Academia
drorzel | March 3, 2008Michael Nielsen is planning to attend an "unconference" and is considering possible topics. He quotes one from Eva Amsen:
My idea: find 4 or 5 volunteers from different backgrounds to sit on a 20 minute panel and (with audience feedback) make a list of Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Science. Since we have a wide audience, this hopefully would be a varied list. Actually, maybe we could just put up a large sheet of paper and have people write down what they think should be on the list and get back to it later.
Michale offers a suggestion, which leads him to ponder scientific literacy,…
clock | March 2, 2008Anne-Marie reviews two books that appear to be useful in thinking about one's career in science: The Beginner's Guide to Winning a Nobel Prize, by Peter Doherty, and The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology, by Chandler, Wolfe, and Promislow. Read the review and, if you think this is something you need, buy the books.
And, if you have additional recommendations, let Anne-Marie know in her comments.
evolgen | March 1, 2008I'm easily annoyed. A lot of things piss me off. Here are the things that irked me today:
Fake St. Patrick's Day. A large drinking school schedules Spring Break the same week as St. Patty's Day, and they do it two years in a row. This pisses off the students because it costs them an official drinking day (they'll be drunk on spring break regardless if it's St. Patrick's day). So, the students schedule their celebration of St. Patrick's day for the weekend before Spring Break. There's a few hundred drunk douchebags walking around town in green shirts and stupid hats today. It's goddamn…
drorzel | March 1, 2008The Science Fiction class for which I agreed to guest lecture is an 8am class, which is earlier than I like to be up and about. Knowing this, I went to bed early on Thursday night. Of course, being a bookaholic of long standing, I needed something to read to put me to sleep. Genius that I am, I grabbed the ARC of Cory Doctorow's upcoming YA novel Little Brother...
So, I hadn't really had enough sleep when I got to campus for the class on Friday. Still, adrenaline can make up for a lot...
I was introduced as "Not only a physics professor, but also a world famous blogger," though I suggested…
drorzel | March 1, 2008As mentioned previously, I was invited to discuss physics and politics at one of the local fraternities earlier this week. Oddly, given the primacy of Greek organizations on campus, this is only the fourth time I've set foot inside a fraternity or sorority house in seven years. The previous occasions were times when I was doing housing inspections for the committee that handles those matters.
They've cleaned up the house since the other time I was there-- they used to be Φ Γ Δ, years ago, and then there was a brief interregnum when they were officially "Alpha Beta" (referred to as "oh, those…
jstemwedel | February 29, 2008I recently received an email, prompted by my series about having a family and an academic career, asking for some input:
I am a mere first year in a Ph.D. program and am a bit older than the other students. I am wholeheartedly committed to the program I am also considering the seemingly traitorous act of having a baby.
Do you think it's essential to wait until ABD status?
From the point of view of getting things done, it is certainly possible to take classes (and TA classes) while pregnant. A lot depends on your work-style. I'm the kind of person who's better off doing something…
drorzel | February 28, 2008Yesterday's cheery hypothetical came about because I've agreed to do a guest lecture in a Science Fiction class in the English department. I'm going to be talking about Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," whose connection to the hypothetical should be obvious to people who have read it, but is a spoiler for those who haven't.
My guest spot will be this Friday, and I sat in on a class last week (where they discussed a Zelazny story and one of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles) to get an idea of what the class is usually like. This will be a different experience for me. It's been fifteen years…
jstemwedel | February 27, 2008Regular readers of this blog know that I am hoping to be on a sabbatical leave during academic year 2008-2009. Indeed, some of you have asked, "Where are you going to go?"
The answer:
My brand new desk at home.
As it turns out, it has been years since I've had a proper desk of my own at home. The computer table that functioned as my desk for the last year of my chemistry studies pretty much became community property once the sprogs arrived. (You'd be amazed at how quickly babies become territorial about computers.) This means that much of my philosophy dissertation was hammered out on my…
tfk | February 27, 2008While Matt Selman's rules of book shelving are clearly insane, Ezra Klein's response is clearly not quite right either. The basic rule, from which all the others follow like a pack of hallucinating baboons, is:
It is unacceptable to display any book in a public space of your home if you have not read it. Therefore, to be placed on Matt Selman's living room bookshelves, a book must have been read cover to cover, every word, by Matt Selman. If you are in the home of Matt Selman and see a book on the living room shelves, you know FOR SURE it has been read by Matt Selman.
No, no, no. Some…
drorzel | February 27, 2008Scott McLemee writes about the shelving of books, spinning off Matt Selman's list of rules for shelving books
RULE #1: THE PRIME DIRECTIVE -- It is unacceptable to display any book in a public space of your home if you have not read it. Therefore, to be placed on Matt Selman's living room bookshelves, a book must have been read cover to cover, every word, by Matt Selman. If you are in the home of Matt Selman and see a book on the living room shelves, you know FOR SURE it has been read by Matt Selman.
(has anyone ever seen Selman and Mike Kozlowski in the same place?) and Ezra Klein's…
drorzel | February 26, 2008The local fraternities and sororities hold occasional dinners/ discussions with faculty, to demonstrate that they're engaged with the intellectual life of the college. One of my students invited me to dinner at the Change in Kinetic Energy fraternity tomorrow night, and I agreed to do a discussion of physics and politics.
That's a vague topic, because I didn't have anything really definite in mind for it, other than that it seems better suited to a dinner and discussion than any of my regular presentations, which tend to be PowerPoint lectures. That doesn't really seem appropriate, so I…
drorzel | February 26, 2008On the subject of silly things said about academia, Matt Yglesias does a quick pass over "assessment,", and in the process recommends Alan Kruger's research that claims the benefits of elite colleges are all from selection effects. He links a Newsweek article on the topic, which contains this paragraph:
Dale and Krueger then compared graduates who had been accepted and rejected by the same (or similar) colleges. The theory was that admissions officers were ranking personal qualities, from maturity to ambition. Students who fared similarly would possess similar strengths; then, Dale and…
evolgen | February 26, 2008Jonathan Eisen is the new Academic Editor in Chief at PLoS Biology, and he's kicking it off with this editorial. In his editorial, Jonathan describes how he became an Open Access publishing advocate. The header of his article features a short biography with an interesting item:
Jonathan A. Eisen is Academic Editor-in-Chief at PLoS Biology. He is also at the University of California Davis Genome Center, with joint appointments in the Section of Evolution and Ecology and the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, University of California Davis, Davis, California, United States of…
drorzel | February 26, 2008For some reason, the infamous "Don't Become a Scientist" rant by Jonathan Katz has bubbled up again, with Scott Aaronson giving his take. I commented on this a while back, and the intervening year and a half hasn't really improved my opinion of the piece.
The discussion in Scott's comments is better than the rant really deserves, and includes a link to another piece of academic catastrophilia, Phillip Greenspun's Women in Science, which I also remarked on back in the day. I didn't make any substantial comment about his time-line then, though, and that's what really jumped out at me:
The…
purepedantry | February 25, 2008Stanley Fish of the NYTimes Think Again blog has some interesting things to say about the appointment of Bruce Benson, oil magnate and Republican activist, to be president of the University of Colorado at Boulder. The appointment raised eyebrows and protests from the faculty and students. Partly the issue is that Benson has never sought a degree higher than a BA, though he has been active in higher education in an advisory capacity before. Partly this issue is that Benson is conservative, and anyone who has spent about 4 seconds in Boulder realizes it is hardly Republican country. (We all…
catdynamics | February 25, 2008Where are the faculty bloggers? asks RPM over at evolgen
Er, mostly hiding pseudonymously from rampaging department chairs and deans...
but Chad takes up the discussion, standing up for the physicists bloggers, and borrowing a couple of astronomers for the good cause
hey, thought I, this is interesting, maybe there is a link with the two cultures - the focused vs the dabblers in academia>?!
I know!
(I think)
Obviously it is us Dabblers who blog, since the Focused Faculty are totally monomanic, in the Lab learning more and more about less and less, as they say.
Clearly the Focused don't…
drorzel | February 25, 2008Over at evolgen, RPM is wondering about the disciplinary distribution of bloggers:
I have an intuition, backed up by absolutely no evidence, that my particular area of interest (evolutionary genetics) has more faculty blogging about stuff related to their research than other fields. This is most likely the result of my interest in those blogs, and, hence, my increased awareness of them compared to blogs of faculty in other research areas.
[... list of half-a-dozen blogs...]
That's not a lot of blogs, but it's also not a huge field. How does that compare with faculty who blog in your research…
tsmith | February 24, 2008...my grad students.
My spring semester course is on infectious causes of chronic disease, looking at the role various infections play in cancer, autoimmune disease, mental illness, and other chronic conditions. Since I've often discussed the importance of having scientists communicate with the public, I decided to assign each of them to write 2 blog posts for the course, discussing anything of relevance to the course. Their first round of assignments was due last week, and I'll be posting them beginning on Monday. Constructive comments on their posts are appreciated, but keep in mind…
evolgen | February 24, 2008I have an intuition, backed up by absolutely no evidence, that my particular area of interest (evolutionary genetics) has more faculty blogging about stuff related to their research than other fields. This is most likely the result of my interest in those blogs, and, hence, my increased awareness of them compared to blogs of faculty in other research areas. From a quick scan of my blogroll and the feeds I subscribe to, here's a list of research faculty who blog about evolutionary genetics:
TR Gregory
Rod Page
John Hawks
John Logsdon
Jonathan Eisen
Larry Moran
That's not a lot of blogs, but…
tsmith | February 23, 2008I received a very nice email from a high school student looking for a mentor for a research project on progeria:
Currently, I'm in a science research program at school where we choose a topic of interest and study it for a period of three years, as well as design an experiment and carry it out based on this topic. Eventually, students are able to present their work for competition purposes or just to share their knowledge in symposia or other forums, such as the Intel Science Competition, or the Siemens Competition.
I am studying Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome for my project and…