Academia
drorzel | September 29, 2008In the comments to last week's science majors follow-up post, commenter Jim G calls me out:
OK, I agree with that 100%, and I'm sure everyone who reads this post has observed the phenomena you mention dozens of times or more. But I wonder whether you have a proposal, or if you're just pointing out the problem. With no snarkiness intended, to change this we need something a bit more concrete than "it's the fault of the kids/parents/media/poverty," or "someone needs to spend more money" to fix it.
Really, I'm curious. I don't want to clutter up your blog with my own theories; but this is your…
jstemwedel | September 29, 2008You know how graduate students are always complaining that their stipends are small compared to the cost of living? It seems that some graduate students find ways to supplement that income ... ways that aren't always legal. For example, from this article in the September 8, 2008 issue of Chemical & Engineering News [1]:
Jason D. West, a third-year chemistry graduate student at the University of California, Merced, was arraigned last month on charges of conspiring to manufacture methamphetamine, manufacturing methamphetamine, and possessing stolen property. West allegedly stole…
catdynamics | September 29, 2008Futures
made of
virtual insanity
Now always
seem to
be governed by this love we have
For useless
twisting
of our new technology
Virtual Insanity...
tsmith | September 25, 2008Thanks again to those who blogged, commented or emailed regarding our PLoS Biology manuscript. Nick already has his own response here, highlighting posts such as Larry's, Blake's, Drug Monkey's, Thomas', and Carlo's. Several criticisms ran along the same lines: that, as Nick notes, "that further institutionalizing blogs risks compromising their inherent spontaneous and independent 'blogginess'". I agree with much of what he says in response:
We by no means argue that all blogs should be more institutionalized. In fact, I would argue that institutionalized blogs will and should remain a…
clock | September 25, 2008As you may have already heard, Alias Zerhouni will step down from his position of the NIH director in October, not waiting for the inauguration of a new Administration. He has been a strong and effective proponent of Open Access and I hope his successor will be as well. The blogospheric responses are all over the spectrum, from very positive to very negative, depending on what aspects of his tenure are the focus. Here are some examples:
Heather Morrison:
Dr. Zerhouni has led the NIH through the long process of the NIH Public Access mandate, first the voluntary policy, then the mandatory…
clock | September 24, 2008The PLoS Biology article about science blogs and their (potential) relationship to the academic institutions has, as expected, received quite a lot of coverage in the blogosphere. Nick collects the responses and responds to the responses - join in the conversation in the comments there. Update: So does Tara.
Update: Jessica's post is what I would have written. Now I don't need to - go read hers.
scientificactivist | September 24, 2008Since our paper on the role of blogs in academia was published earlier this week, we've received quite a bit of feedback from the across blogosphere. Befittingly, the authors of the paper have contributed to this, as Tara gave her thoughts on her blog, I gave mine on my blog (Shelley has been busy traveling for interviews, so she hasn't had a chance to weigh in yet), and we published a list of acknowledgments. (I'd also like to thank our respective universities' press offices for their outreach efforts. I found Oxford particularly pleasant to work with, and they even put up something on…
scientificactivist | September 23, 2008Yesterday, I blogged about the paper that Shelley Batts, Tara Smith, and I just published in PLoS Biology on integrating blogging into academia. As promised, we have a very long list of people we would like to acknowledge for their contributions to this work. As I noted yesterday, this paper was built upon the anecdotes, suggestions, and other feedback we collected from across the science blogosphere. In addition to the people listed below, we also gained insight from a variety of discussions that took place within the internal ScienceBlogs forums, and we owe a big thanks to all of our…
jstemwedel | September 23, 2008In the last post, we started looking at the results of a 2006 study by Raymond De Vries, Melissa S. Anderson, and Brian C. Martinson [1] in which they deployed focus groups to find out what issues in research ethics scientists themselves find most difficult and worrisome. That post focused on two categories the scientists being studied identified as fraught with difficulty, the meaning of data and the rules of science. In this post, we'll focus on the other two categories where scientists expressed concerns, life with colleagues and the pressures of production in science. We'll also look…
jstemwedel | September 23, 2008In the U.S., the federal agencies that fund scientific research usually discuss scientific misconduct in terms of the big three of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism (FFP). These three are the "high crimes" against science, so far over the line as to be shocking to one's scientific sensibilities.
But there are lots of less extreme ways to cross the line that are still -- by scientists' own lights -- harmful to science. Those "normal misbehaviors" emerge in a 2006 study by Raymond De Vries, Melissa S. Anderson, and Brian C. Martinson [1]:
We found that while researchers were aware…
tsmith | September 23, 2008Along with Shelley Batts and Nick Anthis, I have a new paper out today in PLoS Biology on academic blogging: a short commentary on potential ways to integrate blogs into academia. Nick already has a bit of the history and goals of the manuscript over at The Scientific Activist so I won't repeat those here; long story short, we started out with the goal of simply reviewing academic blogs, and the paper ended up morphing into a road map describing potential ways to integrate blogs into academia.
Many, many readers and writers in the blogosphere donated their time to send us messages about…
scientificactivist | September 22, 2008Just over a year ago, I joined fellow science bloggers Shelley Batts (Of Two Minds) and Tara Smith (Aetiology) in setting out to catalogue the accomplishments--and pitfalls--of the scientific blogosphere and to explain why people should pay attention. In a sense, we wanted to say "We are the science bloggers; hear us roar!" And, in order to make our case, we drew from the collective experience of our fellow science bloggers, far and wide, asking how blogging had affected their work, their careers, and their lives--both positively and negatively.
The results were astounding. Across the…
neurotopia | September 22, 2008The downside of this semester is that I am dog tired. Having 3 classes with exams all at once wasn't a good idea when I still have to work 40+ a week. I haven't had a day off in weeks. On the upside, I can afford to get the room reshingled. If the damn roofers will ever show up. I may also have a slightly different teaching arrangement and a reduced workload next semester, more on that later!
So a big shout-out to my coblogger, two weeks into it and we've already got Boingboinged! Great work Scicurious!!!! We'll be getting a bit of a redesign around here as well, some drastically…
drorzel | September 22, 2008I meant to follow up on some of the comments to my post calling for more science majors last week, but we had some Issues Thursday night, and I didn't get to it on Friday. There were a number of people making negative comments about things that weren't quite what I was saying, though, and I do still want to respond.
Happily, Johan Larson gets it:
[I]t seems to me that for a large portion of undergrads what they study doesn't seem very important, for several reasons: they don't know what they want to do with their lives, their preferred employers require a college degree but don't much care…
drorzel | September 22, 2008Your must-read academic link of the week is today's Inside Higher Ed article by Gary Lewandoski, with the provocative title: Stop Trying to Get Tenure and Start Trying to Enjoy Yourself. His thesis is pretty much clear from the title:
When I started my own tenure-track position I had the same questions. I perused published sources and quizzed colleagues to gain insight. I believed that by identifying the right steps to take, people to meet, ways to teach, scholarship to pursue, committees to seek out, and committees to avoid, I would bring clarity to the ambiguity of the tenure process.…
clock | September 21, 2008A new book explores the challenges of balancing motherhood and a career in science:
Editor Emily Monosson has collected the voices and personal stories of 34 mother-scientists working in various fields. In eloquent and often witty essays, these women directly address the challenges of being mothers in the scientific workforce.
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Essays in the book are arranged chronologically, according to the date by which the writer's PhD was conferred. The book opens with scientists who received their PhDs in the 1970s, and marches onward through the 80s and 90s, ending with the voices of…
terrasig | September 20, 2008Dr Ernest Eliel, a past-president of the American Chemical Society, passed away in Chapel Hill, NC, on Thursday evening. Dr Eliel was 86.
His obituary notes:
Born December 28, 1921, in Cologne, Germany, Dr. Eliel was the son of the late Oskar and Luise Tietz Eliel. He moved to the United States in 1946, and received a Ph.D degree from the University of IL at Urbana-Champaign in 1948. Dr. Eliel lived in South Bend, IN, where he taught at the University of Notre Dame from 1948 until 1972, at which time he moved to Chapel Hill, where he was the W.R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chemistry at the…
jstemwedel | September 19, 2008Do not claim to have earned a degree (or degrees) that you did not in fact earn.
Degree-granting institutions maintain records of degree recipients. Eventually, chances are good that someone will check.
And even if your talents are worth more to your position than a degree could be, your dishonesty will be held against you.
Go with talent and integrity over talent and pretend credentials. Those who employ you will appreciate not being played for chumps.
drorzel | September 18, 2008I have often expressed a wish for there to be more physics majors, and more science majors in general. Given the demographic information in the previous post, is this just irresponsible feather-bedding on my part?
I don't think so, but that's because I would make a distinction between science majors, at the undergraduate level, and scientists, by which I mostly mean people with Ph.D.'s. The study mentioned previously concerned the supply of scientists, noting that the job situation is not good for Ph.D. scientists (though I suspect that this may reflect a shortage of academic jobs, not a…
drorzel | September 18, 2008There's an article in yesterday's Inside Higher Ed about the supply of scientists and engineers, arguing that there is not, in fact, a shortage:
Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, looked at what he called five "mysteries" of the STEM work force issue. For example, why do employers claim a shortage of qualified STEM graduates while prospects for Ph.D.s remain "poor"? Why do retention and completion rates for STEM fields remain low compared with students' aspirations? Why is there a "serious" funding crisis at the National Institutes of Health after its…