Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

Back from New England

It was a great time in New England this past week. My niece got married in Watertown. We attended the MBL gala to support Woods Hole’s scientific gem, spent some time on the cupola roof of the Mansion House in Vineyardhaven (that’s the image), and came back to the MBL to attend the annual Corporation meeting.

Yesterday, I woke up early–around 4:30 and enjoyed a walk through town that was virtually quiet except for the stirrings of folks getting their boats ready for fishing. Otherwise, nothing but the ducks on Eel Pond and me. But by 5, the Pie In The Sky bakery was humming with activity, the coffee was brewed and I was on my way to Boston by 5:15.
Posted by Picasa

Mount Sinai admitting medical students without Organic Chemistry or the MCAT

From today’s NY Times on line, here.

Money quote:

The students apply in their sophomore or junior years in college and agree to major in humanities or social science, rather than the hard sciences. If they are admitted, they are required to take only basic biology and chemistry, at a level many students accomplish through Advanced Placement courses in high school.
They forgo organic chemistry, physics and calculus — though they get abbreviated organic chemistry and physics courses during a summer boot camp run by Mount Sinai. They are exempt from the MCAT. Instead, they are admitted into the program based on their high school SAT scores, two personal essays, their high school and early college grades and interviews.

Heading Past Third Base on Summer

We’re only about four weeks out from the beginning of the Fall semester here at George Mason.  Already, you can feel the campus gearing up. Today at Academic Council we went over the University’s QEP (Quality Enhancement Plan) to substantially increase undergraduate participation in scholarship and creativity over the next years. This is quite exciting to me because of how clearly valuable undergraduate research experiences are to the success of future scientists. Both at NIH and at the MBL, I got to see this first hand. Good science is inherently a creative endeavor. And when one experiences creative science during the undergraduate years, science becomes a passion.

In the meantime, I’m headed to Woods Hole next week. What’s not to love about that?

Tyler Cowen weighs in on the tenure debate

Link is above. Money quote:

With the pro-tenure arguments, you might wonder how higher education is supposed to differ from other sectors of the economy.  I believe it is this: given that higher education is in part about signaling and certification, socialization and networking of students, “warm glow” of the donors, and research superstars, the later-period shirking of the typical laggard doesn’t hurt actual productivity nearly as much as the schools themselves might like to think.

Daniel Schorr RIP

Daniel Schorr passed away today. The legendary journalist was, to use his own words, “a living history book”. Meeting him two years ago at the Cosmos Club was one of the high points of my life. He was both brilliant and funny. I’ll miss his commentaries on NPR, but the real loss is for American journalism. They’ve lost a giant.

Tenure as an economic proposition

Over at the Atlantic, Megan Mcardle writes about tenure in starkly economic terms. You can read the blog entry here.

Money quote:

Imagine I offered you one cell phone contract for two years at $100 a year, and another for 50 years at $90 + inflation.  Would you really consider the second contract “cheaper”?