What one Republican wants to know about Health Care reform
What I want to know:
I want to know why begging an insurance company bureaucrat to cover some medical treatment is better than petitioning the government for a similar service. Read the rest of this entry »
New Authors and Rejection
A few weeks ago, I was on a panel of Editors that was answering questions from scientists about how scientific papers are published, and giving advice to help authors. This happened at the joint, American Society of Naturalist/Society for the Study of Evolution/Society of Systematic Biologists meeting in Moscow, Idaho. One of the most fascinating parts of this conversation was the degree to which new authors think that the system is stacked against them or that their “enemies” are all reviewing their papers and having them rejected.
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Why don’t we do experiments anymore?
I came into the science of ecology during the mid-1980’s. This was a time when ecologists were learning the lesson that one cannot simply go out and collect observational data to test hypotheses. Proving that species compete by demonstrating Hutchinsonian ratios proved to be a rather futile endeavor, to say the least. The problem is that many different causal mechanisms can create the same general pattern in the data that one collects.
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The hardest transition
One of the hardest transitions that students have to make on the way to becoming a scientist is embracing the uncertainty of what you have to do. Science is a very weird endeavor. The philosophy of science explains why a scientist can never know whether they have the correct answer to a question; one can only know if they are wrong. Moreover, science is much more about defining a question, which means that we don’t even know what the right questions to ask are. Thus, being a scientist means that not only will you not know if you have the right answer, you won’t even know if you’re asking the right question.
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Returning to the Small Teaching College?
Many of Dartmouth’s disgruntled alumni feel that President Wright’s emphasis on increasing the research and scholarly profile of the faculty to be antithetical to Dartmouth’s mission. That mission in their minds seems to be defined as undergraduate teaching to the exclusion of all other activities.
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Getting Tenure at Dartmouth
In many respects Dartmouth is a very unique institution of higher learning. Across much of the undergraduate college, the place is simultaneously a major research university and a small teaching college. Many of us here think it has the best of both.
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One Trait of a Good Scientist
David Brooks in a recent column in the New York Times highlighted the shift in thinking about what makes someone a “genius”. The upshot of the argument is not that raw intellect and inate talent are the sources of genius, but rather it is practice, practice, practice.
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Finally an adult!
Finally, a president who speaks with quiet confidence and inner strength about the United States and our ideals, and without the bullying swagger.
Doing Science
The best faculty member in any discipline at a major university integrates teaching and research into one seamless endeavor. These activities are at one level synergistic: teaching forces the faculty member to think beyond the narrow confines of the current grant or the current experimental result, while research maintains the desire for discovery that pervades the best teaching. However, when considered at a more fundamental level, they are in fact the same endeavor.