Academia
clock | August 15, 2008Welcome to the first experimental issue of the newest science blog carnival - Praxis. Why experimental? Because we still have to see where to set the boundaries. If it is "Life in Academia", then pretty much everything on science blogs is eligible and the effect is diluted. If we narrow it down to one topic, e.g., Open Access publishing, then there will not be sufficient posts and sufficient interest to keep the carnival alive. We'll have to define a happy middle. We want people to find each other here - folks that write about the business of science, about publishing and Science 2.0,…
catdynamics | August 14, 2008Krugman notes headline price inflation, 5.6% for the year, with an instantaneous rate of over 10%.
But, we are not to panic.
Because wages are declining, and the inflation is only commodity driven price inflation, not a wage inflation spiral.
Yeah, that will work.
So, anyone care to bet whether Krugman got a pay cut, a pay raise less than inflation, or a pay raise larger than inflation?
drorzel | August 13, 2008I hate to break up the pattern of alternating cute baby pictures with rants about science and the general public, but I wanted to sneak in a plug for a new initiative that I'm very tangentially involved in on campus. Union has launched a new fellowship program, the "Minerva Fellows", providing funding for 7-ish students a year (it's supposed to be seven but they did eight this year) to spend most of a year providing aid to poor people in developing countries, and then return to campus to talk about their experiences.
This year's Fellows and their projects are introduced on this page, with…
clock | August 13, 2008Robert Bruce Thompson is the author of Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, a book I have and like, but cannot really use as it is hard to get the chemicals. Thompson now writes a guest popst on MAKE blog: Home science under attack
The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports that Victor Deeb, a retired chemist who lives in Marlboro, has finally been allowed to return to his Fremont Street home, after Massachusetts authorities spent three days ransacking his basement lab and making off with its contents.
Deeb is not accused of making methamphetamine or other illegal drugs. He's…
drorzel | August 13, 2008You may be wondering whether the recent spate of blogging about science in popular media and peer review (by the way, you should definitely read Janet's two posts on these issues) has any connection to my talk next month at the Science in the 21st Century workshop. Yes, yes it does-- I figure that I'm going to be getting so little sleep in the next few weeks that I need as much of a head start as I can manage. Of course, this also means that I will continue to go on and on about this topic for a little while yet...
The thing that I think is most critical here is to recognize that the poor…
neurotopia | August 13, 2008So when does trying to advance one's career become a Bad Idea? How about when you're trying to recover from a nightmare postdoc so you take a part-time lab job while you regroup, then apply to a few teaching spots only to find out that you're only missing one qualification-- more teaching experience-- else you'd be gainfully employed?
The obvious solution is to get more teaching experience. For me, the only realistic option for doing this is to teach at the local community college. I taught Intro Bio this summer and it was really fun. However, as most people know, adjuncting at a…
scientificactivist | August 12, 2008...apparently involves reposting others' blog posts without permission or proper attribution.
I'm being facetious here, of course, but it is quite ironic that Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority just caught anti-open-access warrior Elsevier copying the majority of one of his blog posts and posting it on a freely available site without attribution to him (although there is a link to his original post) or his permission. Click here to see his original post and here to see Elsevier's reposting (Mike also saved it as a pdf).
Although it is common practice within the blogosphere to quote…
clock | August 12, 2008The new blog carnival, covering the way science is changing (or not changing enough) in the 21st century - Praxis, is about to start. The call for submissions is now open - send them to me at Coturnix AT gmail dot com by August 14th at midnight Eastern so I can post the carnival on the 15th in the morning.
The business of science - from getting into grad school, succeeding in it, getting a postdoc, getting a job, getting funded, getting published, getting tenure and surviving it all with some semblance of sanity - those are kinds of topics that are appropriate for this carnival, more in…
omnibrain | August 8, 2008 Oh you crazy non-English speaking people... please please please take the extra effort and get someone like me with a dirty mind to proofread your papers. And Editors... get your mind INTO the gutter and things like this won't happen.
It all starts innocently with this perfectly normal sounding setup:
Chem. Commun., 2007, 1733 - 1735, DOI: 10.1039/b614147a
Electrochemical synthesis of metal and semimetal nanotube-nanowire heterojunctions and their electronic transport properties
Dachi Yang, Guowen Meng, Shuyuan Zhang, Yufeng Hao, Xiaohong An, Qing Wei, Min Ye and Lide Zhang
Metal and…
drorzel | August 6, 2008I'm very happy to be an academic scientist. And I'm not alone:
a study presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association finds that academic scientists -- in the natural and social sciences -- are more satisfied than are their counterparts outside of higher education. The original hypothesis of the paper was that there might be a convergence of satisfaction levels, especially since satisfaction was defined in ways that stress traditional academic values, not more entrepreneurial ones. The scientists were asked about satisfaction with their independence and…
catdynamics | August 6, 2008Academic term will start soon here, just in time for football season.
Enrollment is high, due to demographic and economic factors, but, with the slowly developing funding crunch, will the students actually show up and register?
Enrollment in institutions of higher education, in the US, is very high right now, due primarily to demographics- the echo of the baby boom is passing through the lucrative 18-22 phase - but also because of higher participation rate and because times are hard.
It is rational for people to defer entering the job market and take on the direct and opportunity cost of…
drorzel | August 6, 2008Arts & Letters Daily sent me to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education with the headline How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science. "Hey," I thought, "Good to see this issue getting some more attention." And, indeed, the article starts off well enough, with a decent statement of the problems in science education:
Back in 2003, the National Science Board issued a report that noted steep declines in "graduate enrollments of U.S. citizens and permanent residents" in the sciences. The explanation? "Declining federal support for research sends negative signals to interested…
catdynamics | August 5, 2008Fascinating article on slashdot about why California can't cut wage payroll employees to fed minimum wage, because their financial system is a COBOL legacy system
and Schwarzenegger's executive order bans hiring retirees with the requisite expertise...
"The state controller, who has opposed the pay cut on principle and legal grounds, now says the pay cut isn't even feasible because the state's payroll systems are so antiquated. He says it would take 6 months to go to minimum wage, and 9 months more to restore salaries once a budget is passed. The system is based on COBOL, according to the…
clock | August 5, 2008Today, I have everything I need on my computer, and so do most working scientists as well. Papers can be found online because journals are online (and more and more are Open Access). Protocols are online. Books are online. Writing and collaboration tools are online. Communication tools are online. Data collection and data analysis and data graphing and paper-writing tools are all on the computer. No need for having any paper in the office, right? Right.
But remember how new that all is. The pictures (under the fold, the t-shirt is of Acrocanthosaurus at the NC Museum of Natural…
terrasig | August 4, 2008It's a lovely crescent moon this evening up here in the Northern Hemisphere so I can't blame the latest unbelievable and irrational happenings on a full moon (which would be unscientific, of course). Okay, maybe sunspots?
First, the Bush administration was proposing draft legislation to grant medical professionals the right to withhold care, prescriptions, etc., based upon religious beliefs or other objections by reclassifying birth control pills and IUDs as "abortion." PalMD covered this among others, but reminded me of several of my old posts on my objections to pharmacists refusing to…
clock | August 4, 2008The new blog carnival, covering the way science is changing (or not changing enough) in the 21st century - Praxis, is about to start. The call for submissions is now open - send them to me at Coturnix AT gmail dot com by August 14th at midnight Eastern.
The business of science - from getting into grad school, succeeding in it, getting a postdoc, getting a job, getting funded, getting published, getting tenure and surviving it all with some semblance of sanity - those are kinds of topics that are appropriate for this carnival, more in analytic way than personal, if possible (i.e., not "I will…
drorzel | August 4, 2008Last weekend's post, The Innumeracy of Intellectuals, has been lightly edited and re-printed at Inside Higher Ed, where it should be read by a larger audience of humanities types. They allow comments, so it will be interesting to see what gets said about it there.
I may have some additional comments on the issue later, but it's a little hard to focus while going crazy waiting for FutureBaby.
(There's also a tiny chance that this will be noticed by some of my colleagues, which could be interesting. I know that some of them read the Chronicle of Higher Education religiously, but I'm less…
catdynamics | August 2, 2008"...a fire was started on the porch of a faculty member's home. Injuries were sustained as the faculty member and his wife and children escaped the residence."
Attack comes after pamphlets were found threatening faculty claimed to use animals in research.
Fires were set at two faculty residences, car in the driveway of one house, and on the porch of another's house.
"Injuries were sustained as the faculty member and his wife and children escaped the residence."
UPDATE: Injury was incurred during escape down a fire ladder, researcher whose house was firebombed identified as Prof Feldheim -…
drorzel | August 2, 2008I subscribe to a bunch of EurekAlert RSS feeds, including the "Education" feed, which could often be re-named "The Journal of Unsurprising Results." Take, for example, today's ground-breaking study, Male college students more likely than less-educated peers to commit property crimes, which comes complete with the subhead "Sociological research reveals paradox of higher education, crime":
Sociologists at Bowling Green State University found that college-bound youth report lower levels of criminal activity and substance use during adolescence compared to non-college-bound youth. However, levels…