Dear Sarah Gardner and Marketplace producers,
I listened with interest to your story on today’s show about the current prospects for the solar energy sector. While the story was engaging, I have a nit to pick.
URGENT: Help fund a biology proposal that expires at the end of the day!
This is a project in Brian Switek’s DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge, and if it doesn’t find full funding by the end of today, it’s not going to happen.
From the other end of the pipeline: views of science from Yale’s MB&B entering class of 1991.
There’s an article in the 19 September 2008 issue of Science (“And Then There Was One”) [1] that catches up with many of the 30 men and women who made up the incoming class of 1991 in the molecular biophysics and biochemistry (MB&B) Ph.D. program at Yale University. The article raises lots of interesting questions, including what counts as a successful career in science. (Not surprisingly, it depends who you ask.) The whole article is well worth a read no matter what stage of the science career pipeline you’re at (although it’s behind a paywall, so you may have to track it down at your local library).
Because there’s so much going on in the article, rather than try to distill it in a single blog post, I thought I would point out a few thought-provoking comments contained in it:
DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2008: fabulous prizes from Seed.
We’re nearly to the halfway mark (in terms of time) on Blogger Challenge 2008 and the mommy bloggers are still leaving us in their dust. We’ve told you about the school kids you could help by donating to our challenges, we’ve offered small incentives (and big incentives).
Today, the news comes from our benevolent overlords at Seed that they’d like to help us coax some donations from you by offering more prizes.
DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2008: some BIG incentives.
In a lot of ways, the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge is a community endeavor. It is all about what you, our community of readers, can accomplish together for public school students and teachers in need. Also, it’s a great example of how citizens of the blogosphere think about community — not just a group of people clustered geographically, but people we’re connected to by common interests and values.
While you’re working together to make things better for school kids in classrooms across the fifty United States, you can also work together toward what Chad calls a ‘big incentive’. Chad is offering a ‘big incentive’ if donors get his challenge to its goal of $6,000, although it’s not quite clear at this point just what that ‘big incentive’ will be. The current contenders include Chad dancing like a monkey, slipping a dialogue with his dog into the abstract of his next peer-reviewed publication, or growing full mutton-chop whiskers.
Competitive git that I am, I figured I should offer some big incentives, too. In order to tell you about those, first I need to introduce you to my midlife crisis.
DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2008: more incentives for your donations.
Today is day 10 of Blogger Challenge 2008, in which generous ScienceBlogs readers help public school teachers come up with the funds to deliver the educational goods to their students. As I write this post, challenges mounted by ScienceBloggers have crossed the $10,000 mark.
Given that this money has come from 113 donors and that there are about a bajillion ScienceBlogs readers, I’m guessing there are some folks thinking about making a donation but hanging back from actually donating. My hope is that this post will give you that little push forward you might need.
Friday Sprog Blogging: another science fair contender.
At Casa Free-Ride, our science fair discussions take an unexpected turn:
Younger offspring: I want to do a science fair project, too.
Elder offspring: Hey, second graders don’t have to do science fair projects!
Younger offspring: But second graders get to do science fair projects if they want.
Dr. Free-Ride: Seriously, it’s not like the thirst for knowledge is restricted to the upper grades.
Talking a little later while the elder Free-Ride offspring was somewhere else, no doubt ruminating on the injustice of younger siblings:
Prizes for women. Progress for women?
2008 is the tenth year of the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science awards to remarkable female scientists from around the world. Indeed, our sister-site, ScienceBlogs.de, covered this year’s award ceremony and is celebrating women in science more generally with a For Women in Science blog. (It, like the rest of ScienceBlogs.de, is in German. Just so you know.)
In addition to the global contest, three further scholarships are given to women scientists in Germany. But, the only women eligible for these awards are women with kids. (The rationale for this is that childcare options in Germany are not as good as they should be for working mothers, so women scientists with kids need special support.)
A drug company, a psychiatrist, and an inexplicable failure to disclose conflicts of interest.
Charles B. Nemeroff, M.D., Ph.D., is a psychiatrist at Emory University alleged by congressional investigators to have failed to report a third of the $2.8 million (or more) he received in consulting fees from pharmaceutical companies whose drugs he was studying.
Why would congressional investigators care? For one thing, during the period of time when Nemeroff received these consulting fees, he also received $3.9 million from NIH to study the efficacy of five GlaxoSmithKline drugs in the treatment of depression. When the government ponies up money for scientific research, it has an interest in ensuring that the research will produce reliable knowledge.
GlaxoSmithKline, of course, has an interest in funding studies that show that its drugs work really well.
DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2008: help fund these projects before time runs out!
We’re in the last hour of week one of Blogger Challenge 2008, and ScienceBlogs readers have already donated a respectable $8,999 to public school projects. Yay ScienceBlogs readers!
You know I’m offering you enticements to donate to my challenge, but tonight I want to point out some proposals in other ScienceBloggers’ challenges that need to be funded soon before the proposals expire.
Here they are, with the ones expiring soonest at the top: