Apparently this essay came out in the Journal of Cell Science last year, and I guess Sci just didn't hear about it. I finally DID hear about it, however, when I discovered The Faculty of 100 Biology. It's freakin' BRILLIANT. It basically gathers together over 2000 well-respected scientists from arou...

Harry writes about an article by Mary Ann Mason in the Chronicle. Our study of faculty members at the University of California revealed that mothers, on average, worked 95 hours a week, with 43 percent of those hours devoted to child care and housework and the rest to professional activities. Father...

In case you hadn't heard, a UCLA researcher had his car firebombed recently. You can get the story here. The firebombing is one in a series of aggressive acts aimed at university researchers who use animals in medical studies, UCLA spokesman Phil Hampton said. In other cases, firebombs have been lef...

(This blog post will probably be interesting to the handful of political scientists who read this blog. Everybody else be patient. I feel a rant coming on.) Both Duck of Minerva and the Monkey Cage have discussed the move by Western Lutheran College to dissolve their political science department. In...

Marc Bosquet has a great piece at the Valve in response to the NYTimes piece about humanities PhDs and the economy. The thrust of the Times piece is what a terrible effect plummeting endowment values and constricted state budgets are having on job possibilities for humanities PhDs. The thrust of Bos...

The academic job market is gruesome, according to the New York Times. Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures ...

For any students out there who aspire to graduate education to launch a career in this discipline, allow me to offer the one bit of advice that no one wants to tell you: Don't. I really hate to be the one who rains on the parade, but the stark reality is that the Academy is a collapsing profession--...

A friend sent me the text of a recent WSJ editorial entitled “Will This Crisis Produce a ‘Gatsby’?� I’ll link to it later—for now I want to recreate my bad-faith reading experience in all its glory.  My first reaction was to the title, even though I know authors never write their own ti...

My husband and I went to see Milk , the film about the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, a few months ago. We enjoyed the movie, with some exceptions, and I predicted Sean Penn would win the Oscar for best actor — he was just that transcendentally good. And the suppo...

P-values come from null hypothesis testing, where you test how likely your observed data (and more extreme data) are under the assumption that the null hypothesis is true. As such, they do not allow us to decide which of a variety of hypotheses or models is true. The probability they encode refers t...