Academia
clock | May 7, 2008Peter Suber relays the announcement (and add some more) of the Open Humanities Press, a collection of seven Open Access journals (a humanities PLoS of sorts) in critical and cultural theory.
Humanities bloggers have been way ahead of science bloggers in regards to posting their own work (including ideas, hypotheses and rough drafts) online, yet official humanities publishing has lagged behind natural sciences and medicine when it comes to adopting Open Access, so this is a very positive move on their part.
drorzel | May 7, 2008For all the ranting people do about the evils of PowerPoint, it seems to me that people are missing the one bit of technology that is most responsible for incomprehensible presentations in science: the laser pointer.
Having watched a bunch of student talks last week, I was reminded once again of just how useless laser pointers really are. Unless you have a really bright pointer, with a fresh set of batteries, the dot of light is almost completely invisible. And I have reasonably good (corrected) vision-- I doubt that anybody who's red-green colorblind can pick them up at all.
The widespread…
jstemwedel | May 6, 2008More than a month ago William the Coroner tagged me. It is not just that I am slow; this meme is challenging!
Not mush, methodology.
A surprising number of people seem to think being ethical amounts to not being an inherently evil person.
I am passionate about teaching my students that making ethical decisions involves moving beyond gut feelings and instincts. It means understanding how your decisions impact others, and considering the ways your interests and theirs intersect. It means thinking through possible impacts of the various choices available to you. It means understanding…
drorzel | May 5, 2008Jake Young points to a Bloggingheads conversation between Dan Drezner and Megan McArdle about, among other things, whether academics are bitter and why. This mostly comes out of a post Megan wrote (link is a leap of faith-- the site is down as I type this), and serves as a lead-in to a discussion of John Yoo.
I found this somewhat annoying, for a couple of reasons, chief among them that I just don't like videoblogging very much. I could read a transcript of this conversation in about a fifth of the time that it takes to watch it, and that would also enable me to quote it accurately. As it is…
terrasig | May 4, 2008Well, we kept the polls open as long as possible and some bloggers voted early and often while others waited 'til the last minute. We've had some locals and some out-of-staters with recollections of North Carolina. So, without further adieu, the NC primary edition of the Tar Heel Tavern:
NC Politics
Political bloggers in the state were not surprisingly among the first to submit entries. Perennial NC blogging fave, The Olive Ridley Crawl, gives us NC Primary - Vote for a Non Panderer.
Jim Buie submitted several of which I picked Obama, in Raleigh, Shows He's No Elitist Egghead and In NC,…
neurophilosophy | May 3, 2008
This beautiful two-photon microscopy image, by Alanna Watt and Michael Hausser, shows a network of Purkinje cells in the cerebellar cortex. Named after the Czech anatomist who discovered them, Purkinje cells are the largest cells in the mammalian brain. They have a planar structure with a highly elaborate dendritic tree which forms hundreds of thousands of synapses with the parallel fibres of cerebellar granule cells, and a single axon which projects down into the deep cerebellar nuclei.
The image comes from a collection inspired by the UCL Neuroscience website, which has just been launched…
purepedantry | May 2, 2008There is a great blogginghead.tv conversation up between two of my favorite bloggers, Megan McArdle and Daniel Drezner.
They discuss whether academics are bitter. McArdle argues that the labor market makes their lives very unfortunate. Drezner argues that the issue is complicated by the fact that some academics how outside job choices such as industry. They are both probably right.
drorzel | May 2, 2008I'm going to be busy all day (more or less) at the Steinmetz Symposium, listening to talks about the fantastic things our students have been doing with their research projects. So it's going to be a "talk among yourselves" day here at Uncertain Principles, for the most part.
It's been a little while since I ran a Dorky Poll thread, mostly because I'm running low on topics. Here's one that may be a little too esoteric, inspired by looking at the diploma on my wall:
Chemical Physics, or Physical Chemistry?
For bonus points, what's the difference between them?
Also, are there other pairs of…
drorzel | May 1, 2008Speaking (as we were) of pro-science film festivals, Sigma Xi (the scientific research honor society-- think Phi Beta Kappa for science nerds) is announcing a student film competition:
In conjunction with a year-long focus on the issue of water, Sigma Xi is sponsoring a competition for three-minute student films on aspects of this precious and dwindling natural resource. The entry deadline is September 1, 2008.
Prizes of $1,000, $800 and $500 will be awarded for the top three films. The competition is open to undergraduate and graduate students, either individually or in teams. There is no…
jstemwedel | May 1, 2008This post is standing in for a lecture and class discussion that would be happening today if I knew how to be in two places at once. (Welcome Phil. 133 students! Make yourselves at home in the comments, and feel free to use a pseudonym if you'd rather not comment under your real name.)
The topic at hand is the way relationships in research groups influence the kind of science that comes out of those groups, as well as the understanding the members of the group have of what it means to do good science. Our jumping off point is an article by Vivian Weil and Robert Arzbaecher titled "…
drorzel | May 1, 2008One of the interesting things to come out of the switch to Matter & Interactions for our intro classes has been some discussion among my colleagues of how the books treat specific topics. A couple of people have raised concerns that the coverage of certain topics is different from the traditional presentation, in a way that isn't entirely accurate.
This is interesting to me not because it calls the books into question, but because the standard treatments of these things aren't entirely accurate, either. Both the new book and the older book are full of lies-to-children.
"Lies-to-children"…
jstemwedel | April 30, 2008Maria has an awesome post about her thoughts upon wrapping up her Master's thesis. It captures the kind of shifts one can have in figuring out what to do, who to be, and how schooling fits into all of that -- and how what's at stake is as much emotional as it is intellectual. She writes:
I have found that clinging too stubbornly to long-term goals is actually bad for me. Not because the goals themselves are bad, but I tend to become emotionally overinvested in them, and then I freak! out! at the slightest threat to my success. Learning to keep things in perspective has meant, for me,…
drorzel | April 30, 2008The Mad Biologist, like 80% of ScienceBlogs, is mad at Chris Mooney:
Here's the problem: you keep coming to evolutionary biologists with a problem (the perception of evolutionary biology), and you don't have a solution. Do you think there's a single evolutionary biologist who is happy with public opinion regarding evolution and creationism? But you're not giving us concrete solutions.
Between teaching and research, along with all of service obligations expected of us (including public outreach), we have too much to do. When we are then told that we need to somehow organize a pro-…
drorzel | April 30, 2008Randy Olson's movie A Flock of Dodos comes up again and again in the course of arguments about public communication of science, but I had never gotten around to seeing it. I finally put it on the Netflix queue, and ended up watching it last night.
For those who have been living in caves and haven't seen this blogged a thousand times, A Flock of Dodos is a documentary about the "intelligent design" fight, primarily in Kansas, where Olson is from. Using the school board debate over science standards as a frame, Olson sets out to learn about "intelligent design," its promoters, and why we're…
drorzel | April 29, 2008We had a talk yesterday at lunchtime from an alumnus who graduated with a physics degree, got a Ph.D. in Physics, did a couple of post-docs, and then decided to give academia a miss, and went to Wall Street where he's been a financial analyst for the last 12 years. He talked, mostly for the benefit of students, about his path to the world of finance, and what's involved in financial jobs.
This was terrifically interesting, and really useful. Given the way academia works, people who manage to get tenure-track faculty positions almost never have any first-hand experience of the other career…
drorzel | April 29, 2008Inside Higher Ed reports on a new study of the connection between college athletics and alumni giving, with some interesting findings:
First, they find that male alumni who played on teams while they were undergraduates are more likely to donate more (to the athletics department and to the university as a whole) when the teams they played on win conference championships (the researchers' chosen measure of on-field success) in later years. The same is not true for women.
Second, male alumni who played on teams as undergraduates tend to donate more if the teams they played on won conference…
drorzel | April 28, 2008Today's episode of "Thrilling Tales of Physics Pedagogy" is brought to you through a comment by CCPhysicst who picks up on the implications of last week's schedule post:
You are ripping right along in that course. You do E and then B and only later get around to circuits?
Yes and no. We are ripping right along, because our insane trimester calendar demands it. We're not ripping along quite as rapidly as this might make it seem, though, because we're using a new curriculum based on Matter and Interactions by Ruth Chabay and Bruce Sherwood. It approaches topics in a somewhat idiosyncratic…
drorzel | April 26, 2008Every Friday (more or less) there's a "Faculty Social Hour" on campus. They have cheese and crackers, a fairly random assortment of beer, and a couple of bottles of wine, and various faculty come by to wind down a bit at the end of the week. It's a chance to socialize a little with people from different departments, talk about our students, and go into the weekend on a happy note.
Yesterday's social hour was designated as a "Multi-cultural Happy Hour," to coincide with the annual International Festival thrown by students from other countries. They had brought in much better food than usual,…
drorzel | April 25, 2008Given the amount of time I've spent writing about academic issues this week, it's only fitting that the science story getting the most play is about math education. Ed Yong provides a detailed explanation, and Kenneth Chang summarizes the work in the New York Times. Here's Ed's introduction:
Except they don't really work. A new study shows that far from easily grasping mathematical concepts, students who are fed a diet of real-world problems fail to apply their knowledge to new situations. Instead, and against all expectations, they were much more likely to transfer their skills if they were…
terrasig | April 25, 2008Okay, some people are smoking some bad dope.
Whilst helping the PharmKid get down to the car for school this morning, I came upon PharmGirl, MD, in a rage while sitting in front of her laptop. The object of her vitriol was a 17 April article in BusinessWeek entitled, "Are There Too Many Women Doctors?: As an MD shortage looms, female physicians and their flexible hours are taking some of the blame." The article derives from a point/counterpoint pair of essays in the 5 April issue of BMJ (British Medical Journal) entitled, "Are there too many female medical graduates?" ("Yes" position, "No"…