Academia
drorzel | November 30, 2007This could easily be a Links Dump item, but it's so good that it deserves more prominent placement. Inside Higher Ed has a spoof Editor's Note from an imaginary US News & World Report ranking of churches:
In thanking those who took the time to write, I would remind all in the community of believers that our rankings are intended as a public service to aid spiritual consumers in making one of life's highest-impact personal choices. We claim no infallibility in our rankings. We strive to provide accurate, user-friendly data to allow seekers of quality worship to do their homework and grasp…
jstemwedel | November 28, 2007In the freshman introduction to engineering class, where I am teaching the ethics module, the students have electronic clickers with which to respond in real time to (multiple choice) questions posed to them in lecture. I took advantage of this handy technology to get their responses to a few questions on cheating. I'm presenting the questions here in poll form so you can play along at home:
(In the event that Quimble is down and the poll is thus inaccessible, you can view the questions in this follow-up post.)
What do you suppose the students said?
On why they don't cheat, the…
terrasig | November 28, 2007This question, posed in 1965 by a Gator football coach to University of Florida renal physiologist J. Robert Cade, MD, PhD, led to the development of Gatorade and the tremendously successful sports drink industry.
Yesterday, the revered Dr Cade went to that Gatorade cooler in the sky, at age 80.
What a remarkable renal physiology study back in the 1960s: Cade recognized that football players in "The Swamp," Florida's Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, were so dehydrated that they could not make urine.
But he and his colleagues took this one step further.
They collected sweat from football players to…
drorzel | November 28, 2007Over at Unqualified Offerings, "Thoreau" offers some musings about peer review. I saw this and said, "Aha! The perfect chance to dust off an old post, and free up some time..." Sadly, I already recycled the post in question, so I feel obliged to be less lazy and contribute some new content.
I generally agree with most of what he says, but I would raise one quibble about his list of criteria:
What scientists are looking for when we evaluate a paper is whether the paper clearly addresses 3 points:
1) What is the question or issue being studied in this work?
2) What are the methods being used,…
evolgen | November 28, 2007John Hawks linked to a wiki with information on cultural anthropology job searches. If you poke around the website, you'll find a list of such wikis for many different academic disciplines. Of interest to evolgen are the Biology Jobs Wiki and the Ecology/Evolution Jobs Wiki. If you're currently on the job market, consider contributing information to these wikis.
Do you know of any other academic job wikis for biologists? If you do, link to them in the comments.
drorzel | November 21, 2007On a happier science-related note, the AIP's Physics News Update highlights a very nice article in The American Journal of Physics about the wide-ranging scientific investigations of Luis Alvarez:
Scientist as detective: Luis Alvarez and the pyramid burial chambers, the JFK assassination, and the end of the dinosaurs
Luis Alvarez (1911-1988) was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century. His investigations of three mysteries, all of them outside his normal areas of research, show what remarkable things a far-ranging imagination working with an…
evolgen | November 21, 2007I hate vanity posts -- who the fuck outside my mom cares how I'm doing, and she don't read this -- but I feel somewhat obliged to explain the lack of activity on this unread blog. This is especially important in case my Seed overlords stop by and notice a stark absence of any recent posts and a deficiency in posting regularity over the past couple of weeks. Aside from the few regular visitors, I doubt anyone has noticed the near death of evolgen.
That said, here's what I've been up to instead of blogging. I'm in the middle of that clusterfuck known as the last year of grad school. Those of…
jstemwedel | November 20, 2007A comment on ScienceWoman's post (concerning, among other things, how her students tend to call her Mrs. ScienceWoman and her male colleagues Dr. MaleColleague), got me thinking about the norms around addressing faculty that prevailed at my undergraduate institution and whether, if they still prevail, they're worth abolishing.
The commenter wrote:
No one I know (just graduated college) would ever dare address a professor by Mr. or Mrs.... As far as I'm concerned, those titles are related to marital status--which has nothing to do with education or as a sign of respect... Addressing a female…
jstemwedel | November 20, 2007Likely, the throbbing mass of humanity at my university knows at least a little more than it did before last week, owing to an article in the student newspaper about the institutional animal care and use committee. (It was a front-page article, so the chances that it attracted eyeballs was reasonably good.)
A few things that jumped out at me:
The very existence of an IACUC is treated as news.
It seems to be a big surprise that university researchers (and physiology professors) don't just order mice like they do whiteboard markers -- maybe because most of the students (and, perhaps, a…
drorzel | November 20, 2007I am writing this letter in support of J. Randomstudent's application to your graduate or professional program. I have known J. since the fall of 20__, when he was a student in my introductory physics class.
From the very first day of that course, J. was a constant presence on my grade roster. I assume he came to class as well, as I have quiz and homework grades for him, though I do not have any specific recollection of him participating in class.
I have had many "B" students in my years as a professor, but I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that J. Randomstudent was the most…
catdynamics | November 19, 2007Snowy morning
fingers numb
large hot coffee
on the run
Loose lid pops
liquid flows
keyboard fizzles
so it goes
Fortunately my many "to do" lists soaked up the main pool of coffee, which seems to have saved the cpu and disk.
There are advantages to a messy desk.
I think I will use this as a reason to reinvent myself, since I no longer know what "to do".
And I'm locked out of my desktop until I get a new keyboard.
Bonus.
Wouldn't ya know it.
Campus computer store is closed for a week for stock taking.
Bastards.
And for some ineffable reason Apple has not put an Apple Store in town...
Anyone…
drorzel | November 16, 2007Inside Higher Ed has an article on yet another study of why there aren't more conservatives in academia:
Colleges have been increasingly competing to offer "family friendly" policies -- in the hopes of attracting the best academic talent from a pool of Ph.D.'s that includes both more women than ever before as well as many men who take parenting responsibilities seriously. A new study suggests that such policies may be important for another group that believes its needs aren't fully addressed in academe: conservatives.
The study -- "Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don't Get Doctorates" --…
tsmith | November 16, 2007Now that a proposed increase of funding to NIH has again been shot down, scientists have to once again face the reality of intense competition for very scarce funds.
However, the process of awarding research grants is, well, a bit crazy. Scientists work for months on a grant, drafting, revising, trying to winnow it down to fit the page limitations, finding collaborators and assembling potential research teams, obsessing about minutiae in the methods section. We then cross our fingers and send them off for review (which can take many months), and hope that they'll be well-received. When…
revere | November 15, 2007SciBling Bora (aka coturnix) at Blog Around the Clock has scored a major coup for Open Access publishing today. Fittingly the subject matter is a dinosaur, an apt symbol for the new nail in the coffin of traditional scientific publishing that the paper represents. Bora is the Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science), one of the leading Open Access science publishers. PLoS ONE is unusual even among OA publications in that it concentrates on rapid publication after a baseline technical review by Editorial Board members. It covers all areas of science and medicine and…
clock | November 14, 2007If scientific papers can be publicly reviewed either pre-publication or post-publication, and if one day soon the public can have a voice on the patents, then why not also grant proposals? Now, Michael does not go that far - he only proposes a more direct communication between the researcher and the reviewer - but, why not? Some people write good proposals. Others can sell them better in a different way: by talking about them. I would certainly like to be able to try to sell my grant proposal by shooting a video and posting it on a site like Scivee.com, where both the reviewers and the…
revere | November 14, 2007The academic world has lots of dark nooks and crannies not usually seen by the general public. One of them is the order in which authors are listed on a publication. If you have six people from two or three laboratories collaborating on an important paper, who will be the "senior author." And what does senior author mean? And how do you find the senior author on the list of names attached to the paper? It turns out that different disciplines have different conventions:
Authorship practice varies by field, making interdisciplinary collaborations and the subsequent author lists more complicated…
clock | November 11, 2007OK, back home and rested - it's time for a pictorial report, in two parts. This one is social, the other part will be about the conference itself. All of it under the fold...
Day 1
On Thursday morning I got up early, took the kids to school, loaded my luggage and got started for the airport. As my car was on empty I had to stop at the nearest gas station to fill up and, who stops behind me and start pumping gas? John Edwards. In jeans. Elizabeth was in the car. He recognized me and said Hello. I said Hello. A regular guy, in a regular car, wearing regular clothes, doing something we…
retrospectacle | November 9, 2007The University of Michigan just started a new blog on the topic of how to handle the academic interview. What kinds of questions do you fear, and how should they be handled? How do you prepare for the interview?
In general the four primary topical areas of any interview, especially early in the process, are your dissertation work, future research goals, your teaching, and your interest in the specific institution and/or department. Obviously the role and importance of each of these will vary by each situation, but in general most interviews will spend considerable time on each of these…
terrasig | November 8, 2007About 10 days ago, I wrote a post on my thoughts regarding gender issues in science and medicine. In the post, I made note of the recent recruitment of Nancy Andrews, MD, PhD, from Harvard to become the new medical school dean at Duke University. In my post, I noted:
What would normally be a modestly newsworthy story for a dean who happened to be a man is instead noted in the press release and on the webpage as:
Andrews, 48, is the first woman to be appointed dean of Duke's School of Medicine and becomes the only woman to lead one of the nation's top 10 medical schools.
When I read that, I…
evolgen | November 8, 2007Chad asked a fun question last week, and I just got around to finding it yesterday:
What items should be on the list for a scavenger hunt through an academic physics department?
Let's now ask: what items should be on a list for a scavenger hunt through a biology department? Taking some hints from Chad and his commenters, here are my ideas to prime the pump:
A reagent bottle with a label dating it to the 1980s
An out of use fume hood above "the line"
A paper copy of a PLoS Journal (they exist)
A non-top-heated thermal cycler
A Project Steve Steve
A journal article used to prop up something
A…