopia | December 15, 2008The semester is finally winding down. Kudos to Scicurious for holding down the fort. After teaching 3 courses on top of my 40+ hour-a-week lab job, I'm rather grateful. No wait, I'm frakkin' ecstatic. Possibly rapturous. Don't get me wrong, I had a blast being an instructor. Most notably my Basic Concepts students told me they really appreciated my efforts, and a number of them did pass their departmental exams to enter their respective programs. That made me feel great. My Human Bio course was a bit of a sleeper, however, since almost every single person was there to fill a credit.…
clock | December 15, 2008Pawel tried, for a year, to be a freelance scientist. While the experiment did not work, in a sense that it had to end, he has learned a lot from the experience. And all of us following his experience also learned a lot about the current state of the world. And I do not think this has anything to do with Pawel living in Poland - I doubt this would have been any different if he was in the USA or elsewhere.
You all know that I am a big fan of telecommuting and coworking and one of the doomsayers about the future existence of the institution of 'The Office'. And you also know that I am a…
clock | December 13, 2008This one is good and thorough - by Colin Purrington, Department of Biology, Swarthmore College. Short excerpt from the beginning:
Why a poster is usually better than a talk
Although you could communicate all of the above via a 15-minute talk at the same meeting, presenting a poster allows you to more personally interact with the people who are interested in your research, and can reach people who might not be in your specific field of research. Posters are more efficient than a talk because they can be viewed even while you are off napping, and especially desirable if you are terrible at…
clock | December 12, 2008On arXiv, by M. E. J. Newman (Santa Fe Institute):
We investigate the structure of scientific collaboration networks. We consider two scientists to be connected if they have authored a paper together, and construct explicit networks of such connections using data drawn from a number of databases, including MEDLINE (biomedical research), the Los Alamos e-Print Archive (physics), and NCSTRL (computer science). We show that these collaboration networks form "small worlds" in which randomly chosen pairs of scientists are typically separated by only a short path of intermediate acquaintances. We…
catdynamics | December 11, 2008last class, and we got through 126 slides in the last two lectures...
twice a week, for the last three months, except for the "few" odd times I was on travel, I have walked into our freshman seminar with a small cup of black coffee, and, if the grad students hadn't eaten them all, a cookie - lemon cream or oreo, usually.
So, for the last class the students decided I needed to modernise, and get one of them new fangled healthy blended drinks:
I think this is called a "strawberry island oasis yogurt cream smoothie";
not half-bad actually, in fact could get used to it...
Not much caffeine…
clock | December 11, 2008Sam Dupuis (yes, the son of John) contacted Michael Nielsen and posted a nice, smart, long blog interview. Check it out.
drorzel | December 10, 2008Will Wilkinson has some comments about an article by Malcolm Gladwell from The New Yorker. I basically agree with him about Gladwell, but I'm bothered by the last paragraph:
Now, there's no point in saying things that will make your readers think you are an evilcrazy person, so I can understand why Gladwell wastes words on quarterbacks instead of on the deeper mechanisms at work here. But why is it that "society devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?" The obvious answer is that care and patience are in greater…
terrasig | December 10, 2008I have something like ten posts already started and none of them done due to that silly work thing. I don't know how the other people around ScienceBlogs actually get posts up with such frequency.
In the meantime, I had a thought while conversing with Alice Pawley and Suzanne Franks about their session at the upcoming ScienceOnline'09 unconference on gender issues in science where I, brave one that I am, will represent all men and discuss how we all think we boys can be allies.
In the meantime, please re-read Alice's post on the recent anniversary of the Montreal Massacre:
On December 6,…
omnibrain | December 9, 2008I've always joked around about girls who would walk into a tattoo parlor and ask for a Chinese character that means something to them... like love, hope, or faith. Of course the tattoo artists don't know one damn character in Chinese so they just pick a random character from the internet and the girl ends up with something that actually says slut, pink slippery Christmas tree, or something else random. I never imagined a scientific magazine would fall prey to something absolutely ridiculous like this.
Science journal mistakenly uses flyer for Macau brothel to illustrate report on China…
clock | December 7, 2008This kind of he-said-she-said False Equivalence journalism is infuriating and is the prime reason why nobody trusts the corporate media any more which is why the newspapers are dying:
Academic Elites Fill Obama's Roster:
.....All told, of Obama's top 35 appointments so far, 22 have degrees from an Ivy League school, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago or one of the top British universities. For the other slots, the president-elect made do with graduates of Georgetown and the Universities of Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina.
While Obama's picks have been lauded for their ethnic and…
jstemwedel | December 7, 2008In spring of 2007, after nearly two years without a contract, the faculty of the 23 campuses of the California State University system (of which my university is a part) voted to ratify a contract. Among other things, that contract included raises to help our salaries catch up to the cost of living in California. (Notice the word "help" in that sentence; the promised raises, while making things better, don't quite get the whole job done.)
The negotiations for this contract were frustratingly unproductive until my faculty union organized a rolling strike that was planned as a set of two-…
drorzel | December 7, 2008Carl Zimmer sent me a message via Facebook, which made me think I might owe the New York Times an apology for last week's ranting. Publishers Weekly has come out with their list of the best books of the year, and they do even worse than the Times: not one of the 27 books in their "Nonfiction" category are about science-- the closest they come is probably Gladwell's Outliers.
Better yet, in a move that will no doubt delight my colleagues here at ScienceBlogs, they have an entire category on their list for "Religion," but no category for "Science." Fantastic.
I'm not quite as bothered by this…
drorzel | December 7, 2008I spent most of yesterday helping out with an on-campus workshop for high school teachers and students. Seven high school physics teachers and seventeen high school students spent the day doing a half-dozen experiments to measure various physical constants.
I was in charge of having them measure Plack's constant using the photoelectric effect. The actual measurement (made using a PASCO apparatus) takes about fifteen minutes, so I gave each group a quick explanation of the history: Einstein proposed the particle model of light as an explanation for the photoelectric effect in 1905, and nobody…
revere | December 5, 2008Given the size of the kinds of Federal bail-outs being discussed these days, Harvard University's endowment, almost $37 billion, by far the largest of any university in the world, sounds like chump change. But it is a staggeringly large endowment for a university and the interest alone accounted for 35% of the Harvard's annual operating budget. The previous statement is not quite accurate, we find out now. The endowment stood at $36.9 billion four months ago, the biggest decline in modern history of the institution. In the time since it has lost at least 22% of its value ($8 billion). The…
drorzel | December 5, 2008A few days ago, I complained again about the relative lack of science books in the New York Times "Notable Books of 2008" list. Yesterday, one of the big stories was CNN axing its entire science unit, such as it was, which drew comments from lots of blogs (and more whose links I can't be bothered to track down).
I'm probably the only one who thinks this, but in my opinion, these two are related. I'm not saying one caused the other, but that they're both symptoms of the same thing: the broad lack of respect for science among educated people. (Which I've ranted about before.)
One of the…
tfk | December 3, 2008CNN shutters its science/environment/technology unit:
[Longtime CNN anchor/reporter Miles] O'Brien's departure comes as the network dismantles its science, space, environment and technology unit in Atlanta. That includes O'Brien as well as six producers. O'Brien has been CNN's chief technology and environment correspondent since being replaced as anchor of American Morning in April 2007.
Before, during and after anchoring, O'Brien worked the NASA beat for CNN. He covered John Glenn's return to space in 1998. In 1999 he led CNN's coverage of the failed Mars Orbiter and Polar Lander missions…