education
jdupuis | December 1, 2010A couple of really interesting articles in InsideHigherEd the other day:
Should Profs Leave Unruly Classes?
Now two faculty members at Ryerson University, in Toronto, sparked discussion at their institution with a similar (if somewhat more lenient) policy -- and their university's administrators and faculty union have both urged them to back down, which they apparently have.
The Ryerson professors' policy was first reported last week in The Eyeopener (the student newspaper) and then was picked up by other Canadian publications. Two professors who teach an introductory engineering course in…
bioephemera | November 30, 2010
The BBC is screening a new documentary, "The Joy of Statistics," hosted by Hans Rosling of Gapminder. This is a short clip; you'll probably recognize the data and presentation from a couple of years back, but the Minority Report-style, virtual full-body interface is new. Granted, it starts off a little reminiscent of a local news meteorologist gesturing stiffly at a greenscreen. But within the first minute it starts to seem more natural, and the data (comparative life expectancy, wealth, and population in the developed and developing continents) is always eye-opening. The BBC seems to be…
jtoney | November 30, 2010I am delighted to be part of ScienceBlogs, the largest online community dedicated to science. I accepted this challenge because I believe that most in my profession are far more focused on making the next discovery rather than explaining to the public the value of what they do. I invite you to join me on this journey and to share my articles with anyone who has that curiosity that each of us had as a child - remember discovering your first ladybug, seeing your first rainbow? You will be an important part of an ongoing discussion about the beauty and fascination of science.
So it begins:
"…
sa smith | November 29, 2010Looooooooook what Ive gooooooooooot!
'Songs From the Science Frontier', a pro-science CD you readers helped happen, is finally out!
Its SUPER CUTE!
The OKGazette is astonished that Monty Harper & Cos music 'doesnt induce nausea' like most kids music, LOL!!!
You can hear more from Monty in this podcast he did for OKC Atheists last week!
jdupuis | November 29, 2010Via Bora Zivkovic, I see that there's a new blog in town -- this one devoted to the joys of scientists blogging to advance their work.
It's called Science of Blogging and it's by Peter Janiszewski and Travis Saunders who blog at Obesity Panacea.
I'll let them explain their mission:
Social media provides a tremendous outlet by which to translate and promote scientific knowledge and engage the public discourse. All scientists, researchers, clinicians, government and not-for-profit organizations have much to gain by adopting an effective and viable social media strategy.
Science of Blogging will…
mikethemadbiologist | November 29, 2010Last week, I discussed the butchering by Stanley Fish of an economic explanation for why college costs are high--and, as importantly, where all of that money goes. Robert Archibald and David Feldman offer a good response to their critics in The NY Times, but this is the key point (italics mine):
We would like to thank Stanley Fish for allowing us to respond to reader comments regarding his column about our new book. Reading them felt like working through the worst set of course evaluations a professor ever received.
The power of the dysfunction narrative was on full display in the…
cagapakis | November 26, 2010
It's been a few weeks since the iGEM jamboree, a whirlwind, completely exhausting weekend of student synthetic biology projects. This tweet from Robin Sloan from the #igem2010 stream is a pretty good way to sum up the weekend:
*/
Tweets tagged #igem2010 right now read like dispatches from the future. (It's the big student synthetic biology [!!] conference.)less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhoneRobin Sloanrobinsloan
Bacteria that fill in cracks in concrete, bacteria that feel empathy, probiotic bacterial sentinels as new antibiotics, bacteria that play sudoku, yeast that can live…
bioephemera | November 26, 2010Okay, so is this the perfect job for me or what?
Massachusetts College of Art and Design seeks a full time, tenure track interdisciplinary position in the Liberal Arts Department at the assistant or associate professor level to teach biology and environmental science and related science courses, including arts-oriented science courses, beginning in September 2011. The Liberal Arts department provides the general education component of Massachusetts College of Art's BFA degree program. Successful candidates will help build an academic program in collaboration with colleagues from non-…
jdupuis | November 24, 2010A couple more shorts lists.
HistoryNet
Rival Rails: The Race to Build America's Greatest Transcontinental Railroad by Walter Borneman
DC-3: A Legend In Her Time-A 75th Anniversary Photographic Tribute by Bruce McAllister
Air Power: The Men, Machines, and Ideas that Revolutionized War, from Kitty Hawk to Iraq By Stephen Budiansky
O Magazine
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
I'm always looking for recommendations and notifications of book lists as they appear in various media outlets. If you see…
drorzel | November 23, 2010I've probably gotten a dozen pointers to Gregory Petsko's open letter in support of the humanities, addressed to the President of SUNY-Albany, over the last couple of weeks (the link is to a reposting of the letter at Inside Higher Ed; it was originally on Petsko's own blog). I haven't linked to it or commented on it here, mostly because while I'm broadly sympathetic with his position, after the second use of "[Famous Writer] said [interesting thing] which I'm sure your department of [humanities field] could tell you about, if you hadn't eliminated them," my reaction had shifted significantly…
jdupuis | November 23, 2010A terrific new edition of The Journal of Electronic Publishing (v13i2), focusing on the future of university presses and, by extension, of scholarly publishing as a whole.
A lot of terrific-looking articles:
Editor's Note for Reimagining the University Press by Phil Pochoda
Reimagining the University Press: A Checklist for Scholarly Publishers by Peter J. Doughtery
Reimagining the University Press by Kate Wittenberg
Stage Five Book Publishing by Joseph J. Esposito
Next-Generation University Publishing: A Perspective from California by Daniel Greenstein
What Might Be in Store for Universities…
mikethemadbiologist | November 22, 2010Brad DeLong, Scott Lemieux, and Felix Salmon all take Stanley Fish's absurd discussion of Why Does College Cost So Much by Robert Archibald and David Feldman to task--and are right in doing so. It's a shame because Archibald and Feldman actually do have some key insights into where the money goes. The arguments they make aren't Fish's arguments either. How one can claim that college costs haven't risen faster than inflation boggles my mind: it simply involves division (college costs have risen much faster than the median household income). Of course, this is Stanley Fish, so numerical…
drorzel | November 22, 2010I'm giving the final exam in my introductory E&M class this morning, which means spending a couple of hours sitting in a room full of students taking a test and doing my best not to fall asleep. As far as I'm concerned, getting rid of exam proctoring is the best argument for an honor code system-- I'm less worried about cheating than I am annoyed at wasting my time.
Anyway, here's a thematically appropriate poll to pass the time:
Which of the following activities are less fun than proctoring an exam (check all that apply)online survey
PollDaddy handles multiple-selection polls in a…
bioephemera | November 21, 2010Today's Guardian has a very interesting (though long) article by Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder, about the unsung women of science. In the Guardian piece, Holmes shares some of his research for his forthcoming book, The Lost Women of Victorian Science:
[M]y re-examination of the Royal Society archives during this 350th birthday year has thrown new and unexpected light on the lost women of science. I have tracked down a series of letters, documents and rare publications that begin to fit together to suggest a very different network of support and understanding between the sexes.…
jdupuis | November 21, 2010I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, is from May 28, 2008.
I have also read Shirky's Cognitive Surplus and mostly like it quite a lot. A review is still brewing for that one and I…
jdupuis | November 20, 2010I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism: Knowing What's Real and Why It Matters, is from June 8, 2007.
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The whole raison d'etre of this book is to counter creationists' arguments against…
bioephemera | November 18, 2010Hannah Waters at Culturing Science has written a lovely little post on the day-to-day benefits of having a scientific worldview:
I grew up immersed in science. Any facts that exist that I couldn't reconcile with experience, I just chalked up to the limitations of my senses or even my brain's ability to conceptualize (the latter usually reserved for when I'm dealing with astrophysics). But if you aren't well-versed in how science works and perhaps the basics, this stuff sounds completely insane!
Read more here. While I'm not quite as optimistic that the power of awesome, or science…
jdupuis | November 18, 2010Via my York University Computer Science & Engineering colleague Andrew Eckford, two contrasting blog posts by two different Harvard computer science profs. One has decided to leave academia for greener pastures at Google and the other has decided to stay.
First, Matt Welsh on leaving.
There is one simple reason that I'm leaving academia: I simply love work I'm doing at Google. I get to hack all day, working on problems that are orders of magnitude larger and more interesting than I can work on at any university. That is really hard to beat, and is worth more to me than having "Prof." in…
drorzel | November 18, 2010I'm grading a big backlog of homeworks today, so I don't have time to do any really lengthy posts this morning. Thus, a poll question inspired by going through these homeworks:
You are doing a physics homework problem. How many significant figures do you report?survey software
While the class in question uses some quantum ideas, the poll is strictly classical, so no superpositions of multiple answers are allowed.
(Honestly, at some point, I would expect laziness alone to compel people to round their answers off before their hands cramp up from copying all these digits...)
bioephemera | November 17, 2010
The New York Times decided earlier this week that biological animation warrants its own article. About time! :)
Seriously, for those of you who haven't discovered BioVisions' amazing animations, you should check them out and/or use them in class - with the caveat that they're not "pure" data:
While acknowledging the potential to help refine a hypothesis, for example, some scientists say that visualizations can quickly veer into fiction. "Some animations are clearly more Hollywood than useful display," says Peter Walter, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of…