Academia
neurotopia | June 15, 2006...and they shall have one!! The question:
How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?...
Well the answer is... we don't!!! I'm definitely not going to be one of SEED's most prolific bloggers, but I would bet that most of us don't find the time, we make the time. Unfortunately this time may come at the expense of spouses, kids, hanging out with friends, exercise, fishing, whatever.
So perhaps the better question is... why do we do it? I can't speak for…
catdynamics | June 14, 2006Bérubé pontificates on Academic Freedom
Read it.
I don't want to tell you how much time was wasted chasing down the false allegation of the the "bio instructor who showed a Michael Moore movie in class" last year, this issue is not just one of principle for academia, it is a matter of pragmatism, these idiots can smother a university for months by a single lie.
A colleague of mine likes to calculate the opportunity cost of administrative task; if you figure a mean cost of ~ $50 per faculty per hour then a committee of 8 people meeting for two hours four times in a semester is an effective…
neurotopia | June 14, 2006I have just learned that Reed Cartwright successfully defended his dissertation and now joins the inner cabal of the Evil Darwinist Conspiracy!!! He is expected to report to his new job for the Department of Manufactured Evidence after a night of heavy drinking and debauchery.
Congratulations Reed! Errr, Dr. Cartwright!
scientificactivist | June 14, 2006Via Evolving Thoughts comes news that the Public Library of Science (PLoS) is starting a series of blogs to promote its recently announced interdisciplinary PLoS ONE journal. PLoS publishes several prestigious open access scientific journals and is now taking things a step further with a new journal that will, among other things, "empower the scientific community to engage in a discussion on every paper and provide readers with tools to annotate and comment on papers directly." In the stuffy culture of science publishing, this is a pretty big deal.
Although PLoS ONE won't use open peer…
drorzel | June 14, 2006Tara wrote a post about pressure to be perfect a few days back. This collided somewhat weirdly with this month's Rolling Stone piece on Duke (cashing in on the lacrosse scandal), which includes a few serious issues among a bunch of credulous stuff about sex:
In 2003, Duke launched a yearlong study, known as the ''Duke Women's Initiative,'' to look at the social attitudes and concerns of women on campus. What they found was alarming, says Donna Lisker, director of Duke University's women's center. The kind of hyperactivity Allison describes is typical among female undergraduates, whom, Lisker…
drorzel | June 14, 2006The esteemed Dr. Free-Ride has a post about politics responding to Sean Carroll's recap of Yearly Kos. Both of them say things about the practice of politics that nicely encapsulate why I'm not a political activist-- I'm too much of an academic:
Sean:
Deep down, though, I learned once again that an environment of political activism is not for me. I've volunteered and been active politically in very minor ways in the past, and I am always reminded that I should go back to academia where I belong. Of necessity, political action feeds on fervent commitment to the cause and a deep-seated…
drorzel | June 14, 2006Rob Knop talks about a great teaching moment: A student who refused to just smile and nod:
I was very grateful for that student. You see, when professors ask, "do you understand that?", it's not a test. It's not the professor trying to catch the students up in admitting to being confused, it's not the professor trying to sepearate the good students (Hermiones) from the bad students, the latter being the ones who will admit to struggling with the material. When we ask the question "do you understand that?" we ask it because we want to, yes, find out if the students understood what we just did…
scientificactivist | June 13, 2006"Ph.D. programs don't really attract the most exceptional students," he said. I was having dinner with a few professors and graduate students from the Oxford Department of Biochemistry last night when one of the professors made that assertion. The topic of conversation was why so many graduate students in our program seem to lack a broad knowledge of areas of biochemistry outside of their specific area of research.
Feeling slightly offended, and fueled by the copious quantities of wine we had consumed, I pointedly asked, "Have you actually seen any figures that would back that up?" He hadn…
jstemwedel | June 13, 2006Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance has a great post with some of his thoughts about Yearly Kos. In it, he describes the convention's heartening attention to matters scientific:
The good news is: science! Thanks largely to DarkSyde's efforts, there was a substantial presence of science bloggers at YearlyKos. A "Science Bloggers Caucus" on Thursday night, which I expected to collect a dozen or so misplaced souls who weren't interested in the gatherings sponsored by some of the big political blogs, instead packed a room to overflowing with over fifty energetic participants from a wide cross-…
drorzel | June 13, 2006Inside Higher Ed has a story this morning about Smith College moving toward requiring math. Smith, a women's college in Massacusetts, has had an "open curriculum" (i.e., no requirements at all) for many years, which has allowed lots of students to graduate without ever taking a course requiring math or mathematical reasoning.
They haven't introduced a requirement yet, but they're apparently leaning in that direction. As you might expect, I'm all in favor of this-- I think we need to demand a greater level of mathematical knowledge from all our college graduates.
As a confirmed liberal arts…
tsmith | June 13, 2006This week's Ask a Scienceblogger question is:
"Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?"
Musings below the fold...
First, I'll note that this question was actually somewhat difficult for me. I really, really like my job. It's a combination of all the things I "wanted to be when I grew up." Part medicine, part author, part teacher, part disease researcher (OK, so it's not investigating Ebola in the DRC, but it's still interesting). But, if I had unlimited time and money and had to…
tsmith | June 12, 2006About two weeks ago, Cognitive Daily linked an article discussing The Paradox of the Perfect Girl.
The perfect girl is everywhere. She is your niece, your daughter, your friend's genius kid. She is the girl who makes the valedictorian speech at your son's graduation and the type-A class president in the skimpy black dress that he brings to the prom. The perfect girl is thin and hungry, not for food, but for honors, awards, scholarships, recognition. The Princeton Review book is the perfect girl's bible. Her appointment book, even at 14, is filled morning to night with scheduled activities…
drorzel | June 12, 2006One of my least favorite end-of-term rituals for faculty is the dreaded student course evaluations. These have two components: the numerical bubble-sheet evaluations, which provide the pseudo-quantitatvie evaluation used to compare courses, and written responses to a half-dozen very general questions. The latter are at least potentially more useful, particularly when the standard questions are supplemented with some class-specific questions, and end up providing some of the most useful feedback on my teaching (though this sometimes includes things I can't do much about, such as the student…
retrospectacle | June 12, 2006A common question I am asked, on my blog and in real life, is what is the "trick" to getting into a good graduate program (for the sciences). The trick is that there is no trick, but there are a few preparatory steps that *do* make all the difference in the application process. And no, it isn't all about GPA. Cause I didn't even have one. The first ten in this post, the next ten will follow. (More under the fold....)
1. Spend your spare time doing research.
This one should be a no-brainer, so to speak. If you want a career in research, you need to show your committment early on. Also, as…
drorzel | June 12, 2006Miscellaneous thoughts prompted by yesterday's Commencement:
- Like most of the graduations I've been to, Union's academic procession is led by a pipe and drum band. Why is that? What is it about academia and bagpipes?
- Also like most of the graduatiions I've been to, Union's graduation is held early on Sunday morning, with the students required to vacate campus housing by 5:00 that afternoon. This means that all the really big student parties are the night before, which in turn means that a large fraction of the graduating class is nursing a bad hangover during the procession and speeches.…
drorzel | June 11, 2006Today was Commencement at Union, and a cold and miserable morning for it. Normally, the faculty are grateful for our spots on the Library collonnade, where we're out of the sun, and able to enjoy a slight breeze, but today, it was about twenty degrees colder than normal, and the breeze was more of a gale. Global warming, my ass.
It was also a memorable commencement for me personally, as it marked the graduation of my first group of advisees. Last year was the first class I'd seen all the way through their four years of college, and this year's bunch was the first class in which I was assigned…
revere | June 11, 2006No surprise that the American public is more concerned about how to pay for higher education than they are about the ideology of its purveyors. If I had to pay for it today (and were still paying my kids' freight), that would be my number one concern, too. I'd still worry about what they were learning, too, and from whom. My highschool education in the 1950s was a daily diet of rightwing ideology we all thought was "normal." College at the turn of the sixties wasn't much better, and I went to a university with a notorious lefty reputation (I'm proud to say). It's no surprise that the public…
drorzel | June 10, 2006By the numbers:
Exams graded: 16
Mean exam grade: 64%
Mean final grade for Physics 121: B-
Papers assigned: 17
Papers received and graded: 16
Mean final grade for Physics 311: B+
Students receiving grades of Incomplete: 1
Large bottles of Scottish ale drunk while watching "Dr. Who": 1
And another academic year is in the books, but for a few odds and ends (one seriously ill student who needs to get me a final paper, receiving my course comment sheets for the term). This is the last term that will count toward my tenure review on the teaching side, so I'm vaguely apprehensive about the course…
jstemwedel | June 9, 2006Regular readers of this blog know that I periodically muse on the question of why there aren't more women in science. But since I'm not, say, an anthropologist, my musings have been rooted mostly in my own experience and the experiences of people I know.
Well, the Summer 2006 issue of Washington Square, San Jose State University's alumni magazine, has an article -- including interviews of an anthropologist and a sociologist -- entitled "A difficult crossing: Obstacles that keep women from science" (pdf). Some evocative anthropological insight from that article after the jump.
The notion of…