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Updated NRC data, rankings site outage
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JUL
10
2009
4
PM
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NRC rankings are getting closer...
The methodology report for the forthcoming NRC rankings is out. It's an interesting approach to ranking programs, but it's complicated. For those without a statistics background, I'm sure it's conceptually pretty weird.
In the short term, the NRC rankings have two weaknesses: first, they're quite late, and se...
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JUL
08
2009
2
AM
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"There is power in a union"
Cue the Billy Bragg. The University of California's postdocs have unionized.
The unionization of the University of Connecticut's postdocs seems to have gone smoothly. I'll be curious to hear what the ultimate contract will look like for the University of California.
There's more about the union here.
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JUN
28
2009
5
PM
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Risk aversion at NIH
"Grant System Leads Cancer Researchers to Play It Safe" in today's NY Times highlights NIH's crazy risk averse grant making process.
> ...the fight against cancer is going slower than most had hoped, with only small changes in the death rate in the almost 40 years since it began. One major impediment, scientists...
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JUN
21
2009
1
AM
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America's new export: excess PhDs?
What Helps New Ph.D.s Land Jobs in Academia? A Passport says an article in today's Wall Street Journal.
> While hiring freezes and budgets cuts pervade U.S. higher education, universities in Asia and the Middle East are hungry for candidates, often amid a dearth of native applicants. Although most advertise their...
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JUN
05
2009
6
PM
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Benefits of Female Faculty
There's an intriguing piece in Slate on what looks like a very well designed study of the role of faculty gender on female students' career trajectories.
A few highlights:
> The authors persuasively demonstrate that the overall male-female student performance difference is due in large part to the fact that me...
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JUN
05
2009
1
AM
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Rankings Ruckus at Clemson
A former Clemson institutional researcher has just given an eye-opening presentation that described how the US News college rankings drove the agenda of Clemson's administration. The measures taken ranged from promising (decreases in class sizes and increases in admissions standards) to unethical (allegations that ...
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MAY
25
2009
8
PM
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Lab Safety?
There's an interesting piece in Slate this week about lab safety (or the lack thereof) in academic settings relative to their corporate counterparts. The author may be familiar to some - Beryl Lieff Benderly writes for Science's Next Wave.
The article describes an awful chem lab accident at UCLA and then goes on...
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APR
28
2009
2
AM
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"End the University as We Know It"
There's an op-ed in yesterday's Times with a great opening paragraph:
> Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is d...
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MAR
18
2009
3
PM
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Science Stimulus
Sam Wang (an old friend of Peter's) and Sandra Aamodt have an interesting proposal in today's NY Times for spending a chunk of the NIH's $8B stimulus funds: hire a bunch of recent college graduates as lab techs in a program modeled after Teach for America. The goal is to provide the needed supply of cheap lab labor...
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MAR
17
2009
5
PM
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CS enrollments back up
The NY Times reports that undergraduate enrollments in computer science programs are back up. The explanation: competing alternatives for people with the required skill set have gotten less attractive. Investment banking is no longer luring people away. It's further supporting evidence for Richard Freeman's work ...
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