Academia
clock | May 15, 2008I got an interesting e-mail yesterday:
Columbia White Sale goes through May 31st. For more information, please visit: http://cup.columbia.edu/sale/23. We are offering up to 80% off on more than 1,000 titles in all subjects. (There are some really great deals). I hope this will be of interest to you and your readers. Please feel free to pass the word to friends and colleagues.
Hmmmmm, shiny!
drorzel | May 15, 2008Over at Swans on Tea, Tom has a great story of his Frankenstein Moment, that moment in science when the lightning flashes, and it's immediately clear that everything just worked, and you have successfully reanimated your creation, or split the atom, or discovered high-temperature superconductivity, or whatever.
As he says, these are rare. My own career has been lacking in real, definitive laughing-maniacally-during-the-thunderclap Frankenstein Moments. It's not that I haven't had experimental successes-- I've done some things that I like to think are pretty cool-- but most of them have been…
drorzel | May 15, 2008I'm giving an exam this morning (magnetic fields, circuits, magnetic forces on charges), which is always a carnival of boredom-- happily, I have papers to grade during the test, which will keep me busy. Sadly, this is not a final exam, as Female Science Professor and others are making or grading right now-- we still have three more weeks of class. Joy.
Anyway, this seems like a good time and topic for a Dorky Poll. So, bouncing off the FSP post, let me ask:
What's your favorite trick question from an exam?
This could be an exam you've taken, or one you've given. All that's required is that…
scientificactivist | May 14, 2008On Monday, I attended an interesting lecture sponsored by the 21st Century School here in Oxford entitled "What Is Science For?". You can see a discussion on the event here and read a pdf summary of it here. The lecture was co-presented by scientist John Sulston and philosopher John Harris, and it was introduced by Richard Dawkins, who also moderated the Q&A afterward. As the summary focuses on, the event was partially a debate on the purpose of science, with Harris proposing a utilitarian view and Sulston defending a focus more on the intrinsic value of inquiry and discovery (and…
jstemwedel | May 14, 2008There's an article in Access (the glossy magazine put out by our School of Journalism and Mass Communication) about why so few of our students manage to get their degrees in four years. Part of it has to do with the fact that most of our students work -- many the equivalent of full time (or more) -- and many have long commutes to get here. As well, many who start out taking courses at community colleges discover that some of those credits don't transfer.
But a lot of the challenge, it turns out, has to do with lining up all the classes to fulfill all the major and general education…
drorzel | May 14, 2008Having done a whirlwind and somewhat disappointing swing through the Museum of Natural History, I strolled across Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to get me some culture. I guessed correctly that it was less likely to be choked with middle-school kids, and I never fail to find something interesting to look at.
Of course, art being art, I always find some crap, too, so let's get that out of the way first. Also, it's easier to blog snidely about art I didn't care for than to explain the wonders of the stuff I did like.
We'll start off easy, though, with the Gustave Courbet…
drorzel | May 14, 2008Some colleagues organized a bus trip to New York yesterday, which I went on, on the grounds that a) it was cheap, and b) in a few months, we won't be doing much traveling at all for a while. This required me to get up at an ungodly hour to catch the bus on campus, and the trip itself reminded me of why I don't take public transit, but on the whole, it was a good day. And, of course, blog fodder.
The purpose of the trip was to take students from the intro Astronomy classes to the American Museum of Natural History to see the planetarium show (cue Fountains of Wayne). As this show takes less…
j7uy5 | May 14, 2008I realize that in the spectrum of boneheaded moves by the
Administration, this one is not the most extreme. Still, it
was a pretty dumb thing to do.
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/washington/13tsa.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all">Blunt
Federal Letters Tell Students They're Security Threats
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: May 13, 2008
WASHINGTON -- A German graduate student in oceanography at M.I.T.
applied to the Transportation Security Administration for a new ID card
allowing him to work around ships and docks.
What the student, Wilken-Jon von Appen,…
terrasig | May 13, 2008I'm not sure whether this story qualifies as alternative medicine or religion, or neither. I throw it out to you because I and other sci/med bloggers widely criticize the infiltration of so-called alternative medicine in our academic medical centers.
But here in today's Health Journal section of the Wall Street Journal, Melinda Beck tells us of the application of mindfulness, a practice derived from Buddhism, to overcoming binge-eating disorders. Sure, this may be considered alternative medicine but it's really an application of psychology under the auspices of integrative medicine:
In a…
jstemwedel | May 12, 2008Which do you choose?
Behind door #1:
You've labored to create a website that captures all the information for your course -- reading schedule, assignment schedule, guidelines for completing the assignments, the works. You've even set up navigation so that there are multiple ways to get to these items (since "the logical place to look for it" means different things to different students).
But a vocal segment of the students in the class clearly do not avail themselves of this resource. (Instead, they email you to ask you for the information they could find by accessing the website -- or, you…
clock | May 11, 2008I will be going to a scientific conference next week. Believe it or not, this will be the first purely scientific meeting I'll attend since I quit grad school and started blogging (all the others had to do with science communication, blogging, technology, journalism, Internet, publishing...). So, I am thinking....
I remember going to scientific meetings meant going to a nice little Florida resort and spending a couple of days with one's friends and colleagues, isolated from the rest of the world, talking about science 24/7. It is an opportunity to share your latest work and ideas with an…
drorzel | May 9, 2008Timothy Burke has some interesting thoughts about the College of the Atlantic, which represents a real effort to build interdisciplinarity on an institutional level. "Interdisciplinary" is the buzzword of the moment in large swathes of academia, and the College of the Atlantic, which doesn't have departments and works very hard to make connections between disciplines, is sort of the apotheosis of the interdisciplinary movement.
Toward the end of his post, Burke relates a story from earlier in his career:
When I was briefly at Emory at the start of my career, I was in a workshop on…
clock | May 9, 2008Holden Thorp is a chemist and an overall great guy. Good news for NC science and education.
clock | May 9, 2008Our governor agrees. At least in the print version of this article which has a somehwat different title: "Easley supports college for aliens". I wonder why they changed it for the Web version - is the editorial position that having green or purple skin disqualifies one from higher education?
catdynamics | May 8, 2008apropos nothing - what sort of circumstances hypothetically trigger university disciplinary investigations?
Universities have rules that are both an improper subset of and a superset of community laws.
Generally, universities are subordinate to the laws of the jurisdiction they are in, although there are historical exemptions. Further, universities are not actually obliged to discipline their members, whether students or faculty, merely because of legal convictions, although in practise they often do.
Issues of concern to the university include internal safety - conduct that threatens the…
terrasig | May 8, 2008Alison McCook has a lengthy article now up on The Scientist website that illustrates how NIH grant funding shortfalls are coming home to roost, with soft money faculty first to be jettisoned.
In 2007, more than 4,000 NIH-funded researchers were denied grant renewals. For some, that means they have to close up shop.
The article itself is well-done, chronicling the experience of Alan Schneyer, a well-established and productive reproductive endocrinology researcher formerly at Massachusetts General Hospital, whose research program was shut down after three tries for a competing renewal of his…
jstemwedel | May 8, 2008I have at least six things I really want to write blog posts about at the moment, but the day job is a harsh mistress.
So instead of a content-laden post, you get a list so you can play along vicariously.
In the next nine days, I must:
Lead the last new-content class meeting of my "Ethics in Science" class (for two class sections) - done
Remember to distribute student evaluations - done
Devise two more rubrics with which to evaluate case study responses for the engineering ethics module and distribute them to my unholy army of the night grading team - done
Grade the last case study from my…
catdynamics | May 7, 2008Prof Brad DeLong dislodges an academic grain of sand, and formally requests academic action on the question Prof Yoo.
The immediate response is repose.
We will see if the talus slope is ever exceeded. Inertia works both ways, even at the institutional level.
Another episode of linking as a public good.
PS Interesting back-and-forth at Volokh on the issue
and Brian Leiter's take on it - he takes a narrow interpretation that tenured faculty misconduct are strictly limited to internal academic affairs.
It should be noted that the Berkeley conduct guide explicitly notes that its list of…
drorzel | May 7, 2008Writing in Scientific American, Mark Alpert argues that we need more novels about science:
A good work of fiction can convey the smells of a laboratory, the colors of a dissected heart, the anxieties of a chemist and the joys of an astronomer--all the illuminating particulars that you won't find in a peer-reviewed article in Science or Nature. Novels such as Intuition, with their fully fleshed out characters and messy conflicts, can erase the ridiculously sinister Dr. No cartoons. And most important, these books can inspire readers to become scientists themselves.
As you might imagine, this…