Category Archives: Academia

How important are labs for learning science?

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Steve Gimbel has a provocative post that suggests the costs of undergraduate lab classes may outweigh the benefits. Quoth Steve:

[E]verything I know about physics, I learned from my theory classes. You see, science classes come in two flavors. There are theory classes where a prof stands in front of the room and lectures and then there are lab classes where for many hours, students walk in ill-prepared and tried to figure out which one of these things we’ve never seen before is a potentiometer, fumble their way through procedures that yield results that are not even close to what they were led to expect, and then plug and chug their way through scientific and error calculations that frankly mean little to them. I will freely admit that all my experiences in lab classes were a waste of intellectual time and curricular space that could have much better utilized.

Now, I’m supposed to be writing a serious academic paper right now*, but Steve, as a fellow philosopher who is well aware of my misspent scientific, actually emailed me to see if I’d weigh in on the (as did another blogger coming at the issue from the perspective of a working scientist). And, coincidentally, just the night before Steve published his post, my better half and I were reminiscing about our undergraduate experiences with laboratory classes. So really, what choice do I have but to respond?

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Blogging as myself.

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In a private communication, Sciencewoman asks:

Just out of curiosity, how have you been able to blog under your real name? Has your department been supportive? Are you post-tenure and immune from some of the pressures that the rest of us feel? Or is it that a philosophy department views outreach/education differently from a strict science department?

In the same communication, she also suggests that I might answer these question in a blog post, so I am.

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Knowledge, belief, and what counts as good science: More thoughts on Marcus Ross.

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Following up on my query about what it would take for a Young Earth Creationist “to write a doctoral dissertation in geosciences that is both ‘impeccable’ in the scientific case it presents and intellectually honest,” I’m going to say something about the place of belief in the production of scientific knowledge. Indeed, this is an issue I’ve dealt with before (and it’s at least part of the subtext of the demarcation problem), but for some reason the Marcus Ross case is one where drawing the lines seems trickier.

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Intellectual honesty in science: the Marcus Ross case.

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By now, you may have heard (via Pharyngula, or Sandwalk, or the New York Times) about Marcus Ross, who was recently granted a Ph.D. in geosciences by the University of Rhode Island. To earn that degree, he wrote a dissertation (which his dissertation advisor described as “impeccable”) about the abundance and spread of marine reptiles called mosasaurs which disappeared about 65 million years ago.
Curiously, the newly-minted Dr. Ross is open about his view that the Earth is at most 10,000 years old.

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Dramatists and scientists have something in common.

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Yesterday, while transporting the sprogs to Science Scouts aquatic training maneuvers, I caught a few minutes of a City Arts & Lectures interview with Lewis Black. In the part of the interview I heard, Black discussed his efforts (over the course of eight years) to make it as a playwright, and he revealed a couple ways in which that career path might not be so different from that of the scientist:

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Keeping score in academe: blogging as ‘professional activity’ (or not).

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During the discussion after my talk at the Science Blogging Conference, the question came up (and was reported here) of whether and when tenure and promotion committees at universities will come to view the blogging activities of their faculty members with anything more positive than suspicion.
SteveG and helmut both offer some interesting thoughts on the issue.

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I must have missed the line in my contract that said this is volunteer work.

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The faculty where I teach is at a bargaining impasse with the administration of our university system over our contracts. We are hoping that the administration will come back to the table for a real negotiation*, but in the event that that doesn’t happen, there are plans for a system-wide “rolling strike”, with staggered two-day walkouts at each of the 23 universities in the system.
This prompted some opinion pieces in the school newspaper, including this one. There’s a lot I could say about the claims in this piece (the university is going to hire replacement teachers or drop courses from the catalog because of a two-day strike? unlikely!), but there’s a single sentence that I think merits real attention:

If the teachers care more about getting paid rather than the education of the students, I say let them walk.

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Beginning of semester moment of clarity.

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Since classes for our Spring semester started just last Wednesday, my approach to the university this morning (from freeway exit to parking garage) involved a huge line of cars, creeping very slowly. It also involved campus police directing the movement of long lines of cars at what is, in normal circumstances, a four-way stop. It has been this way since last Wednesday, and it will continue to be this week for probably another week.
In about a week, as if by magic, campus police will no longer be needed to move the traffic, and the lines of cars at any given moment will be reduced by at least 50%.

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