Academia
drorzel | December 12, 2007EurekAlert had a press release yesterday regarding a new study on the training of middle-school math teachers. It's not pretty:
Middle school math teachers in the United States are not as well prepared to teach this subject compared to teachers in five other countries, something that could negatively affect the U.S. as it continues to compete on an international scale.
[...]MT21 studied how well a sample of universities and teacher-training institutions prepare middle school math teachers in the U.S., South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Bulgaria and Mexico. Specifically, 2,627 future teachers were…
drorzel | December 12, 2007One of the alternately entertaining and depressing things about the culture wars in the US is the existence of a sort of parallel academic universe, in the form of vanity universities like Oral Roberts University, Bob Jones University, and Jerry Fallwell's Liberty University. These provide both a thin veneer of credibility for pseudo-academic nonsense and a launching point for hilarious academic misconduct.
There's really nothing comparable on the militant atheist side. But here's your chance, Pharynguloids: Myers University is for sale:
Don't write the obituary for Myers University yet. The…
drorzel | December 11, 2007I have a good deal more synmpathy for the plight of religious scientists than most of my fellow ScienceBlogs bloggers. For example, I'm willing to believe that people can both have sincere religious faith and be practicing scientists, without assuming that they're either brainwashed or evil.
I really find myself feeling sorry for Richard Colling, then, who Inside Higher Ed reports has been barred from teaching introductory biology because of his religious beliefs. "Boy," you might be thinking, "I bet the Discovery Institute and the Christian Law Association must be all over that..."
Not so…
evolgen | December 9, 2007The Scientist blog reports that a representative of the National Science Foundation (NSF) was at the annual meeting of the America Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). The NSF representative pointed out a couple of things things:
If your proposal describes research designed to find a cure for some disease, the NSF will not fund it. Well, duh! The NSF is about funding basic research. If you want to cure diseases, go ask the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for money. Research about human diseases and human health are not fundable by the NSF.
If your lab is well funded, don't expect the NSF…
scientificactivist | December 9, 2007Almost a year after Robert Gates left his post as President of Texas A&M University to become Secretary of Defense, the A&M Board of Regents has announced a successor: Elsa Murano, who since 2005 has served as Vice Chancellor of Agriculture for the Texas A&M System and Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The Board of Regents announced on Friday that Murano was the sole finalist for the position, and although Texas state law stipulates that 21 days must pass before the offer becomes official, she is effectively the new President of Texas A&M University.…
neurotopia | December 6, 2007Intelligent Design is a career-killer. There's just no two ways about it. And not because of how peers treat the ID supporter; they throw their own productivity under the bus, to use Casey Luskin's overworked cliche. We saw the same thing with Behe and Dembski. Behe has published ONE peer-reviewed paper in the last decade-ish. And Dembski... well, does anybody even know where he works these days?
All hyperbole aside, let's look at Gonzalez's publication track record while we keep in mind that tenure committees consider work that comes in after one joins the university to be of prime…
drorzel | December 6, 2007Kevin Drum looks at the latest story about American students lagging the world in science test scores, and notes that this has been going on at least since he was in school. This leads him to wonder whether it's really as bad as all that:
I still wonder about this. If American kids are getting mediocre educations, and if they've been getting these mediocre educations for several decades now, shouldn't this have long since shown up in the business world, the tech world, and the financial world? And yet, it hasn't. So what's the deal? Makes me wonder if maybe American kids don't actually suck…
neurotopia | December 5, 2007Phil over at Bad Astronomy has it a bit backwards, but hey it's not his fault. He didn't have to sit through that nightmare of a press conference.
I still stick by my own conclusion too, that by trying to say that Gonzalez's religious freedom has been curtailed, they are admitting ID is religion and not science, which they vehemently denied with the Dover case. I think if this comes to court, that'll be a fun issue to grill them about.
From the press conference, the DI is clearly trying to distance religion from ID. The subject never really came up until a reporter asked about it. Even a…
jstemwedel | December 5, 2007If you're "writing" a philosophy paper and you're going to plagiarize, why would you plagiarize a sub-optimal source like Wikipedia? Why wouldn't you at least rip off a top-notch source like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?
It seems to me there was a time when cheaters took more pride in their craft.
Disclaimer: Regardless of the quality of your source material, plagiarism is wrong. Don't plagiarize!
drorzel | December 5, 2007The building where my office is is one of those 60's era brick buildings with lots of basically identical little offices arranged along indistinguishable hallways. Tenured professors are known to get lost in there trying to find specific offices. To make it a little easier, some of us decorate our doors:
The key identifying the numbered items is below the fold, but as this is a fairly general phenomenon in academia, I thought I'd try making this a Bonus Photo Edition Dorky Poll:
What's on your office door?
(If you don't have your own office, then what's decorating your workspace? If you're…
neurotopia | December 4, 2007Yesterday the Discovery Institute held a press conference at the capitol building in Des Moines, to announce Guillermo Gonzalez's plans to sue Iowa State University over their decision to deny him tenure. Supposedly the lawsuit will be filed pending the rejection of an appeal to the Board of Regents, which is virtually guaranteed simply for the fact that the Regents typically uphold tenure decisions. Joining Casey Luskin, Rob Crowther, Gonzalez's attorneys, and a few other DI folk was state Senator David Hartsuch (R-District 41).
The core of the DI's assertion is that there were "secret…
drorzel | December 4, 2007Physics World has an interview with Alastair Reynolds, who was trained as an astrophysicist but is now a full-time SF author:
How does your physics training help with your writing?
Less than people imagine. I think the most important attribute for a science-fiction writer is to be fascinated by science -- in all its manifestations. It's not necessary to be able to understand all the details, but just to be inspired and stimulated. Most of the ideas that have fed into my writing have come from reading popular articles on subjects far away from my own very limited specialization, such as…
drorzel | December 4, 2007While I'm ranting about Inside Higher Ed articles that pissed me off, here's another. Rob Weir walked uphill through the snow to his first academic job, and thinks the academy shouldn't be hiring the spoiled kids we have these days:
[J]ust about one year ago the popular media sounded alarmist notes about how "gray" the academy had become, especially at top research institutions and elite colleges. Predictable anecdotes were bandied about, sprinkled with a few carefully culled statistics -- apparently we should be alarmed that 2.1 percent of tenured profs are over 70 -- and the call for…
drorzel | December 4, 2007Over at Inside Higher Ed, they have a piece looking at the state of college football as we enter bowl season. This is dominated by two large tables of numbers, one good, and one bad.
The first table is the good one, as it explains why the college football "championship" is so messed up. It lists the 32 bowl games that will be played over the next month, and the per-team payout for each. The five major BCS bowls pay each team $17 million, which neatly explains why the college football elite are unwilling to put in a playoff-- in any real championship system, they might end up having to share…
jstemwedel | December 3, 2007A friend of mine in a philosophy department at an Ivy League school asked for my advice in helping students on the market for academic jobs prepare for their interviews:
One of the things our students asked us about was preparing for interviews at schools quite different than this one (e.g., state schools, liberal arts schools, satellite campus, etc.). In particular, they want to know what kinds of questions to be prepared for. The first question one student was asked last year, for example, was "Can you tell us what you think about the ideal teacher/student relationship?" This is not what…
evolgen | December 2, 2007
BioMed Central advertises itself as "The Open Access Publisher" (see their logo floating next to this text). They publish a lot of journals, but I think the Public Library of Science (PLoS) has the lead when it comes to being THE open access publisher. That's because everything published by PLoS is Open Access -- it's free to read, distribute, and reproduce, provided there is proper attribution. BioMed Central, not so much.
That's right, BioMed Central, The Open Access Publisher, publishes paid-access articles. In fact, it publishes entire journals that are not open access. That includes…
jstemwedel | December 1, 2007In an earlier post, I shared the responses freshman engineering students had made (via electronic clickers) to a few questions I asked them during an ethics lecture I was giving them.
My commenters are pretty sure I left out options in the multiple choice that should have been included.
In this post, I consider some of those other options, and I try to explain my thinking in formulating the questions and the possible responses the way I did.
(Also, I'll include the questions themselves, since the Quimble polls I used to present them in the original post seem not to be working at the moment.)…
jstemwedel | December 1, 2007
Near the beginning of November, I announced my intention to jump on board with International acaDemic Writing Month. I put up a list of writing projects on which I was going to try to make some serious headway.
And my commenters asked, essentially, whether I was nuts.
My commenters are very, very smart. They hardly ever lead me astray, and this matter is no exception.
First, let me note that I did, in fact, accomplish some academic writing that I might not have without pledging that I'd be making some progress. Here's my original list of writing projects with what I actually did noted in…
catdynamics | November 30, 2007bring me some paperwork!
Lest I become in danger of committing science.
drorzel | November 30, 2007Via Kate, a story from a legal blog about a decisions in the case of a messy professor:
"Clean your room or get out!" Words from a frustrated parent to a messy teenager? Not quite. The mess-maker in this case was a chemistry professor at the University of Texas, who ignored repeated warnings to clean up his dangerously cluttered lab space. When University officials decided to clean it themselves, the professor caused such a disturbance that campus police had to lead him away in handcuffs. The professor was eventually fired, which prompted a lawsuit claiming that the University retaliated…