Category Archives: Education

Read All About It: Piled Higher and Deeper

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Nature has a special edition out on the future of the PhD

I will admit that I have not read all of the articles/editorials, but in my sampling, I see they fall into the familiar and perhaps comfortable view that the sole purpose of a PhD is to get you a job in academia. My familiarity, of course, in physics, and perhaps things are different for the varied flavors of chemists and biologists (biology and life sciences are seeing the largest uptrend in degrees awarded), but only around a third of physics doctorates go into academia. I can’t seem to dredge up the statistics from historical data for physics (the keepers do not seem to have committed it to being readily available online, or perhaps my Google-fu just sucks ATM) but I suspect this has been true for a while; research professors have been churning out multiple graduates for a number of years. If academia were the only market, a professor would be limited to two or three: his/her replacement, and one or two for institutions that do not have graduate students. The data from 1990-2206(pdf alert) for all STEM fields in OECD countries shows that it’s around half for the US and perhaps a little larger in that grouping; it varies by country. But the notion that a STEM PhD necessarily leads to an academic position is a fiction perpetuated and persists within the community.

One also might wonder, in the US, why we issue H-1B visas to bring in people with PhDs, if there is this glut of people with doctorates on the market.

Why Humanities People Should Care About Math

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Guest Post: Why Humanities People Should Care About Math

Anyone in the traditionally “humanistic” fields (what a dumb term) would see this as a great instance of why it’s awesome to know foreign languages: you can’t be left out of the conversation. No one can pull the wool over your eyes. You can’t be the butt of a joke perpetrated right in front of your face. By knowing a foreign language, you remove an invisible barrier between you and the rest of the world.

One of my colleagues (with kids, and very involved in their education) has made the point that if more effort were made to point out that math is a language, then there might be less of a tendency to let people slide in learning it.

Campaign claims, legislation, environmental movements… even the weather — they’re all conducted with copious references to mathematics, usually in the form of statistics. And the simple fact is, I can convince you of just about anything if I whip out the right statistics and you’re not sure what I’m doing.

Not everything, of course, as it’s been recently observed (again). But convinced of a lot.

Is Science Fickle?

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The Triceratops Panic: Why Does Science Keep Changing Its Mind?

One of the nice things about growing up is you don’t have to spend time thinking about planets, digestion or awesome dinosaurs if you don’t want to, because what you were taught was “science” so those things are supposed to stay that way forever.

And then, suddenly, there is “news.” Someone in authority says, “Wait a second! New information has come to our attention, and that thing we told you was true may not be true any more. Or not as true. Please pay attention so we can un-teach what we told you.”

“WHAT?” is a lot of people’s first reaction. “I thought you knew this. I believed you…”
And then they get mad.

Perhaps the first failure of science education is the notion that “things are supposed to stay that way forever.” The facts and realities of science are always the best interpretation that we have available at the time, but it’s subject to change as we get more information. New information will always be interpreted according to the best theories of the day. (And someone in the media will always distort it to the point that its wrong.) What science won’t (or at least shouldn’t) do is be dogmatic and push information that’s become outdated, even if it’s for the comfort of the casual observer. There are sources for reassuring lies, but science should not be one of them.

I Deserve Success

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From Students, a Misplaced Sense of Entitlement

How could it be that graduate students delivered such appallingly poor papers and presentations? They’d gotten undergraduate degrees; why couldn’t they write in sentences? Why were they devoid of originality, analytical ability, intellectual curiosity? Why were they accosting me with hostile e-mails when I pointed out unsubstantiated generalizations, hyperbolic assumptions, ungrounded polemics, sourcing omissions, and possible plagiarism?

The sad thing is, I’m not alone. Every college teacher I know is bemoaning the same kind of thing. Whether it’s rude behavior, lack of intellectual rigor, or both, we are all struggling with the same frightening decline in student performance and academic standards at institutions of higher learning. A sense of entitlement now pervades the academy, excellence be damned.

He Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks

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More scandalous news from court.

Got another update, and I can’t resist. I don’t think it’s the gossip (which isn’t really my bag, baby) so much as someone being wrong on the internet. And by wrong, I mean making-shit-up wrong. The latest update accuses the department chair of a nefarious scheme to get rid of Joshua Robinson, and the dastardly plan included a threatening letter. Which starts out

After consultation with your oral examination committee, and per the graduate handbook rules of NERHP, faculty of NERHP have voted on your status. The majority agreed that you have passed your oral examination and have therefore passed the Qualifying Examination.

That bitch! How dare she … congratulate him … on passing his quals …

Wow. That’s some threat, sending out a boilerplate milestone letter that every student probably gets when the pass their qualifying exam.

It turns out the oral exam was not the acceptance oral exam, in which one outlines the proposed research. In an interview with the CorVegas paper, it’s pointed out that the oral exam was a followup for “conditionally passing” the written exam (details of these circumstances are spelled out in the graduate student handbook). I find it a little weird that he’s passed this in his fifth year in grad school (one possibility being that it was not his first attempt), and his response of saying he has a job lined up sounds premature, considering he still has to do his thesis research. Whatever he had already done would have probably counted toward a Masters degree, not a doctorate.

One of the really silly things about all this is that if the faculty really were conspiring to kick someone out of school, an oral exam is the perfect time to do it. Ask hard questions, and then say, “Sayonara!” That’s the scary realization that I think all grad students who go through this type of system have — that your committee could fail you if they wanted to. They have the experience in their respective fields and can ask questions you can’t answer. And that didn’t happen, which doesn’t speak highly of the abilities of our “conspirators.” Fear not, though, since I’m confident that some new machination will be conjured up soon.

The Wonderful World of Palace Intrigue

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Nothing like a little scandal to perk one up.

Just got an email pointing me toward a “travesty” that is occurring, and hoping to enlist my aid in the fight. Somebody named Art Robinson is screaming about his kids being a victim of political retribution. I felt obligated to look into it, and found a WorldNet Daily article (no, this is not starting out well), written by Art Robinson himself (continuing along the path of not going well). I’d heard of him before, in the context of being a global warming denier extraordinaire, but there’s more, unless you think all of his bad press is conspiracy.

He ran for congress and lost, and is now accusing Oregon State University of kicking his kids out of the nuclear engineering program as retribution for running. There’s really no corroborating evidence and other than denial of the allegations, the university can’t comment on the details because the students’ privacy is protected by law. But after reading

OSU is a liberal socialist Democrat stronghold in Oregon

I wondered if the emailer realized that I went to grad school at OSU. I also can’t help but wonder why his kids would go there if it was such a horrible, nasty, smelly place.

More blips on my BS detector make me wonder how much of this is fabricated.

Democrat activist David Hamby and militant feminist and chairman of the nuclear engineering department Kathryn Higley are expelling four-year Ph.D. student Joshua Robinson from OSU at the end of the current academic quarter and turning over the prompt neutron activation analysis facility Joshua built for his thesis work and all of his work in progress to Higley’s husband, Steven Reese. Reese, an instructor in the department, has stated that he will use these things for his own professional gain.

Once you get past the smearing, what’s there? Any apparatus that is built by a graduate student belongs to the university, and would be controlled by the student’s advisor or the department. Of course they are going to use it for “professional gain,” i.e. further research. Grad school isn’t camp, where you make something in arts and crafts and take it home to give to the folks.

Lots more smearing and innuendo (it is also rumored that…) which may play to his audience but makes me tune out. If you have to lead off with ad hominem, I have to think you don’t have much in your hand.

Robinson also makes a point of revealing his kids’ GPAs (all around 3.9), but doesn’t mention that in grad school, any grade below a “B” is considered unacceptable. There is no curve, so a 3.9 GPA is not the indicator it is for undergraduates.

The department is now controlled by ideologues, most of whom do not have Ph.D.s in nuclear engineering.

Slander and misleading; it’s the department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics, so you might expect some radiation health physics-realted faculty as well, and the mix depends on what the department does. They all have PhD’s, and the claim is actually false as 7 of the 13 have PhDs in Nuclear Engineering. The last time I checked, more than 50% counts as “most.”

Forgive me if I don’t step up to fight alongside Mr. Robinson.

Added: (It occurs to me that if this is all a fabrication, OSU does nothing, and Robinson gets to claim victory. All because there is innuendo and no evidence.)

The Sniff Test

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One of the benefits of having a background in science is that it tends to enhance your BS detector. One can take information and make a try at assessing the veracity of it — is it consistent with things that I know to be true? Does it follow valid models of how things behave? You can’t accept or reject all information this way, because some of it will be outside of your experience or ability, but it’s a first cut at the problem. One of the major stumbling blocks is that “things I know to be true” can’t be “things I want to be true;” we have to keep ideology out of the process.

Take as an example the ongoing political unpleasantness (in many cases, this phrase is redundant) regarding budgets. I keep hearing that reducing the budget is reeeeaaaally important, and moves are being taken to reduce spending. But if moves are being taken that don’t actually reduce the deficit, our model breaks down — either the proponents have some other agenda, or they’re bad at math, or stupid, or some combination of those things.

We find out that cutting spending on poison control centers will actually cost money. I don’t see what the possible hidden agenda is there; this is just plain stupid. Rachel Maddow points out (at about 19:00; the segment starts at about 17:30) a dollar spent trying to find tax cheats nets more than ten dollars in revenue; as long as a dollar spent results in more than a dollar’s worth of revenue, you should be increasing the budget, because it pays for itself! I don’t see how the standard GOP line of loving America plays here. Regardless of where you’ve drawn the line of what the tax rate actually is, cheating on your taxes is not what I would call patriotic. And going after high-income people who are cheating is where the money is, so proposing cuts means its more important to let tax cheats go, which goes along the lines of letting them pay fewer taxes in the first place. Jon Stewart reminds us of the hypocrisy of calling a ~$50k salary too large, making the de-facto 10-20% salary cuts justifiable, while claiming that $250k is not a lot of money when faced with a 3% tax increase. Something is not adding up.

On the topic of Wisconsin teacher salaries, I’ve seen it compared to the state average salary. Once again, let’s use the BS meter. Different jobs have different requirements, and as we require more in the way of qualification, the pay generally goes up. Part of that is simple supply and demand. To be a teacher, you are generally required to have at least a Bachelor’s degree. The most recent statistics I could find were from the 2000 census, when less than 25% of adult Wisconsinites had college degrees. So why wouldn’t a person with a college degree be expected to earn more than the state average? Bachelor’s degree holders earned a median salary of just above $40k back then; if we allow just a 2% per year increase for inflation, that brings us to $50k for this year. Teachers make, on average, about what you’d expect someone of their training to make, without allowing for the ones who have even higher education levels, who might be expected to make even more money. They make more than average, because your average Wisconsinite doesn’t have a college degree.