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“1) Did you notice the part where I said I’d want a higher salary to compensate for having less security? Yeah. See, lots of people are willing to slave away in grad school and postdoc positions and adjunct positions in exchange for a shot at the tenure lottery. Dilute the value of the prize, and suddenly people start wanting more money in return. A lot of smart, highly-educated people will start looking at other white collar career paths if academia doesn’t provide a shot at life-long security, or at least higher pay than is currently on offer. Take away tenure, and not only do you pay more for the people that you ultimately hire for full-time positions, you also have to pay more for all of the grad student TA’s and research assistants and postdocs and adjuncts who are trying to claw their way to a full-time position.
Why, pray tell, would the administration go for that bargain?”
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“Isabelle Boutron and colleagues[…] took every trial published over one month that had a negative result – 72 in total – and then went through each trial report to look for evidence of “spin”: people trying to present the results in a positive light, or distract the reader from the fact that the trial was negative.
First they looked in the abstracts.[…] Normally, as you scan hurriedly through an abstract, you’d expect to be told the “effect size” – “0.85 times as many heart attacks in patients on our new super-duper heart drug” – along with an indication of the statistical significance of this result. But in this representative sample of 72 trials with negative results, only 9 gave these figures properly in the abstract, and 28 gave no numerical results for the main outcome of the trial, at all. It gets worse. Only 16 of these negative trials reported the main negative outcome of the trial properly, anywhere, even in the main body of the text. “ -
“Class-based [affirmative action] programs might, in the end, provide modestly less help for ethnic minorities than current policies — though well-designed ones might not. But they have some advantages too. For one thing, they help poor people. That’s worthwhile all by itself. (Kahlenberg quotes William Benn Michael as noting acidly that currently the debate in higher education is mostly about what color skin the rich kids will have.) Beyond that, there’s another benefit: for all the good it does, there’s no question that race-based affirmative action has drawbacks as well. It makes employers suspicious of minority graduates, wondering if their degrees were really fairly earned. It provokes a backlash among working class whites. And it’s open to abuse on a number of fronts. Class-based programs don’t solve all these problems at a stroke, but they go a long way toward addressing them.”
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“Science fiction has largely become a self-referential genre. While the intention of authors is likely not to look to the past of the genre, that doesn’t change the fact that almost everything in contemporary science fiction has already been done before. Contemporary science fiction is, for better or worse, a genre that is always looking to its golden past, always conjuring images and ideas presented at a time when the genre inspired and shocked people based solely on its ability to present a vision of the future not found elsewhere (wondrous or terrifying futures, depending where you looked). And if science fiction is self-referential, replicating the same references without realizing it is doing so, then “sensawunda” no longer functions. It can’t–at least not for those who are well read in the genre. “
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chemistry isn’t what it used to be.
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“It is wrong to teach creation science or intelligent design in the science classroom, according to the American Academy of Religion. In its “Guidelines for Teaching About Religion in Kâ12 Public Schools in the United States,” issued in April 2010, the Academy poses the question “Can creation science or intelligent design be taught in schools?” and answers (PDF, p. 21, emphasis in the original):
Yes, but not in science classes. Creation science and intelligent design represent worldviews that fall outside of the realm of science that is defined as (and limited to) a method of inquiry based on gathering observable and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.”
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“Drove over to Yarmouth Port to visit the one-time home of writer and illustrator Edward Gorey and if I was clever enough the following notes would be presented alphabetically and in rhymed couplets as an homage to one of Gorey’s most famous books, The Gashlycrumb Tinies, kind of like this:
A is for ashes divided in thirds.
B is for books that he drew and sometimes wrote the words.
C is for cats who played with his ink.
D is for Dracula that made him rich clink clink clink
E is for Elephant House which he bought on a whim.
F is fur coats in which he looked quite trim.
Hmmm…
No Edward Gorey, am I?
Better skip it.”