Academia
drorzel | November 15, 2008As mentioned briefly the other day, I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation with Jennifer Ouellette on Thursday. The full diavlog has now been posted, and I can embed it here:
This was the first time I've done one of these, and it was an interesting experience.
I'm rocking the handset in this because of the aforementioned cell phone service problems, and because the whole thing was very hastily arranged, and I wasn't able to obtain a headset for the landline. If they ask me back again, I'm definitely getting one.
On the other hand, being tied to the handset did restrain…
drorzel | November 14, 2008It's seminar week over at Female Science Professor, and today she's polling her readers as to the best day and time for seminars.
Our departmental colloquia are generally held on Thursdays at lunchtime. We provide pizza and soda as an enticement for students (which doesn't work as well as you might think), and have the talks start about half an hour after the food arrives, in hopes that people will mostly have finished eating.
Of course, it wasn't always this way...
My first year or so here, we had colloquia on Fridays. This turned out to be a gigantic pain in the ass, both because it was…
terrasig | November 13, 2008For whatever reason, I woke up really depressed and exhausted today - pretty much for no reason, I think.
I checked my schedule on my Treo - today marks 19 years since my dissertation defense.
I remember being really depressed throughout writing my dissertation thinking, "is this all I have to show for this many years of public support for my training?"
My defense was on a Monday so I spent most of Sunday practicing my seminar in the room where I'd give it - it sucked so badly that I couldn't even get through it once.
When the time came, it was the most incoherent performance I had ever…
catdynamics | November 13, 2008All Public Universities will be free, says Congress.
Canadian Scientists find Shorter Work Week as Effective as Viagra
A special edition of the New York Times just appeared, with some good news, finally.
The Yes Men
Every headline is a joy, and pay special attention to the advertisements.
Though even they show no signs of an end to the housing and financial crisis...
catdynamics | November 12, 2008Can I just ask for one thing, of those seeking recommendation letters for postdoctoral fellowships... ?
...please, please, please - agree on some consistent phrase to be part of the "Subject:" line.
Preferably something involving the words "Letter" and "Application" or "Recommendation" or "Reference" - anything, as long as you stick with it.
Being able to do electronic submission is good; and I know it is too much to ask for a consistent web format for upload, but, the automagically generated "reminder" that everyone sends k days before the due date, and/or when the application is activated…
drorzel | November 12, 2008Speaking of departmental seminars, as we were, it occurs to me that this might be an amusing Dorky Poll question:
What's the craziest thing you've heard asked of a seminar speaker?
One of the nice things about academia is that lots of educational events are put on, free and open to all. The problem is, these all too often provide an opportunity for slightly unbalanced individuals to ask distinguished speakers questions that don't make any sense at all. And I'm not just talking about crazed questions from the faculty, either.
Anybody who has spent time around academia has heard some loopy…
drorzel | November 12, 2008The Female Science Professor is thinking about seminar series. Specifically, whether attendance should be mandatory for students:
Being required to attend the departmental seminar eliminates that pesky decision-making process about whether to go to seminar or not. But then, if required to attend, you might sit there in the seminar, seething with resentment about being forced to attend rather than being trusted to make the decision to attend, and your anger at the controlling professors who are oppressing you leaves you unable to appreciate the seminars, even the ones that aren't horrific…
clock | November 10, 2008Tom Levenson has an interesting idea:
A Modest Proposal: A Science Initiative for the Obama Administration
But I'd like to lay down one relatively cheap marker that would, I think, have a significant impact on both the culture and the productivity of American scientific research to a degree disproportionate to the underlying amount of dollars. It's not a new idea, and hardly original to me -but seeing as it has been completely out of court for almost a decade, I think it bears repeating, even if it is old news to veterans of the business.
More on a Modest Proposal
In this post, I laid out a…
terrasig | November 10, 2008My long absence from home and the blog was followed yesterday by my lying on the floor and going through accumulated mail. These quiet times for "literature review," such as preparing the recycling and walking back from the mailbox, frequently provide me with blog fodder.
So I read with interest yesterday an Oncology Times article by Eric T Rosenthal from late last month on the Congressional appropriation of $4 million USD toward melanoma research:
Following passage by the House and Senate, and signing by President Bush, melanoma joined breast, prostate, and ovarian cancers as the only ones…
drorzel | November 10, 2008SteelyKid has recently begun to figure out her hands. As I noted last week, within the last couple of weeks, she's started to be able to reliably grab things near her. Just within the last few days, she's discovered that she has two hands, and they can interact with each other:
She's started grabbing one hand with the other, and exploring them. I've also seen her start to use both hands in concert, holding a hanging toy steady with one hand, while manipulating bits of it with the other, like a good little scientist.
Hands are, of course, critical to science. You can't be a good scientist…
terrasig | November 7, 2008Please accept my apologies for not letting y'all know in advance that I'd be off to an undisclosed location for activities that would minimize or ablate my blogging for a few days.
In the meantime, I learned of a happy surprise just as I was leaving town: that Dr Isis received an invitation to join ScienceBlogs.com. You'll recognize Dr Isis as the author of On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, previously here and now up here with her inaugural post in the new digs.
Completely serendipitously, I wrote about Isis in my last post, many moons ago, about her commentary on a recent NEJM…
jstemwedel | November 7, 2008It turns out that the session on electronic scholarship I mentioned didn't really get into the defining characteristics of electronic scholarship, nor how it might differ from "digital media". (Part of this had to do with trying to fit spiels from nine speakers into a 75 minute session while still allowing time for discussion. You do the math.)
Anyway, one of the panelists, Stephen Greenberg, is from the National Library of Medicine, and he gave us a peek at some digital materials that warm my old-timey, hide-bound heart. Specifically, I am ga-ga for the Turning The Pages project.
Take…
jstemwedel | November 7, 2008This is not an exhaustive account of my experiences at the PSA so far, but rather what's at the top of my Day-Quil-addled head:
I am not the only academic whose tastes run to hand-drawn slides.
However, it is possible that I am the youngest academic whose tastes run to hand-drawn slides.
Apparently, using Powerpoint marks me as nearly as tremendous a Luddite as using actual overheads. Keynote is where it's at. (But I may be unwilling to actually invest the time necessary to make the transition, especially seeing as how I like hand-drawn slides.)
A "coffee breaks" in the conference schedule…
drorzel | November 5, 2008Slate (who, by the way, drive me up the freaking wall with their habit of giving each story about six different headlines, depending on where the link is) has hit the ground running with a panel of distinguished right-wing types discussing what the Republicans should do now. Jim Manzi gets the ball rolling with an idea that's sure to be a winner: market-based education reform.
No amount of money or number of "programs" will create anything more than marginal improvements, because public schools are organized to serve teachers and administrators rather than students and families. We need, at…
clock | October 31, 2008Duncan Hull and colleagues just published an excellent, must-read article - Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web:
Many scientists now manage the bulk of their bibliographic information electronically, thereby organizing their publications and citation material from digital libraries. However, a library has been described as "thought in cold storage," and unfortunately many digital libraries can be cold, impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places. In this Review, we discuss the current chilly state of digital libraries for the computational…
catdynamics | October 29, 2008Ouch, Chad calls me out on the use of science blogging
Last night, after giving a talk on science blogging, I posted a rather frustrated rhetorical question on whether science blogging has done any good.
Now, I specifically asked this excluding science policy and science communication, not because I think these are no good, but because of the context I was working with.
I had been talking specifically with working scientists about what was involved in blogging and why they might consider it. The public outreach possibilities are obvious although I am not sure that much outreach blogging…
drorzel | October 29, 2008Steinn asks a provocative question:
has science blogging done any good?
I can think of science policy issues where blogging has made a contribution, and the general spread of information and communication done by blogs has probably had some impact, but has any actual science been directly impacted by blogs, or discussion on blogs? I am hard pressed to think of concrete examples.
I think this is a badly framed question. That is, I think it's a mistake to define "good" for science to exclude science policy questions and the general spread of information. It's a very common mistake, mind, and…
drorzel | October 28, 2008Over at Dot Physics (which might be the best physics blog in the world at the moment), Rhett Allain has a pair of posts exploring the physics of Fantastic Contraption.
The posts don't really lend themselves to excerpting, so you need to go over there and read them, but I think they're brilliant, and deserve better than just a spot in a links dump. These may be the best example of the scientific mindset that you'll find on a blog.
What he does is to set out to determine whether the world of Fantastic Contraption obeys a consistent set of physical laws, by coming up with ingenious experiments…
clock | October 27, 2008ScienceWoman gives us a heads-up on a new and interesting organization - UnderTheMicroscope.com:
The Feminist Press with IBM have just launched UnderTheMicroscope.com, a new site to involve young women in science and to encourage them to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math. The site is part of the Women Writing Science, a project initiated by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York and funded by the National Science Foundation.
The site features personal stories of women scientists, role models, and mentors; tips for parents and teachers; links to related…
drorzel | October 27, 2008One of my service activities at the moment is serving on the committee that determines our nominees for the Watson Fellowship. Participating institutions are allowed to nominate up to four students, and we've just selected this year's nominees, who are a really interesting bunch.
The Watson, for those who haven't heard of it, is, as it says on their web site,
A one year grant for independent study and travel outside the United States awarded to graduating college seniors nominated by participating institutions.
It's not a grant to study at any particular place-- in fact, Watson winners are…