It started when someone asked Dr. B. for advice about starting a Ph.D. program with three kids in tow. Since then, the question has been bouncing around the academic blogosphere, with posts you should read at Academom and Geeky Mom. Although this is absolutely the worst time in the semester for me to fire on all cyliders with this one, regular readers know that I’ve shared my own experiences in this area, so I can’t stay completely out of it.
A brief recap of the current conversation:
Category Archives: Academia
Karpova-Tonegawa update.
College freshman proclaims: “Bias a myth!” Zuska calls shenanigans.
There are some days I run into a piece of writing that just floors me. For instance this piece from The Cornell American, whose author, a freshman, proclaims:
I’ve got it made. As an attractive, professional female chemical engineer attempting to graduate a year early from Cornell, I find it hard to believe I couldn’t get a job or professor status before a good majority of males.
The point of her piece was to dismiss a report on the bias faced by female academics. Because, you know, a college freshman is much more in touch with the data than some panel charged with actually studying the data.
Since she hasn’t noticed discrimination, it must not exist.
But I am saved the trouble of formulating a methodical, point by point response to her article — or, worse, of muttering darkly about the youth of today — since Zuska has posted an apt reply to it.
It really does take a village.
Making repairs, staying afloat.
Like sailors we are, who must rebuild their ship upon the open sea, never able to dismantle it in dry dock or to reconstruct it there from the best materials.
Otto Neurath, “Protocol Sentences”
* * * * *
The Neurath quotation above was offered to explain something about scientific theories and scientific knowledge, but today it puts me in mind of scientific communities instead. For surely, if we could bring the ship of science to dry-dock, there are lots of rotten planks that we might replace with strong new lumber, but that’s not an option. We have to fix the old tub while it’s still at sea, and there are some bits in need of repair that might put the person making the repair in shark-infested waters.
I’ve been thinking about this because of a couple of blog posts that got stuck in my head.
The dangers of reading a paper at a conference.
Chad Orzel has an excellent post up about good ways to use PowerPoint for a presentation. In a similar vein, I’d like to offer some reasons for academics in disciplines (like philosophy) in which it is the convention to read papers to each other at professional meetings to consider breaking with tradition and not just reading the papers they are presenting.
First, for those of you in science-y fields puzzling over that last sentence: Yes, a great many philosophers really do go places and read their papers to other philosophers. Yes, when I saw it the first time, coming to philosophy via chemistry where people don’t do this, it confused the heck out of me, too. The setting in which this manner of presentation struck me as the most misguided was in department colloquia where the speaker had sent a copy of the paper ahead so that people had time to read it — and indeed, many people in attendance had photocopies of the paper with them at the colloquium — and yet, the speaker still read the paper to these presumably literate members of the audience!
Academic philosophers are a funny bunch, and a complete analysis of their customs is beyond the scope of this post. My goal for the moment is to urge examination of this particular custom — and some of its pitfalls — in the hopes that it may lead to more productive communication at future conferences and colloquia. (Am I looking out for my own interests as a person in the audience for philosophy presentations? You’re darn tootin’!)
A backward glance at PSA 2006
ScienceBloggers meet in the three-dimensional world: (from left) Janet Stemwedel, John Lynch, Prof. Steve Steve, John Wilkins, David Ng, Ben Cohen.
I managed to get back home last night from the PSA meeting in Vancouver, although just barely. My co-symposiasts got a rental car and headed off to see mountains, an expedition I’d have joined were it not for my plane-missing paranoia. (“You realize that flying home from Vancouver is essentially a domestic flight, so you probably don’t need to check in until about 90 minutes before flight time,” the field trip organizer assured me. But I know what I worry about, rational or not.) Given that the hotel had pretty much cleared of philosophers and historians, I got bored enough hanging around in the lobby that I ended up catching an earlier airport shuttle, which proceeded to get stuck in traffic. No matter, I was still at the airline check-in kiosk 2.5 hours before my scheduled departure time.
And then the kiosk informed me that my flight had been cancelled. AAAAAAAIIEEEEEE!!
One of the remaining human gate agents was able to work out how to get me booked through to another Bay Area airport as my final destination. “But,” she said, “your flight out of here departs in 30 minutes, so you’re going to have to hustle!” Through customs, through security, to a gate in the hinterlands that required that I run across a large connecting tube, down a flight of stairs, across another large stretch, up a flight of stairs, and then a little further to the gate (carrying my coat and shoes the whole time, of course). But I made it.
Off the top of my travel-tired head, here are some observations from this year’s conference:
Why do scientists lie? (More reminiscing about Luk Van Parijs.)
Yesterday, I recalled MIT’s dismissal of one of its biology professors for fabrication and falsification, both “high crimes” in the world of science. Getting caught doing these is Very Bad for a scientist — which makes the story of Luk Van Parijs all the more puzzling.
As the story unfolded a year ago, the details of the investigation suggested that at least some of Van Parijs lies may have been about details that didn’t matter so much — which means he was taking a very big risk for very little return. Here’s what I wrote then:
What ever happened to Luk Van Parijs?
Just over a year ago, MIT fired an associate professor of biology for fabrication and falsification. While scientific misconduct always incurs my ire, one of the things that struck me when the sad story of Luk Van Parijs broke was how well all the other parties in the affair — from the MIT administrators right down to the other members of the Van Parijs lab — acquitted themselves in a difficult situation.
Here’s what I wrote when the story broke last year:
Some academic links worth following.
There is a bunch of interesting stuff to read on the subject of teaching, learning, and being part of an academic department right now. Here are a few links I think deserve your attention:
Online AP science classes — with lab?
Adventures in Ethics and Science field operative RMD alerted me to a recent article in the New York Times (free registration required) about an ongoing debate on the use of online instruction for Advanced Placement science classes. The crux of the debate is not the value of online science classes per se, but whether such courses can accomplish the objectives of an AP science course if they don’t include a traditional, hands-on laboratory component.
The debate is interesting for a few reasons. First, it gets to the question of what precisely an AP course is intended to do. Second, it brings up the question of who has access to AP courses — and the special challenges presented for science instruction in some regions. Finally, I think it also prompts an examination of how colleges and universities deal with incoming student bodies whose preparation for college is rather more heterogeneous than homogeneous.
Full disclosure: As some of you already know, I regularly teach an online section of my philosophy of science course.* As well, about a hundred years ago, I was a high school student who took a bunch** of AP classes and AP tests.