In yesterday’s post about the lack of money in academia, I mentioned in passing that lack of funding is part of the reason for the slow pace of progress on improving faculty diversity. That is, we could make more rapid progress if we suddenly found shitloads of money and could go on a massive hiring… Continue reading Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation: Reaching Gender Equality in Physics Faculty
Category: Economics
Everything Would Be Better With Shitloads of Money
Over in Twitter-land, somebody linked to this piece promoting open-access publishing, excerpting this bit: One suggestion: Ban the CV from the grant review process. Rank the projects based on the ideas and ability to carry out the research rather than whether someone has published in Nature, Cell or Science. This could in turn remove the… Continue reading Everything Would Be Better With Shitloads of Money
This Is Not What I Want As a Defense of “The Humanities”
Yesterday was Founders Day at Union, celebrating the 220th anniversary of the granting of a charter for the college. The name of the event always carries a sort of British-boarding-school air for me, and never fails to earworm me with a very particular rugby song, but really it’s just one of those formal-procession-and-big-speaker events that… Continue reading This Is Not What I Want As a Defense of “The Humanities”
Academic Science Is Complicated, Like Scrabble
Blogging will continue to be light to nonexistent, as it’s crunch time in a lot of ways at the moment, including our double tenure-track search. Which it would be inappropriate to talk about in any more detail than “Wow, this is a lot of work.” There are, however, two academic-job-related things that I probably ought… Continue reading Academic Science Is Complicated, Like Scrabble
Cash and Respect
The London School of Economics has a report on a study of academic refereeing (PDF) that looked at the effect of incentives on referee behavior. They found that both a “social incentive” (posting the time a given referee took to turn around the papers they reviewed on a web site) and a cash incentive ($100… Continue reading Cash and Respect
Travel Cons
Matt “Dean Dad” Reed has a post about the issue of academic conference travel, which is expensive and often the first thing cut out of college budgets. Which leaves faculty either disconnected from their field, or paying out-of-pocket to attend meetings that they need to demonstrate their scholarly productivity. This, in turn, tends to skew… Continue reading Travel Cons
On “Excessive Technical Detail”
I’ve seen a few links passed around to this Tom Siegfried post about science literacy, which is mostly a familiar story about how polls show most Americans giving incorrect answers to science questions. The sort of stuff you find in the NSF’s Science and Engineering Indicators report. What’s getting the social-media attention, though, is this… Continue reading On “Excessive Technical Detail”
Overwrought Arguments About TED Are an Existential Threat to Our Civilization
When I wrote about Benjamin Bratton’s anti-TED rant I only talked about the comment about the low success rate of TED suggestions. That was, admittedly, a small piece of his article, but the rest of it was so ludicrously overheated that I couldn’t really take it seriously. It continues to get attention, though, both in… Continue reading Overwrought Arguments About TED Are an Existential Threat to Our Civilization
Congratulations to Fama, Hanson, Schiller, and DougT
It was looking like we were going to slip through the entire Nobel season without a winner in the Uncertain Principles Betting Pool, but at the eleventh hour, we got one: DougT correctly predicted that the 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel would be shared by Eugene Fama (remember,… Continue reading Congratulations to Fama, Hanson, Schiller, and DougT
On Corrective Incentives
SteelyKid’s kindergarten teacher is big on incentives and prizes– there are a number of reward bags that get sent home with kids who excel in some particular area. I’m not entirely sure what’s in these, because SteelyKid hasn’t gotten any yet. This isn’t because she misbehaves– from all reports, she’s very good– but she’s in… Continue reading On Corrective Incentives