Today, Inside Higher Ed has an article about the recent decline of peer reviewed papers authored by professors in top five economics departments in high profile economics journals. A paper by MIT economics professor Glenn Ellison, “Is Peer Review in Decline?,” considers possible explanations for this decline, and the Inside Higher ed article looks at the possible impacts of this shift.
The alternative threatening the peer reviewed journals here is the web, since scholars can post their papers directly to their websites (or blogs) rather than letting them languish with pokey referees. But I think the issues here go beyond the tug-of-war between old media and new media and bring us to the larger question of just what is involved in building new scientific* knowledge.
Author Archives: admin
Lessons from the Ward Churchill case.
The news today from Inside Higher Ed is that the University of Colorado Board of Regents voted to fire Ward Churchill. You may recall that in May 2006, a faculty panel at the university found that the tenured ethnic studies professor had committed repeated, intentional academic misconduct in his scholarly writings. You may also recall that the close scrutiny of his writings was sparked by an outcry at some of the political views he voiced (especially that the September 11th attacks were an instance of “chickens coming home to roost”).
The mix of factors here — a movement to remove a tenured professor at a public university because his views are judged politically objectionable, plus a finding of real problems with the integrity of his scholarship, not to mention a whole set of issues around shared governance and the appropriate process within university hearings (which I will leave to the people with a much better feel for org charts) — have made the Churchill case a Rorschach test. How people interpret what the case was about, and how they will judge the outcome, probably tells us more about their priorities and anxieties around higher education than it necessarily tells us about Ward Churchill himself.
The other ScienceBloggers will be back soon.
I’ve been getting word (via carrier pigeon, mostly) that some of your favorite ScienceBloggers are just itching to provide you with fabulous new posts. However, a series of massive power outages in San Francisco Tuesday afternoon seem to have given the interwebs some hiccups.
When the series of tubes is properly connected, they’ll be back. Thanks for your patience.
Murphy’s law of conferences?
Let’s say you’re looking at a wide-open fall semester, and you are asked to be a participant on a panel at a conference. Since your semester is wide open, you agree.
Months later, you’re asked to be a participant on another panel at another conference. Except for the conference you already committed to, your semester is still wide open.
What do you suppose the chances are that the two conferences overlap in time? And meet in different cities? Was this predictable, or am I just lucky?
(It looks like the two panels will meet on different days. Assuming no plane-grounding weather events, it should be do-able.)
Opening lines of communication between universities and the FBI.
In the July 16 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (secure behind a paywall), the article “FBI Reaches Out to Campuses” [1] caught my attention. The gist of it is that academic scientists are increasingly the targets of foreign espionage, where the stakes have less to do with national security than potentially huge economic losses. The FBI would like to help academic scientists avoid being dupes and giving scientists in other countries an unfair advantage.
A resolution for the Tripoli six.
Almost a year ago, I learned about the case of the Tripoli six, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian physician in Libya sentenced to death for infecting hundreds of children with HIV despite the fact that the best scientific evidence indicated that the children were infected due to negligence in the hospital well before these health care workers even arrived in Libya.
Book review: The Canon.
The average American’s lack of scientific literacy has become a common complaint, not only among scientists but also among those who see our economic prospects as a nation linked to our level of scientific know-how. Yet somehow, science has become an area of learning where it’s socially acceptable to plead ignorance. Adults leave the house without even a cocktail-party grasp of the basics they presumably learned in middle school and high school science classes, and the prospects of herding them back into a science classroom to give it another go seem pretty remote.
Natalie Angier’s new book The Canon seeks to provide an audience of adults with the central ideas in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy, as well as a reasonable handle on the activity of science more generally. Angier is not presenting a textbook for a survey course, but rather a taste of how these different scientific disciplines understand various chunks of the world we live in. The audience she is trying to reach may fear science, or remember it as boring, or have no good story about how it connects with everyday life. Angier is relentless in identifying science as it crosses our paths, and it is clear that she is taken with the beauty in the scientists’ accounts of their phenomena. What is less clear is whether Angier’s rhapsody to science will really engage her intended audience.
Basic concepts: refrigeration.
My last post for the basic concepts series involved phases of matter and transformations from one phase to another. This post will look at how a phase change can be put to practical use in a common household appliance — the freezer. My aim here is to give you a good thermodynamic feel for how a freezer works. As a bonus, I’ll explain why leaving the freezer door open is a futile strategy for cooling down a hot kitchen.
Some questions about the cadaver calculator.
Orac’s calculated value (if he shuffled off this mortal coil in his present state — and I really hope he doesn’t) piqued my curiosity and led me to calculate the value of my own potential cadaver. But the calculated value leaves me curious about the assumptions underpinning the calculation.
First, my results:
Happy Caturday!
It’s John Lynch’s fault. And honestly, how can you be aware of the existence of a quiz that will determine which LOLcat you are without acting on that information to determine which LOLcat you are?