Academia
drorzel | August 29, 2008No, not me. Not literally, anyway-- I'm quite happy with my current family.
Sigma Pi Sigma, the APS, and the AAPT are running a program called "Adopt-a-Physicist to help high school students learn more about what careers in physics are like:
Physicists and students interact through discussion forums for a three-week period. Before the three week period begins, the physicists and classes (via the teachers) each create a brief introduction page. After registration closes, teachers choose some physicists for their classes to interact with, preferably from different career categories.
The…
clock | August 28, 2008There is a new letter to Nature - Postdoc glut means academic pathway needs an overhaul - which I cannot read as I have no access, but others are discussing it on FriendFeed and there have been recent posts on the topic of endless/hopeless postdoc positions on DrugMonkey and The Alternative Scientist.
Bill sums it up the best graphically:
clock | August 27, 2008Why is the letter P the most useful for alliterative titles?
But back to the substance. One thing that bugged me for a long time is that I often see on blogs or hear in person a sentiment that "there are no comments on PLoS ONE". Yet I spend quite some time every week opening and reading all the new comments so I KNOW they are there and that there is quite a bunch of them already. Why the difference in perception? Is it due to the predictable distribution (a few papers get lots of comments, most get one or none, just like blog posts)?
So, when we saw this nice analysis of commenting on…
clock | August 27, 2008Why don't *You* organize a conference?
A scientist should behave as a good citizen in the scientific community. You cannot expect that other colleagues perform all the unpleasant jobs and that you can spent all your time on science. I am referring to low-reward activities like reviewing papers, reviewing grant proposals, sitting on review panels, being an editor of a scientific journal, sitting on program committees and - which is the subject of my present post - really organizing a conference.
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My Advice
Try to stay away from organizing a conference. I have…
drorzel | August 27, 2008Over at Sciencewomen, they have a list of six things departments should do to make academic job interviews more comfortable. It's excellent and reasonable advice.
Of course, while it is an excellent post, it also contains more words than it really needs to. In the spirit of physics, which always tries to boil things down to a single, unifying principle, here's the rule for hiring committees from which all the other suggestions can be derived:
Remember that job candidates are people, too.
Think of things that annoyed you or made you uncomfortable when you were interviewing for jobs. Don't do…
catdynamics | August 23, 2008California about to lose its AmEx card...
California currently is not refunding its workers for any travel expenses they incur using their state credit cards (SacBee story)
"...AmEx is carrying $10.4 million in unpaid charges on its books that were incurred by state workers and agencies since the new fiscal year began"
The way it works, apparently, is AmEx issues approved employees cards to be used for State related business (generally travel) - employee is responsible personally for paying the charges, and filing for reimbursement - which presumably ought to happen inside a payment cycle,…
neurophilosophy | August 23, 2008Clay rendered three-dimensional model of the UCL campus, created by Andrew Hudson-Smith of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, using SketchUp and 3DMax.
Nature News reports that UCL will host a centre of excellence for neuroscience research:
University College London (UCL) will host the new centre, after beating rival universities Oxford and Cambridge, Nature has learned. The £140-million (US$261-million) institute will be funded by the Wellcome Trust, the largest UK research charity, and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, founded by David Sainsbury, a British politician and…
neurotopia | August 21, 2008I signed up to teach 3 courses at the community college this fall; Human Biology and 2 sections of a Basic Concepts in Biology course. The latter is "remedial" biology, designed to catch up people with little or no biology experience so that when they take Intro biology, they're all on the same level. We give them a basic smattering of cell biology, molecular and genetics. Apparently the program has had decent luck with this course, and the students who take it often do well compared to those that don't. I think it is a fabulous opportunity to teach motivated but basically naive…
drorzel | August 21, 2008The recent news about the Amethyst Initiative, in which a number of college and university presidents are calling for a lowering of the drinking age from 21, has sparked a bunch of discussion. Jake Young and Mark Kleiman have good contributions.
There are two main arguments against lowering the drinking age:
1) Raising the drinking age to 21 led to a decrease in drunk-driving fatalities
2) Lowering the age to 18 would mean a rampant increase in high school drunkenness, as there are a fair number of 18-year-old high school students.
Just in the interests of being provocative, let me throw…
drorzel | August 20, 2008Chris Mooney has a new Science Progress column on the number of scientists that challenges the claim that there are not enough students earning science degrees.
The facts clearly say otherwise, no matter how you slice them. According to the National Science Foundation, in 2006--the last year for which data is currently available--the nation produced a record number of science and engineering Ph.D.s: 29,854 in total. This was the fourth year in a row that the total doctorate number has increased, and a 6.7 percent increase from the year 2005 (the previous record).
And what about less advanced…
drorzel | August 20, 2008In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, Union, like most other colleges and universities, installed a new emergency alert system, which they test much more frequently than it can possibly require. This always produces a flurry of emails alerting us to the upcoming test, and then the test message itself (which is also read over loudspeakers across campus). The test message (which just showed up in my inbox) begins:
This is a test of Union's Emergency Alert Notification System. In the event of a real emergency this email would provide relevant alert info[rmation]
I always want this to be…
drorzel | August 20, 2008The Mad Biologist points to and agrees with a post by Jonathan Eisen with the dramatic title "Why I Am Ashamed to Have a Paper in Science. Eisen's gripe is mostly about Science not being Open Access, but he throws in a complaint about length restrictions, which is what the Mad Biologist latches on to and amplifies. Eisen writes:
Science with its page length obsession forced Irene to turn her enormous body of work on this genome into a single page paper with most of the detail cut out. I do not think a one page paper does justice to the interesting biology or to her work. A four page paper…
clock | August 20, 2008Jeremiah Owyang: How to Successfully Moderate a Conference Panel, A Comprehensive Guide
Not all of it is applicable to an unconference like ScienceOnline'09, but lots of nuggets of wisdom in there.
drorzel | August 20, 2008Via Swans On Tea, a ranty blog post titled Sucky Schools - How To Repair Our Education System, which takes its structure and much of its tone from Paul Lockhart's "Mathematician's Lament" (which, unfortunately, is a PDF file). I'm fond of ranty posts about education reform, but both of these kind of lose me. Lockhart, in particular, strikes me as being an excellent example of the dangers of being too attached to a subject.
He writes with great passion and at great length about the fun and creativity involved in math, which is all very nice. Unfortunately, it also leads to paragraphs like this…
drorzel | August 19, 2008Via a comment to an earlier post, here's an example of a journalist doing science right: NPR's Sarah Varney looks at "cleansing" foot pads, and finds them wanting.
She took a set of the pads, tried them out, and then brought used and new pads to a laboratory at Berkeley, where chemists studied the composition to see if the greyish black goo on the pad contained heavy metal toxins, as the ads claim. They didn't.
Then she tested an alternative hypothesis, that moisture and warmth cause the color change, by holding a clean pad over a pot of hot water. The pad turned black.
What she did wouldn't…
catdynamics | August 18, 2008There are all too few roman a clefs for life in modern academia
Changing Places, of course, and its sequels by Lodge; Smiley's Moo; and the classic, if dated, History Man by Bradbury.
(I'm tempted to add in the Rachel Papers by Amis but I won't.)
Now the legendary pseudonymous Female Science Professor has compiled some of her favourite blog entries into a (self-published) book, thereby attempting to prove that there really are some true gems in the self-publishing industry.
I have not read it, yet, but I am assured it must be good.
You just know it has to be good.
Yes, it really will be…
drorzel | August 18, 2008Via Alex, WNYC's Radiolab podcast features a wonderful commencement address by Robert Krulwich to the Caltech class of 2008, making the case for the importance of telling stories about science to the general public.
This fits in wonderfully with what I said last week about science popularization. He comes at it from a different angle (and make an explicit connection to the evolution/ creationism debate, which I was avoiding), but it's the same basic argument.
And, as a bonus, he has a good NPR voice, suitable for helping get a slightly fussy infant to go to sleep...
drorzel | August 18, 2008A while back, after handing in my manuscript and before SteelyKid, I asked readers to suggest blog topics. I got to a few of them already, but there's one more that I've been meaning to comment on, from tcmJOE:
I'm a physics undergrad about to begin my final year, and while I'm still thinking of physics grad school, I'm starting to feel less and less inclined to go into academia. Would you talk some more about career options for physics students outside of academia/pure research?
In many ways, I'm a lousy person to ask about this-- I went directly from college into physics grad school, with…
terrasig | August 18, 2008I'm sure this question has been addressed in the educational literature to which I do not currently have electronic access.
The question for the day is whether a department that has, say, a 10-year record of awarding tenure to every faculty member who has come up for evaluation is one that has standards that are too low.
One might argue that such an outcome would be the result of outstanding and prescient recruiting of new faculty. Alternatively, superb resources and an enriching collaborative environment might promote such a culture of success.
Another reason might be that underperforming…
terrasig | August 16, 2008CORRECTION: The following was to be a part-sincere/part-serious sendup of my buddy Bora's penchant for monitoring the entire Internet. Bora did indeed host the first edition of Praxis, the new blog carnival of academic life.
However.
The Praxis experimental carnival of "the experience of living the scientific" was established, founded, and otherwise continues to be led by Martin, author of The Lay Scientist blog.
Mini Bio:
Well I'm Martin, I live in Cambridge, England, and this is me on the Amazon in 2007. I did a frankly weird Ph.D. looking at the relationship between models from ecology,…