Things been quiet these last couple of weeks because I've been working on a face lift for the site. We have a new front page at <http://www.phds.org>, and a new layout for the rest of the site. One of the big goals was to do a better job of communicating that the site contains a lot more content than just the set ... read more

A bunch of new and interesting studies on women in science have come out in the past couple of weeks. Today, the first two, on workplace issues: *The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology* from the Center for Work-Life Policy has gotten some good coverage in the *New Yo... read more

The *New York Times* reports this week that "Japan is running out of engineers." The reasons cited: fewer young people, reduced enrollment rates in engineering classes, and an unwillingness on the part of foreigners to immigrate. This is pretty telling: > Some young Japanese, products of a rich society, unf... read more

Over the years I have given a lot of talks to senior faculty about how graduate and postdoctoral education can be improved. There are always a few members of the old guard who dig deep and come up with the most bizarre reasons why I can't possibly be right, despite lots of evidence. I have been reading up on var... read more

Nature this week has an opinion piece about the continued mediocre ranking of the US in standardized tests of mathematics and science. The authors claim that the tests don't really matter that much because 1) it's the proportion of very high scorers that matters, not the mean, and 2) a lot of the countries that... read more