Academia
catdynamics | April 15, 2009President Obama is this year's commencement speaker at the Arizona State University
ASU decided, somewhat unusually, not to give him an honourary degree
The Huffington Post has been all over this
Stupid move.
Here is the list of all past ASU honourary degree recipients
usual mix of local politicos, senior scientists and random nominees including some people who apparently played some sort of game.
To say:
""University spokeswoman Sharon Keeler said Tuesday that the University awards honorary degrees to recognize individuals for their work and accomplishments spanning their lifetime. '…
terrasig | April 15, 2009Serendipity. Me and Tancredo, of all people.
Start here: The press has been buzzing today about former Colorado congressman and US presidential candidate, Tom Tancredo, having to cut a speech short yesterday at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill due to protesters on his stance toward illegal/unauthorized immigration to the US. With regard to state universities, Tancredo is opposed to granting in-state college tuition to children whose parents came to the US outside of legal immigration procedures.
I am not a fan of Tancredo or his policies. The time has come in this country…
drorzel | April 15, 2009A recurring problem in academic science is trying to correctly identify a single author. For example, I was reviewing a grant that made reference to a group, but not a specific paper, and needed to sift through a few pages of search results in order to determine which of the people with that surname was the one I was looking for.
I'm somewhat fortunate in that the combination of my last name and first initial is not common. The Harvard/ Smithsonian Astrophysics Data System turns up all of my papers and nothing else when searching for "Orzel, C." The INSPEC database comes up with one bogus…
terrasig | April 14, 2009
Well, it's that time of year for public radio stations in the United States: the biannual fund drive to support operations and programming. Many public radio stations are run by or associated with universities, thereby giving provide course and internship opportunities to students in print and broadcast journalism, graphic design, recording engineering, and music studies.
I love my radio station, WNCU-FM 90.7 in Durham, North Carolina - "Your Connection To Something Different." WNCU is a jazz-intensive station run out of North Carolina Central University (NCCU), a HBCU within the…
drorzel | April 14, 2009Over at Faraday's Cage, Cherish has had a Huck Finn moment with regard to paper writing style:
I know that I'm not supposed to use the first person plural when writing papers. Frankly Scarlet, I don't give a damn. I am going to say, "we did this" and "we did that".
This made me blink a little, because I've never thought that was a rule. In fact, one of the things I had beaten into my head when I was a grad student writing papers was that scientific papers ought to be written in the first person plural and the active voice.
There definitely seems to be a belief that scientific writing should…
clock | April 12, 2009About a week ago, my brother sent me a couple of interesting papers about funding in science, one in Canada, the other in the UK. I barely had time to skim the abstracts at the time, but thought I would put it up for discussion online and come back to it later. So I posted the link, abstract and brief commentary a few days ago to the article: Cost of the NSERC Science Grant Peer Review System Exceeds the Cost of Giving Every Qualified Researcher a Baseline Grant:
Abstract: Using Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC) statistics, we show that the $40,000 (Canadian)…
scientificactivist | April 11, 2009The gold standard for measuring the impact of a scientific paper is counting the number of other papers that cite that paper. However, due to the drawn-out nature of the scientific publication process, there is a lag of at least a year or so after a paper is published before citations to it even begin to appear in the literature, and at least a few years are generally needed to get an accurate measure of how heavily cited an article will actually be. It's reasonable to ask, then, if there exists a mechanism to judge the impact of a paper much earlier in its lifetime.
Several analyses now…
khannula | April 11, 2009Advising and registration for summer and fall semesters has just finished, so I've been spending a lot of time talking and thinking about general education requirements. In particular, I've been thinking about one question: why? What's the point of general education requirements? What are they good for? What should students get out of them?
In the US, most colleges (up to four-year schools) and universities (schools with graduate programs) require that all students take some classes spread across a range of disciplines. These general education programs vary from school to school - some are…
terrasig | April 10, 2009Congratulations are going out today to Duke women's basketball guard and Coloradan, Abby Waner, on her no. 21 selection in yesterday's WNBA draft. A solid competitor, leader, and scholar, Waner was the 2nd pick by the New York Liberty. A Highlands Ranch (CO) ThunderRidge High School standout and Colorado Sports Hall of Fame inductee, Waner contributed over the last four years to Duke's NCAA Tournament appearances, including the 2006 finals when Duke lost to Maryland in a heartbreaker.
The entire Waner family holds a special place in our hearts. Extending a little Southern hospitality to…
drorzel | April 9, 2009Sabine Hossenfelder from Backreaction has landed a job as an assistant professor at NORDITA. That's good news any time, but especially in the current climate.
And going Sabine one better, Mary at View from the Corner has both defended her thesis and gotten a job at the same company as her husband. Way to solve the two-body problem, Mary.
Congratulations to both of them. And if you have happy job news to report, consider this a Happy Job News Open Thread.
catdynamics | April 9, 2009and it comes down to this...
double first, Caltech doctorate, postdocs at top research institutions, personal fellowship, tenure-track, tenure...
and the forecast is for rain.
The good news is that since I am tenured I can probably still afford to buy even a new pair of Nikes.
The bad news is that since I am tenured I probably do not have the time to do so anytime soon.
Ah well, I really hate shopping anyway.
terrasig | April 7, 2009Great timelapse video of the crowd converging on Franklin St at Columbia just below the Top of the Hill Restaurant and Brewery and the evolution of the bonfires that I still just do not understand.
But the best part of yesterday's game for me was reading Ed Brayton's recollections of his connections to the 30th anniversary of the 1979 Michigan State national champions:
So watching them win the national championship was a huge deal to me. I still remember every name, not just Magic and Greg Kelser and the stars but all the role players too - Terry Donnelly, Mike Brkovich and his brother Don,…
clock | April 6, 2009This is very interesting, referring to Canadian system:
Cost of the NSERC Science Grant Peer Review System Exceeds the Cost of Giving Every Qualified Researcher a Baseline Grant:
Using Natural Science and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC) statistics, we show that the $40,000 (Canadian) cost of preparation for a grant application and rejection by peer review in 2007 exceeded that of giving every qualified investigator a direct baseline discovery grant of $30,000 (average grant). This means the Canadian Federal Government could institute direct grants for 100% of qualified applicants…
drorzel | April 6, 2009Over at the First Excited State, the quasi-anonymous proprietor laments the tendency of basketball replays to focus on the shot rather than the play that set up the shot, and compares this to a maddening student habit:
Students in introductory physics classes inevitably place too much focus on the final numerical answer of the problem, which in reality is the least important part. I graded a quiz last week where I spent way too much time trying to decipher the numbers the students wrote down, because they placed the numbers in their equations rather than writing them clearly with the symbols…
terrasig | April 6, 2009I was very late to the game on a DrugMonkey post last week examining the demographics of Early Career Award winners from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Drug noted that only 9 of the 50 awardees are women:
So who got lucky? See the slideshow here.
huh. anything strike you? no? lemme get a pencil here....hmmm.
2 African-American looking guys, another maybe. Six Asian guys. Maybe another four or five men who look other than standard model white guy. Nine women.
Really? That's the best you could do? Seriously? You couldn't even that gender ratio up even a little bit better than…
drorzel | April 2, 2009The spring round of the Adopt-a-Physicist outreach program will begin soon. I did this in the Fall, and it was a good experience, so I've registered myself again.
The program pairs volunteer physicists with high school classes, and provides a web forum in which students can ask questions about physics and careers in physics. Back in the fall, the students I communicated with asked smart and interesting questions, and it was a pleasure to talk to them.
If you have a degree in physics (undergraduate or graduate), and would like to help encourage high school students to consider physics, you…
omnibrain | April 1, 2009Jason, a graduate student at USC, shot me an email asking for more information about my blogging experiment and I thought I'd post some of the things I sent back to him. Totally unpolished and stream of consciousness but here it is...
Hi Jason,
This is really the first time around that I've tried the blogging thing. I've been thinking about doing it for a while but having 2 classes with 50 people in each meant a blog would be a bit unwieldy. If there are that many people in the class a discussion board is a much better choice (like on blackboard or something). If you have under 20 people…
sb admin | March 31, 2009I'm currently teaching Introduction to Psychology which has a number of university honors students who are required to do extra work in a certain number of their courses each semester in order to get 'honors credit.' The University leaves it up to me as to what they students should do to get this credit. I decided, along with my students, to let them explore the psychological literature through blogging. Each week they pick a relevant piece of literature (in this case - aggression, attractiveness, and political psychology) and write a short blog post about it.
I've found the blog to be a…
omnibrain | March 31, 2009I'm currently teaching Introduction to Psychology which has a number of university honors students who are required to do extra work in a certain number of their courses each semester in order to get 'honors credit.' The University leaves it up to me as to what they students should do to get this credit. I decided, along with my students, to let them explore the psychological literature through blogging. Each week they pick a relevant piece of literature (in this case - aggression, attractiveness, and political psychology) and write a short blog post about it.
I've found the blog to be a…
drorzel | March 31, 2009In the last course report post, we dispensed of atomic and molecular physics in just three classes. The next three classes do the same for solid state physics.
Class 25 picks up on the idea of basic molecular potentials from the end of the previous class, and uses that to introduce energy bands in a qualitative manner. Bringing two atoms together splits the electron levels into two states, adding a third adds more closely spaced levels, and so on. Every time you add more atoms, you add more closely spaced energy levels, and as you approach truly macroscopic systems, those states run together…