Why Aren't You Reading This?
thusspakezuska | July 11, 2007There's a great review over at Adventures in Ethics and Science on a book called The Ethical Chemist: Professionalism and Ethics in Science by Jeffrey Kovac. The book takes a case study approach to teaching ethics in science.
The case studies are concise but rich with possibilities, and range from situations one might encounter as a student taking chemistry classes (or dealing with professors) to issues that might face the academic scientist trying to make a discovery or the industrial chemist trying to shore up the bottom line. Each case is followed by a brief commentary that examines the…
thusspakezuska | July 5, 2007The latest Scientiae Carnival is up at Amelie's Welt; the topic is responsibility. In a completely irresponsible move, I missed the deadline for contributions this time around, my first time. I can point to migraines and doctor appointments and MRI scans and whatnot last week but still, I should have put something together. Well, go and read the excellent contributions of the responsible bloggers who didn't let summer's fine weather turn them into slackers. Jokerine's mind map is a thing of beauty to behold, as well as instructive and thought-provoking. Amelie seems to worry that the…
thusspakezuska | June 21, 2007The Chronicle of Higher Education had a great piece this week about A. Van Jordan and his new book of poetry, Quantum Lyrics. Unfortunately, I think you need a subscription to read the article online. It's the June 22, 2007 issue, p. A48, if you have access to the print version.
"Physicists talk in metaphor all the time," says Mr. Jordan, 41, who weaves theories and theorems into his latest poetic examinations of history, race relations, memory, and grief. The centerpiece of Quantum Lyrics is a lengthy cycle of poems about Albert Einstein, but the book is alive with a wide array of…
thusspakezuska | June 8, 2007Many of my Sciblings have a regular Friday feature of one sort or another. For example, Dr. Free-Ride's got her Friday sprog-blogging, and there's Orac's Friday Dose of Woo over at Respectful Insolence. Karmen has Friday Fractals at Chaotic Utopia, which are particularly fun.
So I'm thinking of trying out my own Friday feature, which I am boringly calling "Friday Bookshelf". I've spent years collecting a mini-library of books on gender and science & engineering. Some of my readers will be familiar with more or less all of them; some may know of relatively few of them. I thought I…
thusspakezuska | June 1, 2007Yes, it's Scientiae Carnival time again! FemaleCSGradStudent has asked us "How We Are Hungry", and has collated and contextualized a most interesting set of responses.
Maybe you want to go visit Kat on a Wire and leave her a comment. Online communities can be very, very important for those of us deprived, for whatever reasons, of that community in the meat world.
Addy wants to be taken seriously. I swear, when I read this:
I was recently introduced to a professor emeritus in another department and he asked "are you a grad student?"
My first reaction was, "Hey, why is she writing about…
thusspakezuska | May 31, 2007From the Chronicle of Higher Education daily update, I learned about a forthcoming book, Mothers on the Fast Track: How a New Generation Can Balance Family and Careers:
In the new book, Ms. Mason and Ms. Ekman say it is common for women who start off in fast-track jobs in law, medicine, academe, and business to slip into the "second tier" once they have children.
Those jobs, they write, have fewer and more flexible hours, but do not pay as well and offer less responsibility. It is often difficult for women who slip into the second tier to make it back into the upper echelons of an…
thusspakezuska | May 29, 2007Some of you will remember the Life as a Leak series that I posted awhile back. If you were interested in that then you may want to read this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education: Conference Confidential. Annoyingly, it is behind a paywall, so you may want to look around for a print version of the Chronicle - the June 1, 2007 edition, page C3.
Alexandra M. Lord writes about her decision to leave a tenure-track job in history for life as a public historian, and her subsequent experiences attending professional conferences. She also mentions in passing her father, a chemical…
thusspakezuska | May 22, 2007I recently received a copy of Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies in the mail from the Seed offices. Although I can't say I was particularly dying to read this, free books are always a nice thing.
So I opened it up to take a look. Chapter 1 starts out this way:
For thousands of years, human beings have contemplated the world about them and asked the great questions of existence: Why are we here? How did the universe begin? How will it end? How is the world put together? Why is it the way it is?
and I might not have gotten the giggles there except that the next sentence goes on
For all of…
thusspakezuska | May 17, 2007The 6th Scientiae Carnival is up over at Sciencewoman's pad. The topic is "mothers and others, those who influenced us along the way" but the collected posts are not limited to this topic. Scienceowoman has put together a very interesting mix of some truly thought-provoking posts. As always, the richness of writing by women scientists and engineers continues to delight me.
This post by Female Science Professor on a new professorship for a woman in engineering in Switzerland sparked a lively discussion in the comments. And I very much liked this post by Jokerine on gender coding in talk…
thusspakezuska | May 4, 2007Bora notes that some people are wondering why there aren't more Indian (or Serbian) science bloggers. Bora links to an interesting post from Selva on this topic.
This is all very ironic to me because just two days ago I discovered the blog Nanopolitan (which, as it turns out, Selva has on his blogroll, so I could have discovered a lot sooner and by a lot less circuitous route than the one I followed). Nanopolitan is written by T. A. Abinandanan (Abi for short). Abi recently had an interesting series of posts on possible gender discrimination in India's top engineering institutions (TEI's)…
thusspakezuska | May 1, 2007The 5th Scientiae Carnival is up at Clarity. I've been so out of it most of this month that I had nothing to contribute to it this time. The carnival theme this time is why and how do you labor at what you do?
There's lots of good stuff on the carnival, as usual. You might want to check out this horror story, I mean nightmare, I mean descent into hell and back, I mean tale of a graduate student's struggle to wrest her PhD from the slimy paws of her advisor and committee.
thusspakezuska | April 2, 2007Mosey on over to Lab Cat's place and check out the third Scientiae. As is becoming the standard, lots of good stuff.
thusspakezuska | March 2, 2007I missed posting on this the day it went up because of my stupid health issues, but the first Scientiae carnival is up thanks to Skookumchick over at Rants of a Feminist Engineer! Go forth and read!
Also note that calls for the second carnival are already posted. Propter Doc of Post Doc Ergo Propter Doc will host.
Now I must get off the computer again before the stupid neck and shoulder seizes up on me. Y'all will have to wait a bit longer for the third installment of discussion of Week 2 of Joy of Science. I hope you are enjoying discussion posts one and two.
thusspakezuska | February 27, 2007Welcome to the Week 2 of our course on "Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science". This post will be a presentation of the summaries for each of this week's assigned readings. If you were not able to do the readings or couldn't get access to the books, I hope this post will give you a good flavor of what the week's readings were all about.
You can reference the course syllabus for more details about the readings in the whole course and the course structure. Here's the initial post about the course. And here are some guidelines about how I'll post on readings and what we should strive for in…
thusspakezuska | February 26, 2007The fabulous folks at Fairer Science, coming back from a great experience at the AAAS conference, have decided to share with all of us a few of their snazzy power point presentations:
...the session convinced me it was time to add a new section to FairerScience: "Presentation Tools." We've started it with two power points presentations (which can also be downloaded in pds):
Women, Science and Media: Where is the FairerScience? provides a general introduction to issues related to women scientists and the media and suggests some things that can be done to get more accurate portrayals.…
thusspakezuska | February 26, 2007Thanks to Skookumchick, there's a new blog carnival in town called Scientiae!
This is a blog carnival that compiles posts written about the broad topic of "women in STEM," (STEM=science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and may include posts:
stories about being a woman in STEM
exploring gender and STEM academia
living the scientific academic life as well as the rest of life
discussing how race, sexuality, age, nationality and other social categories intersect with the experience of being a woman in STEM
sharing feminist perspectives on science and technology
exploring feminist…
thusspakezuska | February 13, 2007This is the third of three discussion posts for Week 1 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/archives.php>archives and clicking on "Joy of Science" under in the Category section.
This post deals with the readings by Hubbard, Spanier, and Keller, as well as the NSF report "Beyond Bias and Barriers".
Ruth Hubbard, Bonnie Spanier, and Evelyn Fox Keller each made the transition from practicing scientist to feminist critic of science. Hubbard addresses an issue that bothered me greatly when I…
thusspakezuska | February 12, 2007This is the second of three discussion posts for Week 1 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the archives and clicking on "Joy of Science" under in the Category section.
This post deals with the readings by Silverman and by Wenneras & Wold, as well as the NSF report "Beyond Bias and Barriers".
These readings deal with two major issues that dog women throughout their careers in science and engineering: the wage gap and gender bias in peer review. Lest you think the data in the Silverman piece are out of date, consider the…
thusspakezuska | February 12, 2007This is the first of three discussion posts for Week 1 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the archives and clicking on "Joy of Science" under in the Category section.
This post deals with the readings by Eisenhart & Finkel and Brainard & Carlin.
"Women (Still) Need Not Apply" by Eisenhart and Finkel and "A Six-Year Longitudinal Study of Undergraduate Women in Engineering and Science" by Brainard and Carlin seem to be in conflict with each other. Can "compensatory strategies" like women in engineering (WIE) programs make…
thusspakezuska | February 12, 2007On the syllabus, I listed some questions for consideration when analyzing the readings for this week:
Why might women want to become scientists or engineers? Would their possible motivations differ from, or be in addition to, things that might make men want to become scientists or engineers?
I tried to keep these questions in mind as I wrote my discussion pieces for this week. If they inspire you for any of your comments, that's cool. The discussion piece will appear in several posts, as I find I am too wordy for one post.
And in that regard, let me just say that the professor has got…