society
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 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…
drorzel | February 28, 2013Every now and then, I run across a couple of items that tie together a whole bunch of different issues that weigh heavily on my mind. That happened yesterday courtesy of Timothy Burke, whose blog post about an NPR story is so good that there aren't enough +1 buttons on the entire Internet for it.
The NPR piece is about eating and exercise habits, and the way families struggle to do what they know they ought to:
More than half of children ate or drank something during the "crunch time" window that can lead to unhealthy weight gain, as perceived by their parents. And more than a quarter of…
drorzel | January 5, 2013I started following Chris Stedman on Twitter thanks to a recommendation from Josh Rosenau citing him as someone who promotes atheism without being contemptous of religious people. He was, indeed, a source of religion-and-politics material that I found congenial, and when I noticed he was flogging a forthcoming book, I picked up a copy, which I just got around to reading.
I'm a little hesitant to review this at all here on ScienceBlogs, given past history. I've pretty much completely withdrawn from culture-war blogging, finding it more aggravating than useful, and these days just about the…
drorzel | December 17, 2012As I'm sure you wish you hadn't heard, there was another school shooting in Connecticut on Friday, one that was hellishly awful even by the standards of such things. The Internet, of course, instantly exploded with the depressingly predictable standard response. And it's hard to put into words just how depressing it is that there's a standard response to this-- The Onion pretty well nailed it back in July, but amazingly, they managed to do it again this time.
I shut social media down for most of the day-- and, anyway, I was home with a sick SteelyKid-- but the usual flamewar was still in full…
drorzel | November 29, 2012In the comments to yesterday's post about college admissions, Joseph Yoon quoted my statement that "I'm somewhat sympathetic to claims that Asians have a difficult position in higher education," and shot back with:
I wonder if you will feel more strongly about this in 10 years when your kids are near college. Will you advise them to not check the Asian box if it decreases their chances?
As a general matter, I try to avoid responding to comments when my initial reaction is "Oh, go fuck yourself." But I'll make an exception here, because I think it goes to a more general issue about college…
drorzel | May 30, 2012In which we compare a couple of different systems for evaluating teachers, looking at what's involved in doing a fair assessment of a teacher's performance.
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Another casualty of the great blog upgrade, in the sense of a post that was delayed until the inspiration for it has been forgotten by most of the people who might want to talk about it, was this Grant Wiggins post on accountability systems:
[The Buckingham, Browne, and Nichols prep school where he taught in the 80's] had a state of the art teacher performance appraisal system back in the 80’s (we’ll need current or recent folks…
drorzel | May 2, 2012A week or so ago, lots of people were linking to this New York Review of Books article by Steven Weinberg on "The Crisis of Big Science," looking back over the last few decades of, well, big science. It's somewhat dejected survey of whopping huge experiments, and the increasing difficulty of getting them funded, including a good deal of bitterness over the cancellation of the Superconducting Supercollider almost twenty years ago. This isn't particularly new for Weinberg-- back at the APS's Centennial Meeting in Atlanta in 1999, he gave a big lecture where he spent a bunch of time fulminating…
drorzel | April 27, 2012This is apparently my day to be annoyed at the reporting of pieces about gender differences in STEM, because a bunch of people are linking to this PBS NewsHour article about women in engineering, which is linked to an interview with Maria Klawe of Harvey Mudd College, who I ran across a few weeks back thanks to a New York Times profile/article. While the general thrust of the piece is very good, there are a couple of areas where the reporting really breaks down, in a way that is pretty annoying.
One of these is just the usual breakdown whenever anything remotely quantitative comes up in media…
drorzel | April 27, 2012Somebody on Twitter linked this article about "brogrammers", which is pretty much exactly as horrible as that godawful neologism suggests. In between descriptions of some fairly appalling behavior, though, they throw some stats at you, and that's where it gets weird:
As it is, women remain acutely underrepresented in the coding and engineering professions. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics study, in 2011 just 20 percent of all programmers were women. A smaller percentage of women are earning undergraduate computer science degrees today than they did in 1985, according to the National…
drorzel | April 23, 2012Via Joerg Heber on Twitter, a great post on gender divisions in STEM by Athene Donald:
As children try to work out their personal identities, the difference between 'boy' and 'girl' is as fundamental and omnipresent as it gets - and they receive the clear messages that collectively society gives out about the attributes implicitly associated with that distinction. Inevitably they are likely to 'hear' the message that boys are noisy, into everything and generally vigorous and enquiring, whereas girls are 'expected' to be good, docile, nurturing and passive. Parents may do all they can to…
drorzel | April 12, 2012The big publishing news this week is the US Department of Justice bringing an anti-trust suit against the major book publishers and Apple for allegedly colluding to force the "agency model" of ebook pricing on Amazon and other retailers, resulting in higher prices for consumers. I already links dumped an article about the detailed charges, and three of the six companies involved have agreed to a settlement that will change the way their books get priced. A couple of the publishers, particularly Macmillan, whose nasty public spat with Amazon kicked this whole thing off, have decided to fight…
drorzel | April 5, 2012Over in Scientopia, SciCurious has a nice post about suffering from Impostor Syndrome, the feeling that everyone else is smarter than you are, and you will soon be exposed as a total fraud. Which is nonsense, of course, but something that almost every scientist suffers at some point. The post ends on a more upbeat note, though, when she thinks about fighting it:
The more I thought about ways to combat imposter syndrome, either by myself or in academia in general...the more I came up with nothing. Until today, when I was working out.
I'm doing circuit training, and as I worked my way through…
drorzel | March 27, 2012I was thinking about attitudes toward physics the other day, and realized that whenever I meet somebody (not a physicist) for the first time and tell them that I'm a physicist, their initial responses most frequently fall into one of three general categories:
"You must be really smart."
"I hated that when I took it in high school/ college."
"Can you explain string theory to me?"
It occurs to me that this helps explain why physicists are not generally considered scintillating conversationalists. Because, really, where can you go from any of those starting points?
Anyway, that got me…
drorzel | March 27, 2012I mentioned this in the Links Dump this morning, but Timothy Burke's post on the inherent tensions in the residential part of small college life is really excellent stuff, and deserves more than the 1000 characters I can quote in Delicious:
At Swarthmore this semester, for example, some students were deeply annoyed that the administration attempted to enforce a rule against parties between midnight and 2am on Thursday nights (or Friday mornings, to be more precise). Other students are this very minute angry that the administration has not acted more forcefully, rapidly or directly against…
drorzel | January 9, 2012In comments to Friday's snarky post, I was chided for not engaging with the critique of standardized testing offered by Washington Post education blogger Valerie Strauss. I had intended to say more about the general topic, as there have been a bunch of much-cited articles in a similar vein crossing my RSS reader recently, but I sprained my ankle playing basketball at lunch, which kind of blew a hole in my afternoon...
Looking at her posts, though, it's hard to really engage with her critique, because there's next to nothing there to engage with. In the most recent post, the closest thing to a…
drorzel | September 2, 2011As mentioned earlier in the week, I recently read Charles C. Mann's 1493 (see also this interview at Razib's place), which includes a long section about the colony at Jamestown. Like most such operations, the earliest colonists were almost comically incompetent, managing to nearly starve to death several times, despite being in an absurdly fertile region, and nearly running out of money on multiple occasions before they stumbled on the idea of tobacco as a cash crop (at which point they nearly starved again because all agricultural activity shifted to tobacco, and they needed to force people…
drorzel | August 24, 2011The new school year is upon us, so there's been a lot of talk about academia and how it works recently. This has included a lot of talk about the cost of higher education, as has been the case more or less since I've been aware of the cost of higher education. A lot of people have been referring to a "Student Loan Bubble," such as Dean Dad, who points to this graph from Daniel Indiviglio as an illustration:
That post is a week old, which is a hundred years in blog time, and I wish I'd gotten to it sooner, because it's a terrible graph. Indiviglio says:
This chart looks like a mistake, but it…
drorzel | August 22, 2011The whole issue of pseudonymity has come up again, both on Google+ and on ScienceBlogs. While I've been on the Internet for nigh on 20 years, my initial point of entry was through a Usenet group that strongly preferred real names (or something real-name-ish). As a result, I've never tried to maintain a separate Internet name-- all of my Usenet posting and all of my blogging has been under my real name. So I don't have a great deal invested in the question, on a personal level.
There are a couple of points, though, that I think are worth making about the recent discussion:
1) There's a much-…
drorzel | August 15, 2011Over in Twitter-land, Josh Rosenau re-tweeted a comment from Seattle_JC:
It is a bad sign when the promotion of science and science education has been reduced to a grassroots movement in this society.
It's a nice line, but it doesn't entirely make sense. When I hear the term "grass-roots movement," I think of something that has widespread popularity among the public at a low level, with that public support forcing political elites to take notice. Things like organized labor back in the day, or antiwar activism in the Vietnam era.
That's almost the opposite of how the term is used here. If we…