Academia
catdynamics | July 24, 2008so the governator "has prepared an order to cut the pay of about 200,000 state workers to the federal minimum wage of $6.55 an hour until a budget is signed"
"Administration officials said Schwarzenegger was expected to sign the order, a draft of which was obtained Wednesday by The Times, early next week as part of an effort to avert a cash crisis. The deadline for passing a budget was July 1, and without one soon, the officials said, California may be unable to borrow billions of dollars needed to keep the state solvent."
Hmm.
Interesting.
BTW: I have authoritative information that UC will…
catdynamics | July 24, 2008inspired.
graduate students, I'm guessing
XKCD really is lovely
h/t Making Light, of course
scientificactivist | July 23, 2008The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), which is responsible for higher education in the UK, is seeking feedback to help it develop its new science strategy. The DIUS has put together a website for this purpose: interactive.dius.gov.uk/scienceandsociety/. There, you can read its latest report, comment on various sections of the report, or provide general feedback. I think that it's great that the UK government is seeking this sort of feedback, so if you're interested and have some time, go participate in this worthy endeavor.
catdynamics | July 23, 2008A couple of Durham postgrads have set up The Graduate Junction - a career/social webforum for (post)graduates in all disciplines.
Looks like it has potential, glancing at it. Try it if you feel like it.
Physics/Astronomy seems underrepresented currently.
neurotopia | July 23, 2008We've all had that R21 or R03 come back with completely useless comments. Months and months of work, hours or weeks spent in the lab collecting that preliminary data (which is supposedly unnecessary for those R21s). More time spent waiting and waiting. Revisions. Resubmissions. The same useless comments back to you.
Come on. We all know it's a racket. In a tight funding climate, nobody in charge of the purse strings wants to fund a competitor. But they gotta find a way to reject your grant in a way that is completely noncommittal. Hence, weasel words.
Here's my favorite: "The…
j7uy5 | July 23, 2008Harvard
Medical School recently completed a review of their required
premedical curriculum, culminating with the development of recommended
changes. The outcome of this process is reported in an
article in the recent issue of the New England Journal of
Medicine. It's one of their open-access articles:
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/359/3/221">Relevance
and Rigor in Premedical Education
Jules L. Dienstag, M.D.
In recent decades, scientific knowledge has changed dramatically,
once-settled scientific principles have been replaced by more
sophisticated concepts and…
drorzel | July 22, 2008I've been somewhat decoupled from blogdom in general recently, as I've been busy working on the book and getting ready for FutureBaby. It's also been a useful mental health break, though, as I'm a little less worked up about stupid stuff than I was a few months ago.
Every now and then, I catch the edges of some kerfuffle-of-the-moment, though, and it reminds me that continuing the decoupling is probably a Good Thing. The latest is the ongoing squabbling over Sizzle, which is the new "framing" fracas. This has been dragging on for a week, now, with the latest entries to catch my eye coming…
evolgen | July 22, 2008
All good medicine is evidence based -- that is, diagnoses and treatments are developed via the scientific method. Oftentimes, evolutionary biology is employed to understand human health and diseases. This is known as evolutionary medicine.
Evolutionary medicine is a growing field that takes an interdisciplinary approach toward studying human disease. Tools from population ecology, molecular evolution, comparative anatomy, and many other fields are all integrated with clinical medicine to improve our understanding of human disease and develop new treatments. This approach can be applied to…
terrasig | July 21, 2008I was originally going to let this one lie since I was so late to the game: Jacob Goldstein at WSJ's Health Blog picked up on a recent NEJM perspective paper by Harvard Medical School Dean for Medical Education, Jules L Dienstag, MD, describing the need and justification for re-examining the pre-med curriculum. In the article, Dienstag notes that the current requirement of 1 year of biology, 2 years of chemistry (including organic chemistry), 1 year of physics and, in some cases, 1 year of mathematics, might be out of touch with today's required focus on human biology.
Dienstag notes:…
terrasig | July 21, 2008Go on over and offer your best wishes to Dr. Ventii.
She was just awarded her Ph.D. in cancer biochemistry from Emory University in Atlanta.
Karen writes the blog, Science to Life.
Congratulations, Karen!
clock | July 19, 2008Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship by James A. Evans, ironically behind the paywall, has got a lot of people scratching their heads - it sounds so counter-intuitive, as well as opposite from other pieces of similar research.
There is a good discussion on FriendFeed and another one here.
A commentary at the Chronicle of Higher Education is here, also ironically behind the paywall.
Here is the press release and here is the abstract:
Online journals promise to serve more information to more dispersed audiences and are more efficiently searched and recalled.…
clock | July 18, 2008Scientific Collectivism 1: (Or How I Stopped Worrying and Loved Dissent):
I want to bring up a discussion about what I perceive is a dangerous trend in neuroscience (this may be applicable to other areas of science as well), and that is what I will term "scientific collectivism." I am going to split this into two separate posts because it is so long. This first post is the weaker arguments, and what I see are the less interesting aspects of scientific collectivism-however, they deserve a discussion.
What will you be? and the related Friday Poll: Tinker, Tailor, Biologist, Researcher. So, how…
terrasig | July 17, 2008Arachnologist and diplopodologist Dr Jason E Bond at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC, is most recently well-known for naming a spider (Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi) after Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, Neil Young.
Kristin Day of The Daily Reflector is now reporting that Professor Bond has agreed to name a spider after Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's host of "The Colbert Report."
When news emerged in May that Bond had named a species of trapdoor spider after Neil Young, the biologist could not escape Colbert's web:
"Where's my spider? I have lots of animals named after me: turtles,…
neurotopia | July 17, 2008I teach class as an adjunct at the local community college from MTWTh, from 1-3 pm. Today I'm giving an exam over evolution and biotechnology. The last exam was pretty rough. I made one that would've been tough for biology majors but this is a nonmajors course and the students don't have as much background. Consequently, I told them I'd make it up to them by having this test be painfully easy and with opportunities for extra credit abound. So one would think that a student who's barely pulling a D would prioritize this exam, right? Especially since I was kind enough to send out a…
neurotopia | July 16, 2008I've been enjoying my first teaching gig at the local community college. The students are plenty bright and have taught me quite a bit as well. Although they definitely didn't like the midterm...
I'll probably start talking a bit about my experiences, and about my job prospects in this transitional career mode. There are more opportunities out there than I figured there would be, but knowing how to find them is a challenge. Additionally, it's time to start blogging about my horrific postdoc a bit. That should be entertaining. Who knows, maybe I'll even feel like posting actual science…
jstemwedel | July 15, 2008I'm on sabbatical for academic year 2008-2009. This being summer, you'd think I'd consider the sabbatical officially begun.
Not quite. But I'm getting closer. All that remains:
Grading the papers from the graduate seminar that I was persuaded to team-teach.
Calculating final grades for the students in the aforementioned graduate seminar and filing those final grades by Friday.
Helping my advisees usher two masters theses into final form.
Helping a student from last fall complete an "incomplete".
One last committee meeting.
There's also some desk cleaning and family vacation taking. But…
drorzel | July 15, 2008As you have no doubt noticed, my early-morning review of Randy Olson's Sizzle was part of a concerted effort to get blogs to review the movie all on the same day. It's an experiment of sorts in using blogs to promote the movie.
Unfortunately for Olson, it seems to be an experiment designed to test the old adage that "there's no such thing as bad publicity, as long as they spell your name right." Most of the blog reviews collected at the ScienceBlogs page for the film were, um, less than glowing. My own kind of "Meh." review is one of the better ones on ScienceBlogs.
Having looked at a whole…
neurophilosophy | July 15, 2008
This coming Friday is my 34th birthday, and the lovely people from ScienceBlogs/ Seed Media Group have given me a fantastic present: they're sending me on an all expenses paid long weekend to Barcelona to cover ESOF2008.
The mission of the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF) is to provide both the European and the international science and business communities with an open platform for debate and communication. It presents and profiles Europe's leading research trends in the sciences, humanities and social sciences. It is an opportunity to discuss and influence the future of research and…