Academic Mixtape Six

this batch has so many top notch things in the world of higher ed and science. really!

Transcripts shouldn’t be academic rap sheets. We can do better.

I am guilty of academic rubbernecking here, and will share this guilty pleasure of what might be the most fatal academic book review that’s made it to print in recent years: “This essay aims to provide ample evidence to demonstrate how the book systematically misrepresents the majority of its primary sources to support an untenable thesis. It argues that the book's central claims are ungrounded in evidence.” My gosh. (And in case you think it’s just this one reviewer who had it in for this person/book, here’s another review that strikes the same notes.)

We actually have a shot at stopping the climate crisis.

The mountain behind my home in the foothills of the San Gabriel National Monument is home to Mt. Wilson Observatory, which established and operated by Carnegie Science. The biggest discoveries in astrophysics of the 20th century happened there. This article in the LA Times introduces that history and also the financial peril that this facility now faces.

By the way, one of my favorite museum exhibits ever is at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. It’s a display of 100-year old letters, postcards, and telegrams from over the world to the astronomers at Mt. Wilson, with unsubstantiated theories of the physics of the universe. They’re collected in a book called, “No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again” that you can buy from the MJT, if you don’t have a trip to visit the museum anytime soon.

It’s really hard to capture the right words about the pain, causation, and responsibility for the escalation of violence in Palestine and Israel. I think a lovely starting point comes from Talia Levin:

Speech and Speechlessness

How the ballpoint pen changed handwriting. This isn’t brilliant but it makes a really good observation and draws some conclusions from it. Even the best ballpoint pen is harder to write with than a fountain pen. It takes a lot more effort to use a ballpoint. I switched over to fountain pens a few years ago (a Lamy Safari, for fountain pen nerds) and it made me enjoy writing so much more.”

Why I’m advising that people stop assigning essays, and it’s not just because of AI

I find it incredibly wild that Scholastic (the company that sells a ton of books to kids in K-12 schools) has two separate lists of books that schools can order for booksales: The normal list or the one created for white supremacists. For reals.

When Katalin Karikó received the Nobel Prize a couple weeks ago, there was renewed reflection of the history of her breakthrough work at UPenn and how the university derailed her work because it wasn’t bringing in enough grant money. The best take out there was from C. Brandon Ogbunu, on our collective complicity. (That said, there are a bunch of great zingers and one-liners from this 2021 profile of Dr. Karikó in Glamour Magazine)

The many survivors of George Tyndall (the doctor at USC whose history of sexual assaults caused the university to pay more than $1 billion in settlements) just lost their opportunity to have justice served in court.

I abandoned my not-insubstantial platform on twitter months ago, but the detioriation is so complete that academics with huge audiences are now calling it quits, like historian Kevin Kruse. It’s the same reasons as the rest of us, but it’s interesting to read him explain why this chapter come to a close:

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

A recent paper in Science is about an experiment showing with some stunning detail that teaching calculus with student-engaged collaborative learning is so, so much better than the way it’s been traditionally taught.

Meanwhile, I only just caught this paper from 2019 that documents specifically how pedagogical gatekeeping generates gender inequities in physics education. Especially if you’re teaching more technical material, I think this is an important read to make sure that you’re not implicitly fostering environments like described in this paper.

There is a lot of powerful stuff in this special issue of the ADVANCE Journal entitled “Institutional Betrayal and Academic Trauma.”

Do you think it’s a good idea to share interview questions with interviewees before the interview? I do. And folks say it’s an equitable practice. There’s a bunch of reading out there on this, but this piece from a library blog interviews a bunch of people and I thought the diversity of perspectives and thoughtfulness of the responses was worth reading.

The college backlash is going too far. Yes, you knew this, but someone decided to write it so you didn’t have to.

Today in “a picture speaks a thousand words” Did I fully read this paper, and if I did, would I understand all the math? No, and no.