Academia
drorzel | March 18, 2008Via Steinn, a "meme" asking people to name women in science:
Rules:
1. You can't choose people from your own institution or company.
2. You can't google or use the internet to aid in your search. (But if you know someone is a scientist, but not sure what disciple, you can look that up).
3. You can consult textbooks, journals, and class notes.
4. You can ask others to help you brainstorm, but they can't use the internet just to get 5 names fast (see #2).
5. Living and deceased scientists are acceptable.
6. Links to or references about the named scientists are greatly appreciated. Let's share…
tfk | March 17, 2008G. Wayne Clough, president of Georgia Tech, was tapped to run the Smithsonian Institution. As we've reported, he steps into a deeply troubled organization. His predecessor allowed infrastructure to crumble, appropriated museum artifacts for personal use in his offices, and focused more on cozying up to corporate sponsors than on the scientific and educational mission of the Smithsonian.
In many ways, Clough seems well-suited to restoring faith in the Smithsonian. He comes with an academic background, which means he will understand the needs of his staff, and appreciate the balance between…
drorzel | March 17, 2008Over at Physics and Physicists, ZapperZ is thinking about the intro curriculum, and offers a suggestion:
I believe that we should have a more open-ended experiment to be given to the students. So I'll give an example. Note that while thing is something that I've thought about for a while, I'm still writing this off the top of my head. So there may be other problems with it that I haven't carefully considered.
Give them a problem to solve such as something like this:
Construct a pendulum clock. To make this clock useful, it would be helpful if the pendulum can swing back and forth once as…
drorzel | March 15, 2008Paul Krugman is now a famour economist, but many years ago, he was "an oppressed assistant professor, caught up in the academic rat race." So, he did what any good academic would do in that situation: he wrote a silly paper to cheer himself up. In this case, a paper discussing the issues that arise in interstellar trade because of realtivistic effects.
It's a brilliant bit of silliness. It's hard to pick a favorite bit, but this is pretty good:
To conclude this section, we should say something about the assumption that the trading planets lie in the same inertial frame. This will turn out to…
revere | March 15, 2008You may not know Joe Weizenbaum's name, but many people are familiar with the computer program he wrote more than 40 years ago, Eliza. Eliza mimics a Rogerian psychotherapist, picking up key words you type in and spitting them back in the form of questions:
You: "I feel anxious today." Eliza: "That's interesting. What are you anxious about?" Etc.
In some ways it was very simple minded and Joe himself considered it a parody of psychotherapy. But in other ways it struck a deep chord. It was one of the first computer programs to simulate a human conversation and to give the impression of a…
tsmith | March 13, 2008Via Ed, if you puked on VoxDay's shoes after his column earlier this week in WorldNetDaily:
But this is not to say there is not a genuine threat to all three aspects of science today. Unsurprisingly, it comes from the same force that is the primary threat to the survival of Western civilization: female equalitarianism. Flush with their success in decimating the collegiate sports programs of America, the equalitarians have now set their sights on applying the infamous Title IX quotas to science education, despite the fact that women already earn 57 percent of bachelor's degrees, 59 percent of…
drorzel | March 13, 2008Over at the new(ish) Of Two Minds, Shelley has posted a video giving advice on scientific presentations from a couple of guys at Michigan. They offer a few quick tips to giving better presentations:
Know your material well enough to give it without slides
Skip the outline (for short talks in particular)
Minimize text on slides
Make your figures big and visible
The central point is really to put the focus on the data, not the words or slides.
The one specific tip I would add to their list is this: When you put up a graph, you should clearly identify what is being plotted on what axes. The…
retrospectacle | March 12, 2008
We've all been to some *bad* science presentations over the years. Heck, I think I've given a few. No more! This 6 minute video (by 2 UM students) points out some common issues with Powerpointing and how to have your audience salivating for more of your data.
From the author:
I think there should be more of an acceptance of "walking out of talks" in science. I have been tempted so many times to get up and walk out in the middle of a presentation or even to heckle the presenter with "Did you actually prepare in any way for this talk? I take time out my day/experiments/writing to see this"…
clock | March 12, 2008Check the website and download the PDFs:
An unprecedented five consecutive years of stagnant funding for the National Institutes of Health is putting America at risk--slowing the pace of medical advances, risking the future health of Americans, discouraging our best and brightest researchers, and threatening America's global leadership in biomedical research. Unfortunately, President Bush's budget proposal recommends a sixth year of flat funding for the NIH in 2009.
On March 11, 2008, a group of seven concerned academic research institutions, released a new report--A Broken Pipeline? Flat…
clock | March 12, 2008POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITY in SLEEP MEDICINE
Charles A. Czeisler, Steven W. Lockley, Christopher P. Landrigan, Laura K. Barger
Harvard Work Hours, Health and Safety Group
Division of Sleep Medicine, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School
The Harvard Work Hours Health and Safety Group focuses on understanding the consequences of extended work hours and disordered sleep schedules on health and safety across a range of professions and populations. We also develop and test countermeasures to prevent the increased risk of accidents and injury for both worker health and…
neurophilosophy | March 11, 2008
UCSD-TV, the local television station broadcast by the University of California at San Diego, has a series called Grey Matters, which is devoted to neuroscience.
To date, fifteen full-length presentations have been produced for the series, all of which are availabe online in RealPlayer at the UCSD-TV website. They can also be viewed on the UCTV YouTube Channel, along with the other programs produced (all 1,800+ of them).
The programs in the neuroscience series cover topics such as autism, aging, decision making, neural stem cells, perception, and development and evolution of the brain.
clock | March 8, 2008[rant]So, if you organize a study-group online instead of in meat-space, the old fogies who still remember dinosaurs go all berserk. A student is threatened by expulsion for organizing a Facebook group for studying chemistry. Moreover, as each student got different questions, nobody did the work for others, they only exchanged tips and strategies. See the responses:
The Star:
Yet students argue Facebook groups are simply the new study hall for the wired generation.
Yes, they are.
Greg:
How much of this is a matter of administrative fear of the internet?
100%.
Larry:
Today, that sense of "…
clock | March 8, 2008In academia? See what they say:
Mad Hatter
EcoGeoFemme
ScienceGirl
Jennie
Mad Hatter again
DrugMonkey
Laurie Granieri
ScienceWoman
Telecommuting has its perks. But working only 40 hours is not one of them. Especially in my case in which the line between work, blogging, schmoozing and fun is blurry. Is posting this weekend post to be considered work (building and keeping my own community that, tomorrow, will click on a link to PLoS) or pleasure (doing what I always did - reading interesting stuff online and sharing with my readers)? Both? Who's to tell? I have fun doing it. But I have…
evolgen | March 7, 2008I really like the PLoS journals. Their mission -- to make research freely available -- is totally awesome. And, on top of that, the journals publish very interesting research. PLoS Biology is a top notch journal, with papers on par with those in Science and Nature. And the specialty journals, like PLoS Genetics and PLoS Computational Biology, consistently have articles that I find quite attractive.
But the website is totally fucked. I can't access most of the articles in PLoS Genetics. Thankfully, the articles are all mirrored on PubMed Central, but it's a major pain to track those down after…
terrasig | March 7, 2008
Eve Carson | student body president | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
This photo was taken on Monday, 3 March. Eve was shot less than 36 hours later. The entire campus, community and alumni mourn her death. She had a ethic of public service so strongly symbolized in her response to why she does what she does. [Photo by Tony Deifell]
Primary UNC-CH website
10,000 celebrate Carson's life
Rose Hoban WUNC-FM report on celebration of life
Chancellor's message to students following arrests of suspects (13 March)
Remarks of Eve's father, Bob Carson
Remembering the student's president…
evolgen | March 6, 2008Apparently, ScienceBlogs is loaded with white people. Hell, the whitest person I know blogs in this very domain. That got me thinking. Sure, we may look white. But are we really white? I mean, really white. So white that we like the stuff white people like.
We do have someone who really likes graduate school:
And we've got a Canadian:
And someone who likes to study abroad:
We look pretty white, huh? Well, it gets whiter. We've got a lawyer:
A dog owner:
Guys who like living by the water:
And marathon runner:
Man, we're the whitest group of whities I've ever been blinded by when the sun…
drorzel | March 5, 2008The Female Science Professor is thinking about conferences:
Some scientific conferences are dominated by talks and some are comprised of talks + poster presentations. At conferences with talks and posters, it varies from conference to conference as to whether talks are more prestigious or whether it doesn't matter very much because there are so many posters, though of course it tends to be the case that talks are preferred. Big professors typically get talks, and students and other unfamous people get posters.
Naturally, this ends up being about the difference between her and one of her male…
clock | March 4, 2008Jane is the cool new tool that everyone is talking about - see the commentary on The Tree of Life, on Nature Network and on Of Two Minds.
In short, the Journal/Author Name Estimator is a website where you can type in some text and see which scientific Journal has the content closest to the text you input, as well as people who published on similar topics. If you click on "Show extra options" you can narrow your search by a few criteria, e.g., you can search only Open Access journals.
The idea is to discover journals to which you can submit your work. Most people know the journals available…
omnibrain | March 4, 2008Whenever I walk down the hall someone pulls me aside and says "Help me Steve! I don't know what journal to submit my paper to. As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure who does research similar to me. I need to help find people to review my article. I don't know my own field that I'm publishing in!"
I tell each and every one of them that there's a new system out there called Jane (aka The Journal/Author Name Estimator) which allows you to put text (abstract, title, whatever) into a little text box and it will find journals and people who have written about your topic.
Ok so maybe this is a…
clock | March 4, 2008That is what Anne-Marie asked after a week with seven mid-term exams. In a few weeks, she'll have another bunch of exams all at the same time. And then a finals week in May.
This is, obviously, not the most efficient system. So, have you, as a student or a teacher, encountered a better system?