Academics
pharyngula | August 2, 2011I don't care what his next movie is about. I'll pay to go see it.
I notice who's doing the interview: Libertarians. Screw 'em.
pharyngula | July 28, 2011Hey, this is good news: Nature included a short opinion piece from a stem cell biologist on his experiences blogging, writing the Knoepfler Lab Stem Cell Blog — I'll have to start following it. He has some good general advice for scientists starting to blog, although I have some reservations about the first bit.
Here are some tips for beginners. Start slowly; wait a day after writing and reread your draft before posting. Try to avoid discussing your own institution, and critique papers or theories in the field in a constructive manner. It is important that you include your own opinions, but…
pharyngula | June 22, 2011Athletics are a fine part of the college tradition — students come to our universities, and some of them want to participate in sports, others like to watch, and others like to enjoy a non-academic social event. I think some support for our students' extracurricular interests is a good idea. What I detest, though, is the overpaid coaches and the tendency to set the small group of college athletes apart as something special, deserving of special consideration. Even at my small university, there is a constellation of special programs to serve the college athletes, and it gets rather annoying…
pharyngula | June 15, 2011Gary Bradley, a professor at the Seventh Day Adventist college La Sierra University, has been under fire because he teaches evolutionary biology competently — he doesn't accept the young earth creationism that SDA dogma demands. The battle is over, though, and he and several others have been asked to resign for great crimes.
According to the Spectrum article, Darnell met up afterward with Beach, Bradley, and Kaatz at a private home, where they watched a National Basketball Association playoff game and discussed the meeting. The recorder kept running, unbeknownst to the four men. It captured "…
pharyngula | May 15, 2011You may recall the furious debate among philosophers about a philosophy journal, Synthese, that made a tacit rebuke of critics of Intelligent Design creationism in an editorial added after acceptance of a number of papers on ID; it's not just that they caved to creationist pressure, but that the editors-in-chief went over the heads of the working editors who assembled that issue of the journal to criticize excellent work by rational philosophers like Barbara Forrest. There has been a boycott of the journal; links to various commentaries on the issue can be found on a status page.
Well now the…
pharyngula | May 12, 2011When I fly off to give talks, I've got three basic categories that I choose from: there's the "science is godless, and here's why" talk for atheist audiences, there's the "development and evolution go together like peanut butter and chocolate" talk for atheists or scientists, and finally, there's the "you better pay attention to the online world, and here's why" talk for scientists, who often don't have a clue about blogs and twitter and facebook. Now Nature gets in on the latter act, with a feature on managing your online reputation. It turns out that most scientists, especially younger…
pharyngula | May 11, 2011I don't need people posting stuff their students have submitted. I'm in the middle of grading, so I've got my own, thank you very much.
pharyngula | May 10, 2011Bluefield College is looking for someone to teach general biology. They have a few requirements before hiring you, though. It always amazes me how they can get away with this.
The individual must be a committed Christian and have ability to integrate faith and learning, ability to foster critical and creative thinking, ability to work cooperatively within the campus community to advance the mission of the college and demonstrated excellence in undergraduate teaching.
Bluefield College is a private, four-year liberal arts college located in the scenic Virginia highlands. The college is…
pharyngula | May 10, 2011That's a bargain price for throwing a reputation down the drain. FSU has turned over some hiring decisions to a billionaire ideologue.
A conservative billionaire who opposes government meddling in business has bought a rare commodity: the right to interfere in faculty hiring at a publicly funded university.
A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University's economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting "political economy and free…
pharyngula | May 8, 2011Almost all of your public school teachers have sex. Most of them enjoy it and do it repeatedly, even.
Many of your public school teachers vote for the Democratic party. Some are conservative Republicans. Some are Communists.
Some of your public school teachers are atheists. Or Episcopalians. Or Baptists. Or Scientologists.
All of your public school teachers go home at the end of the school day and have private lives, where they do things that really aren't at all relevant to your 8 year old daughter, your 15 year old son. That you pay taxes to cover their salaries for doing their jobs during…
pharyngula | May 3, 2011Look who was just inducted: David Kingsley, stickleback development and genetics, and Neil Shubin, another devo guy you may have heard of for Tiktaalik and Your Inner Fish. Congratulations!
pharyngula | May 3, 2011Eggers and Calegari have an excellent op-ed on the problem of American education: in short, it's the money, stupid.
When we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers. We don't say, "It's these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That's why we haven't done better in Afghanistan!" No, if the results aren't there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.
And yet in…
pharyngula | April 28, 2011Ellen Lewin is a professor in the anthropology department at the University of Iowa. Like all of us, she is constantly dunned with email announcing this, that, and the other thing at our universities, and sometimes we get email that makes our blood boil. In this case, she got mail from the College Republicans, announcing a "coming out" party (like Republicans in the midwest are a closeted and oppressed minority…) that featured some hagiographic movie about George W. Bush (that ignorant ass), an "animal rights barbecue" and other such joyful shenanigans to celebrate the party of morons and…
pharyngula | April 11, 2011Uh-oh. I was just reading this very silly fundy Christian piece, in which the pious author is bemoaning all those terrible, awful, un-Christian things on the television and radio, and saw this explanation.
While listening to a preaching by Pastor David Wilkerson, he said something that stuck with me "What are you going to do if you are watching profanity and Christ returns at that moment? We think, but I will have time to repent. I'm sorry, but I don't think it will work out that way."
And then I realized…what if some nice goody-goody Christian were reading Pharyngula when Jesus showed up.…
pharyngula | April 8, 2011As a member of the professoriate, I like to think that we are egalitarian and do our very best to correct the social inequities that are so prevalent outside of our relatively benevolent, enlightened institutions. Only…not. It looks like women get screwed over in academia, too.
The gender gap in faculty pay cannot be explained completely by the long careers of male faculty members, the relative productivity of faculty members, or where male and female faculty members tend to work -- even if those and other factors are part of the picture, according to research being released this week at the…
pharyngula | April 5, 2011What a deal. The American Association of Physical Anthropologists is
meeting in Minneapolis next weekend, and they are offering a free, open workshop for teachers on "Fossils, Bones, and Primates: Enriching High School Teaching." I hope our local educators can find time to take it!
The workshop runs from 8:15 to noon on April 16 in the Rochester room
at the Hilton Minneapolis, 1001 Marquette Avenue in Minneapolis.
Featured will be Andrew J. Petto (the editor of Reports of the NCSE
and a member of NCSE's board of directors) speaking on "Primate Clues
to Human Behavior"; Michael Alan Park…
pharyngula | April 5, 2011Wait—Liberty University gets half a billion dollars a year in federal aid? And they have almost 50,000 students? I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if thousands of minds suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
I looked a little further and discovered, though, that Liberty is actually a mid-sized private college with an on-campus enrollment of about 12,000 — they're sucking in all that money because they're deeply involved in that lucrative on-line 'education' game, where they shuffle students through a series of web pages and declare them S-M-R-T, smart. I was made…
pharyngula | March 30, 2011The animal rights kooks were crowing about their 'victory' in intimidating one student, but that's no victory at all. Alena Rodriguez is a real person who was targeted with an intense campaign of harassment and threats, and who was made to fear for her life; all they accomplished, though, was to reveal their hand and show what kind of contemptible terrorist tactics they will use. They've engaged in a little consciousness-raising of their own, but it's all going to work against them.
Speaking of Research has a new article on their opponents' recently invigorated embrace of terrorism, and all…
pharyngula | March 26, 2011William Cronon is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and he recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that placed the recent labor troubles in Wisconsin in historical context — he explained how many of the progressive policies in that state were actually the product of Republican lawmakers, that the state has long been a battleground between the progressive and conservative wings of the Republican party, and that a good part of the liberalism in the state is due to a reaction against the autocratic hand of Joe McCarthy, who violated the traditions of the…