To my faithful three readers,
In an effort to add content with a minimum of effort, as well as to educate my fellow physicists on where the candidates stand, I plan on sending this letter to the various presidential candidates in both parties. Of course, this is just a rough draft. Suggestions are more than welcome, and do please feel free to leave comments about it.
Posted: May 17th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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  As yet another semester comes to a close, the inevitable explosion of students who realize only too late that their grades aren’t as high as they would like is coming in. Mercifully, there have only been a few e-mails, and I have made myself scarce over the past week to avoid too many run-ins. I can only imagine the similar troubles of the professors teaching the course I’m a TA for.
It’s a disconcerting trend that I thought happened only recently with students I graduated from high school with: the presumptuous belief that if a student doesn’t like his or her grade, he can just go negotiate with the teacher to get the grades higher. An article I found as a freshman in college revealed to me that this trend is far older than I suspected. Read more »
Posted: May 13th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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In a recent article on Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik drew some attention to a rather disturbing (although very seldom-used) tactic on Capital Hill: Congressmen calling into question the validity of research grants based upon a cursory review of the title and abstract. In this particular case, the study in question was a sociological study entitled “Accuracy in the cross-cultural understanding of others’ emotions”, conducted by a UC Berkeley professor, Hillary Elfenbein. Read more »
Posted: May 6th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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A recent scandal at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business leads me to discuss a distressing statistic: according to the article, 56 per cent of MBA students report cheating, while the overall graduate student population sees 47 per cent of students claiming to have cheated. This leads to an interesting question, though. What exactly constitutes cheating?
Most universities have the same general guidelines for what constitutes Academic Misconduct: plagiarism is always at the top, theft of exams from professors (i.e. grabbing a discarded printing error out of the recycling next to the department copy machine) is there with it, conspiring to share information on an examination is there as well. All of this is very clear-cut, and designed to keep a student or group of students from gaining an advantage over the others based on something other than their aptitude at a subject. Read more »
Posted: May 2nd, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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