Science Education & Policy

Having returned from a Polymer Physics conference a couple of days ago, I felt the need to read one of the masters of the subject, Nobel laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes.   I came across this gem: Fragile Objects: Soft Matter, Hard Science and the Thrill of Discovery by Pierre Gilles de Gennes and J. Badoz (read the link for a description). Here I found this gem within a gem, a chapter entitled The Imperialism of Mathematics, which starts: There exists a theorem that states: "Whenever an entrance examination is instituted in a scientific discipline, it invariably becomes…

In creating a science site for kids (that would be Kids Science Zone - if you haven't written anything there, feel free to do so) , the majority of comments I have gotten have been likely about the same as I would have gotten if I had opened up this site to a large community of people with advice to give - namely a lot of suggestions from people who don't use it about how awesome it would be if it had X, Y or Z added. First rule of business - you don't take product enhancement requests from people who are not customers.   By that I mean, a salesperson who is always going to his boss or…

Peter Lawrence in PLoS Biology writes about the story of K.: It is a summer day in 2009 in Cambridge, England, and K. (39) looks out of his lab window, wondering why he chose the life of a scientist [1]. Yet it had all begun so well! His undergraduate studies in Prague had excited him about biomedical research, and he went on to a PhD at an international laboratory in Heidelberg. There, he had every advantage, technical and intellectual, and his work had gone swimmingly. He had moved to a Wellcome-funded research institute in England in 1999. And although his postdoc grant, as is typical, was…

Are scientists press shy?    Are researchers who engage journalists ridiculed by other researchers as not serious enough?    No, according to a new study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers in Journalism&Mass Communication Quarterly - the difference is that scientists who have been trained or otherwise briefed about how to work with journalists are more likely to engage reporters. The study conducted by journalism professor Sharon Dunwoody, life sciences communication professor Dominique Brossard and graduate student Anthony Dudo says that many mainstream…

What does peer review do for science and what does the scientific community want it to do?  Should peer review detect fraud and misconduct? Does peer review illuminate good ideas or shut them down? Should reviewers be anonymous? The Peer Review Survey 2009, a large international poll of authors and reviewers, released its preliminary findings today. Peer review is considered fundamental to integration of new research findings and it allows other researchers to analyze findings and society at large to weigh up research claims. It results in 1.3 million2 articles published every year…

I received an interesting question today from an Alex Ziller in the comments thread of a recent post. Here it is: Do you think blogging actually improves Science? (I know, one should first define what "improving Science" actually means). I think this matter has been debated elsewhere not too long ago -where by "elsewhere" I mean "some site I sometimes visit, can't recall where". Nevertheless, I consider it a crucial question to ask, and one with several facets. Here is my short answer to Alex -of the kind of depth a comments thread is worth: I think blogging does not improve Science. Blogging…

Right now I'm asking myself why I spent 100+ hours carefully writing a grant proposal that was destined to not get a serious reading. Below are dueling comments from the same reviewer (for the sake of discretion, some details have been censored): #1. On a technology I proposed to develop: The single cell technology is interesting but does not seem terribly “ground breaking”. The second goal of designing an [X] method of doing single cell [X] studies would be terrific technological breakthrough. #2. On a career development plan in which I propose to hone my mathematical and computational…

Everyone says they want to get kids to get a better science - now we can all actually do something about it. We're doing a small beta test of our Science For Kids site.(1)  It isn't perfect yet but that's why we need people to try it out.   Once we find any glaring bugs we can sort those out and finish the cosmetic stuff.   For Scientific Blogging columnists, you can just log in and go to it.  Everything is all set.   For new people who sign up the articles will go into moderation, because, let's face it, we're writing for kids and our names are on the thing so we…

We've all slogged through books in school that we didn't particularly like, wondering how knowing how to interpret the deeper subtexts of the oligarchial collectivist society in Orwell's 1984 will help us as adults. Education is a perennial topic of concern, and within that debate reading is always a touchpoint. How do you teach literature? How do you instill a love of reading in kids who would rather play video games or watch TV? A fascinating article in the NY Times describes a new method of doing just that. For those not familiar with the American public school system, the article…

Tyler Cowen says the prevalence of individuals falling within autism spectrum make American academe competitive: A lot of people at colleges are aware of dealing with autism (and Asperger's syndrome; I will refer generally to the autism spectrum) in their "special needs" programs. The more complex reality is that there is a lot more autism in higher education than most of us realize. It's not just "special needs" students but also our valedictorians, our faculty members, and yes —sometimes- our administrators. That last sentence is not some kind of cheap laugh line about the many…