Academics
emjohnson | March 22, 2010Five years ago Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, made headlines when he suggested that women are not as well represented in science because of "issues of intrinsic aptitude." By proposing that women are biologically less capable of succeeding in science he gained the anger of many of his colleagues and continued his reputation for divisive management (African-American Studies professor Cornel West reportedly left Harvard for Princeton based on disagreements he had with Summers).
Now, a report released today on the representation of women in science reveals that, while there are…
pharyngula | March 7, 2010Coyne was quoted in this article on homeschooling, which brought in an unexpected surge of email, including some rather nasty words from the Christians. This doesn't surprise me at all; criticizing religion, especially the more far-out beliefs that are clearly unsupportable and in contradiction to all of the evidence, is always a reliable trigger to start some kooks spewing.
Homeschooling is another trigger. People care very much about their kids, and so telling them that they're wrecking their children's future by giving them a substandard education poisoned with a falsified ideology is not…
pharyngula | March 6, 2010I've been on a few job search committees, and I've been on a few job searches myself, and there's a standard piece of boilerplate we put on all of our job ads.
The University of Minnesota is committed to the policy that all persons shall have equal access to its programs, facilities, and employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, disability, public assistance status, veteran status, or sexual orientation.
Whenever we start a job search, too, human resources reviews whatever we do, and we also get to attend a meeting where we're…
emjohnson | February 28, 2010Four years ago today a young researcher at the beginning of his graduate program in primatology sat down with the most intelligent, engaging, and downright beautiful fellow primate he'd ever had the opportunity to share a beer with. Freshly minted with her Master's degree in women's studies (emphasizing public policy), our conversation quickly moved to a discussion of evolution and male vs. female strategies. It's only in hindsight that it seems bizarre to be talking about theories of male promiscuity and female choosiness on a first date. I had recently returned from my first primate…
pharyngula | February 17, 2010I've got my hands on a strange paper by D Kanduc: "Protein information content resides in rare peptide segments". Here's the abstract.
Discovering the informational rule(s) underlying structure-function relationships in the protein language is at the core of biology. Current theories have proven inadequate to explain the origins of biological information such as that found in nucleotide and amino acid sequences; an 'intelligent design' is now a popular way to explain the information produced in biological systems. Here, we demonstrate that the information content of an amino acid motif…
pharyngula | February 16, 2010And she may be fired for it.
Hussain is an eighth grade science teacher in North Carolina who was getting harrassed by bible-thumping students in her classroom — harrassment that was apparently encouraged by their red-necked ignorant parents. The kids were giving her Bibles and Jesus postcards and reading Bibles instead of doing their classwork, and seemed to have enjoyed flaunting their dumb-ass religiosity at her. So she vented on Facebook. The parents got indignant that she would dare to express her unhappiness with their darling little children, and are pressing to have her fired — but…
pharyngula | February 13, 2010Tenure reviews are extremely stressful: imagine a job evaluation in which you may be told that you've been doing a fine job, you're doing interesting work, but you aren't quite as dazzling as your employer would like…so you're fired. And then, because academic jobs in your specialty are scattered very thin on the ground, you get to spend a year struggling to find a new position (with the same horror show finale possible), and pack up and move to a completely different part of the country, uprooting all your connections that you may have built up over the last 5 or 6 years. What makes it even…
emjohnson | February 3, 2010As people who have been following the issue are well aware, there is a crisis of scientific literacy in the United States. Unscientific America may have had a poor explanation for why the problem exists, but it effectively announced the severity of the problem to a wide audience. To combat this problem it will take a a great diversity of tactics including education, popular culture, involved parenting, economics and political will. Everyone who cares about this issue should use the skills they have to both draw attention to the crisis of scientific literacy and seek positive solutions.
One…
emjohnson | January 27, 2010As reported this evening in the Boston Globe, the internationally renowned historian and bestselling author of A People's History of the United States died today while traveling in California.
For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn's best-known book, A People's History of the United States (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers -- many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out -- but rather the farmers of Shays' Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.
I…
pharyngula | January 15, 2010There are a lot of small four year colleges around, and the competition is tough. We feel it at my university, the University of Minnesota Morris, and it's difficult because we can't honestly say that all those other colleges are bad — they're actually very good because they value the same advantages that we do — small class sizes, personal attention to every student, a curriculum that emphasizes breadth of knowledge and the integration of ideas. So it's always good to see some place where we, as a secular and public liberal arts university, have a clear advantage.
Concordia College is one of…
pharyngula | December 31, 2009Two distressing news stories out of that wealthy western state:
Berkeley High School has a serious problem: it's a good, relatively well-funded school, but black and latino students aren't doing as well as white students. Their solution: kill those expensive science labs and redirect the money to remedial classes. Science classes with no labs? Inconceivable! That's what a body of earnest, well-meaning, and apparently scientifically illiterate parents and teachers have decided to do.
You cannot learn about science without doing science. It's like deciding to continue to teach theater and…
pharyngula | December 23, 2009Next Fall, I'll be back in the classroom teaching introductory biology again. One thing I'm planning to do is to use Shubin's Your Inner Fish for that course…and just look what the good man has done just for me: all the figures from the book have been released as powerpoint slides.
OK, he probably didn't think about me at all, and he's releasing them for everyone to use, but still…it's awfully serendipitous.
Grab 'em all, teachers! These are tools for getting more evolution into the biology classroom!
pharyngula | November 28, 2009Katherine Kersten is Minnesota's own version of Glenn Beck. She's a 'columnist' (literally true, since she is given a regular column to fill with right-wing nonsense) for the Star Tribune, and is a regular embarrassment. She recently aimed her smear-gun at the University of Minnesota, in a deranged tirade that has been picked up by Wing Nut Daily and Hot Air (read the comments at that site for a glimpse of how insane the right wing has become).
What made her so angry? The UM has a program in the college of education called the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, or TERI. It's a reasonably…
emjohnson | November 18, 2009Carl Zimmer, science writer extraordinaire and blogger at The Loom will be speaking tonight at the University of British Columbia. It's at 7pm in
Room 2 of the Woodward Instructional Resources Centre (map).
According to his hosts at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum:
This year the world celebrates the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species; the most important book in the history of modern biology. The science of evolutionary biology has come a long way since 1859. In this talk, Carl Zimmer takes a look at how scientists are studying evolution to…
emjohnson | November 17, 2009As I posted earlier, graduate teaching assistants at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had voted to authorize a strike unless the university negotiated with them in good faith. It appears that this strike was a success because at 7pm EST tonight the Strike Committee of the Graduate Employees' Organization (GEO) at UIUC unanimously voted to suspend the strike that had brought the University to a standstill for two days. According to a press release posted at GEO's website the agreement with the university "achieved gains across all four "pillars" of its original contract…
emjohnson | November 11, 2009In an overwhelming majority members of the Graduate Employee's Organization (GEO) at the University of Illinois at at Urbana-Champaign authorized their union to to go on strike if the university doesn't change direction in their current negotiations.
According to a GEO Press Release sent out Monday:
Over the course of a three day vote, an overwhelming 92% of participating GEO members chose to authorize a strike against the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. With the vote, GEO members have given the strike committee of the GEO a clear mandate to call a strike at any time. The…
pharyngula | November 5, 2009Professor Thomas Tang of Middle Tennessee State University has broken the code of silence and revealed one of the vast powers which are conferred upon us when we land an academic job. It's true, professors can send you to hell.
Frustrated over cheating allegations, one professor at Middle Tennessee State University took the idea of a traditional honor code in a controversial direction.
Suspecting that one of his MBA candidates had just cheated on an exam, Professor Thomas Tang had each of them sign a pledge that said if they had cheated, they'd be condemned to an eternity in Hell.
The…
pharyngula | October 27, 2009This story strikes a little close to home, because I've faced exactly the same kinds of complaints from some of my students — except that these are Religious Studies students. They are very upset because they consider one of the questions on a standard exam to be "unfair". Here's the question:
Question four on Islam, worth 20 marks, gave candidates a quotation referring to the Qur'an and the prophet Muhammad. Then it asked candidates: "With reference to the quotation, analyse the role played by the revelation through the Prophet in the life of Muslims."
It sounds reasonable to me. They're…
pharyngula | October 5, 2009One flaw with a small school in a remote location is that we only occasionally get great speakers to come all the way out here to give lectures. Now look here: Rutgers has Alan Leshner coming out to speak on Evolution's Impact on Science and Society, while Princeton has Sean Carroll speaking on Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species.
On the same day and time.
This is no fair. I want them to release one of them and ship them out to Morris, Minnesota. I promise, there won't be much competition.