Entries Tagged 'Academia' ↓

Disturbing news:

• Leiter on King’ College London firing Shalom Lappin
• Shalom’s statement

This past weekend, my colleague Sally Haslanger and the rest of MIT’s Women’s and Gender Studies program put on a 25 Year Anniversary conference. One of the panels presented a continuous four-generation teacher-student link of women scientists at MIT. An article on the MIT news site tells the story. How great is that? But how great would it be if this were not such a unique story?

In today’s Nature:

The pleasure and importance of printed journals

Sir

I am shocked to read in Nature News online that the American Chemical Society intends to stop all personal subscriptions to its printed journals by 2010, and to start introducing major changes this year (‘Chemistry publisher moving towards online-only journals’).

The attractive printed versions of Journal of the American Chemical Society, Journal of Organic Chemistry, Accounts of Chemical Research and Organic Letters provide distinct advantages in letting me browse their content (during breakfast at home, for example) and readily take in information, without the lengthy opening of individual web pages, article by article.

But I also find this decision to stop the print journals disturbing in my capacity as a board member of the German chemical society, the GDCh, and as head of the editorial board of the journal Angewandte Chemie. I believe that high-quality journals such as Nature and Science and, in chemistry, Angewandte Chemie and Journal of the American Chemical Society should continue to appear in all their published formats, including print. Otherwise, there is a risk that the quality of these prestigious journals could gradually decline to the standard of many of today’s web-only journals.

François Diederich, Laboratorium für Organische Chemie, ETH-Zürich

doi:10.1038/460033c

Along the same lines, I firmly believe that there was a significant decline in the quality of scientific discourse when we moved from stone tablets to papyrus and onwards.

Shameless copying Greg Restall’s prose:

Are you a Friend of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? So many of us — students, academics, interested readers — use it for our research, and it’s a great resource for everyone. If you’re a regular user of the SEP (and if you’re interested in philosophy, who wouldn’t be?), consider joining the Friends of the SEP Society to help support the work of the Encyclopedia. For a small fee, you support the encyclopedia, you help it keep up its mission of free, high quality introductions to philosophical themes — and you get access to great quality PDF versions of the entries in the SEP, which are just ideal for printing out and reading (and annotating) offline. You also (if you like) get email notifications whenever the articles you’ve downloaded get updated. It’s a good deal, and it’s much cheaper (at $25 a year for a full subscription, down to $5 a year for a student subscription) than a journal subscription.

An article by Robert L. Hampel in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “In Search of New Frontiers: How Scholars Generate Ideas”, has sparked some posts on science blogs:

• “Good Topics for Future Research – And How You Find Them” on Thus Spake Zuska
• “Factory of Ideas” on FemaleScienceProfessor

Hampel:

If graduate students cannot see how senior scholars generate and manage their ideas, then their induction is incomplete. Our students dutifully take research-methods courses, but every graduate seminar should discuss the wide range of sources of creative work. Otherwise our students will think in terms of the assignments we give them, when they should really be thinking about the assignments they can give themselves: interesting topics for future study.

FSP:

How do you teach someone to have ideas, other than by example? Isn’t absorbing the spirit of curiosity a major step towards generating ideas? As a student, you don’t have to be told explicitly by a professor “OK, now I am going to teach you how to generate ideas”. In grad school, you learn by doing, you learn by watching, you learn by absorbing, and then you figure out how you want to do things.

I definitely think it is good to have conversations with students and postdocs about some of the idea-generating concepts discussed by Hampel and Zuska (and her commenters), and I think that another important role for faculty and other advisors is to give students and postdocs the confidence to express and develop their own ideas.

In the course of our advising and teaching, we can provide information that helps our students and postdocs to develop ideas and recognize what is a good idea and what might not be such a good idea. As advisors, we also teach others how to follow through on an idea. That is, once you have an idea or a glimmer of one, what do you do about it?