Academics
pharyngula | March 24, 2011Oh, no! She's revealed the secret! Elizabeth Collins exposes the magic recipe for doing well on standardized admission tests. Also, that perfect 800 score thing? I did that, too.
I don't expect a sudden surge in elevated scores on the SATs, though. The best formula to do well is to simply read a lot of different books, and it turns out that is hard work for some people.
pharyngula | March 13, 2011Let's compare teacher salaries in different countries and find out.
(Click for larger image)
You go, USA! Looks like we need to bust up some teachers' unions and get those pay scales down even lower.
(That's sarcasm, for any Republicans/Teabaggers/Libertarians who might show up and find that kind of thing difficult to read. We're starving our teachers; it's not a job that earns significant returns on the major educational investment it takes.)
pharyngula | March 10, 2011Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse are coming out with a book called Reasonable Atheism, and they argued for some form of accommodationism in a recent blog entry. I left a brief comment in which I pointed out that they had misrepresented the Gnu Atheists in one section. This has prompted a rebuttal to various atheist arguments against their position, which is fine, except…well, let me show you. Here's an excerpt of their long post.
Our claim, to be clear, is that the epistemic evaluation of beliefs is a task that is conceptually distinct from the epistemic evaluation of believers. Of course, the…
pharyngula | March 4, 2011I'm teaching human physiology this term, and those of you who have done it or taken it know that this kind of course is a strain to get through the huge volume of material. I think I must simply be a horrible teacher, though, because here's an
online physiology course that does a much better job than I do.
Here's Your Chance To Skip The Struggle
and Master Human Anatomy & Physiology
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Wow. And guess what…it's a $1985.00 value, available now for a limited-time only for the low, low price of only $37. And it's been shown on the Martha Stewart show!
If…
pharyngula | March 4, 2011We'll be getting to human reproduction sometime near the end of the term, but I don't think we'll have any demonstrations like this:
More than 100 Northwestern University students watched as a naked 25-year-old woman was penetrated by a sex toy wielded by her fiancee during an after-class session of the school's popular "Human Sexuality" class.
The woman said she showed up at the Feb. 21 lecture in the Ryan Family Auditorium in Evanston expecting just to answer questions, but was game to demonstrate. The course's professor on Wednesday acknowledged some initial hesitation, but said student…
pharyngula | February 6, 2011Way back in October, I told you we were trying to hire a new cell biologist. We had a very successful search, found a whole lot of brilliant candidates, and then brought a few of them out for interviews, where they shone like stars and dazzled us with their potential…and then they all turned down our offers. We should have mentioned in our criteria that working here demands that you be slightly mad — only slightly, though, just enough to be committed to undergraduate education in spite of a remote rural location, but not enough to be be, you know, committed. It probably didn't help to be…
pharyngula | February 2, 2011Actually, I know they got a lot wrong. The Mail reports that a study "proves" students believe everything they read on the internet. They cite some work done with the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus site, which they claim was created as part of a study to test student gullibility. This is wrong; that site has been available for years, and it's a satire and humor site; look at the rest of zapatopi.net to see what I mean.
Also, I actually use the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus every semester, in the first lecture of our introductory biology course! After giving an overview of the scientific…
pharyngula | February 1, 2011Several people have sent me messages of despair lately. They're working in universities which, like every university in the country, is struggling with tight budgets and declining support from the state government, and a citizenry that seems to be a sucker for every pseudoscientific scam some scoundrel will sell, and what is the academic administration doing? They're joining in the con!
Look here at the University of Maryland School of Medicine: they've opened something called the Center for Integrative Medicine, where prospective doctors can go to learn how to gather Qi, or how to relieve…
pharyngula | January 28, 2011I am completely unsurprised by the recent report on the state of evolution in the American science classroom. It confirms entirely my impressions from years of freshman college students and from previous studies of the subject, and puts specific numbers and issues to the problem.
The short summary: public schools suck at teaching basic biology. You already knew this, too, though, didn't you? The question has always been, "How bad?"
We can now say how many high school biology teachers do a good job, teaching the recommendations of the National Research Council and also, by the way, obeying the…
pharyngula | January 25, 2011Richard Dawkins takes a slightly harder line than I do on the case of Gaskell, the astronomer who didn't get a job because his potential employers objected to his faith-based mangling of evolutionary biology. Dawkins regards that as entirely justifiable, and makes a good case.
A commentator on a website discussing the Gaskell affair went so far as to write, "If Gaskell has produced sound, peer-reviewed literature of high quality then I see no reason for denying him the position, even if he believes Mars is the egg of a giant purple Mongoose". That commentator probably felt rather pleased with…
pharyngula | January 24, 2011Cothran, an analyst for one of those right-wing religious think tanks, the Family Patriarchy Foundation, has written an op-ed rebuking the University of Kentucky for discrimination against Christians. It is breathtakingly ridiculous. He claims that the reason Gaskell was not hired was religious oppression, overt discrimination against him for the fact of being a Christian. A university in America would have virtually no faculty or staff if they had an unspoken policy of discrimination against the Christian majority in this country; there were believers on that committee, I'm sure, just as…
pharyngula | January 22, 2011Martin Gaskell, the astronomer who wasn't hired at the University of Kentucky (my words were chosen carefully; that really is the only 'crime' against him), has won an out-of-court settlement in his discrimination suit, and has gone on to give an interview which confirms my opinion of him: Kentucky is better off not having this credulous guy on the staff. He now insists that he is a supporter of evolution, a fact not in evidence in his writings about the field, and also not evident in his answers to his dodgy replies to specific questions in the interview.
But the real problem is his complete…
pharyngula | January 5, 2011I don't think journal editor L. Henry Edmunds is quite clear on how the scientific method should work: we're supposed to have the free exchange of information. His journal recently retracted a paper (from other sources, it was apparently because the authors, um, "recycled" data from another study), and when asked why, his answer was "It's none of your damned business", ranted a bit against "journalists and bloggists", and then made an interesting comparison: "If you get divorced from your wife, the public doesn't need to know the details.".
Hmmm. Except that details of your relationship with…
pharyngula | December 23, 2010It really isn't that hard to learn to think scientifically — kids can do it. In a beautiful example of communicating science by doing it, students at Blackawton Primary School designed and executed an experiment in vision and learning by bees, and got it published in Biology Letters, which is making the paper available for free. It's nicely done, an exercise in training bees to use color or spatial cues to find sugar water, and you can actually see how the kids were thinking, devising new tests to determine which of those two cues the animals were using. They were also quite good at looking…
pharyngula | December 16, 2010I know this struggle well. Good teaching involves getting the students actively involved and asking questions and thinking about the material, and it's hard work sometimes to wake them up. For example, my last lecture in our introductory biology course is always about bioethics, where I bring up a lot of controversial topics: eugenics, abortion, animal rights, etc., and rather than just lecturing at them to let them know what the right answers are, I expect them to express their opinions…and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. In two sections this semester with the identical lecture…
pharyngula | December 13, 2010Gaskell is an astronomer who applied for a job at the University of Kentucky, and didn't get it. This is not news. The great majority of the people who apply for jobs in the sciences don't get them, even if they are well qualified — the rejected candidates know just to pick up and move on to the next application, because it is so routine.
Not Martin Gaskell, though. Gaskell is suing the university for not hiring him, which is amazing: when I was on the job market, I sent out at least one hundred applications, and ultimately got hired for one, so I guess that means I missed 99 potentially…
pharyngula | December 6, 2010I just finished off one big chunk of grading, and on this exam, as is my custom, I give students a few bonus points with an easy question at the end. It is also my custom every year to have one of those easy questions be, "Name a scientist, any scientist, who also happens to be a woman," just to see if they've been paying attention.
About 10% of the class leave it blank. C'mon, it's a free 2 points on a 100 point exam! Over half the time, I get the same mysterious answer: Marie Curie. We do not talk about Marie Curie in this class at all, and it's always a bit strange that they have to cast…
pharyngula | December 2, 2010Who needs expertise and knowledge? In the bold new world of the Teabagger Republicans, all you need is a sense of privilege and outrage, and you too are qualified to do rocket science and brain surgery…or, at least, to complain about rocket science and brain surgery. Here's the latest brilliant idea from a Republican congressman: the National Science Foundation provides easy access to their database of grant awards online, so let's sic a mob of uninformed, resentful, anti-science gomers loose on the field of already extensively vetted (by qualified people!) awards and have them seek out…
pharyngula | November 22, 2010You all want to know what is going on in the minds of my students, right? Here you go.
Hannah writes about mitochondria, autism, and pain.
Lisa writes about autism, the dog genome, and sea urchins.
Logan writes about giant insects.
Kele has survived his senior seminar and is now writing about the genetics of Mario.
Rev. Frost is falling behind.
So is Anthony.
Gonza275 writes about treefrogs, the T allele, and developmental mathematics.
pharyngula | November 17, 2010You can't get much more cynical than this article by a fellow who churns out term papers for incompetent students. He gives some examples of how awful their writing is, and talks about the formulaic approach he takes to writing everything from term papers to Ph.D. theses…and it's more than a little depressing.
I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow. I…