Posts

May 09, 2013

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8:37 PM | Observations on the final week of a semester

The end of a semester and the possibility of graduation for some, survival for others, puts a lot of strain on the system. After many years on a university campus you sort of get used to a certain amount of manic activity and stressed out behaviors. And there are other hallmarks that the semester is nearly over. Let's see what we have. A fellow just ran down the hallway screaming and throwing papers every which way. Hmm. Based on the papers, perhaps he was happy to […]

May 08, 2013

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7:35 PM | Post semester clean-up

In addition to grading and grades, followed by tears and gripes, TPP's research lab and teaching classroom/lab are basically a pit. The debris left over by a semester of student work is considerable. Fortunately disposable petri dishes may just be disposed of. OK, this isn't green, but it is ultra convenient. Bits and pieces of student research projects either get removed or discarded as well. Much of it was recycled material anyways. Glasswear gets […]

May 01, 2013

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2:46 PM | End of the semester for good or bad

Semesters end, for good or bad, and TPP has seen this happen for the past 40+ years. The worst aspect of semesters' ends is that they are hectic, rushed, cramped, and just plain ugly what with everything that must be done. Just about now, or maybe up to a week ago, some students are realizing that it's too late; you can't do a semester's work in a week. A few are learning that all their effort and hard work have paid off. It's TPP's job to let the grades reflect this […]

April 16, 2013

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3:16 PM | Academic hiring and coaches

Without question the most highly overpaid, least loyal members of the academic community, and here TPP plays very loose with the concept of academic community because most coaches, having been jocks themselves, have little interest in scholarship. Coaches are employees of the same institution as are faculty, but that's it. Not only are coaches among the most highly paid employees of a university, a double standard exists in their hiring. TPP has been in charge of […]

April 03, 2013

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5:22 PM | Crap! Student finds a way to ruin my day.

Grading exams has always been TPP's least favorite academic activity, unless you can use it as an excuse to get out of a faculty meeting, and then you had to grade them anyways, but at least that way you're using your time well. The thing that TPP dreads most is cheating; it's so disappointing, it's such a hassle, it's so foolish, and if not for a feeling of obligation to protect the efforts of honest students, TPP might avoid dealing with cheaters altogether. Perhaps the most […]

April 01, 2013

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1:54 AM | March Meanderings

It’s been another month of fascinating scientific adventures for your resident hydrologist. It all began at the end of February, when I travelled to La Crosse, Wisconsin to the Upper Midwest Stream Restoration Symposium, which was a really stimulating and … Continue reading →

March 15, 2013

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3:32 PM | Science Show-and-tell

Back in 2006, Moshe Pritsker thought to use video technology to capture and transmit the intricacies of life science research, facilitating both the understanding and reproduction of experiments and techniques. This idea of “letting scientists look over each other’s shoulders” led to the launch of JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, which is peer reviewed [...]

March 09, 2013

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1:48 PM | Scenic Saturday: Echoes of Mary Anning

On March 9th, 1847, the world lost a great scientist to breast cancer. She was poor, lacked formal education, and practiced a minority religion, but she had a keen eye and mind that helped see things that others couldn’t and … Continue reading →

February 22, 2013

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2:20 AM | The diminishing returns of lecture preparation

It seems that like so many other things, lecture preparation expands to take up the time available. Continue reading →

January 29, 2013

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6:57 PM | Today's Laboratory - Survey of algae

Surveys, breadth without depth, are hardly ideal, but watcha gonna do? TPP's classroom is over 800 miles from seawater at a public university that cannot afford stools for students to sit on let alone paying for a nice shipment of seaweeds from a coastal area. So you have to make do with small ones, immature ones, pickled and dried specimens, and prepared slides. Lots of other green beasties get covered in this survey too: cyanobacteria (formerly called blue-green algae), […]

January 27, 2013

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5:50 PM | Things I Learned From My Students #12: New Year Exams

The first few weeks of term have been taken up with AS, and then A2 exams. I think my classes are now back to normal, or at least our rather unique definition of normal. This is what I've learnt so far this year. I genuinely look five years younger than my actual age. Whether this is down to the blue hair, baggy jeans, slogan t-shirts, willingness to swear like a navvy with piles, or simply a decent combination of phenotypes, I do not know. This makes me a TILF. Yes, I have officially been […]

January 25, 2013

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7:21 PM | No idle hands around here!

Part of TPP's job is to keep students from being idle. Students learn about science and how to do it, how to become a biologist, by basically apprenticing with masters, the faculty. Fortunately, my research is rather non-technical in the sense of instrumentation and techniques, so there are lots of questions and jobs for students to pursue. Let's see what they're up to. Oh, this is really almost unfair, but you never know. A hort/botany student is working with […]

January 17, 2013

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2:51 PM | Explaining geoscience using only the 10 hundred most common words

Take the challenge and join the growing list of scientists explaining their discipline using only 1000 common words. Continue reading →

January 16, 2013

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10:57 PM | How to run a university – the pseudobusiness model

Our great public university says it is a “student-centered” institution. Wonderful! No arguments from TPP. It also promotes the idea of shared governance where students, faculty, and administrators cooperate and collaborate to decide on various policies, but when it comes to the fiscal side of things, somehow this sharing comes up short. The Provost seems to want to run things based on the corporate model. Now actually TPP is willing to give […]

January 11, 2013

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9:28 PM | The semester begins when!?

TPP suffers from a day-date disconnect that only gets when complicated by holidays. Having operated on a M-F schedule for so many decades, it is hard to think in other terms, and things like dates don't matter much. Here is how it doesn't work. OK, having checked with Mrs. Phactor that today is a Friday, TPP proceeds to get lost in various activities. This means that while well aware that the semester begins on January 14, it comes as rather a surprise that that is this […]

January 09, 2013

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7:19 PM | Us professors got the least stressful job for sure

Susan Adams at Forbes in an article about the least stressful jobs provides a most naive perspective of the modern professorship. "University professors have a lot less stress than most of us. Unless they teach summer school, they are off between May and September and they enjoy long breaks during the school year, including a month over Christmas and New Year’s and another chunk of time in the spring. Even when school is in session they don’t spend too many hours in the […]

December 31, 2012

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11:20 AM | 2012: A Year of Moving Adventures

As another year draws to close (and without the Apocalypse that no-one sensible was expecting) we take a moment to reflect on what has been a busy and exciting year for Anne and Chris. The year started off with lots … Continue reading →

December 26, 2012

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9:36 PM | Saving Faculty Time - An Administrative Fairy Tale

This is the time of year when you have to report, on the basis of a calendar year, what you accomplished over portions of two academic years and the summer in between. So when your provost introduces a new system for reporting your productivity based on the premise that it will save you time you know you're about to get hosed. Provosts do not care about saving your time; they want things to be easy for themselves. So clearly the new system called digital measures is […]

December 23, 2012

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1:44 PM | Management

Our department is in a precarious position at the moment. Our manager left suddenly (rumours abound about why, but it is no secret that a lot of the figures for our area were found to be completely inaccurate) and we have an interim manager from another department. She is amazing, and I am enjoying the sensation of having a supportive, empowering manager. The other CL in the department is also on extended leave, so I am assuming some of his responsibilities. I'm realising that, while I am not […]

December 17, 2012

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8:06 PM | Citations - Scholarly Beans

When you publish in science, you must place your research into context, that is, you must show how your work relates to all other work relevant to your study and findings. This is no small task and the list of citations in some of TPPs publications runs well upwards of 100. This is somewhat easier to keep track of now, heck, it's a whole lot easier to keep track of now than at any time in the past. In the early days of my career we'd spend at least one day a month shifting […]

December 13, 2012

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10:48 PM | Final exams graded

It's 4:35 pm on Thursday of final exam week, and the exams are graded a whole day early! Results were generally better than expected, but this was not universal. Still almost all students are doing better now than they were at the beginning of the semester. As always the best are quite impressive and that's sort of the whole point; eventually the world wants to know who these people are. The final grading will have to wait until tomorrow. Lots of lab portfolios […]

December 08, 2012

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5:16 AM | AGU Dispatches: Final Day and Final Thoughts

Unless you are presenting, the final day of a 5 day-conference can be a test of your intellectual fortitude: it can be tough to force your tired and stuffed-with-cool-new-science brain to take an interest in any more talks or posters. … Continue reading →

December 07, 2012

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4:01 PM | TGIF Big Time - Introducting students to research

Today is the last class day of the semester; how appropriate it's a Friday. It always seems to work out that way. One of my classes was an introduction to research, a seminar with the goal of introducing 2nd year biology majors to real science, a new class. Firstly 18 students is too many for a good seminar because it lets the passive students be passive no matter how hard you try to force class participation. So the class dealt with misconceptions and definitions of […]

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3:41 PM | AGU Dispatches: Earthquakes, Education and Edification

Another packed day, although for me, today was less about consuming science and more about both disseminating it, and learning how to teach about it. Nonetheless, I kicked off my morning in an interesting session on the links between short-term … Continue reading →

December 05, 2012

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3:56 PM | AGU Dispatches: Posters and Pontification

There are two main ways to get your science at AGU: by sitting in on one of the dozens of sessions of themed talks, or browsing the monstrous poster hall in Moscone South. I spent Tuesday morning mostly wandering around … Continue reading →

December 03, 2012

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3:44 PM | Monday, December 3 - End of the semester blues

The first Monday in December is the last Monday of the semester (exam week doesn't count really). TPP has about 10 lectures worth of material to cover in 3 lectures, so something is amiss. A number of students have made appointments this week. Some of them will give me a lot of excuses for their poor performance, but no good reasons. This distinction will be largely lost on them. Now having been one of those students myself, albeit many years ago when the prospects […]

December 02, 2012

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6:14 PM | Terrane Accretion: the end of Chris’s postdoc odyssey

Almost six years ago, I left the lab in Southampton where I had studied for my PhD on a quest to stay in academia and get paid to do interesting science. Thus began a period of my life which can … Continue reading →

November 29, 2012

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7:20 PM | My AGU Posters: a visual history

It’s a miracle! In an amazing (and probably entirely serendipitous) feat of organisation, I find myself printing my poster for the AGU 2012 Fall Meeting a whole 3 days before I fly to San Francisco. Since I am generally more … Continue reading →

November 26, 2012

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7:40 PM | Doom Looms - end of the semester version

While looking forward to the end of the semester, the last couple of weeks are not the Phactor's favorite time of the semester because now it all comes home to roost and you end up explaining the sad reality of their situations to students. Upon learning that their potential grade in your course is nothing to brag about, you're asked, "Can I get some extra credit?" Now of course this student has cut nearly 50% of the classes and turned in none of the required lab reports, but […]

November 24, 2012

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7:30 AM | Bishopblog catalogue (updated 24th Nov 2012)

Source: http://www.weblogcartoons.com/2008/11/23/ideas/ Those of you who follow this blog may have noticed a lack of thematic coherence. I write about whatever is exercising my mind at the time, which can range from technical aspects of statistics to the design of bathroom taps. I decided it might be helpful to introduce a bit of order into this chaotic melange, so here is a catalogue of posts by topic. Language impairment, dyslexia and related disorders The common childhood disorders […]