The Free-Ride offspring have developed a serious penchant for nature programs. The latest one they viewed was Nature: Encountering Sea Monsters, and as you might expect, they have some thoughts (and artwork) to share. So, we follow in Tim Lambert’s footsteps by combining Friday cephalopods with sprog-blogging.
Author Archives: admin
Why Jade scares me.
OK, if you clicked through the links in my answers to the ABC meme, you know an embarrassing personal detail about me: I rather enjoy watching America’s Next Top Model. (Truth be told, I wouldn’t enjoy it nearly so much were it not enhanced by the reading of snarky episode recaps by Potes. And, as it turns out, regular commenter Uncle Fishy knows Potes from when he lived in Providence — so I had to read the recaps.)
If you don’t like wallowing in the depravity of others (which is to say, my depravity), feel free to go read a classic post from the vault. Otherwise, read on.
NSF and “Senatorial Peer Review”: one blogger’s paranoid response.
Please notice that the title of this post promises a “paranoid response”, not a careful analysis. It’s one of those unscheduled features of this blog. Kind of like a snow day.
Yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed has an article about the U.S. Senate getting kind of testy with the director of the NSF about certain research projects the NSF has seen fit to fund. Regular readers know that I think we can have a reasoned debate about funding priorities (especially when that funding is put up by the public). It does not sound to me like the exchange in the Senate was that kind of reasoned debate.
“I do not think that phrase means what you think it does.” (NYT on peer review)
There’s an article in yesterday’s New York Times about doubts the public is having about the goodness of scientific publications as they learn more about what the peer-review system does, and does not, involve. It’s worth a read, if only to illuminate what non-scientists seem to have assumed went on in peer review, and to contrast that with what actually happens. This raises the obvious question: Ought peer review to be what ordinary people assume it to be? My short answer, about which more below the fold:Not unless you’re prepared to completely revamp the institutional structure in which science is practiced, and especially the system of rewards.
Teaching Carnival call for submissions.
Next Friday (May 12), I will be hosting Teaching Carnival #9, right here. The Teaching Carnival encompasses the many aspects of teaching, learning, and figuring out why it all matters, in the realm of higher education.
I especially encourage submissions about teaching or learning science in higher education. Also, since for may the term will be over (or drawing to a close) by mid-May, I’d be interested to see posts about how well pedagogical innovations worked (or didn’t), or what you would do differently if you could live the term over.
Undoubtedly, there will also be posts about the horrors of grading. They’re welcome, too.
Submission procedures below the fold:
Getting ideas from Donald Trump? (An oldie from the vault.)
Hey, it’s May already! Could that explain why things are crazy-busy here?
There will be new content soon, once I’ve plowed through some more grading and exam-writing and curricular trouble-shooting. In the meantime, since I copped to enjoying reality TV more than I should (in that ABC meme, under “Not going to cop to”), I thought I’d share a May post from the earlier incarnation of this blog, a post in which I muse on what “The Apprentice” (a show, as of this season, I no longer watch … we’ve grown apart) might teach us about how to improve the scientific community.
Yes, it’s utterly daft. So what are you waiting for?
Uninvited nest update.
Yesterday I asked for advice about how to deal with a nest of eggs that presents itself in an inopportune place (a tree slated to meet a gruesome end in a whisper-chipper) at an inopportune time (mere days ahead of when we finally launch our backyard overhaul). The consensus among commenters who professed knowledge of or experience with birds in the wild seems to be that there is no promising way to relocate the nest without scaring the mama bird away and leaving the eggs cold and orphaned. Given that the whole point of moving the nest would be not to throw out the baby birds with the despised tree, this outcome would be sub-optimal.
A call for advice: nest relocation?
I need to call on the collective wisdom of the internets to address an issue in my back yard.
We have this tree in our back yard. It’s a pretty awful tree. It was probably a living Christmas tree that the people who lived here before us planted, but it’s in a really bad location (from the point of view of being able to use the rest of the yard sensibly), and it’s ugly, and it’s also sharp and pointy.
We want it gone. Indeed, finally, after about a year of planning, we are ready to have it removed (replaced with a Fuyu persimmon tree, in a slightly different location) as part of a major back yard improvement project. Work is scheduled to start Monday.
But this week, a complication presented itself:
Cue the theme song.
Via GrrlScientist, the precisely calibrated quiz for determining theme songs yields the following for me:
Friday Sprog Blogging: the world in a fig tree.
Last weekend, the Free-Ride family sat down to watch a nature program together: Nature: The Queen of Trees. The program looked at the variety of life around a giant fig tree. The central “relationship” in the program was between the tree and a wasp. From the program description:
The wasp and the fig depend on each other for survival. Without the wasp, the tree could not pollinate its flowers and produce seeds. Without the fig, the wasp would have nowhere to lay its eggs.
The younger Free-Riders were more captivated, however, by some of the secondary characters in the drama.