education
jdupuis | July 27, 2011As anyone who's a regular reader of my Friday Fun series will know, I'm a huge fan of The Cronk, that paragon of higher ed satire. In fact, you could call me the grand high poobah of Cronk fandom with the Cronk as the Sultan of Satire!
You can see some of my posts here, here and here and even more here.
I love the Cronk, you love the Cronk, we all love the Cronk. And now we all have a chance to put our money where our mouths are and kick a little cash towards the hard working gang that entertain and amuse us so regularly. They fine folk who produce the Cronk have published a print book…
drorzel | July 26, 2011The Dean Dad asks a question on the minds of lots of faculty: how do you handle early-morning classes?
Wise and worldly readers, have you had good experiences with 8 a.m. classes? Does anybody know of any useful empirical studies done at the college level of the effects of 8 a.m. classes? Is this basically solvable with caffeine and nagging, or are we shooting ourselves in the collective foot here?
As I am emphatically not a morning person myself, I'm no fan of 8am classes either, but as Dean Dad notes, they're a necessary evil given the constraints of limited classroom space. I don't know…
bioephemera | July 24, 2011The New York Times did a special Sunday supplement on graduate programs. The editorial graphics they commissioned have much truth to them, grasshopper.
kcollins | July 22, 2011Fed by the news media, our fascination and reverence for celebrities has reached shameless heights.
But when you add the element of royalty to the mix, celebrity worship can take off into the stratosphere, triggered even by an item as seemingly mundane as a dress.
This leaves me wondering -- and angered -- over what is happening to us and our priorities.
I'm referring most recently to the whirlwind North American tour this month of newly weds Prince William and Duchess Kate Middleton (a.k.a. Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge), who seem to be a wonderful couple committed to fostering…
drorzel | July 20, 2011Keeping the week's unofficial education theme, Kevin Drum posts about the latest "kids these days" study, namely the just-released NAEP Geography results. Kevin makes a decent point about the 12th grade questions being fairly sophisticated, but includes one comment that struck me as off base:
I gotta tell you: I went through the five sample questions for 12th graders, and they were pretty damn hard. This was not "identify France on a map" stuff. I ended up getting them all right, but I was half guessing on some of them.
He says that as if it's a bad thing, but it seems to me that it's really…
drorzel | July 20, 2011One of the standard education reform proposals that gets suggested every time somebody brings up the condition of American public education is that teachers should be offered some form of performance incentive, whether in the form of "merit pay" programs on a continuing basis, or bonuses for reaching particular targets. This is one of those ideas that economists swear ought to work, but a new RAND Corporation study found that, well, they don't. This is based on a three-year pilot program run by the New York City school district, which offered selected districts bonuses of up to $3,000 per…
jdupuis | July 19, 2011Trust me, I really tried to come up with a cool, funny title for this post.
Anyways...
We have a new reference assistant starting here next week. As somewhat typical for such a position, the new staff member has a science subject background rather than a library background. In this case, Maps/GIS.
So I thought it might be a good idea to gather together some resources for helping our new hire get acclimatised to reference work in an academic science & engineering library. After all, we're not born with the ability to do good reference interviews!
With the help of the fine folk in…
drorzel | July 19, 2011A lot of pixels have been spent discussing this study of grade inflation, brought to most people's attention via this New York Times blog. The key graph is this one, showing the fraction of grades given in each letter category over the last fifty years:
Lots of effort is being put into trying to explain why the number of A's given out has increased so much over this time span, with most of it focussing on the last twenty years or so (see Mad Mike for a plausible but wrong explanation-- the fraction of students going on to graduate school isn't big enough to drive this). I think this is…
mikethemadbiologist | July 18, 2011By way of Dr. Isis, we come across this post by Catherine Rampell about the rise of grade inflation in colleges:
Dr. Isis observes:
It's interesting that the real change in grading appears to have occurred in the period between 1962 and 1974, probably coinciding with the increase in conscription for the Vietnam War. After 1974 things appear to trend toward a return to baseline. Then in 1990, something new happens that drives grade inflation.
I think it's pretty obvious what happened: increased competition for graduate school slots put (and still puts) pressure on faculty to not give C's…
mikethemadbiologist | July 17, 2011Because these are the idiots you've allied yourselves with:
...many of these voucher advocates claim they simply want to expand school choice and improve the quality of education for all.
Yet one group that has been influential in the school voucher push -- the Independence Hall Tea Party, which has run a major PAC that operates in Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania -- is finally admitting that its true goal is to abolish public education.
Here's what the head batshitloonitarian thinks:
"We think public schools should go away,'' says Teri Adams, the head of the Independence Hall Tea…
jtoney | July 17, 2011
silverlinedwinnebago's Flickr photostream
Some of the happiest people in the world come home smelling to high heaven at the end of the day.
"Bruce Almighty" (2003)
Job growth reigns supreme amongst political discussion. Where will we find these future jobs and how do we prepare for them?
Charles Blow's recent Op-Ed article in The New York Times, "They, Too, Sing America" discusses some compelling data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Job opportunities for the next decade may surprise you.
They are women whose skin glistens from steam and sweat, whose hands stay damp from being…
mikethemadbiologist | July 14, 2011It's as if Republican House Whip Eric Cantor wants to be a cartoon villain:
...as the Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz reports, one group that Cantor is apparently fine with making pay more is American college students. Cantor, at the White House for budget negotiations, apparently proposed that students who take out student loans should immediately start paying interest, rather than getting to make payments after graduation:
As Monday's White House budget talks got down to the nitty-gritty, Eric Cantor proposed a series of spending cuts, one of them aimed squarely at college students. The House…
jtoney | July 12, 2011
Winners (from left to right): Lauren Hodge, Shree Bose, Naomi Shah
Girls swept all three age categories at Google's first science fair!
CONGRATULATIONS!
* Lauren Hodge in the 13-14 age group. Lauren studied the effect of different marinades on the level of potentially harmful carcinogens in grilled chicken.
* Naomi Shah in the 15-16 age group. Naomi endeavored to prove that making changes to indoor environments that improve indoor air quality can reduce people's reliance on asthma medications.
* Shree Bose in the 17-18 age group. Shree discovered a way to improve ovarian cancer…
drorzel | July 12, 2011A month and a half ago, I reported on a simple experiment to measure the performance of a timer from the teaching labs. I started the timer running at a particualr time, and over the next couple of weeks checked in regularly with the Official US Time display at the NIST website, recording the delay between the timer reading and the NIST clock.
As a follow-up experiment, I did the same thing with a different timer, this one a Good Cook brand digital timer picked up for $10 in the local supermarket, and the same Fisher Scientific stopwatch/timer as the first experiment, with the Fisher…
jtoney | July 7, 2011How educated is your state legislator? The answer varies considerably from state to state. While many lawmakers hold a college degree, support of public higher education, it seems, has always been a challenge. Consider this scenario:
Sufficient funds have been raised to support initial construction of the academic buildings and the first faculty member has been hired. But the state legislature is reluctant to provide funding to allow completion of the building, causing considerable delays of opening for its first academic year. Ripple effects ensue. The first freshmen class cannot be…
jdupuis | July 5, 2011Yet another science blogging community. The more the merrier.
We've had another quiet period in the science blogging universe these last couple of months. It seems that the rapid evolution that kicked off with the founding of Scientopia in the wake of Pepsigate is continuing.
And this is the big one: Scientific American Blogs. This is easily the biggest and most important science blogging community launch since ScienceBlogs itself launched back in 2006.
Of course, it was engineered by the master of us all, Bora Zivkovic.
Here's what he has to say about the makeup of the network:
Diversity…
mikethemadbiologist | July 5, 2011I know that sounds like I'm channeling my inner Yogi Berra, but bear with me. A recent article by David Leonhart refuting claims that college is a waste of money has led to a further round of related posts (as you'll see, I agree). But the reason the 'college is a waste' arguments have any traction is not due to what colleges are delivering, but what students (or their parents) pay to attend college. The price of college is becoming prohibitively expensive in light of an educational model--the real benefit--that really hasn't changed much since the 1950s and 1960s. Before I get to the…
bioephemera | July 3, 2011From the Smithsonian, a short video about using technology to virtually reassemble ancient art from fragments long carried away and dispersed:
Majestic sixth-century Chinese Buddhist sculpture is combined with 3-D imaging technology in this exploration of one of the most important groups of Buddhist devotional sites in early medieval China. Carved into the mountains of northern China, the Buddhist cave temples of Xiangtangshan were the crowning cultural achievement of the Northern Qi dynasty (550-77 CE). Once home to a magnificent array of sculptures--monumental Buddhas, divine attendant…
jtoney | June 30, 2011
Photo source.
The blogosphere can be a strange world for writers, offering vistas as broad ranging and fickle as human nature itself. Bloggers relying on pageviews for sustenance, even those who do not, face the challenge of attracting as many readers as possible, sometimes at the cost of becoming an uncivil "woo meister," provocateur or even worse, a demagogue.
From my first post at "Dean's Corner," I wanted to avoid these potential traps and to simply share what I love about science, sometimes bringing to light mistruths or misrepresentations - at least in my opinion. So,
I blog for…
jtoney | June 30, 2011
American taxpayers are supporting more and more private faith-based schools, including anti-science creationist curricula, whether you like it or not.
Consider this, from an article draft that I am currently writing with Sir Harold Kroto:
From 1980 to 2001, the opening of private schools outpaced public schools by nearly two to one (15,131 vs. 8,130). During the same period, the number of private schools increased by 73% whereas the number of public schools only increased by 9%. Current data show that about two out of five schools are private, compared to one out of four in 1980. Three…