Academia
drorzel | December 3, 2008Last year, around this time, I posted a rant about the lack of science books in the New York Times's "Notable Books of 2007." While I was out of town last week, they posted this year's list. So, have things improved?
Yes and no. They do, in fact, have two books that are unquestionably science books on the list: THE DRUNKARD’S WALK: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow (which I also reviewed), and THE SUPERORGANISM: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, by Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson.
By my count, they list 52 non-fiction titles, meaning that a whole 3.8…
drorzel | December 3, 2008One of our 2008 Physics majors is currently in Uganda, working at a clinic/ school in a place called Ddegaya (Google doesn't recognize it, but it's somewhere around here). He's there as part of a program started by the college last year, which sent eight students abroad to work in impoverished areas, and then come back to campus next spring and talk about their experiences. As part of this, he's keeping a blog, because it's all about blogs these days.
Steve's a great guy, and from all reports appears to be doing well and doing good. His most recent post calls me out, though:
I love the…
clock | November 28, 2008The other night, at the meeting of the Science Communicators of North Carolina, the highlight of the event was a Skype conversation with Chris Brodie who is currently in Norway on a Fulbright, trying to help the scientists and science journalists there become more effective in communicating Norwegian science to their constituents and internationally.
Some of the things Chris said were surprising, others not as much. In my mind, I was comparing what he said to what I learned back in April when I went back to Serbia and talked to some scientists there. It is interesting how cultural…
catdynamics | November 27, 2008First Krugman makes a snarky comment about the grownups coming (though I seem to have heard that one before, a few years ago, how did that work out?).
Then Greg Mankiw gets all in a snit about it.
So, Krugman has to apologise, sort of.
Ok, I start to see some of the disadvantages of non-pseudonymous blogging for academics.
But, that is now what is interesting about this.
What is interesting about this is that Greg Mankiw points to a standard ranking of economists' academic accomplisments, and compares positions.
'course Krugman outranks Mankiw... shouldn't it stop there?
But, we're not done…
clock | November 26, 2008That is the Discover Magazine's series of articles, which includes:
The 10 Most Influential People in Science
20 Best Brains Under 40
Teen Genius: 5 Promising Scientists Under 20
...and more (the series, as the numbers above do not add up to 50, must still be in progress).
terrasig | November 25, 2008We had one of our most active comment threads the other day when I posted my thoughts on drdrA's own superb post about what is most important to her in being a woman in science. I noted my own desire to listen to and understand as completely as possible the issues of my women colleagues and discuss, in an upcoming ScienceOnline'09 session with Zuska and Alice Pawley (Sat 17 Jan, 11:30 am, session C), how they can enlist academic allies who have the traditional power and resource structure (i.e., white guys like me) to establish partnerships in working toward fair and equitable treatment of…
clock | November 23, 2008I wish every single laboratory web-page contained a disclaimer like this one:
We currently have room in the lab for more graduate students. Before you apply to this lab or any other, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, be realistic about graduate school. Graduate school in biology is not a sure path to success. Many students assume that they will eventually get a job just like their advisor's. However, the average professor at a research university has three students at a time for about 5 years each. So, over a career of 30 years, this professor has about 18 students. Since the…
clock | November 23, 2008This article made me think about this - it showcases two local examples, and it contains this statement:
Mary Gratch, the academic counselor for the junior and senior classes at CHS [Carrboro High School], was a counselor at Chapel Hill High School for 16 years before CHS opened. She said that about two of her students apply to Canadian universities every year.
"It's a small number, but it kind of consistently happens," she said. "In terms of people selecting schools, it's the United States or Canada typically."
But I am wondering if there are any trends occurring - do more (or less) students…
jstemwedel | November 20, 2008In a comment on another post, Alex gently reminds me that what counts as a leak from the science/technology/engineering/math pipeline depends on your point of view:
I don't think of you as a "leak." But I'm in an undergraduate physics department, so unlike the people in the Ph.D.-granting departments where I trained I'm not in the business of training people to go for science faculty jobs. I'm in the business of teaching people some science so they can go out and use their training to pursue whatever opportunities interest them. You study ethical and philosophical issues in science and…
jstemwedel | November 20, 2008... and the university, in turn, fires the professor.
You've probably already seen this story. Loye Young, an adjunct professor at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, warned his students (as we all do) against plagiarism. Indeed, as reported by Inside Higher Ed, he included this statement in his fall course syllabus for his management information systems course:
No form of dishonesty is acceptable. I will promptly and publicly fail and humiliate anyone caught lying, cheating, or stealing. That includes academic dishonesty, copyright violations, software piracy, or any other…
jstemwedel | November 19, 2008There are some newspaper stories that must be pretty easy to write at this point because it seems like they're essentially the same year in and year out. California is having another budget crisis, and the Californians who are going to take it in the teeth are students -- especially students in the California State University (CSU) system, to which the university that employs me belongs.
Once again, budget shortfalls at the state level mean enrollments will be capped at the 23 campuses in the CSU system. Practically, this means 10,000 or so qualified applicants will be turned away. In…
drorzel | November 19, 2008I got a bunch of really good comments to yesterday's post about athletes and attitudes toward education. Unfortunately, yesterday was also a stay-at-home-with-SteelyKid day, and she spent a lot of time demanding to be held or otherwise catered to, so I didn't have a chance to respond. I'd like to correct that today by responding to the main threads of argument in those comments.
Taking these in no particular order, Moshe writes:
Not sure there is a serious argument here, athletes are different in so many ways, but I'll bite - here is another difference. Some students and athletes have their…
catdynamics | November 18, 2008Students become like their advisors.
In academic style, in mannerism, or maybe just their irrational passion for raquetball.
Why is this?
Sincere form of flattery?
Memetic transmission?
Or, something more insidious...
I have before noted that the descendancy of graduate students from their advisors, and lo their advisors before them, is one of the few good examples of Lamarckian evolution
It is an amusing conceit.
The students, maybe subconsciously, adapting their advisors mannerisms, style, approach to science etc.
But, as this came up over coffee in snowy Ohio, a very clever friend of mine…
drorzel | November 18, 2008It's a great time of year if you're a sports fan. The NFL is in full swing, and college football is coming to the inconclusive end of its season (save for the weird six-weeks-later coda of the bowl games). The NBA and NHL are just starting up, and most importantly, college basketball season has just started.
The abundance of sports, particularly college sports, at this time of year makes it a great time to be a fan. Unfortunately, the fact that both college football and college basketball (the biggest of the big-money sports) are in season at the moment also means that this is the peak season…
terrasig | November 18, 2008DrDrA at BlueLabCoats has returned with an outstanding post, entitled, "I want you to hear me, I don't care what you see...," that she wrote out longhand during her recent travels:
In my absence I picked up a whiff of a lot of chatter about what women scientists wear to work... or talk/write about wearing .... going on in the blogosphere. . .
You see- the struggle I'm in daily in my own life and career is not about appearances, and it is not about symbolism or femininity- and it is not about who I am as a person, my likes and dislikes etc. It is a struggle to be heard and taken seriously…
drorzel | November 18, 2008The History Channel ran a two-hour program on Einstein last night. I had meant to plug this in advance, but got distracted by the Screamy Baby Fun-Time Hour yesterday, and didn't have time to post.
The show restricted itself more or less to the period from 1900, just before his "miracle year" in 1905, to 1922 or so, when Einstein received his Nobel Prize. This was his most fertile period, scientifically, and they did a fairly comprehensive job of covering his life during this time, including his struggles for acceptance and his complicated personal life.
There were, of course, some…
drorzel | November 17, 2008Regarding the current financial crisis, a consensus has developed that the government needs to do something, and do something dramatic. The argument is, basically, that the normal sources of cash flow that might stimulate the economy out of recession have dried up, either through idiotic investments, or out of fear caused by all the idiotic investments. The government, then, is the only entity with the financial resources needed to get things moving, and they should be pumping cash into the economy through infrastructure projects and the like, to get things moving again.
There is another…
drorzel | November 17, 2008There's a link in today's links dump to a post from Pictures of Numbers, a rarely-updated blog on the visual presentation of data (via Swans On Tea, I think). There's some really good stuff there about how to make graphs that are easy to read and interpret.
I would like to dissent mildly from one of their points, in the Better Axes post, specifically the advice about not starting at zero. In many cases, this is good advice, but like most rules of thumb, it shouldn't be followed too closely.
Take, for example, this post from one of my metastable xenon papers:
A strict application of the…
terrasig | November 16, 2008Picking up the Sunday paper after walking the PharmBeagle, I saw Dr Misha Angrist of the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy featured on the frontpage of the local fishwrapper. Ace higher ed reporter, Eric Ferreri, put together a lovely article on this local hero. As Misha notes elsewhere:
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it…