In yesterday’s post about the experience of science, I mentioned that I had both a specific complaint about the article by Alexandra Jellicoe (which I explained in the post) and a general complaint about the class in which the article falls. I want to attempt to explain the latter problem, partly because I think it […]
Tag: academia
Experiment vs. Theory: The Eternal Debate
Melissa at Confused at a Higher Level offers some thoughts on the relative status of experimental vs. theoretical science, spinning off a comprehensive discussion of the issues at Academic Jungle. I flagged this to comment on over the weekend, but then was too busy with SteelyKid and football to get to it. since I’m late […]
How to Read Scientific Papers Without Reading Every Word
Over at Tor.com, Jo Walton is surprised that people skim over boring bits of novels. While she explicitly excludes non-fiction from her discussion, this immediately made me think of Timothy Burke’s How to Read in College, which offers tips to prospective humanities and social science majors on how to most effectively skim through huge reading […]
Teacher Self Management vs. Going to the Dark Side
The New York Times has an article about the opening of a teacher-run school in The City. It sounds like an interesting experiment: Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the […]
The ABC’s of AMO Physics
Over at Confused at a Higher Level, Melissa offers an alphabetical list of essential supplies for a condensed matter experimentalist at a small college. This is a fun idea for back-to-school time, so I’ll steal it, and offer the following alphabetical list of essentials for Atomic, Molecular, and Optical physics at a small college, kind […]
Good Advice Is Good Advice
Over at Inside Higher Ed, there’s a list of “survival tips” for women entering grad school in the sciences. It’s a pretty good and pretty typical list of advice– you can find more or less the same advice posted somewhere every fall. What’s striking about it, though, is that if you stripped all the specific […]
Simple Answers to Complex Medical Questions
There’s a new medical study of the effects of alcohol consumption that finds a surprising result: Controlling only for age and gender, compared to moderate drinkers, abstainers had a more than 2 times increased mortality risk, heavy drinkers had 70% increased risk, and light drinkers had 23% increased risk. A model controlling for former problem […]
Academic Poll: On the First Day…
While I’m still trying not to think about the new academic term that starts in two weeks (yes, the first day of class is Labor Day, grumble mutter grump), it’s beginning to impinge on my consciousness. Thus, this poll on a frequent and annoying phenomenon that recurs with every new academic term: Students who miss […]
The Science Mindset List
It’s nearly time for classes to resume, which means it’s time for a zillion stories about Beloit College’s annual Kids These Days List, listing off a bunch of things that this year’s entering college class, who were mostly born in 1992, have always taken for granted. A sample: 1. Few in the class know how […]
The Full Seminar Experience
Avi Steiner emailed me with a set of questions that are too good not to turn into a blog post: Being a math/science major at a small liberal arts college, I unfortunately never get the “full” experience of a math/science talk. Since I do plan on eventually attending grad school, I thought it might be […]