Culture
drorzel | September 15, 2014Steven Pinker has a piece at the New Republic arguing that Ivy League schools ought to weight standardized test scores more heavily in admissions. this has prompted a bunch of tongue-clucking about the failures of the Ivy League from the usual suspects, and a rather heated concurrence from Scott Aaronson. That last finally got me to read the piece, because I had figured I would be happier not reading it, but I wanted to see what got Scott so worked up.
Sadly, my first instinct was correct. It starts off well enough, taking down an earlier anti-Ivy League piece by William Deresiewicz for being…
drorzel | September 12, 2014Via a whole bunch of people on social media, there's a new study of gender roles in academia, which the Washington Post headlines "Study: Male scientists want to be involved dads, but few are". This is not inaccurate. Some quotes that jumped out at me:
“Academic science doesn’t just have a gender problem, but a family problem,” said Sarah Damaske, a sociology professor at Penn State and one of the report’s authors. “We came to see that men or women, if they want to have families, are likely to face significant challenges.”
The study, Damaske said, showed there was potential for change, in…
drorzel | July 27, 2014Lance Mannion has a really nice contrast between childhood now and back in the 1970's that doesn't go in the usual decline-of-society direction. He grew up not too far from where I now live, and after describing his free-ranging youth, points out some of the key factors distinguishing it from today, that need to be accounted for before lamenting the lack of kids running around outside:
-- A lot of the houses in "the old neighborhood" are still owned by the people who owned them back in the day, so the only kids around are visiting grandkids,
-- Those homes that are occupied by families with…
drorzel | July 7, 2014Also coming to my attention during the weekend blog shutdown was this Princeton Alumni Weekly piece on the rhetoric of crisis in the humanities. Like several other authors before him, Gideon Rosen points out that there's little numerical evidence of a real "crisis," and that most of the cries of alarm you hear from academics these days have near-perfect matches in prior generations. The humanities have always been in crisis.
This wouldn't be worth mentioning, but Rosen goes on to offer an attempt at an explanation of why the sense of crisis is so palpable within the humanities, an explanation…
drorzel | April 25, 2014A collection of miscellaneous stuff with an academic inclination from the past week or so:
-- We gave an exam last night in introductory E&M (I'm teaching one of five sections this term), so we've spent a lot of time this week on exam review. One thing that might be worth mentioning here is the way I run review sessions, which I don't think is entirely original to me, but which generally gets a "Huh. That's a good idea." when I explain it to other faculty, so wherever I got it from isn't well known.
What I do is: at the start of the review session (either a regular class period given over…
drorzel | April 9, 2014No, this isn't another blog post lamenting the fact that music writing gets far more attention than science writing. If anything, it's a bit of an argument that science writing ought to be less like popular music writing.
On Twitter this past weekend Jim Henley, one of the few bloggers I consider "old school" (the name of this blog was influenced by his Unqualified Offerings, though he's mostly stepped back from that) had a long series of tweets about pop-music writing, responding to some arguments that music criticism has degenerated and hardly has anything to do with music any more. Jim…
drorzel | April 4, 2014Yesterday's frat boy post prompted some interesting discussion, one piece of which is a response from Matt "Dean Dad" Reed (also at Inside Higher Ed), who overlapped with me at Williams for a year, but had a very different reaction to the social scene there. His take mirrors mine from the other side, though, which suggests I'm not wildly off base.
The other chunk is a comment exchange on Facebook where some colleagues mentioned the problem of social exclusivity as an issue that I didn't address. And that's true-- as I was at a school without fraternities, where all organizations were formally…
drorzel | April 3, 2014I was invited to a dinner last night hosted by one of the umbrella organizations for fraternities on campus, with a stated goal of improving communication between faculty and frats. It ended up being kind of a weird crowd-- most of the non-students there were Deans of one sort or another; I think there was only one other regular faculty member there. I'm not sure quite how they drew up the invite list, but I suspect the two of us are probably among the most sympathetic faculty members-- I went to a school without frats, but the rugby club was functionally equivalent, and the other guy proudly…
drorzel | March 12, 2014I alluded to this on Twitter, and meant to leave that be, but the other thing I was going to blog today didn't come together, and I probably shouldn't leave a cryptic tweet as my only comment. So...
One of the links getting passed around a lot in my social-media circles is this Tumblr post from Ben Lillie on The Humanities of Science Communication, which argues that discussions of the science of communication often seem to ignore the expertise of people who communicate for a living-- playwrights, actors, journalists, etc. This is a good point, but the post as a whole bugged me a bit, because…
drorzel | January 13, 2014When I wrote about Benjamin Bratton's anti-TED rant I only talked about the comment about the low success rate of TED suggestions. That was, admittedly, a small piece of his article, but the rest of it was so ludicrously overheated that I couldn't really take it seriously. It continues to get attention, though, both in the form of approving re-shares on my social media feeds, and in direct responses such as a rebuttal from Chris Anderson himself and most recently a long piece by Christiana Peppard at Medium, which are getting their own collection of approving re-shares. So I guess I ought to…
drorzel | January 10, 2014The posts on box-checking and liberal arts teaching generated a fair number of comments that I haven't really had time to address individually, across a few different social media platforms. So I'm going to collect some of the more important stuff here, in one catch-up post.
--A few people, mostly in places that aren't conducive to linking, raised versions of "You never know what will be useful" as a justification for having a list of boxes to check. And I don't entirely disagree with that. I'm not against the idea of forcing students to take a broader range of stuff than they otherwise might…
drorzel | January 9, 2014As a follow-up to yesterday's post about liberal education and the failure modes thereof, I thought I should try to do something constructive and make suggestions regarding how you might go about a "poetry for physicists" kind of thing. After all, one of the things I find intensely frustrating about a lot of "crisis in ____" discussions is the lack of specific suggestions, so throwing out a "here's a problem, good luck with that" post would be suboptimal behavior on my part. This required some reflection on the question of just what I got out of my "liberal arts" classes back in the day--…
drorzel | January 8, 2014One of the many ancillary tasks associated with my job that I wish I was better at is the advising of students. More specifically, the advising of students who aren't like I was at that age.
What I mean by that is that when I was a student, I didn't need to be convinced of the utility of liberal arts education. I had specifically chosen to go to williams in part because of the small size (having grown up in a small town, I found it more congenial), but also because I was never only interested in science. I always enjoyed reading books and discussing history and politics, so I didn't need a…
drorzel | October 20, 2013The ongoing mess over Bora Zivkovic's harassment of women writers in connection with his editorial role at Scientific American and Science Online has moved into the "What is to be done now?" phase. The most prominent and linkable of these are from Maryn McKenna and Kelly Hills, though I've also seen the edges of more ephemeral discussions on Twitter. Much of this has focused on formal organizational changes, stripping Bora of power and titles and banning him from the conference. These are entirely appropriate, though partly moot given that he's resigned from both Scientific American and…
drorzel | October 11, 2013I'm sure I've done more than enough wibbling about TED for this week, but the only major physics story at the moment involved the Higgs boson, and I'm thoroughly sick of that. So let's talk about Malcolm Gladwell and journosplaining.
Gladwell has a new book out, David and Goliath that from all reports is pretty much exactly what you expect from a Malcolm Gladwell book. I greatly enjoyed the digested read by John Crace in the Guardian. Among the many bad reviews of this were a trio by my colleague at Union, Christopher Chabris-- first a paywalled review in the Wall Street Journal, then a post…
drorzel | October 1, 2013Last week, before we headed out for the weekend, I had a brief exchange with Ben Lillie on Twitter, prompted by the following set of tweets:
OK, here's a thing. I'll often hear people complain that Hollywood gets science wrong because there's *1* scientist who does everything 1/3
— Ben Lillie (@BenLillie) September 27, 2013
But in reality, science is massively collaborative. So why can't storytellers get that right? 2/3
— Ben Lillie (@BenLillie) September 27, 2013
*BUT* at the same time we have, and wildly celebrate, the Nobel, which embodies exactly that myth. 3/3
— Ben Lillie (@BenLillie…
drorzel | September 5, 2013While I'm quoting other people saying smart things, Timothy Burke has another great post on the failures of economic models of higher education
There is a lot of information that you could acquire about courses or about colleges that you could reasonably use to assemble a decision matrix. What size is the class or the college? Do you have a good reason for thinking that you flourish in small or large classes or institutions? What do you think you need in terms of knowledge or training? What kinds of environments and teaching styles do you enjoy or find stimulating? And so on–this often…
drorzel | March 6, 2013There was a lot of re-sharing yesterday of an article about the "Finkbeiner Test" to be applied to profiles of women scientists. This is analogous to the "Bechdel Test" in pop culture, which asks "Do two women talk to each other about something other than a man?", only because we're scientists, it's more complicated, hitting seven points:
To pass the Finkbeiner test, the story cannot mention
The fact that she’s a woman
Her husband’s job
Her child care arrangements
How she nurtures her underlings
How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field
How she’s such a role model for other…
drorzel | March 5, 2013One of the things that's been rattling around in my head since ScienceOnline back in January is the need for a greater diversity of voices in science communication generally. I don't mean diversity in the sense of racial and gender make-up of the people doing the communication, though that would be nice, I mean a greater diversity in the way people talk about science.
This started bugging me in the panel that led to the "Journosplain" image that I'm somewhat unfairly tagging as the "featured image" for this post (grabbed from here)-- somewhat, because it's not really Carl Zimmer's fault. But…
drorzel | March 4, 2013In rapid succession yesterday, Twitter threw me two how-to-behave-online links that kind of rubbed me the wrong way. The first was a widely re-shared essay titled You Are Boring:
You listen to the same five podcasts and read the same seven blogs as all your pals. You stay up late on Twitter making hashtagged jokes about the event that everyone has decided will be the event about which everyone jokes today. You love to send withering @ messages to people like Rush Limbaugh—of course, those notes are not meant for their ostensible recipients, but for your friends, who will chuckle and retweet…