thusspakezuska | February 24, 2009It's up and available for reading, people! Go over and enjoy at Urban Science Adventures!
This carnival celebrates the people of science and engineering - those who innovate, invent, research, teach, and reach out. This Blog Carnival tells the stories of achievement and perseverance. Why is such a celebration needed? Many reasons, but as Molecular Philosophy put it best, it is to showcase the individuals of science as ROLE MODELS. I think we have a fine list of Role Models for the Black History Month edition of Diversity in Science Carnival.
And when you look at just the first few entries…
thusspakezuska | February 24, 2009It's certainly a tragedy when anyone takes their own life. I feel very sorry for the surviving family members and colleagues affected by the suicides of two U. of Iowa professors accused of sexual harassment who took their own lives last year.
And yet. I have little patience with this Chronicle of Higher Education article about them. You can file it under the category of "but he was such a really wonderful person! There's just no way he could have done these things!" Or, alternatively, "Those TERRIBLE women RUINED the lives of these WONDERFUL men!"
In the case of Arthur H. Miller…
thusspakezuska | February 24, 2009As a graduate student, I observed the nascent field of functional magnetic resonance imaging and thought to myself with some amusement "modern phrenology! Now with big, fancy, expensive equipment!" Count me among those who have never been terribly impressed with fMRI, and certainly not with its applications in what is known as social neuroscience.
Now we have this:
Late last year, Ed Vul, a graduate student at MIT working with neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher and UCSD psychologist Hal Pashler, prereleased "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience" on his website. The journal Perspectives…
thusspakezuska | February 23, 2009The Feb. 20th Chronicle Review has a set of articles about grad school life. The statistics on how grad school cultivates and enhances depression and mental illness are, well, depressing. But if you are or ever have been a graduate student, you knew that already.
Studies have found that graduate school is not a particularly healthy place. At the University of California at Berkeley, 67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide…
thusspakezuska | February 22, 2009Scientists who are still at the bench may not ever think much about administration or, if they do, their thoughts may be markedly negative. And yet administrative work can be both important and personally rewarding and fulfilling, just as much so as bench research. I know, that sounds like sacrilege, but I've done both, so I think I know what I'm talking about. So for my contribution (as terribly late as it is) to the Diversity in Science blog carnival, I want to talk about African-American women in higher education administration.
In 2001 I had the good fortune to attend the HERS Bryn…
thusspakezuska | February 22, 2009Very often in my life I find myself in the situation my dad used to describe as "a day late and a dollar short". So it is once more. This past month I have allowed preoccupation with a number of issues, some familiar some not, to get squarely in the way of blogging. And out of the past 22 days, eight of them came with migraines. So what with one thing and another, I find myself arrived at nearly the end of February, and not only have I not managed to write my post for Danielle Lee's exciting new blog carnival, I haven't even managed to post an announcement about it. I am pathetic.…
thusspakezuska | February 20, 2009I love Ursula K. le Guin's the Earthsea series, and recently finished reading the final novel, The Other Wind. Those who are familiar with the Earthsea books will know that among other topics, le Guin explores traditional gender roles, their change, and men's disparagement of women's power. Towards the end of The Other Wind, one of the characters, Tenar, observes
How men feared women! she thought, walking among the late-flowering roses. Not as individuals, but women when they talked together, worked together, spoke up for one another - then men saw plots, cabals, constraints, traps being…
thusspakezuska | February 20, 2009Spawned by Alice over at Sciencewomen, who dragged it here from Facebook. Because I needed something silly and lighthearted to think about.
1. YOUR REAL NAME:
Suzanne Franks
2.WITNESS PROTECTION NAME:(mother and fathers middle names)
Ann George
3.NASCAR NAME:(first name of your mother's dad, father's dad)
Andrew Steven
4.STAR WARS NAME:(the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first name)
Frasu
5.DETECTIVE NAME:(favorite color, favorite animal)
Green Cat
6.SOAP OPERA NAME:(middle name, town where you were born)
Elizabeth Bobtown
7.SUPERHERO NAME: (2nd fav color, fav…
thusspakezuska | February 16, 2009I found out about both of these courtesy of the Chronicle Review Note Bene/New Books in Print feature. Both look extremely interesting.
First, Revisiting Race in a Genomic World, from Rutgers University Press.
With the completion of the sequencing of the human genome in 2001, the debate over the existence of a biological basis for race has been revived. In Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, interdisciplinary scholars join forces to examine the new social, political, and ethical concerns that are attached to how we think about emerging technologies and their impact on current conceptions…
thusspakezuska | February 16, 2009Whenever I go back home to see my mom, I usually spend some time visiting with her cousin D., who lives in the house across the street from my mother's house. D. has spent a good many years taking care of his elderly mother, my great-aunt. I have known D. all my life. As a child growing up, he was one of my elders. As a young adult, coming back home now and then for visits, I often didn't know what to say to him when our paths would cross, thinking I didn't have much in common with him. Now we are both intimately involved with the care of our elderly mothers and this brings us a…
thusspakezuska | February 10, 2009I love being part of ScienceBlogs. I've gotten to meet a lot of my Sciblings in person by now and have generally found them to be wonderful people. Readers, I like them!
Except. I really don't like the trash one of my Sciblings has been flinging around lately. Sooooo not cool. Details over at Isis's pad. Sing it, sister!
When people go around saying stuff like this
I have been accused of not being on board because I don't like the anger. At the same time I'm a progenitor of anger when I feel like doing it. I admit that the anger works, but I also feel that ally building is sometimes…
thusspakezuska | February 9, 2009In my last post, I wrote
Me, personally, I'd like to see a lot more chicks in touch with their Inner Pissed-Off Woman, spouting off, making people uncomfortable. It's good for all of us.
I received an email in response from Anonymous Reader:
I...liked [your] post about sometimes you just have to show your anger. I understand and sympathize, but am not sure it is always the greatest strategy in academia. If you do it very often, you then become tiresome even for fellow travelers and are seen only as the strident pain in the ass by the old white guy establishment. At least for administrators, I…
thusspakezuska | February 8, 2009Here's the story:
Samia was hacked off about something.
I know I recommended white science bloggers link to other bloggers in a show of link-lovin, but some of the stuff I see just seems tokenizing/LOOK AT ME I'M OPENMINDED! Ew. Fuck a bunch of wannabes.
This kinda got Isis hacked off.
What the fuck??? No, I mean seriously. What the fuck?...
...So what has you upset Samia? Is it a particular incident or the blogosphere in general. Either way, you've got to offer more guidance than today's brief blog-lashing. You've established yourself as an advocate for diversity and as someone who is…
thusspakezuska | February 5, 2009It was snowing again last night as I drove back from the assisted living home to the house my mother was born in, and it was cold - very cold. It was supposed to get down to around 10° F, with windchills as low as -5 to -15. My route took me past the bathhouse (third picture down on that page) my grandfather used to use before and after his shifts in the coal mine. Mom and I had been talking about Pappap and his miner's pick-axe.
I thought about our conversation as I drove by the bathhouse. I tried to imagine what it would have been like, on a winter's night much like this one, to be…
thusspakezuska | February 4, 2009The Chronicle News Blog has an item today on a new film about the Montreal Massacre, Polytechnique. I don't have time to do much else than tell you about it. Go read what the News Blog has to say about it. Try to ignore the inevitable ensuing pro-con gun control discussion in the comments.
thusspakezuska | January 29, 2009A week or so ago I finally gave in and allowed my friends to convince me that I really, really needed to go on Facebook. It has been fun - I've gotten back in touch with some old friends I'd lost track of; I've enjoyed reading tidbits about the daily goings-on of my friends' lives; I've tried to figure out what the heck L'il Green Patch is all about.
Yet it also seems to me, in some ways, like a nightmare. With email, I log on, read messages, respond, delete, I'm done. With blogging, I log on, write a blog post, post it, check comments to see if anything is languishing in moderation, I'm…
thusspakezuska | January 28, 2009Perhaps you have noticed our newly redesigned front page, and on that page, a link to the Rightful Place Project. In his inaugural address, President Obama promised to restore science to its "rightful place". Seed Media Group is starting a dialog in response, asking the question "What is science's rightful place?", through Seed Magazine and ScienceBlogs. Our benevolent overlordz have asked us to offer our thoughts in response to this question.
You'll see at the Rightful Place page that you can submit your own thoughts on this question, and there is a link to the Rightful Place blog to…
thusspakezuska | January 27, 2009The other day I needed to pick up a few items at the grocery store, and run a few errands. So I made a list, because I cannot keep more than two or three things in my head with any degree of accuracy. I used time-tested technology to achieve this purpose: paper and pen.
But apparently this is no longer sufficient. Oh no. You need a SmartShopper Grocery List Organizer!
The SmartShopper is small electronic device for you to speak your grocery list and errands into, because after all, who can be bothered with the time-consuming chore of writing down something like "eggs" or "toothpaste"…
thusspakezuska | January 22, 2009Gordon Brownell is the person who got me to go to MIT.
I had turned down my acceptance at MIT because my then fiance (now ex-husband) did not get in. Dr. Brownell telephoned me himself to ask why I had declined the nuclear engineering department's offer. When I explained the circumstances, he replied, "oh, is that all? Well, we can take care of that!" And he did. He arranged for my fiance to be accepted into nuclear engineering as well, and so off the two of us went to MIT.
And that, my friends, is how you actively recruit women into your program.*
It was with great sadness that I…
thusspakezuska | January 21, 2009As if the world needed another example of how the American health insurance system is completely insane, maddening, inefficient...I mean, we've all seen Sicko, right? But let me just share the private hell I've been through recently. I'd like to tell you what happened yesterday, but to do that, I have to go back a month or two.
In November my mother was hospitalized, and then spent time in a rehab hospital. During that time, she had a CT scan that diagnosed blood clots in her lungs. Medicare had approved my mother's stay in the rehab hospital and, presumably, the treatments and…