Academics
pharyngula | January 30, 2007The Little Professor has A Compendium of Professorial Magic that looks useful—I'm going to have to master these.
The list, though, is of low level spells. I think I really need an "Enchant Knowledge" area-effect spell that infuses all of the targets with mastery of the subject matter. It's probably a ninth-level spell, I'm afraid, and I'm going to have to get more experience before I can handle it. (Knocking over creationists is probably analogous to fending off a kobold raid—tedious hack-and-slash that garners darned little experience, and they don't even have any loot worth harvesting.)
pharyngula | January 27, 2007Hey, I'm teaching a genetics class this term, and someone is taking one. I'm going to be spending part of my day setting up flies for an upcoming lab…this looks awfully familiar.
pharyngula | January 26, 2007I was on the radio again this morning, this time to announce the upcoming Café Scientifique here in Morris, which was also announced on the university web page. Did you happen to tune in? Are you coming?
It's going to be a fun one. The chemistry discipline will be putting on a show, with discussions and demonstrations of household chemistry.
Café Scientifique: Chemistry Style
A presentation by Joe Alia, Nancy Carpenter, Jenn Goodnough, Troy Goodnough, Ted Pappenfus and Jim Togeas.
Household Chemistry
Joe Alia: Joe'll tell us what's cooking in chemistry with the chemistry of spices.
Nancy…
pharyngula | January 26, 2007Sara at Orcinus has an excellent article on the UC/Calvary Chapel Christian School lawsuit, in which a Christian private school is suing the University of California system to require them to accept their dreck for credit. She's right that the universities need to stand up for standards, but I do have some problems with her opening statement: it ignores some complexities.
I've been saying for a long while now that the power to end the Intelligent Design fiasco, firmly and finally and with but a single word, rests in the manicured hands of the chancellors of America's top universities. The…
pharyngula | January 24, 2007Grrr. This story pisses me off beyond all reason. It's a trumped up contretemps generated by one of our local Minnesota Republican hacks, griping about a UM faculty member using her campus email.
A University of Minnesota professor has come under fire for sending a message using her university e-mail account to help comedian Al Franken with his likely U.S. Senate candidacy.
Sally Kenney, director of the Center on Women and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, sent an e-mail last week from a "umn.edu" address to an undisclosed number of…
pharyngula | January 23, 2007Some might be surprised to hear that I'm actually in favor of this change in the British school standards:
Teenagers will be asked to debate intelligent design (ID) in their religious education classes and read texts by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins under new government guidelines.
In a move that is likely to spark controversy, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority has for the first time recommended that pupils be taught about atheism and creationism in RE classes.
The all-important qualifying phrase is "in their religious education classes". It's not science, so I'll always…
pharyngula | January 16, 2007AND I'M NOT READY!
Can we have a couple more weeks of vacation, please?
Last day of classes: May 2nd. 30 lectures, 45 lab sections away.
pharyngula | January 13, 2007I know some of my students read Pharyngula, so I'll mention this here: if you're taking Biology 3101, Genetics, the course web page and syllabus are online. Get the textbook and start reading chapter 1!
pharyngula | December 29, 2006Captain Fishsticks is one of our local conservative nutjobs who haunts the pages of the St Paul Pioneer Press—he's a free market freak who wants to privatize everything, especially the schools, and yet everything he writes reveals a painful ignorance of anything academic. This week he's written a response to an article that left him distraught: Peter Pitman advocated more and better science education for Minnesotans, especially on the subject of climate change. Fishsticks, to whom all education is a zero-sum game because every time he has to learn another phone number a whole 'nother column…
pharyngula | December 28, 2006I am actually completely done with all of my grading, at last. Fall term 2006 is officially finished for me, and I got everything submitted a whole 9 hours before the deadline. Now I need to party.
Fortunately, my copy of The Physics of the Buffyverse(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Jennifer Ouellette arrived just now, so I think I'll get wild with a book.
pharyngula | December 23, 2006Check out this heartwarming tale of a Republican staffer who tried to retroactively get his GPA adjusted by hackers—he got caught, his pathetic attempts to cheat publicly aired, and now he has been fired.
The really sad thing is that GPAs aren't that big a deal. They make a difference if you are trying to get into a post-bac academic program, but seriously…we all know you can be a dithering incompetent at school and get into business and government.
Oh, and the university this bozo wanted to hack? Texas Christian. Icing on the cake.
pharyngula | December 18, 2006
The latest Ask a Science Blogger question is one I've already answered, so I thought I'd just repost this unpleasant little vignette to answer this question:
What's a time in your career when you were criticized extremely harshly by someone you respect? Did it help you or set your career back?
But first, I have to mention that every scientist must have a nemesis or two, as has been recently documented in the pages of Narbonic.
Thinking about graduate school? Here’s a little story, all true, about my very most unpleasant experiences as a graduate student—and they all revolve around one…
pharyngula | December 16, 2006One of those things we professors have to struggle with every year is textbook decisions. Your standard science textbook is a strange thing: it's a heavily distilled reference work that often boils all of the flavor out of a discipline in order to maximize the presentation of the essentials. What that typically means is that you get a book that is eminently useful, but isn't the kind of thing you'd pick up to read for fun, and then we hand it to our undergraduate students, who may be in our class for only the vaguest of reasons, and tell them they must read it. Finally, of course, at the end…
pharyngula | December 14, 2006Time to go get a beer at Drinking Liberally, 'cause the Fall semester of 2006 is all over but for the final exams and the grading and the tears. The last of the written work was turned in today, and now it's just grading until my eyeballs evulse.
Here is a prime bit of end of term suckage, too: it is mid-December in Minnesota, and it is raining. Raining! If I wanted to live in a place with cool wet winters, I'd move back to Seattle.
pharyngula | December 11, 2006Today, I gave my final lecture in developmental biology this term. We have one more class session which will be a final discussion, but I'm done yapping at them. Since I can't possibly teach them everything, I offered some suggestions on what to read next, if they're really interested in developmental biology. They've gotten the fundamentals of the dominant way of looking at development now, that good ol' molecular genetics centered modern field of evo-devo, but I specifically wanted to suggest a few titles to shake them up a little bit and start thinking differently.
For the student who is…
pharyngula | December 5, 2006The direct confrontation between Bérubé and Horowitz has been recorded for posterity at the CHE—I think Bérubé handled it perfectly, not taking the reactionary clown seriously, and getting a free lunch out of it.
Next, though, he's going to be on the Dennis Prager radio show. I'm beginning to think he's trawling very deep for the pallid, slimy worms that dwell in the abyssal darkness…but hey, whatever satisfies your appetite, I say.
Now we just need the Chronicle of Higher Ed to sponsor my free lunch with Deepak Chopra…or perhaps I could someday aspire to locking horns with Prager.
pharyngula | November 27, 2006This is a troubling development, and perhaps some members of the National Science Teachers Association in the readership here know something about it. They seem to be in the pocket of the oil industry.
In tomorrow’s Washington Post, global warming activist Laurie David writes about her effort to donate 50,000 free DVD copies of An Inconvenient Truth (which she co-produced) to the National Science Teachers Association. The Association refused to accept the DVDs:
In their e-mail rejection, they expressed concern that other “special interests” might ask to distribute materials, too; they said…
pharyngula | November 26, 2006This fellow, Bob Averill, is a Portland atheist who was attending the Art Institute there. You won't believe what happened to him recently.
In the classroom that day, Averill says one young woman was talking about her belief in energy layers and astral beings.
"I jokingly asked her if she believed in leprechauns. It turns out, she does. They live on another energy layer," Averill wrote in notes to himself later that day. "In the interest of bringing my own view to the discussion, I began to ask her how she knew these things. Again I know all too well that people can be sensitive about their…
pharyngula | November 24, 2006OK, if you're familiar with the usual PowerPoint bashing, you might be entertained by this explanation of why PowerPoint is not Satan's pull toy. I can distill it down a bit:
Have something interesting to say
Design a talk, don't just string slides together
Keep the slides simple, clean, and consistent
Basic common sense, I think—PP is just a tool that is very easily abused. There are also many more specific detailed suggestions at that link, though, so don't just go by my suggestions.