Academia
drorzel | June 10, 2009Dear Email Recipients:
Thank you very much for responding rapidly to the question I sent you. Now, please go back to my original message, and respond to the other four questions that were in that message.
Thank you for your reading comprehension,
Annoyed Re-Sender of Emails
drorzel | June 10, 2009OK, it's not really a full post-mortem, because I haven't graded the final exams yet, but I wouldn't tell you about those, anyway. Still, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past term, which was my first teaching introductory mechanics on the Matter & Interactions curriculum.
On the whole, I continue to like the approach. I like the way that the book focuses on the major physical principles-- the Momentum Principle, the Energy Principle, the Angular Momentum Principle-- because those are the real take-away message from introductory physics. I also thing it's good that the class…
drorzel | June 10, 2009Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne is annoyed at Nature's embargo policy. It seems that somebody or another posted a paper to the arxiv while submitting it to Nature, and included a note on the arxiv submission asking people to abide by Nature's embargo.
So, instead of blogging about the Incredibly Exciting Discovery (which I'd loooove to talk about), I'm writing about what a ridiculous fiction the authors are asking us all to participate in, for the sake of the authors' potentially getting a publication accepted to Nature. The authors advertised a paper to thousands of interesting, engaged…
drorzel | June 8, 2009Somebody recently asked me whether I had figured out who Female Science Professor is. I truthfully replied that I haven't even tried.
That was the first thing that came to mind when some jerk from the National Review revealed the identity of "Publius", kicking off another round of discussion about the etiquette of revealing identities that bloggers have chosen to conceal. This one probably won't be any more revealing than the previous go-rounds.
It's worth a tiny bit of effort, though, to fight for correct language in this case. Lots of people, most of them right-wingers, will be referring to…
neurotopia | June 8, 2009One of my close colleagues got on eRA Commons and downloaded the challenge grants she was to review before eRA Commons went down for major upgrades in a majorly untimely fashion. This was a prudent move on her part since by the time eRA Commons would be accessible again, she would be traveling for multiple conferences and would have precious little time to download and review her grant assignments. So, she logged on. She was assigned 2 grants. She reviewed them while traveling and once home, with eRA Commons back up and running, went to upload her critiques the night before they were due…
terrasig | June 8, 2009Yet another hat tip this morning to anjou, a regular reader, commenter, and human RSS feed on all things cancer and alternative medicine (not to mention turning me on to Vanessa Hidary, the "Hebrew Mamita" spoken-word artist).
Last night anjou brought to me a superb AP Impact article, Alternative medicine goes mainstream, from medical writer Marilynn Marchione. I know that AP has been skewered as of late by various science bloggers but this particular article by Marchione is one of the best treatments I have seen in the last two years regarding the truth behind the alternative medicine…
terrasig | June 7, 2009
Since last December, we've been involved with a number of good friends in Key West, Florida, on a green initiative that includes the investigations of medicinal plants of the Florida Keys and northern Caribbean. Following from these interactions with students and colleagues at Duke University and in Key West itself, I had the good fortune of being interviewed last week together with conservation biologist Stuart Pimm on KONK-1630AM community radio by Erika Biddle for her biweekly Eco-Centric World program.
Raised in Germany, she participated in the formations of the first political Green…
drorzel | June 5, 2009This may be too late in the day to generate much action, but I thought of it just a little while ago. Two questions:
1) If you were writing a letter of recommendation for a student, would you refer to them as "Firstname" or "Mr./Ms. Lastname"?
2) Does your answer depend on the level of the student? That is, would you refer to an undergraduate the same way as a graduate student?
I've seen both, and have a definite opinion on the subject, but I'm curious as to what people think.
terrasig | June 5, 2009
Just a quick note to dial up Ira Flatow's Science Friday show on NPR today at 3 pm EDT. Supporting information and the archived show can be found here.
Guy-who-I-would-kill-to-be, Tom Levenson, will be on with Ira to speak about his new book, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist.
Here is also a link to other appearances Professor Levenson will be having related to the book.
For those of you who don't know Thomas Levenson, he is currently a Professor, Interim Program Head, and Director of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at the…
jdupuis | June 3, 2009After last year's success, the organizers put on a another great SciBarCamp show! It was this past May 8th and 9th at the University of Toronto's Hart House.
What is SciBarCamp, you ask?
SciBarCamp is a gathering of scientists, artists, and technologists for a day of talks and discussions. The second SciBarCamp event will take place at Hart House at the University of Toronto on May 9th, 2009, with an opening reception on the evening of May 8th. The goal is to create connections between science, entrepreneurs and local businesses, and arts and culture.
I'll just do some fairly detailed…
jstemwedel | June 3, 2009Dr. Isis reports that faculty and staff at MRU will be taking unpaid "furlough" days to deal with a budget crisis:
In many cases, faculty (some of whom already do not receive summer support) will be asked to take furlough time in the middle of the instructional period of the academic calendar, but not on a day that they are scheduled to teach. Will faculty forgo preparing for classes on days they are forced to furlough? Will they abandon their research programs on those days? I suspect we all know the answer to that question...
Cynically, I cannot help but think that the university…
drorzel | June 3, 2009For reasons that don't really matter, I learned yesterday that there is a marathon in Antarctica:
On December 12th, 2009, the fifth Antarctic Ice Marathon will take place at 80 Degrees South, just a few hundred miles from the South Pole at the foot of the Ellsworth Mountains. This race presents a truly formidable and genuine Antarctic challenge with underfoot conditions comprising snow and ice throughout, an average windchill temperature of -20C, and the possibility of strong Katabatic winds to contend with. Furthermore, the event takes place at an altitude of 3,000 feet.
That's one of the…
drorzel | June 2, 2009I'm in a line of work where I have to listen to a lot of graduation speeches-- at least one per year. Yesterday, though, I got a phone call asking me to give one at my old high school's graduation in three and a half weeks.
This is kind of a weird situation, because while it has been 20 years since I graduated (twenty years this year, in fact), and I have had a fairly successful career to this point, I'm not sure I can distill any generally applicable advice from that. I've been very lucky in a lot of things, and most of the coolest stuff I've had the opportunity to do has been through some…
jdupuis | June 2, 2009As you may have noticed, ScienceBlogs is making a concerted effort to engage a broad range of the Information Science community. That community includes librarians, publishing people and scholars who are interested in issues around libraries, information management, scholarly publishing, Open Access, research metrics, human-computer interaction, privacy, intellectual property and a whole host of other topics.
The first step was recruiting a couple of new bloggers from the library community -- Christina Pikas and myself -- to supplement the considerable amount of IS discussion that's already…
khannula | June 2, 2009There's a question-and-answer in The Scientist online [free registration required] entitled "Is Tenure Worth Saving?" The interviewee, Dan Clawson (a tenured sociologist at the University of Massachusetts) goes through some of the history that's all-too-familiar to people who want jobs in academia: to cut money*, universities have been quietly shifting their work, more and more, to non-tenure-track positions.
But what about reasons besides money? Does the institution of tenure lead to the accumulation of deadwood**?
TS [The Scientist]: Other than the monetary benefits to the university, what…
jdupuis | June 1, 2009Every once in a while I get an email out of the blue from a science student who's thinking of a career as a librarian and they want to know a bit about the field and it's job prospects.
I always respond very positively because I think science librarianship is a great career and that, on balance, the job prospects are pretty good.
Christina has a post up today with a little more detail:
If you are a scientist, but you want to get out of the lab, want to have a little more variety in your life, like helping people and finding information, but still want to use your science degree and be part…
drorzel | June 1, 2009Today is the first day of the last week of class, hallelujah. Unfortunately, it's also the first class on rotational motion and angular momentum. This is unfortunate because it's the hardest material in the course-- angular momentum doesn't behave in as intuitive a manner as linear momentum, and the math involved is the most complicated of anything we do in the course.
This mostly has to do with the vector product, or "cross product." Angular momentum can be written as the product between the position vector from the axis of rotation to the moving object and the linear momentum of the moving…
jdupuis | June 1, 2009First Principles is physicist Howard Burton's story of how Research in Motion founder and CEO Mike Lazaridis basically plucked him out of obscurity to become the founding executive director for The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. And quite a story it is.
Burton had just finished his PhD and was looking for work. He sent some CVs around and one of the responses was from Lazaridis, who was looking for do something both big and important with his considerable wealth. After a brief (and rather odd) interview, Burton got the job. It was then his job to figure…
drorzel | May 29, 2009Why do we have two meter sticks taped together back to back?
What is the dark stain obscuring the markings between 30 and 70 cm on half of the meter sticks?
Where the hell are all the stopwatches?
Why are the demo magnets sticky?
Why do we still have six meters worth of a rusting, broken torsional wave demonstration?
Why are the springs sorted into drawers with color labels ("Springs-Red") when all the springs are the same color, and there's no particular correlation with the spring constant?
Why do we have five hundred yellowing sheets of newsprint?
Why are the metal projectiles stored in an…
khannula | May 28, 2009When I saw there was going to be a discussion of issues facing mid-career faculty at last year's Geological Society of America meeting, my first thought was: "Call the waaaaaaahmbulance!" I mean, pre-tenure faculty have issues. Job-hunting post-docs have issues. ABD grad students have issues. Mid-career faculty, on the other hand, have stable jobs - more stable than most in this economy (assuming the department doesn't get torn apart during budget cuts). Mid-career faculty have the freedom to do the research that interests them, to teach large intro classes without worrying about getting bad…