sciencewoman | May 7, 2009Remember Bill Nye the Science Guy, that television popularizer of science for kids? Maybe it's time to give him an update and a facelift. That's the goal of Susan the Scientist, a project of Dr. Susan Reslewic, who is launching a new blog, myspace, and youtube presence to (in her words):
teach 'citizen science' to kids and curious adults using music and objects in our local households to conduct simple experiments online. The idea is to make science both hip, simple, and most importantly fun. We hope to build this project and message making this available, free online this coming year.
Here's…
sciencewoman | May 5, 2009Alice is right, I have been locked in grading jail. For my amusement, and for the sake of posting something, here's a look at how I've been doing my hard time:
Number of intro-level papers graded: 72
Number of intro-level papers to go: 0 (WooHoo!)
Number of multiple choice questions ready to go in Blackboard for the final exam: 60
Number of emails received from intro-level students in the last week: greater than 30
Number of those emails asking how to calculate their grade or when the final exam is: greater than 20
Number of upper-level papers submitted: 22
Number of upper-level papers…
skookumchick | May 4, 2009ScienceWoman and I are either approaching or inhabiting grading jail, I think. I'm working on grading 30 teams' first-year design projects where teams of 4 had to design a procedure to calculate the energy footprint of a building/system on campus (related to this post). On Friday, we summed up all the systems (overlooking that there were replicates and different ways to estimate embodied energy) and our estimate of our campus system's energy footprint is 9.44e9 kW-hr per year. (We estimate that to be about 7500 trans-Atlantic flights.) So now I'm slogging through the individual reports.…
skookumchick | April 29, 2009It has been a horrible week at work. Horrible. Actually, it started in the middle of last week. Suffice it to say I have had many behind-the-door conversations, real sturm und drang, and I find it completely unbloggable. Just no idea where to start. So until I figure that out, let me share the tiniest silver lining of this week:
Asparagus from our local CSA guy. Our harvest basket starts next week. And Friday is the last day of class this semester. (If I can make it.)
sciencewoman | April 29, 2009Let me now sing the praises of NASA's Earth Observatory, a phenomenal web-based public education resource that is celebrating its 10th birthday today. Every day for the past decade, NASA has been uploading spectacular remote sensing images and astronaut photographs and accompanying them with clearly written, jargon-free but scientifically accurate explanations of the pictured phenomena. The Earth Observatory is one of my favorite web destinations, and I get their weekly email newsletter, and follow them on twitter. (Follow me!)
On numerous occasions, I've used Earth Observatory images to…
sciencewoman | April 28, 2009This being the last week of class, it seems appropriate to reflect a bit more on the semester just finishing. Bluntly, this has been an awful semester for me in terms of things that count toward reappointment, tenure, and (nonexistent) merit raises. If you don't want to hear me whine a little about the suckitude and where that puts me going into the summer, then don't click through.
After two rounds of painful reviews, I had a paper rejected. I'll resubmit it to a lower tier journal, but not without another round of revisions. I have never liked this project.
I missed the deadline for a…
sciencewoman | April 25, 2009ScienceGrandma pointed me to this recent article in the Wall Street Journal. It's titled "So You Want to Be a Professor?" but I think it should have been called "The Perils of a Ph.D."
The article begins by citing some examples of graduate schools that are reducing admissions of PhD applicants for next year, in what may be a cost-cutting move. As we all know, graduate assistantships cost $25K or more per year, even if the grad student doesn't see much of it and returns those costs to the university by teaching labs, grading papers, and doing other grunt work. Apparently, some universities…
skookumchick | April 24, 2009There's an article on the New York Times Online about Allannah Thomas, founder of Helicon, a non-profit that helps low-income women learn math skills they need for better jobs. Thomas's courses are called "math boot camp" because of their focus on fundamental skills, and she works with women to help them develop those skills you need for business, quantitative reasoning, scaling, or technical work.
The article reminds me a bit of the philosophy of Bob Moses, founder of the Algebra Project -- somehow, we live in a culture where it is somehow okay for adults to say to kids asking for help on…
sciencewoman | April 22, 2009Alice and I have been talking about the big and small ways that universities could act to improve the environment, but Earth Day is also about making personal changes to lessen your environmental impact.
So it's fitting that Mike Dunford has issued us an Earth Day challenge:
I'd like you to take a minute or two to come up with three things that you can do to be more environmentally friendly. The first should be something that's small, and easy to do. The second should be more ambitious - something you'll try to do, but might not manage to pull off. The third should be something you can do to…
skookumchick | April 22, 2009Today for me consisted of one PhD defense (I was on the committee; it was successfully defended, congrats Dr. Ken!), a meeting about ADVANCE, 2 hrs of class, another PhD meeting that I'm on the committee of, and then a bunch of following up with folks. So it's been pretty packed, as usual. (Tomorrow looks quite humane in contrast!)
But I didn't want to let today slip by without acknowledging that it is Earth Day. I thought about titling this post "Happy Earth Day!" but it really isn't, is it? The earth is in a mess, global warming is terrifying, and so is the general apathy towards global…
sciencewoman | April 21, 2009Like many other public universities around the country, Mystery U has been hit hard by the economic hard times. Most of this year, we heard ominous rumblings that (at some point) there would be a budget reversion, i.e., we'd have to send some portion of our budget back to the state coffers. But all was pretty much business as usual until a few weeks ago when the axe fell. Instantaneously our whole university budget and we were under strict orders to conserve the precious resources we still had...you know, things like copier paper. Because we have no money to buy any more.
I've been biting my…
skookumchick | April 20, 2009Blogger Feministx popped over the other day to visit and leave a comment on SW's "goody goody" post. I hadn't read Feministx before, but she claims she "started my blog with the intention of focusing on feminist concerns, but lately I have taken to writing about the biological basis of human behavior." Feministx invited Sciencewomen readers to come past her blog because"I really need some women that are interested in science to come add to my blog. Lately, I have been writing about biological basis of behavior issues and most of my readership has become male. They tend to disagree with me…
skookumchick | April 20, 2009I've noticed that a certain grimness has entered my colleagues' and my attitude over the last week or so. It's a "there is only (X) days/weeks left, we just have to finish" attitude, similar to what I anticipate marathon runners experience around about 24 miles or so. A just keep going, don't break down now, you are mortgaging your body with lack of sleep and too much effort, but keep going, you only have a little bit left, and then you can sleep kind of thing. Does that sound familiar?
Well, to try to combat this attitude in myself, my husband and I took ourselves camping this weekend.…
sciencewoman | April 18, 2009Hi there. Long time, no see. I've been busy doing work, having fun, and remembering to celebrate the good things in my life. Here's what's been happening in the past week:
Monday: I got to see a beautiful new place.
Tuesday: My flights home proceeded smoothly.
Wednesday: My daughter woke me up by laughing in her sleep.
Thursday: My PhD student passed hir orals/comps.
Friday: My undergraduate student presented hir first poster and won an honorable mention in the campus undergraduate research conference.
Today: Minnow, Princess Pup and I spent a lovely morning walking in the woods.
We're into…
skookumchick | April 17, 2009 I don't have time to read blogs anymore. And yet, I still have over 211 RSS subscriptions in my Google Reader. To assuage my guilt at having many times the "1000+" posts I haven't read, I thought I would share some cool sites I've come across. Somehow it makes me feel better. Details below the fold, and apologies for not acknowledging where I came across these because I've forgotten. ;-)
Mapping the Marvellous: just the most marvelous collection of curiosities and interesting things, written by Marion Endt. She writes, "Books, articles, quotes, images, concepts, theories and thoughts…
skookumchick | April 17, 2009It was 3 years ago today that I started blogging. I started with a pseudonymous blog, at the edge of the internet, as a lonely graduate student, trying to navigate my dissertation, a long-distance relationship, and unsure future career prospects. My blog, with my pseudonym, is still out there because the prospect of cutting it off made me feel like I was lying, like I was ashamed of what I wrote. But I'm thinking, on this anniversary, maybe it is time to take it down. Retire it, and the url too. Because maybe I could then bring my pseudonym back out of the shadows, where it has been…
skookumchick | April 16, 2009Katharine Haxton over at Endless Possibilities 2.0 on the Nature Network is stepping into another Scientiae hosting breech (yikes!) and will be hosting the May Scientiae, to be posted May 1. She's suggested "A Snapshot" as the theme -- a blog timecapsule for yourself, marking May 2009. Get your posts in by April 30!
skookumchick | April 16, 2009OMG, my sister-in-law is going into labor! How exciting!!
That is all for now. More as things develop, as it were.
skookumchick | April 16, 2009It's maybe hard for some of us to believe, but it has been 2 years since the Virginia Tech massacre. Day of Remembrance activities in Blacksburg include a candlelight vigil, a memorial run, and an open house in the renovated Norris Hall.
It's amazing for me to think about how we are two years on from this event -- in particular, because I interviewed at Virginia Tech the week before, and turned down their offer the morning of the massacre, right before it happened. It was surreal, almost too much to believe.
Once I heard the news, I immediately emailed the folks I had met with, terrified of…