Author: jlolds

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

Scientific writing

One of my students commented today in class on how hackneyed and boring scientific writing is (passive tense and all). I retorted that one might say the same thing about java code or C++, but we don’t because it’s understood that the rules and syntax are required to get the source code to compile. In fact source code that is considered aesthetically pleasing or beautiful gets its qualities, not from its “beauty of language” but rather from its clarity (documentation) and the underlying originality of the pseudo-code.

In the same way, scientific writing gets its beauty from an ability to convey scientific information (lit review, methods, results, discussion) in a clear fashion. The writing itself is not where the originality is. Rather, like iceberg lettuce (which is only a carrier for creamy salad dressing), scientific language is only a carrier for the underlying scientific expression.

Jim

Chronicle picks up the meme

This morning on-line: The Chronicle of Higher Education picks up the meme that mind-sciences is becoming mature and links to some very useful sites. If you have trouble linking, here’s the quote:

If you’re generally concerned about consciousness, check out MindPapers, a new online resource that bills itself as “A Bibliography of the Philosophy of the Mind and the Science of Consciousness.” It’s run by David Chalmers and David Bourget, of Australian National University, and boasts 18,329 entries, some of which are directly available.

Jim

Hamiltonian Blog

Check out Professor Paul So’s blog–only it’s about his new art space in DC on the historic U St. corridor, Hamiltonian Gallery. Paul is an esteemed senior faculty member at the Institute, while also a member of the Physics department. Who says science isn’t about art!

Jim

The decline of tenure track

A very interesting piece that my wife caught from the NY Times on the decline of the number of tenure track professors in the United States. I am concerned that the article misses the somewhat subtle distinction (at least in my mind) between “restricted” or “contract” full time professors and adjuncts.

Here’s the quote from the piece that gets at that classification question:

At some departments the proportion of faculty who are tenured is startlingly low. The psychology department at Florida International University in Miami has 2,400 undergraduate majors but only 19 tenured or tenure-track professors who teach, according to a department self-assessment. It is possible for a psychology major to graduate without taking a course with a full-time faculty member.

“We’re at a point where it is extreme,” said Suzanna Rose, a psychology professor who said she stepped down as department head in August, primarily because she could not hire as many tenure-track professors as she thought the department needed. “I’m just very concerned about the quality.”

Ronald Berkman, the provost at Florida International, disputed her numbers, saying the psychology department has 23 professors who are tenured or tenure track and 5 full-time teachers on contracts. The department is conducting a search for three more tenure-track professors, Dr. Berkman said.

Berkman, the provost, has a point: contract professors (who are full time) are getting added to the adjunct number which is then compared to the tenure-line number. In fact, the proper comparison should be between the number of adjuncts and the number of full-time professors (i.e. contract professors plus tenure-line).

Jim

Over the river and to the Woods…

This is the day when America seems to collectively travel in preparation for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving meal. We’re no exception: we head for the house at Wintergreen inside of the next hour, hopefully missing at least some of the traffic that will surely clog the interstate highways later this afternoon.

Among the things I give thanks for is the opportunity to lead an amazing institute for advanced study, where collegiality, an open mind and excellent research are in abundance. To all of my colleagues and readers, I wish all a very happy holiday.

Jim

Surfing and a shot at a Grand Unified Theory

A surfer (a sport I picked up actually on Cape Cod, not in California) claims to have solved the issue with gravity and a Grand Unified Theory.

Money quote from The New Scientist:

That hasn’t stopped some leading physicists sitting up and taking notice after Lisi made his theory public on the physics pre-print archive this week (www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770). By analysing the most elegant and intricate pattern known to mathematics, Lisi has uncovered a relationship underlying all the universe’s particles and forces, including gravity – or so he hopes. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi’s work as “fabulous”. “It is one of the most compelling unification models I’ve seen in many, many years,” he says.

Pretty cool, even if it turns out to be a wrong turn.

Jim

This is how you build interdisciplinary strength

From the Chronicle of Higher Education on the University of Michigan’s plan to build faculty strength in interdisciplinary areas:

The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor plans to spend $30-million over the next five years on hiring 100 new tenure-track faculty members to lead interdisciplinary research and teaching in areas such as energy and environmental sustainability.

Kudos to President Coleman–that’s really vision and it’ll make a difference I believe. This from a state with an economy that is anemic at best.

Jim

On the evolution of the web

Academic blogger Jean Burgess at Queensland University reflect on how one’s personal web presence as evolved (with social networking and googling)–it’s apparently getting more difficult than ever for Google to report back individual home pages….remember, those things with “under construction” icons?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this also, but in the context of how academic blogging is beginning to intersect meaningfully with professional social networking spaces such as Plaxo or Linkedin through feeds. I first syndicated this blog to the University of Michigan’s alumni social network, but have since added Plaxo.

Here’s an excellent quote from Burgess’ blog entry on this subject:

One thing that has struck me lately, is that this hyper-distributed version of online presence, connecting us in different ways to a variety of colleagues, professional, personal, and online acquaintances, and close friends, couldn’t be further from the 1990s personal home page – a one-stop shop that often seemed to incorporate everything from a CV to cat photos, holiday snaps, essays and online diary. It’s important to note that, given the comparative unevenness of internet access, use and participation at the time, the personal home page was a form of cultural production never adopted at anything like the current scale of blogs and SNS profiles.

Jim

Thinking about TCMS

I am referring to trans-cranial magnetic stimulation–that other major killer-app besides brain imaging that’s come out of the neurotechnology revolution. Think of it as a way to reach out and “touch” an ensemble of neurons without the need for them to “see air” (i.e. neurosurgery). Essentially electrical stimulation of the brain without electrodes (in the brain).

My question has to do with the slightly more esoteric question of whether such stimulation, when appropriately tuned to characteristic firing modes of neuronal groups (say theta –or 4 to 8 Hz) can either tweak or eliminate such characteristic synchronous oscillatory activity.

Any takers out there?

Jim