Academics
pharyngula | October 12, 2016My university is hiring for a full-time, tenure-track biology position. Take a look at our job ad:
Duties/Responsibilities: Teaching undergraduate biology courses including cell biology, genetics, electives in the applicant’s areas of expertise, and other courses that support the biology program; advising undergraduates; conducting research that could involve undergraduates; and sharing in the governance and advancement of the biology program, the division, and the campus.
We're looking for a cell biologist who can also teach genetics…hey, hang on there. Those are the courses I teach! Are…
pharyngula | January 14, 2016Well, cool. You can download Judy Wilyman's anti-vaccination thesis from the University of Wollongong and read it yourself. So click, click, wait a second, and…
YAAAARGH! My eyes! I thought the social sciences side of the academic world would possibly have higher standards for writing than the science side, but no…it's awful. This should have been shredded, and Wilyman told to go back and start all over.
I got a few pages in and couldn't take it anymore. Helen Harris managed to read the abstract, and ripped it apart line by line. Orac read some more bits; would you believe she's criticizing…
pharyngula | February 19, 2015I did! It was an origami microscope, with a single simple lens added. Here's what it looks like:
It's called a Foldscope, and I got it as part of a beta test program. It's a bit like the original Leeuwenhoek microscope, which you held up to your eye to see a magnified image.
The differences are that Leeuwenhoek used a drop of water to form a spherical lens; this comes equipped with a pre-printed lens. Leeuwenhoek used brass and little thumbscrews to move the specimen around; Foldscope comes on a sheet of thick paper, and you punch it out and fold it, and then move a slide around under the…
pharyngula | February 7, 2015A study of students in Israel by Victor Lavy and Edith Sand has discovered a surprising result…or maybe not so surprising to you, but I was rather shocked. Math teachers score girls' performance lower when they know their identities.
In math, the girls outscored the boys in the exam graded anonymously, but the boys outscored the girls when graded by teachers who knew their names. The effect was not the same for tests on other subjects, like English and Hebrew. The researchers concluded that in math and science, the teachers overestimated the boys’ abilities and underestimated the girls’, and…
pharyngula | January 29, 2015We're hiring! If you have skill in teaching, and want to hone those skills at a school with a reputation for excellence in teaching, apply!
Full-Time One-Year Position in Biology
University of Minnesota, Morris
The University of Minnesota, Morris seeks an individual committed to excellence in undergraduate education, to fill a full-time, one-year, possibly renewable, position in biology beginning August 17, 2015. Responsibilities include: teaching undergraduate biology courses including a 2000-level survey of organismal biology for majors (with labs), an introductory-level survey of biology…
pharyngula | November 29, 2014Chelsea Polis and Kathryn Curtis wrote a paper that asked whether hormonal contraceptives affected your likelihood of being infected with HIV, Use of hormonal contraceptives and HIV acquisition in women: a systematic review of the epidemiological evidence. Here's the abstract:
Whether or not the use of hormonal contraception affects risk of HIV acquisition is an important question for public health. We did a systematic review, searching PubMed and Embase, aiming to explore the possibility of an association between various forms of hormonal contraception and risk of HIV acquisition. We…
pharyngula | November 19, 2014But the University of Hawaii at Mānoa looks to be more broken than others. Christie Wilcox writes about the budget cuts there: the place is being gouged to the bone -- the College of Natural Sciences has a cohort of graduate students to whom they are failing to live up to their responsibilities (the university brought them in, these students made a commitment to UH Mānoa, you don't get to suddenly decide midway through their training to abandon your obligations.)
For the spring semester, 81 students applied for TAships within the department of Biology. Only 35 of those have advisors within…
pharyngula | November 1, 2014The New York Times has declared that Academic Science Isn’t Sexist. What a relief! The authors are reporting the results of a broad study of many different parameters of the career pipeline, and are happy to report that there are no problems in academia. None at all, no sir.
Our analysis reveals that the experiences of young and midcareer women in math-intensive fields are, for the most part, similar to those of their male counterparts: They are more likely to receive hiring offers, are paid roughly the same (in 14 of 16 comparisons across the eight fields), are generally tenured and promoted…
pharyngula | August 29, 2014The context of this graph isn't entirely clear, but it's from Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra of UC Davis, and it's from a poll of 800 first year students, so I presume it's the results of a survey of their incoming class?
Maybe one of the things we need to do as part of popularizing science to the general public is to emphasize the diversity of life, and talk more about the cool things plants and bacteria and fungi and so forth do. I know I started out as a zoologist, am still mostly focused on animal development, but over the years I've become increasingly aware that there are amazing contrasts to be…
pharyngula | August 21, 2014Kim Goodsell was not a scientist, but she wanted to understand the baffling constellation of disease symptoms that were affecting her. The doctors delivered partial diagnoses, that accounted for some of her problems, but not all. So she plunged into the scientific literature herself. The point of the linked article is that there is a wealth of genetic information out there, and that we might someday get to the point of tapping into the contributions of citizen scientists. But I thought this was the most interesting part:
She started by diving into PubMed—an online search engine for…
pharyngula | August 2, 2014Take a look at the kind of profit you can make from various businesses. This is pretty good money.
We all know Apple's business model is to build cool gadgets with high end stuff inside that it then sells at a high markup for premium design and ease of use -- they're at least creating something novel. But what makes Wiley and Elsevier so profitable?
That's the genius of it all. Their customers create everything, they charge the customers for the privilege of selling it to the publisher, and then they sell it back to their customers. Imagine if Apple did that: all of you homebrew computer…
pharyngula | July 8, 2014We're always talking about this curious phenomenon, that we see lots of women at the undergraduate and graduate level in biology, but large numbers of them leave science rather than rising through the ranks. Why is that? It seems that one answer is that elite male faculty in the life sciences employ fewer women, that is, the more prestigious, well-known labs headed by male faculty with great academic reputations tend not to hire women for the next level of training.
Women make up over one-half of all doctoral recipients in biology- related fields but are vastly underrepresented at the faculty…
pharyngula | March 19, 2014Here's another twist on the problematic trend to hire more temporary/part-time/adjunct faculty at universities. It's a disgraceful abuse of skilled academics and good teachers — would you believe that some schools hire adjuncts to teach four courses a semester (a brutal load, let me tell you) and pay them $16,000 per year? Who would be insane enough to accumulate all that college debt, then invest 4+ years in an advanced study program to get a Ph.D., for a poverty-level income? But that's where we stand.
Here's the other ugly side of the problem. The University of Idaho needed someone to…
pharyngula | November 7, 2013Last month, I wrote about the terrible botch journalists had made of an interesting paper in which tweaking regulatory sequences called enhancers transgenically caused subtle shifts in the facial morphology of mice. The problem in the reporting was that the journalists insisted on calling this a discovery of a function for junk DNA — the paper itself said no such thing, but somehow that became the dominant message of the popular press coverage. Strange. How did that happen?
So Dan Graur wrote to the corresponding author to find out how the junk crept in. He found out. It's because the author…
pharyngula | September 20, 2013I've mentioned the Earthviewer app from HHMI before: think of it as a bit like Google Earth, only you can dial it back to any period in the planet's history. There have been a couple of developments: it's also available for Android, and it's added some new features, including tracking for major fossils. So now you can see the long strange journey of Tiktaalik's bones on the screen.
They're also making available a lovely big poster of earth's history. This year, we here at UMM are putting together a teacher training program to be implemented in the summer of 2015, and it's going to be a lot of…
pharyngula | September 20, 2013The story of Margaret Mary Vojtko brought out quite a few adjuncts with their own tales of exploitation by universities. It really is shameful how the current system often takes people who love learning and want to teach and treats them like crap, when they should be regarding them as the heirs to the university tradition.
There were also a few clueless twits babbling in dumb incomprehension: why don't you just get a real job? Meaning, of course, some kind of work, any kind of work, that pays you more money. I come from a blue collar, union family, and I know I baffled my father a bit, too;…
pharyngula | April 29, 2013After our disastrous chick lab — it turns out that getting fertilized chicken eggs shipped to remote Morris, Minnesota during a blizzard is a formula for generating dead embryos — the final developmental biology lab for the semester is an easy one. I lectured the students on structuralism and how there are more to cells then genes (there's also cytoplasm and membranes and environment) earlier today. This afternnon I've given them recipes for soap bubble solution and told them to play. They're supposedly making little model multicellular organisms by chaining soap bubbles together, and…
pharyngula | April 29, 2013Today was the last day I lecture at my developmental biology students. We have one more lab and one final class hour which will be all about assessment, but this was my last chance to pontificate at them…so I told them about all the things I didn't teach them, and gave them a reading list for the summer. (I know, there's no way they're going to take these to the beach, but maybe when they move on in their careers they'll remember that little reference in their notes and look it up.)
So here are the books I told them to go read.
We've been all up in the evo-devo house this semester, so I urged…
pharyngula | April 26, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
I've been terrible about updating everyone about my class the last few weeks — we're coming up on the end of the semester, so I've been going a little bit mad. We've been focusing on vertebrate development lately, and right now we've got a few dozen fertilized chicken eggs…
pharyngula | April 17, 2013A few weeks ago I gave a talk in Seattle in which I pointed out that science is not sufficient to define moral behavior. A substantial part of that talk was a catalog of atrocities, such as the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. I said that in purely scientific terms, that was a good experiment; if the subjects had been mice, for instance, setting aside an untreated control group to study the progression of the disease would have been considered an essential part of smart experimental design. One could still argue that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…if one were willing to…