Academia
catdynamics | October 26, 2007The flap over Rowling's revelation about the Dumbledore backstory has really revitalised literary criticism
and, in particular, deconstruction.
I mean, after all, what does the author bring to the discussion?
It is not like Rowling has some special role of privileged position in our interpretation of the novel, her thoughts on the text are just one of the many equal analytic modes of interpretation, and we may reject that her view is dominant or privileged.
No! If white middle aged male,s uncomfortable with their sexuality or youthful indiscretions, want to interpret the text to emphasise…
catdynamics | October 25, 2007Schools around here get a lot of parent volunteers and rely heavily on them.
Some of the kids have an interesting attitude about this.
I was talking to a friend recently. As with many of the volunteers she has no training in education and no experience with actual teaching of groups. She is a professional with two kids of her own.
She mentioned the "two trouble boys" in the class she was helping with, and said she had tried to work with one of them.
After trying to cajole him and then order him to do something, he turned to her and told her bluntly: "I'm not doing it, and you can't make me".…
evolgen | October 24, 2007Peer-to-Peer, one of Nature's many blogs, has a post on pseudoscience on preprint servers. The post is in response to a post from another blog (creationists using nature precedings to pre-publish junk science) that pointed out a potentially pseudoscientific article on Nature's preprint server, Nature Precedings (The saltational model for the dawn of H. sapiens, chin, adolescence phase, complex language and modern behavior). The article in question came off as creationist tripe to selena, who blogged about it at Tending the Garden.
This brings up a couple of questions. Taking a narrow focus,…
drorzel | October 24, 2007Mark Kleiman has rediscovered a semi-clever approach to the problems of smart kids:
So here's the puzzle: is there any justification for not treating high-IQ kids as having "special needs" and therefore entitled to individualized instruction? Yes, yes, I know that in the South "gifted" programs have been used as a technique of within-school resegregation. But that doesn't change the real needs of very bright kids.
I don't know how the special-ed laws are written. Is there a potential lawsuit here?
I say "rediscovered," because I've heard this proposed and rejected a dozen times in education…
drorzel | October 24, 2007One of the odd things about blogdom, and the commentariat in general, is the way that people will all seem to latch on to some particular idea at about the same time, despite the lack of any obvious connection between them. I keep having days when I scan through my RSS feeds, and find the same topics coming up again and again.
This week's emergent theme seems to be "Kids These Days." It started with this deeply silly complaint about the "whiteness" of indie music by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker, which strikes me as a classic example of a writer straining to find deep cultural meaning…
drorzel | October 23, 2007I was standing in the back of the Taiko Ensemble concert tonight, when two students I didn't know came in, carrying large, elaborate Nerf guns. They had a certain... hunted look about them.
"Hey," I said, "Who's winning?"
"Oh, man," said one, "The zombies are kicking our asses. They're multiplying really fast."
Yes, it's Humans vs. Zombies week on campus. Never a dull moment in academia...
clock | October 23, 2007A quick update on the Milwaukee events....
The first time I went to Mocha's (much better wifi than the hotel and it is free) I saw a familiar face walk in - from Scifoo! World is small. She promised to come to the Science Blogging Conference (I am leaving the name out so not to play Gotcha later if she manages not to come in January). Jean-Claude, Janet, Christina Pikas and I went to dinner at Water Street Brewery last night - all four of us will meet again in January at the Science Blogging Conference. Janet, Jean-Claude and I had lunch at 105-year old German Mader's Restaurant. Back at…
clock | October 23, 2007Back at delightful Mocha's cafe on the corner...
We just finished our session at the ASIS&T conference: Opening Science to All: Implications of Blogs and Wikis for Social and Scholarly Scientific Communication, organized by K.T. Vaughan, moderated by Phillip Edwards. Janet Stemwedel, Jean-Claude Bradley and I were the panelists. There were about 50-60 people in the audience who asked some excellent questions afterwards.
I started off with defining science blogs and various uses they can be put to, in particular how they interact with other ways of scientific communication such as Open…
drorzel | October 22, 2007A little while back, Popular Mechanics published a list of 25 Skills Every Man Should Know. Seven of the 25 are car-related, another four have to do with construction, and an additional six are outdoorsy things. Of course, they also threw in "extend your wireless network," for the nerds out there, but it does tend toward the parodically ManlyMan side of things.
In response, Cut to the Chase posted a list of 20 "practical skills every self-sufficient adult should have", which probably errs in the other direction, with entries that are far too humorlessly sensible. (Though I notice that "Know…
revere | October 21, 2007The biggest breakthrough in the treatment of tuberculosis was discovery of the antibiotic, streptomycin. It was isolated on October 19, 1943 by a graduate student, Albert Schatz, working in the laboratory of Selman Waksman. Waksman got the Nobel Prize for this in 1952. Schatz got the shaft. He sued Waksman and Rutgers, to whom he had signed over his discovery on the understanding this would be the best way to make it widely available. He settled out of court. In 1990 Schatz was given official credit. Not the Nobel Prize, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, too.
Schatz worked…
drorzel | October 19, 2007I'm not going to explain exactly what prompted this, but I want to remind my readers of one of the absolute essential rules of life in academia:
The most important person in any academic department is the secretary.
Naive outsiders often think that the department chair is the most important person, or possibly the most senior faculty member, or maybe the professor with the most funding. That's wrong, though. If you want to be able to get things done in academia, the person you need on your side is the department secretary.
I didn't really appreciate this until graduate school...
I bombed my…
drorzel | October 19, 2007An anonymous donor cashes in a $30 donation to ask:
Homework solutions from intro physics through grad school physics are available online, and while working through Jackson and Goldstein problems can be miserable without some guidance, the temptation is there to plagiarize. When you teach, do you use book-problems or write your own? Do you trust that those who are really interested in the subject will do the right thing and slog through homework like thousands before them?
An excellent question.
Homework is really a vexing issue. There's no way to really learn physics without doing…
clock | October 18, 2007On the Oxford University Press Blog, two useful articles:
Grant Writing: Things That You Can Do To Learn Scholarship
Behavioral Science Grants: Surefire Tips and Pointers
neurophilosophy | October 18, 2007I've just received this email from Stephanie Porter, one of the authors of the Oxford University Press blog:
I wanted to share with you a compelling series of posts from our new Complete Writing Guide to NIH Behavioral Studies Grants. Both posts are excerpts from the book that extend pointers on how to write a successful grant submission. The book is a hefty but invaluable resource, and these tips are just the thing to get you refocused on your grant writing! I am hoping you will encourage your readers to check out the series.
Grant Writing: Things That You Can Do To Learn Scholarship…
catdynamics | October 17, 2007Sometimes a blog provides time critical sanity preserving information.
Unqualified Offerings meets the dark side of academic life.
The Uncertain Committee and its Vague Quantitative Assignments.
Fortunately Chad has figured this out, analyzed the context, and generously provides a survival mechanism.
I had some vague notion of this general approach, at least in theory, but Chad elegantly provides detailed, field tested, quite specific instructions for tackling this sub-category of the General Committee Problem.
I may need this in the near future.
Makes me long for the legendary ad hoc…
drorzel | October 17, 2007Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau has encountered the dark side of academic life:
I was assigned to the curriculum committee, so I went to the meeting today. (I don't go to committee meetings for my health.) I learned that one of the tasks before us was demonstrating that we have assessments to show that introductory physics courses satisfy the University's "quantitative science" requirement.
Now, I know what you're thinking: HOW THE HELL COULD PHYSICS NOT BE A QUANTITATIVE SCIENCE? Well, I got past that. I had told myself that I would just accept the bullshit and do whatever needs to be…
clock | October 17, 2007Nobel Prizes are not the only awards given in Stockholm these day. Karolinska Institute also gives an annual Lennart Nilsson Award for photography. This year's prize has just been announced and I am happy to report that the recepient is a friend of mine (and Scifoo camper), Felice Frankel for her amazing science photography. From the Press Release:
Felice Frankel, a scientific imagist and researcher at Harvard University's Initiative in Innovative Computing, has been named the recipient of the 2007 Lennart Nilsson Award. Frankel was sited for creating images that are exquisite works of art…
tsmith | October 17, 2007The DonorsChoose drive here at ScienceBlogs is just over halfway finished. My challenge is almost 50% funded, with $952 raised so far as I write this and donations from 10 of you out there (and thank you very much for that). There's still quite a ways to go, however, and many incentives to get there. For one, DonorsChoose will kick in additional money for anyone who meets their challenge goal, so that's great for the kids; and second, Seed is offering a number of prizes for donors (and especially for donors to my challenge, copies of "Vaccine" by Arthur Allen). If you've donated already…
clock | October 16, 2007Today, Harvard has launched a new website - HarvardScience - showcasing the depth and breadth of science, medicine, and engineering at all of Harvard's schools and affiliated hospitals:
The site provides a comprehensive resource for anyone interested in science in general, and particularly what's happening at Harvard in the sciences and engineering.