Academia
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 25, 2012For something I'm working on, I'm trying to come up with good examples of interdisciplinarity making a difference in science. Specifically, I'm looking for cases where somebody with training in one field was able to make a major advance in another field because their expertise let them look at a problem in a different way, and bring a different set of techniques to bear on it.
I can think of a decent number of examples within physics-- techniques from NMR being adopted by atomic physicists, atomic physics techniques being used to address problems in condensed matter, the whole Higgs boson…
jdupuis | April 25, 2012Harvard Faculty Advisory Council Memorandum on Journal Pricing: Major Periodical Subscriptions Cannot Be Sustained
"No, we can't"
A proposal for the library of the future
Harvard: we have a problem
Harvard Library: subscriptions too costly, faculty should go open access
Could Harvard Library's "untenable situation" regarding journal costs help move scholars toward open access?
Saying Costly Subscriptions 'Cannot Be Sustained,' Harvard Library Committee Urges Open Access
Harvard's library can't afford journal subscriptions
Harvard Library to faculty: we're going broke unless you go open…
jdupuis | April 23, 2012As I mentioned last week, on Tuesday, April 17 I was part of a workshop on Creative Commons our Scholarly Communications Committee put on for York library staff. My section was on open data and the Panton Principles. While not directly related to Creative Commons, we thought talking a bit about an application area for licensing in general and a specific case where CC is applied would be interesting for staff. We figured it would be the least engaging part of the workshop so I agreed to go last and use any time that was left.
Rather unexpectedly, the idea of data licensing and in particular…
jdupuis | April 16, 2012As part of a workshop on Creative Commons, I'm doing a short presentation on Open Data and The Panton Principles this week to various members of our staff. I thought I'd share some of the resources I've consulted during my preparations. I'm using textmining of journal articles as a example so I'm including a few resources along those lines as well.
The Panton Principles
Why does Dryad use CC0?
#sparc2012 a manifesto in absentia for Open Data
Information mining from Springer full-text: I ask for freedom
Textmining Update: Max Haussler's Questions to publishers: They have a duty to reply
The…
tfk | April 12, 2012On Tuesday, Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee allowed HB 368 to become law; it is the second of this new generation of creationist laws, along with a similar bill in Louisiana. Haslam refused to sign the bill, stating that it brought confusion, not clarity. He also noted that the bill had overwhelming legislative support (passing by roughly 3-1 margins in both houses), so a veto was unlikely to have any effect.
That morning, as Haslam weighed his options, balancing the concerns expressed by thousands of parents across Tennessee, and the concerns expressed by the state's leading scientists and…
jdupuis | April 11, 2012It's probably best to start with what Marc J. Kuchner's new book -- Marketing for Scientists: How to Shine in Tough Times -- isn't.
It isn't a social media jackass recipe book for "Success through Twitter." It isn't a detailed treatise on marketing theory. It doesn't come with a guarantee of grants, publications and prizes if you follow it's instructions. In fact, it's hardly about Twitter or blogs or Facebook or Pinterest or any of that stuff at all.
Instead, it's a primer on why getting your message out is a good idea.
Marketing for humans, in other words, where humans = scientists.
Kuchner…
drorzel | April 10, 2012Between unpleasant work stuff and the Dread Stomach Bug wiping out the better part of five days, I only got my student evaluation comments for my winter term class last week, and I'm only getting around to writing the post-mortem now. This was, for those who may not have been obsessively following my course reports, a "Scholars Research Seminar" class with the slightly cute title "A Brief History of Timekeeping," which is intended to introduce students to scholarly research and writing. The topic for my SRS was timekeeping, specifically the development of various timekeeping technologies and…
drorzel | April 5, 2012While none of the college basketball teams I root for made the Final Four in their respective tournaments, I probably really ought to note that there is a team that might loosely be termed "mine" that's playing in the national semifinal. Then again, since they've gotten this far without me saying anything about them at all, maybe they'd be just as happy if I continued my benevolent neglect...
We're all science types here, though, so to hell with superstition: Union College, where I work, plays hockey at the NCAA Division I level, and has made it to the "Frozen Four," the semifinals of the…
drorzel | April 5, 2012Two things I was forwarded or pointed toward this week, that interact a little oddly. First chronologically is from the New York Times, which has a story about how Harvey Mudd College has boosted the number of female computer science majors, by committing serious resources to reforming the intro course (which is required of all students there):
Known as CS 5, the course focused on hard-core programming, appealing to a particular kind of student -- young men, already seasoned programmers, who dominated the class. This only reinforced the women's sense that computer science was for geeky know-…
catdynamics | April 4, 2012we just switched to a "no can" policy
in practise, what this means is that rubbish bins in our offices are no longer emptied (though they are still there, and I helpfully pointed out that most of the bins had not been emptied that one last time when we switched this month - they were emptied this morning...)
instead we have 8 (I counted) sorting bins in the hallways, most of which are for recycling, of course
this is a good thing, and the goal is to get to zero waste (not possible, too much stuff is wrapped in that unrecyclable soft plastic that ends up in landfills)
so now I pile garbage on…
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 wondering…
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…
jtoney | March 25, 2012
Photo source.
"There's an African saying: When the elephants fight, the grass suffers."
Dartmouth College President Jim Yong Kim on the greatest challenge in global health, in a recent interview with Charlie Rose, pointing out that the "poorest of poor suffer the most."
Such wisdom will serve Dr. Kim well as he prepares to lead the World Bank, in response to President Obama's nomination. Dr. Kim is a physician and human rights advocate, whose research was initially bolstered by a major grant from George Soros to treat drug-resistant tuberculosis.
The recent interview by Charlie Rose also…
drorzel | March 15, 2012Over at the Scholarly Kitchen, Kent Anderson complains about the uselessness of comments on journals:
Comments in online scientific journals have been notoriously poor -- either too much material of uneven quality or too little discussion to amount to a hill of beans. All too often, commenting has to be shut down because internecine and tiresome debates break out, creating more noise than signal. The best comments are scholarly, and borrow extensively from the form of letters to the editor.
After more than a decade and millions of blogs, it seems one main lesson practitioners are learning --…
drorzel | March 15, 2012There was a nice piece at Inside Higher Ed yesterday on the myth of more time:
A lack of confidence in one's abilities as a writer, researcher, speaker, etc. is at the root of the myth of more time. When a deadline looms, we become acutely aware of the imminent reception of our work by others. As graduate students, we often submit our work to advisors, etc. who are established scholars and who determine our progress towards a program milestone. Our awareness of this kind of appraisal, then, can be extremely pronounced as we work towards a deadline. As a result, we begin to doubt our abilities…
jdupuis | February 24, 2012The actual content of the post I'm highlighting isn't really all that amusing. It's actually quite pertinent in a real-world context.
But I really love how they've taken actually useful information that might be a bit dry and businessy and using a Star Wars / pop-cultural reference made it into something a little easier to wade through. A spoonful of sugar and all that.
Anyways, here's one of the five from: Five Leadership Mistakes Of The Galactic Empire:
Mistake #1: Building an organization around particular people, rather than institutions.
Perhaps the biggest mistake of the Galactic…
jdupuis | February 21, 2012A little while back the Cost of Knowledge site started up a boycott pledge list in response to mathematician Timothy Gowers' pledge to stop contributing to Elsevier's operations by ceasing writing, reviewing and editing for them.
Here is the call to action:
Academics have protested against Elsevier's business practices for years with little effect. These are some of their objections:
They charge exorbitantly high prices for subscriptions to individual journals.
In the light of these high prices, the only realistic option for many libraries is to agree to buy very large "bundles", which will…
drorzel | February 16, 2012Regular reader Johan Larson sends in a good question about academic physics:
You have written about teaching various courses in modern physics, a subject that has a fearsome reputation among students for skull-busting difficulty. That suggests a broader question: what is the most difficult course at your university? Or even more broadly, how would one determine what course is the most difficult?
This is a good question, but hard to give a single answer to. The most difficult course at the college as a whole would be nearly impossible to determine, because different students find different…