Via Alex, WNYC’s Radiolab podcast features a wonderful commencement address by Robert Krulwich to the Caltech class of 2008, making the case for the importance of telling stories about science to the general public. This fits in wonderfully with what I said last week about science popularization. He comes at it from a different angle… Continue reading Tell Me a Story
Category: Academia
Reader Request: Career Options
A while back, after handing in my manuscript and before SteelyKid, I asked readers to suggest blog topics. I got to a few of them already, but there’s one more that I’ve been meaning to comment on, from tcmJOE: I’m a physics undergrad about to begin my final year, and while I’m still thinking of… Continue reading Reader Request: Career Options
Jolly Good Fellows
I 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… Continue reading Jolly Good Fellows
The Consequences of Poor Science Popularization
You 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… Continue reading The Consequences of Poor Science Popularization
I Love My Job
I’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… Continue reading I Love My Job
Self-Esteem Is Not the Problem With Science Education
Arts & 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… Continue reading Self-Esteem Is Not the Problem With Science Education
What Humanists Think
Last 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,… Continue reading What Humanists Think
Breaking News: College Students Drink
I 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”:… Continue reading Breaking News: College Students Drink
Failing Schools: Better Than Nothing
You know, my opinion of “No Child Left Behind” style attempts to measure “failing” schools is as low as anybody’s, but even I think this new Ohio State study sounds ridiculous: Up to three-quarters of U.S. schools deemed failing based on achievement test scores would receive passing grades if evaluated using a less biased measure,… Continue reading Failing Schools: Better Than Nothing
Email Passeth All Understanding
The other day, the Dean Dad remarked on one of the quirks of academic technology: Last week I saw another iteration of something I still don’t really understand. People who are perfectly civil in person are often capable of firing off incredibly nasty and hateful emails. Sometimes they’ll do that with cc’s all the way… Continue reading Email Passeth All Understanding