Inside Higher Ed is reporting that UT-Austin’s Task Force on Curricular Reform has issued its report on the kind of first-year experience that might dop good things for the undergraduates (in terms of making general education more coherent and so forth).
The faculty are commenting on the report. Apparently, the science and engineering faculty are less than enthusiastic.
Speaking as a scientist …
Can’t blog … grading papers. But, to honor Lawrence Summers’ retirement from fair Harvard, here’s a musing from one year ago today:
Purely hypothetical case. All the names are made up. SInce it’s my thought experiment, I stipulate the facts. Of course, you are encouraged to disagree with me about what follows from those facts.
Consider an economist named Barry Winters. Barry is giving a talk at a conference about what can be done to attract more women to the study of math and science, and to keep them in the field long enough to become full professors. In his talk, Barry suggests as a possible hypothesis for the relatively low number of women in math and science careers that there may be innate biological factors that make males better at math and science than females. (Barry also relates an anecdote about his daughter naming her toy trucks as if they were dolls, but obviously, he means this anecdote to be illustrative rather than evidentiary.) Barry’s talk does not go over well with the rest of the participants in the conference.
Question: Is Barry just exercising academic freedom here?
Toss your cookies
Hey, remember how I mentioned that there had been some issues with the commenting here? And how I suggested the utterly clunky fix of using a different browser to leave your comments?
We (i.e., our tech guru) think we know why that works and, even better, a less clunky way to achieve the desired result:
When ScienceBlogs came into the world not so long ago, the Universe may have experienced a little hiccup, wherein some bad ScienceBlog cookies may have been spewed forth.
Deleting all cookies your browser may have ingested from scienceblogs.com ought to clear up your commenting problems. From here on out? Nothing but good cookies. (Thin Mints hidden in the back of the freezer good.)
Thanks for your patience.
Emailing your professor: some suggestions
Chad says all the online academics are obligated to respond, somehow, to this New York Times piece on emails from students to professors. So, I shall.
But, rather than digging into the details of the article itself, or worrying about the sample size upon which it is based, or the assertions by at least one of the professors interviewed that she was misrepresented, I’ll just share some advice. This is based entirely on my email likes and dislikes, so take it with a grain of sodium chloride.
Qigong in science class?
A reader of this blog reports:
My children went to a [public charter] school in which pseudoscience was taught to them. However, it was something more insidious than “intelligent design.” It was Qigong taught as science. One of my daughter’s classmates fell unconscious while she was performing these exercises. Then the Qigong instructor ran to the victim and began moving his hands over her body, telling the students that he was healing her by moving his hands over her which was mainpulating body energy or “Chi.”
I assume that the girl was OK in the end … but, this gives one pause.
What should we say about the teaching of Qigong in public schools? What should we say about the teaching of Qigong as science?
I’m overthinking this
Sign on the door of the San Francisco Zoo’s “Insect Zoo” building:
No food, drink, gum, or smoking in the Insect Zoo.
No smoking I understand (an indoor space in a part of the zoo aimed at children — and it’s California). I’m less certain about the gum (but no one wants to step in it).
Why no food or drink?
Are they worried it will attract bugs?
Unreasonable expectations (or, there are more dumb people than you think)
Commenting on my last post, Karl thinks PZ and I have missed the boat:
Janet said
“Science isn’t just putting forward a point of view, it’s inviting the audience to check it out and see how it holds up. Nothing for sale — the audience already has the critical faculties that are needed.”
no! No! and NO!
They do not. You and PZ are extremely intelligent people. You seem not to be able to accept how much less intelligent most of the populace is. After all, if they had critical faculties, they would be college graduates. They don’t know and don’t want to know how to “check it out”. They need to have it spelled out in simple words – with pictures.
Think of who have been the most popular exponents of science in the last 20 or 30 years – Sagan and Feynman. What made them popular? Presentation! Demonstration! Pictures! Even in teaching college classes they were lively, animated, entertaining – fun to listen to.
You, who write all these science blogs are brilliant, informative, but duller than …(can’t think of a witty metaphor).
You seem to have the same attitude as a Republican administration toward the working class. They don’t know what life is like when you don’t have a couple of mil in the bank. Why would you need Social Security – just invest 40 or 50K in the stock market every year. And YOU seem to think that everyone has an IQ of 120 or higher. Just hit your local library, or the Internet, and read all the wonderful blogs explaining about science.
Well that can’t happen. We need programs on network television that are attention-grabbing, dramatic, lively and geared towards the mass audience.
(I’ve taken the liberty of adding bold emphasis to a couple of Karl’s sentences.)
“I’m not a scientist, but I play one on TV …” (my worries about getting too glib)
By now, no doubt, you’ve seen Randy Olson’s advice for evolutionary biologists trying to communicate more effectively with members of the general public. While a number of his suggestions are common sense (e.g., try not to be boring), there was something about the ten suggestions, taken together, that bugged me. Not just me, either. John Lynch notes:
Randy Olson, following an MFA in filmmaking from USC, has decided that the way to improve evolution education is basically to engage in sort of dumbed-down glossiness that anti-evolutionists specialize in; all surface flash with little real depth. Olson seems to have forgotten that communicating science is difficult and it’s complexity doesn’t yield to simple Hollywoodization. Taking a bunch of acting classes – which he seems to suggest is necessary – wont solve that problem.
I’m not too receptive to people telling me I need movie star qualities to be able to support science, or that we have to pander to superficial sensibilities to communicate a message.
After turning it over in my head for awhile, I’ve decided that Olson’s suggestions bug me precisely because following them would probably undermine scientists’ communication with laypersons, not improve them.
Algebra-hating and societal problems
I’m a little late to the party on the Richard Cohen “who needs algebra anyway?” column in the Washington Post. As others have pointed out, the column itself is fairly lame. Piling on at this point would be a little mean.
Instead of piling on, I would like to follow the admirable example set at Science, Shrimp, and Grits by trying to think a little about the root causes behind this algebra-hating, and the situation of the particular student who inspired Cohen’s column. I don’t have a complete diagnosis of the problem, but there are some questions that need to be asked here.
There’s a word for people like you
It has come to my attention that there is an adjectival form of my surname in use. However, none of the extant meanings of it seem applicable to me and the stuff I do. So, dear readers, I’m asking for your help.
But first, here’s the usage to date:
Stemwedelian; alternate spelling: Stemewedellian (which rhymes with sesquipedalian)
adj.
1. (in computer science; first usage c. 2000) practically successful despite disregard of formal considerations (e.g., network architectural trickery that seems wrong at the time of implementation but which makes things work within budget constraints)
2. (in contract law; first usage 2006) relying on distinctions too fine to support, but in a way which illuminates flaws in the drafting of a contract; more generally, characterized by the creation of havoc using a clever litigation strategy.
We need to work out the meaning of Stemwedelian properly applied to the realm of the philosophy and ethics of science. Some possibilities: