Academia
drorzel | July 14, 2008Matt Yglesias points to a Peter Suderman post talking about this post about finding jobs:
The last couple of years have seen my friends begin to start their honest-to-goodness careers, as opposed to jobs that were by design short-term. I'd say that among people I would call friends, a good two dozen have gotten long-term/serious jobs in the last couple years. And here's the thing: literally none of them got there jobs without some sort of "in", a personal connection that got them the job.
It goes on a bit from there, and Peter and Matt add some good thoughts about why this might not be as…
clock | July 13, 2008Georgia Harper saw an interesting article in USA Today about Open textbooks and, among else, says:
Open access is just one part of a much bigger and more complex picture. I am very optimistic that open access will find its way into the book market (or what we call books today), but again, it's not like that will cut off the flow of revenues. Quite the contrary. It just makes it possible for a lot more people to benefit from the work of authors while authors and those who help them ready their works for public consumption still reap sufficient financial rewards to make creating worthwhile.…
drorzel | July 12, 2008A couple of links about things that have turned up in my email recently:
-- As a follow-on to yesterday's post about grad school, I got an email a little while ago about Graduate Junction, a social networking/ career building site aimed at graduate students. I'm coming up on ten years of being out of their demographic, but it looks kind of cool. If you're a grad student, you might check it out.
-- The Union of Concerned Scientists is running a cartoon contest for the best editorial cartoon about the politicization of science. They've selected a dozen finalists, and now want your vote as to…
drorzel | July 11, 2008Matt at Built On Facts spots an Inside Higher Ed article that I missed, showing that grad students at South Carolina get $9,500 a year, and uses it as a starting point to comment about grad school salaries:
The difficulty of living as a graduate student varies heavily on what you're studying. Take at the law school model, for instance: you don't get paid at all, and tuition is very expensive and not waived. But the upside to that is that you're not in school very long, you can live comfortably on loans, and once out you can probably get a high-paying job which can pay down your debt fairly…
revere | July 11, 2008Most academic scientists -- including me and my colleagues -- don't want unnecessary federal interference with what we do. We're like any regulated community. Not happy to be regulated. Unfortunately we have made the unnecessary necessary by allowing improper conflicts of interest to infest academic medicine and predictably, Congress is about to step in.
Until now, the academic response to periodic external scrutiny of potential research conflicts has been increasingly to assert that it can police itself. In 2001, the Association of American Medical Colleges issued recommendations for strong…
clock | July 9, 2008Graduate Junction is a new social networking site designed for graduate students and postdocs. I looked around a bit and found it clean, easy-to-use and potentially useful. This is how they explain it - give it a try and let me know what you think:
The Graduate Junction is a brand new website designed to help early career
researchers make contact with others with similar research interests,
regardless of which department, institution or country they work in. Designed
by two graduate researchers at the University of Durham, The Graduate Junction
has proved very popular with research students…
terrasig | July 7, 2008Well, I didn't exactly plan to break my silence with a non-science post but a couple of you asked if I had any comments on the passing of Senator Helms. Frankly, I was already going into the US Independence Day weekend with a bit of melancholia, feeling very much like the Philadelphia Inquirer's Chris Satullo in his not-so-glorious-Fourth essay.
Then Jesse Helms died on the 4th and I had to hear about "the passing of a great patriot," and any number of hypocritical invocations of God ("America has lost a great friend, but Heaven has gained another of the great cloud of witnesses. We stand on…
drorzel | July 7, 2008John Allen Paulos's Innumeracy is one of those classics of the field that I've never gotten around to reading. I've been thinking more about these sorts of issues recently, though, so when the copy I bought a few years ago turned up in our recent book-shuffling, I decided to give it a read.
Unfortunately, I probably would've been a lot more impressed had I read it when it first came out in 1988. Most of the examples used to illustrate his point that people are generally very bad with numbers are exceedingly familiar. They appear in How to Lie With Statistics, and the recent The Drunkard's…
evolgen | June 27, 2008PLoS Genetics has published an interview with Jenny Graves. Graves is one of the leaders in monotreme and marsupial genetics, and has been involved in some of the recent mammalian genome projects, including the platypus genome project (doi:10.1038/nature06936). She is also an expert in the evolution of mammalian sex chromosomes and sex determining genes. However, I'd like to point to a quote in PLoS Genetics' interview of Graves that deals with science education:
So I'm becoming very interested in education, particularly of young children, which is where I think the rot sets in. Science is…
drorzel | June 27, 2008Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake has a very long post about the limitations of science blogs. Brian at Laelaps responds, and Tom at Swans On Tea agrees.
You might be wondering whether I have an opinion on this. Since I'm going to be talking about it at a workshop in September (first talk, no less...), I better have some opinions..
The original post is very long, but can probably best be summarized by the following paragraph:
My thesis is that it's not yet possible to get a science education from reading science blogs, and a major reason for this is because bloggers don't have the…
drorzel | June 26, 2008A few days ago, some colleagues and I were discussing the year that just ended, and the curriculum in general, and the frequent lament about needing to repeat ourselves came up. Due to some quirks of our calendar, we have a lot of students taking courses out of sequence, and as a result, have to teach the same mathematical techniques in multiple classes.
On top of that, though, the students tend to say that any given technique is entirely new to them, even when they've already seen it. When that part came up, one of my colleagues said "Well, of course they do that-- I did that when I was an…
jstemwedel | June 25, 2008Over at DrugMonkey, PhysioProf delivers a mission statement:
Our purpose here at DrugMonkey is to try to help people identify and cultivate the tools required to succeed within the system of academic science as it currently exists. We did not create this system, and we are not in a position to to "take it down". We do the best we can to help the people we train in our own labs to succeed within this system, and we try to share some of our insights here at the blog.
In a winner-take-all system like this, there will always be people who do not succeed through no fault of their own. People who…
omnibrain | June 25, 2008This is seriously the worst press release I've ever read. It doesn't say how the research was done, it doesn't have the results from the research, it is poorly written (run on sentences?!), and it is pointless. Why was this even released? Does EurekAlerts even have any criteria for releasing press releases? I do know they have criteria for who counts as a journalist - and it certainly isn't bloggers (we can't get embargoed articles from them - but we can from PLOS)
Anyway... here's the release.
drorzel | June 24, 2008I'm deep in book revisions at the moment, which largely accounts for the relative blog silence. This is expected to continue for a while yet, broken by the occasional post when something comes up that is irritating enough to push me to write about it. Such as, well, now.
In the chapter on the Copenhagen Interpretation, I spend some time laying out the basic principles of quantum mechanics, and mention the Schrödinger equation. I noted in passing that the name is taken from "the Austrian physicist and noted cad Erwin Schrödinger." Kate questioned whether this was really appropriate, but I left…
omnibrain | June 23, 2008 Grad students do all sorts of funny things on the side to make money. There are the mandatory grad school bands, the bartenders, the tutors, proctor exams, house sit, and a few of us blog ... but this guy really takes the cake:
In the 90s, a typical night for Craig Seymour included G-strings, elbow grease, and dollar bills in his socks.
waiiiiiiit a minute... who shoves dollar bills in socks?! was this a foot fetish club?
Dollar bills go in the G-String!
ok ok... back to the quote:
Between sets at Washington, D.C.'s gay strip clubs - unique institutions while they lasted, where hands-on…
clock | June 20, 2008Repairing research integrity:
Misconduct jeopardizes the good name of any institution. Inevitably, the way in which research misconduct is policed and corrected reflects the integrity of the whole enterprise of science. The US National Academy of Sciences has asserted that scientists share an 'obligation to act' when suspected research misconduct is observed1. But it has been unclear how well scientists are meeting that obligation. In the United States, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) evaluates all the investigation records submitted by institutions and plays an oversight role in…
jstemwedel | June 19, 2008The press covering the story of bioethicist Glenn McGee's departure from the post of director of the Alden March Bioethics Institute at Albany Medical College is hungry for an ironic twist. For example, Scientific American titles its article "An Unethical Ethicist?" What more fitting fall than some self-appointed morality cop going down on account of his own immoral dealings?
Believe me, I'm familiar with the suspicions people seem to harbor that ethicists are, in fact, twice as naughty as other folks. But from the evidence laboriously assembled in the SciAm article, I'm just not buying…
jstemwedel | June 19, 2008In a follow-up to her review of Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women scientists speak out by Emily Monosson, Alison George decided to investigate how many women who won Nobels also did the motherhood thing:
I started at the first Nobel prize awarded to a woman: Marie Curie, in 1903. To my surprise, she had 2 children (as well as 2 Nobel prizes). Her daughter, Irene, only managed one prize in 1935, but also produced two offspring. And so it went on. Gerty Cori (Nobel prize for in physiology or medicine 1947, 1 kid), Maria Geoppert-Mayer (Nobel prize for physics in 1963, 2 kids)…
clock | June 18, 2008If anyone is interested, Thompson has just released the new Impact Factors for scientific journals. Mark Patterson takes a look at IFs for PLoS journals and puts them in cool-headed perspective.
One day, hopefully very soon, this will not be news. What I mean by it is that there soon will be better metrics - ways to evaluate individual articles and individual people in way that is transparent and useful and, hopefully, helps treat the "CNS Disease". Journals will probably have their own metrics based on the value they add, but those metrics will not affect individual researchers' careers…
drorzel | June 18, 2008A bunch of academic bloggers have been talking about the American Scholar essay by William Deresiewicz. The always-perceptive Timothy Burke offers some insightful comments about the general problems of elite education.
Burke is also a lot kinder to Deresiewicz than I'm inclined to be. Because, frankly, the piece pisses me off, from the very first paragraph:
It didn't dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I'd just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a…