Academia
evolgen | October 16, 2007I want to highlight two excellent items related to scientific communication:
The first is a post by Tim Lamber on Deltoid in which he reproduces a comment by John Mashey. Mashey provides a very nice description of how scientists should deal with members of the media. Rather than merely berating bad science reporting (as some are wont to do), Mashey suggests some more pro-active ways for scientists to support good science news.
The second item is an Editorial in PLoS Biology entitled "When Is Open Access Not Open Access?". In the article, Catriona MacCallum draws the distinction between Open…
sb admin | October 15, 2007Commenters convinced me to think twice, and they're right.
Our system is screwed up. Never shed light on anything, because you're small and it could hurt you. If a festering wound exists somewhere, just try to get away. Don't try to point it out. Especially if it's not your problem any more.
Choose your battles, and let other places that are screwed up stay screwed up.
A lawyer on retainer. Jesus Christ. No, I'm not going to jail, but civil law practically limits the reality of free speech in this fucked up and litigious society.
tsmith | October 15, 2007Being a microbiologist can be a dangerous business. Some of us work out in the field, exposed to weather, animals, and pathogens of all different forms. Some do research in countries with unstable governments, collecting samples and tracking down infected individuals in the midst of strife, poverty, and warfare. Some remain in the lab, but share it with agents that can be handled only under high levels of containment, and may need special labs and permits just to do their research. We all realize our job contains some level of risk, and do what we can to minimize that.
However, as much…
drorzel | October 15, 2007In the spirit of the newly clarified regulations governing the Academic Competitiveness Grant and National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent (SMART) Grant Programs administered by the Department of Education, I am pleased to announce the Uncertain Principles Physics Scholarship Program. Under this program, I pledge to personally pay the full tuition for any student who is:
From a low-income family, or a historically disadvantaged group,
Enrolled as a full-time student at an accredited four-year college or university, and
Taking courses toward a degree in physics or related…
scientificactivist | October 13, 2007Recently I came across a Nature commentary article (subscription required) by Robert May, former president of the Royal Society. Published in June of this year, May's article commented on the state of UK science as the government transitioned from the leadership of Tony Blair to Gordon Brown.
As I read it I couldn't help but wonder whether Robert May had been reading my mind. A better explanation, though, is that May is actually in touch with the issues that UK scientists face on a daily basis and has summed them up in a comprehensive and thoughtful way. This article is an excellent read…
revere | October 11, 2007There are a lot of medical schools in the US (126 regular and 28 osteopathic schools), and you probably thought there must be a lot of schools of public health, too. It's true there are a lot more now than there used to be, but even with recent additions there are only 39 schools accredited by the Association for Schools of Public Health (ASPH), the official accrediting body (and in effect the trade association for the schools, although it wouldn't like to be referred to that way -- tough). So there are four times as many medical schools as Schools of Public Health. Says something.
The news…
clock | October 11, 2007Ghosts, drugs, and blogs:
By its hidden nature, it is obviously a challenge to determine the exact prevalence of "ghost management," defined by Sismondo as the phenomenon in which "pharmaceutical companies and their agents control or shape multiple steps in the research, analysis, writing, and publication of articles."
Of course they fight against Open Access Publishing - too much sunshine scares them and would make them scurry away in panic...
revere | October 8, 2007Once again it's the 2007 Blogging Scholarship contest. It's been just short of a year since we offered everyone reading the opportunity to Send a Blogger to College. Now you get another chance. Of course the blogger in question, the now well-known Shelley Batts, maestra of Retrospectacle and my SciBling here at ScienceBlogs, is long out of college and close to being done with doctoral studies in the neurosciences at the University of Michigan. Last year she very nearly took the prize (with magnificent help from readers of Effect Measure). She's a finalist once again and this year the prize is…
evolgen | October 8, 2007The finalists for the 2007 Blogging Scholarship have been announced. There's 20 of them, and, from a quick perusal of the list, it appears that four of them are science bloggers. Two of those four are familiar to evolgen: Shelley of Retrospectacle and Kambiz of Anthropology.net. The other two are new to me, but appear to have actual science content: The Big Room and The Biourbanist.
At this point, you're probably expecting me to tell you to go to the voting page and click a particular finalist. Well, I'm not going to do that. If you are a fan of science blogging, however, I suggest you vote…
tsmith | October 8, 2007That's the thrust of an interesting editorial in Nature Medicine: what would you do if you could publish only 20 papers throughout your career? And how would it affect research productivity, scientific publishing, tenure review, and a host of other issues? More after the jump...
The editorial suggests this model for publishing:
These are the basic rules: whenever you get your first academic job (that is, the first lab of your own), you get 20 tickets. Every time you publish a paper, you hand over one of them. Once you run out of tickets, your publishing days are over. As simple as that.…
omnibrain | October 8, 2007The Nobel Prize in Medicine has gone to Mario R. Capecchi, Oliver Smithies, and Sir Martin J. Evans for inventing a technique called Gene Targeting.
According to the NYTimes:
The three scientists were honored for a technique called gene targeting, which lets scientists inactivate or modify particular genes in mice. That in turn lets them study how those genes affect health and disease.
To use this technique, researchers introduce a genetic change into mouse embryonic stem cells. These cells are then injected into mouse embryos. The mice born from these embryos are bred with others, to produce…
scientificactivist | October 8, 2007The winners of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine were announced this morning. The prize went to Mario R. Capecchi (University of Utah), Martin J. Evans (Cardiff University), and Oliver Smithies (UNC), all for their work contributing to knockout (and knock-in) mice becoming one of the most powerful scientific tools available to biologists today. Or, in the less inspiring Nobel-speak, "for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells."
From the official press release:
This year's Nobel Laureates have made a…
drorzel | October 8, 2007There are a great many reasons to hate David Horowitz, but near the top of the list has to be the fact that his constant harping on "liberal bias" in academia has spawned a thousand studies of the politics of academics, complete with chin-stroking analysis peices about What It All Means.
The latest, from Neil Gross at Harvard, and Solon Simmons at George Mason University, is written up in Inside Higher Ed today
The 72-page study -- "The Social and Political Views of American Professors" -- was produced with the goal of moving analysis of the political views of faculty members out of the…
omnibrain | October 6, 2007Music education in the United States has typically been one of the first thing to be cut when it comes to balancing the budget. This is a horrible shame since music is one of those things (above any of the other arts) that has a wide ranging effect on peoples intellectual achievement. One of the holy grails in education and psychology is skill transference. Imagine being able to train one ability that positively affects the performance of many many other abilities. Sounds a bit ridiculous eh?! Well, music seem to be one of the only things that can have this effect. Psychologists have…
omnibrain | October 5, 2007It's that time of year again when the most exciting set of awards for us here at Omni Brain are announced. If you don't know what the Ig Nobels are you're missing out on a very important part of science! According to some article at MSNBC "The annual no-rules awards ceremony, where flying paper airplanes and interrupting honored speakers are commonplace, pokes fun at bizarre and improbable achievements in real-life scientific research."
This year some of my favorite prizes were:
NUTRITION: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings,…
drorzel | October 5, 2007Inside Higher Ed has a puzzling opinion piece about science and math education by W. Robert Connor of the Teagle Foundation. It's not his arguemtn that's puzzling, though-- that part is perfectly clear, hard to disagree with:
Public and private funders have spent billions of dollars -- sometimes wastefully -- on education initiatives like those in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines without rigorous assessment and evaluation. Not asking for documented results when so much money is on the line misses a golden opportunity to determine whether such programs are…
jstemwedel | October 4, 2007I'm sure my jaw shouldn't drop at this sort of glimpse at the thinking of dorm-dwelling undergraduates, and yet it does. Every single time.
From an article in the school paper about violations of the university's student conduct code:
Some students say one problem is students might not know the policies and consequences and that maybe why they break them.
"I don't know the consequences," [one freshman] said. "I know it's in the student handbook, but I don't think anyone reads that."
[Another freshman] agreed.
"I think it's in the student handbook," she said. "But that's like 50 pages long,…
jstemwedel | October 3, 2007I'm pretty sure the National Collegiate Athletic Association doesn't want college athletes -- or the athletics programs supporting them -- to cheat their way through college. However, this article at Inside Higher Ed raises the question of whether some kind of cheating isn't the best strategy to give the NCAA what it's asking for.
From the article:
[M]any agree that the climate has changed in college athletics in ways that may make such misbehavior more likely. And it has happened since the NCAA unveiled its latest set of academic policies that raised the stakes on colleges to show that…
drorzel | October 3, 2007Inside Higher Ed has an article about a HHMI initiative to encourage more students to pursue science careers:
Until now, calls for action to bolster Americans’ science aptitude and increase the number of graduates who move on to scientific research have focused on nurturing individual students, improving teacher education and collaborating with industry, among other approaches. The Hughes initiative, called the Science Education Alliance, is a more coordinated effort aimed at piquing the interest of students who might not otherwise consider science as a career, inculcating skills that can…
drorzel | October 2, 2007Via Inside Higher Ed, a brilliant new approach to the problem of high tuition costs, coutesy of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley (whose highly impartial Wikipedia entry is a hoot):
The runaway cost of a college education has been on the mayor's radar screen for some time. Last year, Daley suggested a fifth year of high school to address a crisis that he warned threatens to reduce the American birthrate.
On Friday, he suggested that colleges clean up their own act.
"They should cut half the courses. It would cut the cost down tremendously. What are the basic courses that you need in college? Cut…