Recommended reads #168
Here is a rather substantial list of sites with online laboratory modules for a great variety of STEM disciplines. If I was teaching a lab this semester, and was compelled to teach online on very short notice, I’d probably be spending hours combing through what’s available. It looks really useful for this moment that we are in. It was assembled by folks on a POD Network listserv*.
It looks like folks who have more than a tangential relationship to the Pruitt affair are now being quite mum, as Dr. Pruitt has done gone lawyered up and sent out a bevvy of nasty letters bearing what I imagine is letterhead from a very scary law firm. I only know about this from this news story that came out in Science yesterday. The kicker in that article, a quote from the EIC of Ecology Letters, pretty much sums up the slowly unfolding situation: “I don’t think it looks promising that a simple, nonfraud, compelling explanation will surface.”
From the pages of Nature: “You can’t fight feelings with facts.”
Australia has hundreds of programs to get women into science, but are they working? Time to find out.
The New York Times decides to publish a piece on the adjunct labor market in the humanities.
An(other) important piece of quit lit, from Penn State Brandywine.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent perhaps too much time keeping abreast and fretting about the pandemic. (I’m not saying it’s not fretworthy, I’m just saying, I’ve probably fretted too much.) I don’t think I have any particular grand wisdom to share in these circumstances, but anyhow, the following three links are the subset of the things that I think could be worthwhile:
Why you must act now. This is a really good explainer that goes into the modeling of travel restrictions and transmission restrictions (“social distancing”) in areas that that had the novel Coronavirus early on, and what it will take to prevent a huge number of deaths in the US. And it does it with relatively non-technical language. I think everybody running a K-12 school district needs to read this, for example.
Please do a bad job of putting your courses online
Here’s Issac Newton’s Waste Book in the archives from the University of Cambridge, from when he was quarantined during the great plague. Which is when he invented calculus and described the theory of gravity, found in these pages (not that I’ve read them, to be honest. But it’s cool that it’s in the archives for everybody to see, eh?). How do your plans for the next month compare?
When Coronavirus closes colleges, some students lose hot meals, health care, and a place to sleep
* (By the way, the POD Network is having an institute to train folks how to do faculty professional development that looks super cool on account of the cool and wise and experienced people who’ll be there, and happens to be really close to me, and it might be late enough that people will even travel to it in late June.)