Krasnow is of course in the process of growing. Here’s the picture from late last week on the new wing. We’ll add a bunch of new labs and offices, which of course will allow us to expand our research and teaching. When we take delivery, the Institute’s footprint will reach an impressive 60,000 square feet. And we’ll still have satellite operations across the Mason campus which we’ll hope to bring under one roof with a Phase III project on the other end of the facility–sometime in 2014.
I find myself disagreeing with Andrew on much of what he writes about these days, but I think he and others on to something about the future of higher education in his blog post here. In essence, TED represents the future of higher ed. Along with MIT’s Open Course Ware. But this can’t be all of it. You can’t acquire a deep knowledge of quantum mechanics from a few “carefully curated” lectures–even if those are given by geniuses.
Her article on recent progress on Alzheimer’s Disease can be found here. The key apparently is unprecedented data-sharing, something we’ve been advocating for a long time. Krasnow Institute-curated NeuroMorpho.org is a prototype for what is happening across the field.
I’m not usually an avid reader of Stanley Fish’s columns in the New York Times, but this one on academic plagiarism really hits the mark for me.
Money quote:
And if there should emerge a powerful philosophical argument saying there’s no such thing as originality, its emergence needn’t alter or even bother for a second a practice that can only get started if originality is assumed as a baseline. It may be (to offer another example), as I have argued elsewhere, that there’s no such thing as free speech, but if you want to have a free speech regime because you believe that it is essential to the maintenance of democracy, just forget what Stanley Fish said — after all it’s just a theoretical argument — and get down to it as lawyers and judges in fact do all the time without the benefit or hindrance of any metaphysical rap. Everyday disciplinary practices do not rest on a foundation of philosophy or theory; they rest on a foundation of themselves; no theory or philosophy can either prop them up or topple them. As long as the practice is ongoing and flourishing its conventions will command respect and allegiance and flouting them will have negative consequences.
Science Insider has the details here. Cora Marrett will be deputy director at NSF.
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.
Not. Well, let me amend that. Not really as bad as I’ve seen it in the past (think the Clinton era). People are using their cars less and using the bus more–a good thing. Tomorrow, back to MBL and science.
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.
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?
