Science Life
purepedantry | September 10, 2008Inside Higher Ed describes a study of complete rates for PhD students broken down by race/ethnicity, gender, whether the student is international or domestic, and by discipline. Here is the key chart:
Cumulative Completion Rates for Students Starting Ph.D. Programs, 1992-3 Through 1994-5
Group
By Year 5
By Year 6
By Year 7
By Year 8
By Year 9
By Year 10
Gender
--Male
24%
39%
48%
53%
57%
58%
--Female
16%
30%
41%
47%
52%
55%
Race/Ethnicity
--African American
16%
25%
34%
40%
44%
47%
--Asian…
purepedantry | May 27, 2008Don't tell my boss...
Prospects for work this summer are not improving...and fast.
purepedantry | May 5, 2008A post over at the Scientist blog laments the difficulty in getting people to acknowledge the English-language bias in science:
Many, perhaps most, scientists are grateful that English has become the international language, but an informative protest comes from Prof. Tsuda Yukio of Japan, who has taught in the U.S.
"Today one speaks of globalization. It's really Americanization....the dollar economy and communication in English. Isn't it appropriate to think about egalitarian communication and linguistic equality? .... When I told Americans that the reign of English causes linguistic…
purepedantry | March 25, 2008Anne Casselman at Inkling has this hysterical article on scientists/physicians with beards. Here's a bit on why some public health experts want doctors to lose the beard:
Fast forward to 1967, when three scientists from the Industrial Health and Safety Office in Maryland tested their hypothesis that "a bearded man subjects his family and friends to risk of infection if his beard is contaminated by infectious microorganisms while he is working in a microbiological laboratory." The result of their studies was a paper published in Applied Microbiology titled "Microbiological Laboratory Hazard…
purepedantry | August 27, 2007Bring more science into your life with scientific knitting...
This comes via Virginia Postrel where she examines the new glamorous scientist.
That makes the extraordinary success of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which begins its eighth season this month, all the more remarkable. Unlike its direct spin-offs and numerous imitators, which are more-conventional cop melodramas, the original CSI has at its core an eccentric scientist: obsessive, brilliant, objective, and self-contained. "Oh, I have outlets," says Gil Grissom. "I read. I study bugs. I sometimes even ride roller coasters." What a…
purepedantry | August 27, 2007James Kirchick at Independent Gay Forum mentions the trouble he has had dating outside his politics:
"I can't date someone with a different belief system" is what he told me. I expected this answer from the guy I had been casually seeing. From early on, I suspected that our differing political bents -- his liberal, mine more conservative -- would ultimately cause a split. Once, we had a heated argument when I said offhandedly that people who could not afford to care for children should not have them (not a policy prescription, just a profession of personal ethics). After that, I tried to…
purepedantry | August 14, 2007I sometimes gave my anatomy professors hell for wearing anatomy-themed t-shirts, but this is a whole new level. Check out these anatomy-themed tattoos.
There are many more here.
Hat-tip: Andrew Sullivan
purepedantry | August 14, 2007This is pretty funny, but also quite true. It is from a comment on a post at Chicago Boyz:
One of the arguments in Jonathan Rauch's "In Defense of Prejudice," is another dirty secret is that, no less than the rest of us, scientists can be dogmatic and pigheaded. "Although this pigheadedness often damages the careers of individual scientists," says Hull, "it is beneficial for the manifest goal of science," which relies on people to invest years in their ideas and defend them passionately. And the dirtiest secret of all, if you believe in the antiseptic popular view of science, is that this…
purepedantry | September 25, 2006James Gorman, writing in the NYTimes, laments the relative dearth of molecular biology colloquialisms:
Geology and ophthalmology may provide most of our overused metaphors (maybe that's what geopolitics is), but other sciences do their part. Anatomy has contributed the jaws of defeat, into which one could presumably fall after stepping off a brink and sliding down a slippery slope. Cosmology has contributed the black hole. I found a particularly good use of this astronomical phenomenon in an article in Macleans on Canadian politics. In it a politician refers to the "black hole of constituency…
purepedantry | July 24, 2006Fellow Scienceblogger Jonah Lehrer has this nice little vignette in Seed arguing that practice is more important than ability. Two examples that could be forwarded for the idea of innate genius are Mozart and Tiger Woods, two child prodigies that practiced a lot harder than most people give them credit for:
Mozart began playing at two, and if he averaged 35 hours of practice a week-- his father was known as a stern taskmaster--he would, by the age of eight, have accumulated Ericsson's golden number of 10,000 hours of practice. In addition, Mozart's early symphonies are not nearly as…