Academia
terrasig | September 18, 2008Tom Levenson at The Inverse Square blog recently lost his uncle and godfather, Daniel D Levenson.
I've been lucky enough to meet Tom once and yet he still answers my e-mails. Beyond his current position as a prof in the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Tom is a prolific author and award-winning producer of several science documentaries.
This is what you get when a professional writer lovingly remembers a wonderful and influential man whose suffering has finally ended.
Tom asks that Uncle Dan be remembered by a memorial donation to Mazon.
jstemwedel | September 17, 2008Not the financial market, but the market for highly trained folks in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). In particular, why do people keep talking about the need for a larger talent pool in STEM when so many Ph.D.s and postdocs are having a rough time finding permanent positions?
Today, Inside Higher Ed has an article about what demographer Michael S. Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation makes of this apparently paradoxical state of affairs:
Looking at whether there is a shortage of qualified STEM workers, Teitelbaum argued that such claims reappear roughly…
drorzel | September 17, 2008Another thing I thought was intriguing that came up at the Science in the 21st Century meeting wasn't from a formal talk, but rather a conversation over dinner with Garrett Lisi and Sabine Hossenfelder about the future of publishing. Garrett was suggesting a new model of publishing, based on pulling things from the arxiv (or something like it).
The idea here is that anybody who cared to would set up a "journal," consisting of a collection of links to papers they found worthwhile. If you wanted to know what Garrett Lisi finds interesting and useful from recent research, you would look at his "…
clock | September 17, 2008When I posted this originally (here and here) I quoted a much longer excerpt from the cited Chronicle article than what is deemed appropriate, so this time I urge you to actually go and read it first and then come back to read my response.
From Dr.Munger's blog, an interesting article: Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual By MARK BAUERLEIN, The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 12, Page B6 (that link is now dead, but you can find a copy here):
Hmmmm, why was the poll conducted only in social science departments (e.g., sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, anthropology, perhaps…
terrasig | September 15, 2008I'll be a little light on blogging this week so I'll mostly be sharing a couple of quick reads I've stumbled upon recently.
This one is presented in light of my post last week on National HBCU Week and the accompanying post from my colleague, DrugMonkey (whose referral generated even more discussion).
This tidbit is from the journalism and news production students of James Logan High School in Union City, CA:
"I always, always, always like mathematics." Marjorie Lee Browne.
Marjorie Lee Browne (9 Sept 1914-19 Oct 1979) was a notable mathematics educator, the second African-American woman to…
drorzel | September 15, 2008If you listen to people talking about (or read people blogging about) new ways of doing things, you'll frequently hear references to Science or Academia as if they were vast but monolithic entities existing in their own right. Statements like "The culture of Science does not reward open access..." or "Modern Academia does not reward high-risk research..." are quite common. They also are often paired with a call for external relief, usually through some government mandate-- "We need funding agencies to make this a condition of grant funding."
I always find these statements faintly annoying,…
drorzel | September 15, 2008The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about online literacy this week (time-limited link, look quickly), and I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn that the author is pessimistic. The article cites distressing findings from new research:
In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read Web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and color and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational e-mail messages, and news feeds, [Jakob] Nielsen exclaimed, "'Reading' is not even…
clock | September 14, 2008This post was first written on October 28, 2004 on Science And Politics, then it was republished on December 05, 2005 on The Magic School Bus. The Village vs. The University - all in your mind.
Eric at Total Information Awareness wrote two excellent posts on something that touches me personally, yet has much broader consequences on the country as a whole: the well-organized and well-funded assault of the Right on the University (check some links in the comments section, too): Freedom Fighters and Academic Freedom Fighters.
There were a couple of other articles on the same topic, e.g.,The…
purepedantry | September 10, 2008Inside Higher Ed describes a study of complete rates for PhD students broken down by race/ethnicity, gender, whether the student is international or domestic, and by discipline. Here is the key chart:
Cumulative Completion Rates for Students Starting Ph.D. Programs, 1992-3 Through 1994-5
Group
By Year 5
By Year 6
By Year 7
By Year 8
By Year 9
By Year 10
Gender
--Male
24%
39%
48%
53%
57%
58%
--Female
16%
30%
41%
47%
52%
55%
Race/Ethnicity
--African American
16%
25%
34%
40%
44%
47…
terrasig | September 10, 2008Despite having to employ biophysical methods in my day job, I must admit my woeful understanding of physics as a discipline. I wasn't like my high school grease monkey friends using torque wrenches on their cars with Springsteenonian dedication and my lowest grade in undergrad came in physics. For that reason, I rarely have the opportunity to link to fellow ScienceBlogger, Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles. Prof Orzel was one of the earliest science bloggers, coming online in June, 2002.
Chad posted about being on the programme of a meeting in Waterloo, Ontario, entitled, "Science in the…
drorzel | September 9, 2008I've seen a lot of neat stuff discussed at the Science in the 21st Century meeting, some of which I'll talk about in more detail later, when I have more time to think. One of the most interesting experiences of the meeting, though, has been using FriendFeed to sort of collaboratively live-blog the talks, along with a bunch of other people.
You can get some of the flavor from looking at the comments on Timo Hannay's talk (PIRSA video link, which is worth a look). Not only are there several people making notes as the talk goes along, there are links to things mentioned in the talk, for easy…
terrasig | September 9, 2008When I went away to college after the summer when MTV was first launched, I had never heard of the term, "Historically Black Colleges and Universities." But during the following summer while taking organic chemistry, I lived in a dorm with two visiting HBCU students who were doing internships at a local pharmaceutical company. The gentleman who I grew closest to had come from Hampton University (then-Hampton Institute) in Virginia.
As a Yankee born the same year as passage of US Civil Rights Act, I had not truly appreciated that African Americans, particularly in the South, had…
drorzel | September 8, 2008The video from today's talks at the Science in the 21st Century conference have been posted at the PIRSA collection, so if you want to see my talk, you can watch the video (a 110 MB WMV file), and/or look at the slides (a 2.7 MB PDF).
I would also particularly recommend watching the video of John Willinsky's talk on Open Access, which was outstanding.
The video quality is excellent-- they have multiple cameras, so despite my best efforts to pace out of the frame, they kept me on camera most of the time. The audio clip of the "Bunnies Made of Cheese" posting is a little hard to hear, but…
drorzel | September 8, 2008I gave my talk this morning at the Science in the 21st Century conference. Video will eventually be available at the Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive site, but if you'd like to get a sense of the talk, a few people were live-blogging it in the FriendFeed room for the meeting. You get a pretty accurate impression of the talk from the comments there.
I think it went well. People laughed in the right places, and there was some really good discussion in the question period. I look forward to seeing what it looks like on video. They have a really nice AV set-up here, with two cameras…
scientificactivist | September 5, 2008If so, you should check out EcoliWiki, which you might find a useful resource, and you might even find yourself compelled to contribute some of your knowledge to it.
Since I'm already blogging about E. coli today, I thought I would also bring up an interesting project I found out about earlier this week. I'm currently wrapping up a short visit to my alma mater, Texas A&M University, and while there, I've met up with two local science bloggers that I know of: Matt Springer of Built on Facts (a fellow blogger here on ScienceBlogs.com) and Jim Hu of Blogs for Industry. Hu is an associate…
terrasig | September 3, 2008You are an assistant professor in the biomedical sciences and are three or four years in, trying to really hammer on your productivity before the tenure dossier goes in a couple of years from now. Professor MegaMentor, editor of your society's second-tier journal (impact factor of 2.5), approaches you to write an invited review article on the state of your field. You take a look at the promotion and tenure guidelines for your institution and find that review articles are not counted as "original, peer-reviewed research publications."
Professor MegaMentor has been very good to you since she…
drorzel | September 2, 2008This was the last of the experiments that I did for my thesis (it's not the last xenon paper I'm an author on, but the work for that one was done while I was writing up), so my memories of it are bound up with the thesis-writing process.
My favorite story about this stuff was when I gave a talk about this work at NIST-- I don't recall if it was before or after my defense-- and somebody asked the obvious question about how the quantum statistical rules are enforced. That is, how is it that you never get two identical fermions colliding in an s-wave state? Since an s-wave collision is just a…
clock | September 1, 2008A century ago, yet nothing has changed: William James, March 1903:
..............Human nature is once for all so childish that every reality becomes a sham somewhere, and in the minds of Presidents and Trustees the Ph.D. degree is in point of fact already looked upon as a mere advertising resource, a manner of throwing dust in the Public's eyes. "No instructor who is not a Doctor" has become a maxim in the smaller institutions which represent demand; and in each of the larger ones which represent supply, the same belief in decorated scholarship expresses itself in two antagonistic passions,…
revere | August 31, 2008The folks at ScienceDebate2008 pushed hard during the primaries to have the candidates address science policy. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum from Scienceblogs The Intersection were among the leaders in this movement. They didn't succeed in getting a debate then, but now with the field down to the finalists, they have received a response from Barack Obama to 14 questions culled from over 3400 submitted by the 38,000 signers of the ScienceDebate initiative (we were proud to be among them; they include nearly every major American science organization, the presidents of nearly every major…