I've just gotten back from SciFoo, an amazing conference put on by O'Reilly Media in cooperation with Nature and hosted at Google. It's a fascinating mixture of the who's who - picture Ed Felten talking to Martin Rees and Daniel Kahneman - with mere mortals who have done something particularly interesting of late s... read more

The *Times* has a discussion about tenure in today's paper. Nothing really stands out in the discussion pieces, but one thing in the introduction did surprise me: > In 1975, 57 percent of all college professors had tenure or were on a tenure track. In 2007, that number had fallen to 31 percent, and a new federal... read more

An choice memo from a CalTech professor chastising a student for failing to work nights and weekends is making the rounds on the web. > "In addition to the usual work-day schedule, I expect all of the members of the group to work evenings and weekends," Carreira wrote. "You will find that this is the norm here at... read more

Vivek Wadhwa blogs about some interesting looking studies at TechCrunch. Many have argued that H-1B visas depress the salaries of American workers, particularly in IT. A new study finds > foreign-born I.T. professionals on temporary work visas actually earn more than their American counterparts; and that limi... read more

Wired has a handy chart of which agencies get what in Obama's new budget proposal. The NIH gets an extra $1 billion, NSF, NASA, and the EPA each get an extra $500M, and a few others get smaller increases. Only the CDC's budget gets chopped. Given that the proposed budget comes with a giant helping of deficit sp... read more