The Life Academic
jlynch | July 25, 2007Well I made it safely to England and the ISHPSSB meeting. Yesterday evening was spent in the pleasant company of Precious Little Snowflake and others. Good fun and good beer was had by all. Today the conference proper starts and I'll be in two sessions on Evolutionary Developmental biology ("evodevo") and perhaps one on either iconoclastic biologists or multilevel selection. Tomorrow looks good with sessions on selection and homology. My own session (on teaching methods) isn't until Saturday afternoon, so I have plenty of wind-up time.
More anon ... if the damp and greyness doesn't depress…
jlynch | July 22, 2007
Above is a picture of a lightning strike east of Camelback Mountain last night. The monsoon season has officially started here in Phoenix, so we’re looking at a few weeks of increased humidity and thunderstorm activity. A good enough reason to skip out of town. Tuesday sees me head off to England for the ISHPSSB bi-annual conference - the premier meeting of historians, philosophers and social scientists interested in biology. Four days of talks and socializing with people such as John Wilkins. Good fun, though I hear there is flooding in the SouthWest of England that might disrupt travel…
jlynch | June 6, 2007Ed highlights an absolutely asinine regulation (instituted by the Bush administration in 2004) that prohibits
persons subject to the jurisdiction of the United States from purchasing, transporting, importing, or otherwise dealing in or engaging in any transactions with respect to any merchandise outside the United States if such merchandise (1) is of Cuban origin; or (2) is or has been located in or transported from or through Cuba; or (3) is made or derived in whole or in part of any article which is the growth, produce or manufacture of Cuba.
In other word, you as a person "subject to the…
jlynch | May 30, 2007Nature recently ran a story about, what it termed, the "Arizona experiment," changes that have been occurring here at Arizona State University. The article briefly quoted Robert Pettit, the former director of the Cancer Research Institute (CRI) which was closed in 2005. Today's Nature features a letter by John C. Knight which states that:
[A]fter disagreements with the university's president Michael Crow, Pettit was removed from the position and the institute was effectively closed down. All the personnel were transferred to the university's Biodesign Institute. After a year of problems and…
jlynch | May 22, 2007
You’ll probably have noticed that I have returned from Boston and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole (above, looking across Eel Pond on the day before it started raining … a lot) where I was for a break with friends and a workshop for the past eleven days or so. Fun was had and perhaps I’ll post on the workshop (theme: “What is the Value of History of Science for Science?”) later. I will say that I met a Nobel Prize winner, ate great seafood, drank great beer, and talked history and philosophy of science with good friends into the wee hours.
Blogging will be sporadic for a week…
jlynch | May 9, 2007This evening was the convocation for our honors students and featured the largest graduating class ever from our College. Tomorrow I prepare to head off to Woods Hole for the MBL-ASU History of Biology Seminar. While I will have access to the Intertubes while there, I'm going to probably take a break from blogging, recharge, and figure out what I want to do over the summer break. In short, I'll be back online after the 20th.
jlynch | April 26, 2007I was going to post a note on Shelly's run-in with the Journal of Science of Food and Agriculture regarding fair-use of a published graph. I was going to run a copy of the offending graph. But all
seems to be ok now and the journal has backed down, blaming the issue on "a misunderstanding inadvertently caused by a junior member of staff." All good ... but I'm sure this will come up again.
jlynch | April 21, 2007Another semester is drawing to a close. Readers will notice that I've been more-or-less AWOL for the past few months - a combination of deadlines (hit and missed) and teaching have kept me busy beyond belief. The good news is that I expect things to ease off starting sometime next week and to certainly be a lot clearer by mid-May (when I return from a week-long workshop on the utility of the history of science at the MBL in Woods
Hole).
Equally as good news is that three of my undergraduates successfully defended their honors theses. Congratulations go to Leslie, Matt & Ashley for a job…
jlynch | February 28, 2007As Razib notes, Arthur Schlesinger has died at the age of 89. I like this quote from his New York Times obit, if only because I feel the same way and used to spend a lot of time as a kid wondering in the same way:
Mr. Schlesinger saw life as a walk through history. He wrote that he could not stroll down Fifth Avenue without wondering how the street and the people on it would have looked a hundred years ago.
jlynch | February 2, 2007
I hit my deadline a little early (hence the burst of posts today) only to be reminded that the next two weeks is going to be just as bad as the previous ones. Contrary to the impressions of some, academics have to justify their existence and the annual self-evaluations have to be read, judged, and commented upon by their peers. And unfortunately, this year I am one of those peers. So, along with class preps, theses drafts and the normal stuff to take care of, I have to work my way through a bunch of my colleagues'
self-evaluations and the evaluations that their students wrote of them. All to…
jlynch | January 31, 2007Today I ran a workshop for my freshmen on argumentative writing, so this seems appropriate:
Remember folks, an argument is "a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition" not "the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes."
jlynch | January 22, 2007I'm going to be a bit distracted until the weekend and maybe even longer. My annual self-evaluation is due to our Personnel Committee fairly soon, and I also have book reviews, letters of recommendation, student theses, and a few lesser service requirements to clear off my desk. And of course there are class preps to be done.
I have scheduled some posts, but don't expect anything major for a few days.
(The only respite is that I'm going to see The Chieftains play tomorrow night.)
jlynch | January 12, 2007Ah, the start of another semester. That exciting time of the year when you meet new students, make new goals, and invariably curse at the copy machine as it refuses to churn out syllabi for you. Such is mid-January in academia.
Or rather it will be on Tuesday. That's when it all kicks off here at ASU.
This semester I'm teaching two courses. The first is my Origins, Evolution and Creation course that I have been teaching since 1998. Every year I get students from varying religious and educational backgrounds and we examine the evidence for creationist claims (after spending some time…
jlynch | December 29, 2006I've noted before that the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) will be meeting in Phoenix next week and also that PZ, Grrl Scientist, and I will be participating in a media workshop on blogging. We've decided that this might also be a nice opportunity for Scienceblogs readers to get together,
so here's what we're proposing:
Friday January 5th @ 6:00pm. Meetup at a wateringhole near the conference (Hyatt Regency). Wander over to PZ's announcement, holler if you can attend, and suggest a place.
Saturday January 6th @ 5:30pm. Phoenix-area skeptic Jim Lippard has kindly…
jlynch | December 13, 2006Today I managed to finish my grading ... well, most of it. I still have my upper-division Darwin & Design course to take care of. Despite nursing a bad cold, yesterday I attended our Honors Commencement (only 29 graduates walked this semester, none of them working with me on theses ... I've five coming up in the spring). The last extended family members leave town tomorrow and as soon as I finish with the ASU Commencement today (I've the honor of bearing the college banner), I'm home free. Probably home to bed is more like it, but there you have it.
Boring post, I know.
jlynch | December 10, 2006As PZ notes, some of us ScienceBloggers will be at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting which occurs this time around in Phoenix. PZ, GrrlScientist and I will be the talking heads at the Media Worskshop on Thursday January 4th:
Media Workshop: Hey, Wanna Read My Blog?
Blogs are online "diaries" that are growing in popularity. Popular political and social commentary blogs are making the news, but is there more out there than chatty gossip and collections of links? How about some science? Can this trendy technology be useful for scientists? Come to the Media…
jlynch | November 27, 2006I've managed to finish my grading. Yipee! What this means is that the semester is finally beginning to wind down. Sure, there will be some grading left to do, but it will be relatively less onerous. Three classes left to teach, a handful of graduate student papers, and some short pieces from my undergraduates. Then Fall graduation and convocation ... and then the winter break (a.k.a. time for writing all those book reviews and suchlike that were put off this semester).
jlynch | November 26, 2006No posting today (or perhaps even tomorrow) as I'm tucked away in my lair grading. In any case, Mike Dunford made the only point I was going to make.
jlynch | November 22, 2006David H. Price writes:
In San Jose, on Saturday evening, November 18, 2006, the rank and file members of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) attending the Association's business meeting approved resolutions condemning the occupation of Iraq and the use of torture. ...
The first resolution condemns the American occupation of Iraq; calls for an immediate withdrawal of troops, the payment of reparations, and it asks that all individuals committing war crimes against Iraqis be prosecuted. This statement passed with little debate or dissent.
The second resolution condemns not only the…
jlynch | November 22, 2006Others have noticed that John Horgan has presented his own personal list of the ten "worst science books." Many of his choices aren't science books per se and he obviously ignores his own excerable The End of Science which was, frankly, drivel that brought much joy to postmodernist critics during the "Science Wars" of the 1990's. He's also, in my opinion, unfair to E.O. Wilson ... but that is an argument for another day.
Horgan does, however, get Gould's Rocks of Ages correct when he describes it as "Gould at his pompous, verbose worst. He managed somehow both to pander and condescend to…