Academia
jstemwedel | April 14, 2008At DrugMonkey, PhysioProf explores the rules of engagement between grad students in journal club and seminar presentations (building off of interesting explorations of this question from A Lady Scientist, Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde, and Acmegirl -- all of which you should click through to read in their entirety). I'm late to the party, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the balance here between the intellectual aspects and the human aspects of questioning within the tribe of science.
PhysioProf starts with A Lady Scientist's sense that grad students have a duty to watch each other's…
neurotopia | April 14, 2008Let's not kid ourselves. Finding a job in science these days is rough. Finding the job you want, once you get past your postdoc years, is even rougher. And landing your ideal job? Unless that postdoc was picture-perfect, you're screwed.
Case in point; me. I had a rough postdoc. For now I won't get into the gritty details, outside of a number of family-related issues and illnesses, and an anxiety disorder-related meltdown on my end, balanced with a phenomenal clusterfuck of mismanagement and bad mentorship on the part of my governmental employer. Where does this leave me? Beyond the…
clock | April 12, 2008Being out of the lab, out of science, and out of funding for a while also means that I have not been at a scientific conference for a few years now, not even my favourite meeting of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms. I have missed the last two meetings (and I really miss them - they are a blast!).
But it is funny how, many years later, one still remembers some posters from poster sessions. What makes a poster so memorable?
I guess it has something to do with one's interests - there is just not enough time during a session to check out every single one out of hundreds (or…
drorzel | April 11, 2008With the "Vox Day" business winding down (one way or another), it's time to unwind with something less contentious and controversial: Framing! No-- seriously. Most of the really loud opponents have publically washed their hands of the whole topic, so I expect this will be relatively non-controversial. What could possibly go wrong?
Anyway, Janet is thinking about "framing" and the example of stem cells given in the Nisbet and Scheufele article in The Scientist (PDF here). She identifies three "core values" that framers on one side or the other might be trying to reach:
cures for diseases are…
drorzel | April 10, 2008I'm feeling pretty harried this week, because I'm teaching using a new curriculum, which requires all-new lecture slides and notes and homework assignments. I'm also going away this weekend, to Williamstown for the celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of my college rugby club.
As a result, I've been losing more mental processor cycles than usual to thinking about my own college days, and remembering the lyrics to the dozens and dozens of songs I used to know. So, because it's on my mind anyway, and because the mixing of college sports and alcohol would really cheese off…
drorzel | April 10, 2008Inside Higher Ed notes in passing that several NCAA Presidents are complaining about alcohol advertising during the NCAA Tournament. The source for this is a study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest:
According to CSPI's analysis of broadcasts of the semifinal and championship basketball games, the NCAA is exceeding the limits on beer ads it set for itself in 2005 of not more than 60 seconds per hour or not more than 120 seconds in any telecast. During the UCLA versus Memphis broadcast, CBS aired 200 seconds of beer advertising comprised of 15-, 20-, and 30-second spots for Bud…
drorzel | April 9, 2008Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne waxes rhapsodic about her calculator, a HP-15C. This is such an obvious Dorky Poll topic that I can't believe I didn't think of it earlier:
What sort of calculator do you use?
My students, particularly the future engineers, are always shocked by my answer:
I use a TI 30Xa. Actually, I don't know that off the top of my head-- I had to dig it out and look at it to come up with the model number. I think of it as "A $10 scientific calculator that I bought at Safeway."
This does everything I need, though-- it adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides, does square…
drorzel | April 9, 2008The much-promised peer-reviewed research post is going to slip by another day, becuase I had forgotten about a talk by Neil Lewis last night on campus. Lewis is an alumnus of Union, and a writer for the Times best known for writing about the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and he was speaking as part of the Alumni Writers Series.
He had prepared remarks, but his speech still had a very off-the-cuff feel, and he tried to get through the prepared stuff quickly to get to a more open Q&A period. He talked about Guantanamo here four years ago, and joked that he was going to re-use that…
clock | April 8, 2008A post from December 5, 2007:
Communication
Communication of any kind, including communication of empirical information about the world (which includes scientific information), is constrained by three factors: technology, social factors, and, as a special case of social factors - official conventions. The term "constrained" I used above has two meanings - one negative, one positive. In a negative meaning, a constraint imposes limits and makes certain directions less likely, more difficult or impossible. In its positive meaning, constraint means that some directions are easy and obvious and…
clock | April 8, 2008As many of you may be aware, yesterday was the first day of the implementation of the new NIH law which requires all articles describing research funded by NIH to be deposited into PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. Folks at SPARC have put together a list of resources one can consult when looking for answers about the implementation of the access policy.
Bloggers on Nature Network as well as here on Scienceblogs.com will write posts about the NIH bill and its implementation throughout the week (the 'OA week'), informing their readers about the implementation, the next steps to be…
drorzel | April 8, 2008An ad-lib from yesterday's lecture about interactions between electric fields and neutral matter, paraphrased:
So, we can divide macroscopic objects into two categories, based on what happens when you bring large numbers of atoms together. In materials that are insulators, the electrons aren't free to move. The atoms hold onto their electrons very tightly. They're kind of like Republicans.
In materials that are conductors, on the other hand, the electrons are free to move. The atoms share their electrons freely through the whole material. They're basically Communists.
Semiconductors are like…
catdynamics | April 7, 2008one of the "fun" things about academia is that no matter what one actually plans on doing with the precious few spare hours that may appear, reality will cheerfully ignore such plans and provide a surprise
I am so overdue for some karmic restitution
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clock | April 6, 2008Obligatory Reading of the day: Why I feel so strongly about redundant digitization
terrasig | April 6, 2008Alamosa is a town of 8,500 residents on the west side of the Rockies in southern Colorado, equidistant to Denver and Albuquerque. You may sometimes hear of Alamosa described by Al Roker or other morning weather reporters as the "nation's icebox" in setting the low temperature of the lower 48 US states, a title for which it fights with Fraser, Colorado (home of Winter Park ski resort).
Alamosa is also a strikingly beautiful place in the middle of some unique geological features, including the nearby Great Sand Dunes National Monument, a massive group of dunes several hundred feet high…
terrasig | April 4, 2008Actinomycin D was the first antitumor antibiotic isolated from Streptomyces parvallus cultures by the lab of 1952 Nobel laureate, Dr Selman Waksman, at Rutgers University. However, it took a young Chinese physician and the confidence in her by a future US Surgeon General for this natural product drug to positively impact the lives of children with cancer.
An unusually engaging Boston Globe obituary by Gloria Negri caught my attention this week that announced the death of pediatric oncology pioneer, Charlotte Tan (Hsu), MD, of pneumonia on 1 April in Brookline, MA. Dr Tan's 1959 paper in…
catdynamics | April 4, 2008Rainy, rainy friday, again.
So, we have consulted and met, and we ask the iPod: you know what we ask, what should we do?
Whoosh goes the randomizer.
Whoosh.
The Covering: Dein Ist Mein Ganzes Herz - Three Tenors
The Crossing: Walk of Life - Dire Straits
The Crown: A New England - Billy Bragg
The Root: San Antonio Foam Party - Half Man, Half Biscuit
The Past: Let's Do Rock Steady - Bodysnatchers
The Future: Peter & the Wolf: Grandfather - Prokoviev
The Questioner: Meet on the Ledge - Fairport Convention
The House: De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da - Police
The Inside: In Un Palco Della Scala -…
drorzel | April 4, 2008I had the first lab of the term yesterday in my introductory E&M class. This is the first time I've taught out of this book (Matter & Interactions by Chabay and Sherwood), which actually includes the basic elements of this lab as suggested activities in the second chapter of the text. The lab was more successful than I expected (I've done the lab before), and I even managed to add a somewhat more free-form element to it, that worked out well.
The materials for the lab are extremely simple: One roll of "invisible" tape for each group, plus some sort of stand for them to stick tape to.…
drorzel | April 4, 2008The Perimeter Institute will be hosting a workshop in September on "Science in the 21st Century":
Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online. We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet. Without any doubt, these technological developments influence the way science is done, and they also redefine our relation to the society we live in. Information exchange and management, the scientific community, and the society as a…
drorzel | April 3, 2008Via Matt Yglesias, the Quick and the Ed offers an absolutely terrific article about the effect of class on access to college, using AJ Soprano as an example. On The Sopranos, AJ was a delinquent, who nevertheless got sent off to college because of the tireless efforts of his mother, and the family's money. Drawing on new data from the Department of Education, the authors show that this is all too real:
The fourth bar on the graph represents the A.J. Sopranos of the world, those who scored in the bottom 25 percent (the first achievement quartile) on standardized tests as high school sophomores…
drorzel | April 2, 2008In what is, alas, probably too deadpan to be an April Fools' joke, Mark Wilson offers a breathtaking suggestion on Inside Higher Ed:
I propose that all academics with research specialties, no matter how arcane (and nothing is too obscure for Wikipedia), enroll as identifiable editors of Wikipedia. We then watch over a few wikipages of our choosing, adding to them when appropriate, stepping in to resolve disputes when we know something useful. We can add new articles on topics which should be covered, and argue that others should be removed or combined. This is not to displace anonymous…