Academia
terrasig | April 25, 2008MD/PhD student Jake Young at Pure Pedantry came up with a great idea and is collecting recipes for cheap, grad student/med student meals. (We of Eastern European heritage love a kid who suggests an inventive application of kielbasa.).
The submissions in the comment thread remind me that our food supply system is so screwed up that the most nutritious foods are the most expensive. When one is living on a student stipend, paying your own way, or , more seriously, if you are one of millions of US citizens living in abject poverty, one usually purchases the most calories per dollar. In our…
revere | April 24, 2008The art professor is finally cleared but a distinguished biologist was still punished by a ridiculous, mindless, cruel and utterly reckless use of raw power by the Bush administration:
A federal judge dismissed criminal indictments on Monday against an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo who was charged four years ago with mail and wire fraud after receiving bacteria through the mail that he said he planned to use in his art projects.
Judge Richard J. Arcara of the U.S. District Court in Buffalo ruled that the indictment against the professor, Steven J. Kurtz, was "…
tsmith | April 24, 2008You may recall the case of geneticist Robert Farrell, who had been initially charged with bioterroism for sharing generally-harmless strains of bacteria with a colleague, SUNY-Buffalo art professor Steven Kurtz. Farrell plead guilty to a reduced charge last fall and received a fine and probation. Now the verdict is in for Kurtz; more after the jump.
A federal judge on Monday (April 21) dismissed the case against Steven Kurtz, an art professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, saying that the government indictment against him "is insufficient on its face," The Buffalo News…
jstemwedel | April 24, 2008Do you ever get to the point where if you haven't checked your syllabus within the last few hours, you have no confidence that you actually know what day it is?
Or is it just me?
neurotopia | April 24, 2008Well I'm kind of miffed. The teaching postdoc I really wanted decided that I'm not in the first round of interviews, which makes me sad. They really have their shit together and do a thorough job of preparing profs. Oh well. Maybe they'll need to dip into tier 2 of their applicant pool.
In other, better news, the local community college needs a Gen Bio prof for the summer, so I'll at least get some good teaching experience doing that. They also have fall positions, which is good; it keeps me in academia at least part time. I'm hoping that will round out my CV enough to nab that primo…
drorzel | April 24, 2008We had a great time on our visit to Japan last summer, but we had one incredibly frustrating experience, on our first day in Yokohama. We couldn't bring three full weeks' worth of clothing with us, so we brought a bit more than one week's worth, and planned to get things cleaned there. The hotel laundry rates were outlandish, so we loaded up a suitcase with dirty laundry, and when we got to Yokohama, we asked directions to a local laundromat (Japanese word: "ko-in ran-da-ri," or "coin laundry"). The nice lady at the hotel desk gave us a tourist map, with a route indicated on it.
This created…
drorzel | April 24, 2008Monday
9:00-10:15 am Grade exams from last week.
10:15-10:30 am Prepare for lecture
10:30-11:35 am Lecture about magnetic field of current loop, in-class activity on field of solenoid
11:35-12:45 pm Gasp, pant, eat lunch.
12:45-2:45 pm Tweak up apparatus for laser spectroscopy of rubidium lab
3:00-5:00 pm Test and set up lab on finding Earth's magnetic field
5:30 pm Go home and collapse.
Tuesday
9:00-10:00 am Run errands (bank, drugstore, etc.)
10:00-11:00 am Tweak up rubidium spectroscopy lab, fix balky laser
11:00-11:45 am Meet with student about last week's lab.
12:00-12:30 pm Lunch with…
drorzel | April 23, 2008As I may have mentioned in the past, we at Chateau Steelypips have benefitted greatly from Yale Law School's loan forgiveness program for graduates taking public service jobs. Since Kate shattered my dreams of a self-funded basement lab by deciding to use her pricey law degree for good rather than racking up billions as Evil Corporate Scum, the funds they provided to help pay off her loans were a crucial element of our finances for the first few years of our marriage. In fact, you could argue that they're the reason there's a physical Chateau Steelypips in the first place-- even in 2002, I…
drorzel | April 22, 2008The release of Expelled has generated all sorts of chatter, almost certainly more than it deserves on its merits as a film. It's also produced repeated mentions of the fact that it's the eight highest-grossing political documentary of all time-- most recently, Tara Smith writing at Correlations.
That claim reminds me of a long-ago student whose application for a summer program described him as a student at "the fifth best university in Florida." None of the people reading it could come up with four, let alone the fifth. And God knows, I would have a hard time naming seven high-grossing…
evolgen | April 21, 2008Someone was asked something along these lines by a member of some legislative body:
How will your research help protect this country?
That someone replied with something like this:
It won't, but it will keep this country worth protecting.
The exact wording in those quotes probably differ from what was actually said.
This isn't a rhetorical question, nor is it an exercise in trivia. I don't know who said it, what the exact context of the quote was, or whether this was actually said by anyone, anytime, anywhere. So, if you know of the exact quote, who said it, and where it was said, please…
neurophilosophy | April 21, 2008Here's something that I'll almost certainly be entering in two years' time (when, if all goes according to plan, I'll be a Ph.D. student again):
Wellcome Trust and New Scientist essay competition
The Wellcome Trust is inviting postgraduates in science, engineering or technology to tell the world about their research, through an annual essay competition run in partnership with New Scientist.
Prizes this year for outstanding essays include a two-week, expenses-paid media placement with 'New Scientist', £1000 spending money and publication of the winning essay in 'New Scientist'.
As well…
drorzel | April 21, 2008Another reason why I recommend limiting the advice you listen to as a new faculty member on the tenure track is that most of the things that academics do are highly individual activities. There's no one right way to teach or do research, and what works for one person may fail miserably for another.
My favorite example of this is from my first year of teaching. I had a fellowship through grad school, so I didn't do the usual TA'ing, and came into my tenure track job with very little classroom experience. I have a whole bunch of very capable colleagues, though, so I asked around about things to…
drorzel | April 20, 2008Janet follows a post by ScienceWoman on prioritizing research time with a List of advice for tenure-track faculty. It's excellent advice if you're a junior academic seeking tenure.
I have only one suggestion to add:
Seek advice, but don't take too much of it.
If you're on the tenure track, you will have friends and colleagues at your institution who know more about the process than you do. You should absolutely seek them out, and ask them for advice-- whether they're formally in a mentoring role or not, they will have good suggestions to offer.
But in the end, the decisions about what you do…
jstemwedel | April 20, 2008Neil Sinhababu (aka the Ethical Werewolf) lays out one approach to making an impression in a job interview teaching demo:
Before giving my job talk, N[ational] U[niversity of] S[ingapore] had me give an hour-long presentation to the graduate students and advanced undergraduates to prepare them for the talk and also evaluate my teaching abilities. Since my talk was on the Humean theory of motivation, I taught them about the puzzle involving cognitivism, internalism, and the Humean theory -- if you accept all three, you end up having to say that humans can't make moral judgments, so you'd…
jstemwedel | April 19, 2008ScienceWoman has a great post on balancing responsibilities in a new tenure track job, with an eye to publishing papers and setting up a robust and productive research program. It's a must-read, especially for those who are lucky enough to be starting tenure track gigs in the fall. Since I'm getting toward the end of my probationary period before the tenure decision (ask me on May 23, I'll know by then), I thought I'd offer my words of advice for hitting the ground running in a tenure track job:
Find out the basis on which your tenure case will be evaluated from the very beginning. Get…
drorzel | April 18, 2008(Because nothing brings in readers like a physics pedagogy post...)
Out in Minnesota, Arjendu is expressing high-level confusion about the business of lecturing:
As I've said a few times before in this blog, I prefer to let students read the text to get a preliminary take on physics content on their own, generate questions and confusions on which I focus during 'lecture', and then check their comprehension of these principles by working together on applying them via problem-solving -- and doing this in my presence so I can help them work out what they do and don't know.
I see this as…
purepedantry | April 17, 2008Yesterday I took a day off (first in a while for me), and I had a chance to see the movie Smart People starring Randy Dennis Quaid, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Ellen Page.
The movie is about a rather odd literature professor, Lawrence Wetherhold, (Quaid) who is exhausted by the difficulties of academic life. His oft-obnoxious daughter (Page) obsesses over getting into college and feels superior to others due to her intelligence -- as is clearly evidenced by her high SAT scores. Wetherhold is a widower, and since the death of his wife he has been supported by his daughter. When he falls…
terrasig | April 17, 2008Dr Kimball Atwood IV at Science-Based Medicine and my long-time blogging colleague Orac have spilled oceans of e-ink on the institutionalization of alternative or integrative medicine in North America's top academic medical centers. Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is now often called "integrative medicine" to intellectually justify the incorporation of evidence-free, anecdotal practices into the business of academic medicine. Of course, integrative medicine does co-opt a few areas of conventional medicine, like nutritional and psychological counseling, supported by an evidence…
drorzel | April 17, 2008Janet posted a few days ago about asking questions of grad students in seminars and journal clubs and so on. This is part of a larger conversation that I'm too lazy to collect links to-- Janet has them-- about whether grad students should show solidarity with their fellows and refrain from asking tough questions of each other in public.
It's an interesting question, and the sort of thing I would ordinarily be all over, but my graduate experience was idiosyncratic enough that I don't think I can say anything that would generalize well. I was officially a student in the Chemical Physics Program…