Inside Higher Ed reports today on a new study of junior faculty job satisfaction showing that faculty satisfaction doesn’t correlate with institutional prestige: The collaborative, known as COACHE, last year released aggregate findings from its survey of thousands of faculty members at dozens of participating institutions. That analysis found that junior professors placed increasing importance […]
Month: January 2007
L. Sprague de Camp, Lest Darkness Fall [Library of Babel]
I picked this out of the to-be-read pile because it’s specifically name-checked in the “SF and the History of Science” panel description on my Boskone schedule. I figure it’s pretty likely to get brought up, and since we had a copy lying around, I might as well actually read it so as to be able […]
Digg-ing the Arxiv
Some news for those interested in open-source publishing and “Open Science”: Dave Bacon is announcing the debut of scirate.com, a sort of social-networking site for physics preprints: The idea came from the observation that while the arxiv is a amazing tool, one of the problems was that the volume of papers was high and, to […]
How to Get a Small College Job
We’ve been running a search to fill a tenure-track faculty position for next year, and I’ve spent more time than I care to recall reading folders and interviewing candidates. Now that the process is nearing completion, I’d like to do a quick post offering advice for those thinking about applying for a tenure-track position at […]
The New York Times Steals Our Ideas?
An article came through my RSS feeds yesterday that looked for all the world like the New York Times was copying our Basic Concepts idea. Labelled as “Basics,” it promised to provide a general discussion of the concept of time. “You bastards!” I thought. The actual article by Natalie Angier isn’t all that similar to […]
Journal of Unsurprising Psychology
Earlier today, I posted two “Dorky Poll” entries, one asking for people to nominate their favorite science textbook in comments, the other asking for their least favorite science textbook. As of 7:15, a bit less than nine hours after the posts went live, the comment totals are: Dorky Poll: Least Favorite Textbook: 32 comments Dorky […]
Dorky Poll: Least Favorite Textbook
It’s going to be a very busy day, in ways that will keep me away from the Internet for most of the day, so you’ll need to entertain yourselves. Here’s a question for the science-minded: What’s your least favorite science textbook of all time? It could be a book that you loathed when you were […]
Dorky Poll: Favorite Textbook
It’s going to be a very busy day, in ways that will keep me away from the Internet for most of the day, so you’ll need to entertain yourselves. Here’s a question for the science-minded: What’s your favorite science textbook of all time? It could be your favorite book from when you were a student, […]
The Wheels of Ethics Grind Slowly… Or Else
Inside Higher Ed has a report on a new frontier in administrative idiocy: After passing a new online test on ethics required of all state employees, [a] tenured professor in the English department at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale received a notice from his university ethics officer and from the state inspector general that he […]
Controversy Sells
A little while ago, John Lynch asked what really draws readers to ScienceBlogs, and listed his top twenty posts. In a similar vein, here are the top twelve Uncertain Principles posts of the past year, ranked by number of pageviews: SAT Challenge: Bloggers Dumber Than High-School Kids Local Realism, Loopholes, and The God Delusion SAT […]