Manly Men

A long-time reader tipped me off about a recent New York Times article poetically titled Getting the Most Bang Out of Quarks and Gluons. It's all about the really nifty guy-physics going on at Brookhaven National Lab and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC or "rick". Hah.) I'm not sure what I find most annoying about this article. Is it the doofus-y physicists pretending to be Captain Kirk, Scotty, Spock et al. aboard the Starship Enterprise? (You may not be surprised to learn that there was no Lt. Uhura in the group.) "That's Captain Kirk over there," said Dr. Trainor, pointing…
Female Science Professor has the most wonderful story to tell about a career forum at her university. Organized by a junior female faculty at her school, There is typically a panel with representatives from various types of academic institutions (small colleges, research universities, medium-sized universities), from industry, and from government agencies. The panel members speak briefly about their jobs and then there is a lot of interactive question-answer time with the audience. After,there is informal social time for additional interaction between students and the panel members. What's…
I started this as a reply to a comment by Chris on my post Why Are All The White Men Sitting Together In The Other Conference Rooms? but it became a post of its own. Chris wrote: As someone who's attended quite a few engineering conferences, I find that sessions about the profession/discipline tend not to be very well attended, and not representative of the meeting attendees as a whole. For instance, sessions on engineering education tend to attract only a small fraction of the attendees that come to sessions about using steel reinforced concrete in bridge design or retroreflectivity in…
Ask a Science Blogger asks: UPDATE: THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE OCT. 27TH ASK A SCIENCE BLOGGER ANSWER What's the most underfunded scientific field that shouldn't be underfunded?... I can't presume to know the definitive answer. But I can give you one answer: a field that's not even on the radar screen for nearly everyone. We all know women routinely go to see their gynecologist, and women's reproductive health is an important issue. What's the equivalent for men? Do you hear of men routinely going to see their andrologist? The closest thing they have is a urologist, and that's just not…