Recently in Education Category

Nature: Research universities in Japan are starting to look to the West and its philanthropic tradition to help ease their monetary difficulties. Although funded by the government, Japan's universities have become cash starved, writes David Cyranoski for Nature. Recently, Japan's internationally known Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe was offered some $7.5 million from the Kavli Foundation in Oxnard, California. However, Japanese law prevented the IPMU from accepting the full amount. So the Kavli Foundation will instead manage the money for the institute, doling it out in smaller amounts to pay for expenses that public funds don't cover. New laws enacted last year regarding nonprofit organizations in Japan, along with the IPMU's success, may encourage more Japanese universities to seek external funding through endowments.

Nature: Twenty percent of academics from a variety of fields say they have been asked to pad their papers with superfluous references in order to get published, according to a survey conducted by Eric Fong and Allen Whilhite of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Published in Science, the survey results also suggest that journal editors strategically target junior faculty with requests for extra citations as a condition of publication. It has been known for many years that some editors encourage extra references in order to boost their journals' impact factor, but the survey's figures were higher than expected. While 86% of the respondents said that coercion was inappropriate, and 81% thought it damaged a journal's prestige, 57% said they would add superfluous citations to a paper before submitting it to a journal known to coerce. To compensate for the potential inflationary effect that excessive self-citation can have on a journal's impact factor, Thomson Reuters started publishing impact factors with and without self-citations in 2009.

New Scientist: After decades of fighting over the teaching of evolution in classrooms, US science education advocates are bracing themselves for the next battle—concerning the teaching of human-caused climate change. Over the past few years, several states, including Texas, Louisiana, and South Dakota, have introduced legislation that requires teachers to include the views of climate change skeptics. "Climate change education is kind of where evolution education was 30 years ago," says Steven Newton, programs and policy director for the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, California. Whereas creationism is a religious belief, however, climate change denial is mainly political and therefore may be harder to fight in court.

Toronto Star: The Ontario government has cut Can$42 million in university research grants from its budget in order to meet “current fiscal challenges.” The money would have been used to support research in such areas as clean technologies and the bio-economy. In addition, soon after winning the 6 October election, Premier Dalton McGuinty downsized his cabinet and folded the ministry of research and innovation into the ministry of economic development. “We are in an era now of prioritization and rationalization,” said Economic Development Minister Brad Duguid. Ironically, McGuinty has also launched a 30% tuition rebate, totaling Can$423 million, for community college and undergraduate university students.

BBC: A new type of graduate school for science and technology was announced on 4 January by the UK's universities minister David Willetts. The advanced research center would rely on international partnerships and corporate sponsorship and receive no additional government funding. The move is part of an overall push to encourage business and industry investment in research; Willetts has proposed to increase nongovernment funding for universities in general by 10%.

Science: Two researchers have conducted a new study in which they debunk several commonly held myths about gender and math performance. Among the myths they address is the speculation put forth by Lawrence Summers when he was president of Harvard University that males may have greater variability in intellectual mathematical abilities than females. Janet Mertz of the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Jonathan Kane of the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater analyzed internationally standardized math test scores from 86 countries. They concluded that cultural factors are most likely causing the discrepancy in gender performance, and that increasing the number of female role models benefits everybody. "Scientific and mathematical progress relies on the best people doing their best work," said Rebecca Goldin of George Mason University. "If you discourage half the population [from doing math and science], then that part is simply not in your pool of who's the best, so the best science doesn't happen." In the US, parity has been reached at the high school and undergraduate levels, but a huge gap persists at the graduate level.

Chronicle of Higher Education: When Eric Mazur saw in 1991 that his Harvard physics class couldn’t apply his lecture on Newton’s laws to real-life problems, he realized that many traditional teaching methods are ineffective. Thus he began gathering information on his students to improve his pedagogical techniques. Such data mining is now beginning to be used by administrators at the university and college level to improve the admissions process, the teaching of courses, and student advising. By gathering statistics on prospective and current students, officials say, they can better determine which schools would be a good fit and even predict a student’s success or failure in a given class. Students are also starting to use the new data-based tools to choose courses and majors and even to decide whom to pair up with for a group project. In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, writer Marc Parry discusses some of the various methods being developed at universities across the US.

Chronicle of Higher Education: The so-called supercommittee of 12 congressional Democrats and 12 congressional Republicans admitted yesterday that it had failed to carry out its charge: to reach agreement on a series of deficit-reducing measures. The failure triggers automatic spending cuts, which include a $3.54 billion reduction in the budget of the Department of Education. If the automatic spending cuts go through as scheduled in 2013, student-aid programs will lose $134 million, which will affect some 1.3 million students. The Chronicle's Kelly Field reports that the cuts to Education are especially severe because they come on top of cuts imposed in 2011 on career and technical education and college preparatory programs.

Science: A report released yesterday from the European Universities Association (EUA) ranked universities in the UK high in all measures of autonomy. This is the EUA's second report on university autonomy and the first one in which university systems were ranked in four different areas—organizational, financial, staffing, and academic autonomy. While it's not certain how strongly a university's autonomy is tied to its quality, some aspects, such as the ability to attract outside funding, are directly linked with financial autonomy. Report author Thomas Estermann expects the report to be provocative rather than prescriptive and to provide a means of comparison across countries.

Chronicle of Higher Education: A report from the Council of Graduate Schools states that new enrollments of international graduate students grew by 8% this fall, the largest increase since 2006. Most of those students came from China, with graduate enrollments from that country increasing by 21%. Enrollments of graduate students from the Middle East and Turkey increased 14%. Enrollments of Indian and South Korean graduate students were flat or nearly so, but that represents an improvement after several years of dwindling enrollment. US institutions that enroll the largest number of graduate students saw the greatest rates of growth in the number of international students. One hundred US institutions enroll 60% of all international graduate students.

Yorkshire Post: The UK government has announced that it will fund 100 scholarships, each worth £20 000 ($32 000), to help graduates become high school physics teachers. The scholarship program, which is being run in partnership with Britain's Institute of Physics, addresses a significant shortfall in the number of graduates who sign up for a course known as Initial Teacher Training (ITT). Last year, 275 fewer trainees were recruited to physics ITT courses than were needed.

Science: After several years of working in university labs, a PhD chemist switched to teaching science and math to secondary school students. Jeff Cruzan earned his doctorate in physical chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and did his postdoc at Harvard Medical School. When he realized how much he enjoyed explaining things to people, however, he decided to change directions and pursue a career as a teacher. Cruzan got a job teaching science in a Massachusetts high school through a program that does not require a traditional teaching degree, which can take as long as two years of full-time study. Because of the current need for secondary school science and math teachers, a number of people in those fields have been pursuing that “alternative path” to a second, and rewarding, career in teaching, writes Beryl Lieff Benderly for Science.

Chronicle of Higher Education: The first US–India Higher Education Summit took place on 13 October on the Georgetown University campus in Washington, DC. American colleges want to partner with Indian universities to develop global research projects, joint-degree programs, and student and faculty exchanges. Whether US institutions are capable of helping meet India's demand for higher education remains to be seen. The Indian government wants to increase the rate of college attendance among young people from 15% to 30%, and to do that it needs a thousand new universities. Its higher education system currently lacks the financial and talent resources to accomplish that. Proposed solutions range from US institutions building branch campuses in India, to joint-degree programs, to multi-institutional electronic curricula.

Nature: Texas remains determined to phase out "low-performing" physics programs at state-funded universities if they fail to graduate at least 25 students every five years. This could affect nearly half of the 24 undergraduate physics programs in the state. The plans are consistent with the business-based approach advocated by Texas governor Rick Perry; they are also being considered by Florida governor Rick Scott as a way to reduce higher-education budgets in his state. While other undergraduate programs in Texas will be subject to the same metrics, physics programs are more at risk because they tend to enroll fewer students to begin with. Many smaller programs that don't meet the metric are in areas with predominantly African American, Hispanic, or other disadvantaged populations. Cutting programs in those areas could deny minority students access to science-related education. About 35% of undergraduate degrees in physics awarded in the US go to students in programs that don't meet the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board requirements.

Science: Physicist Jan Hendrik Schön had his PhD revoked by Germany's University of Konstanz because of the 2002 scandal in which he was found to have faked data in at least 17 research papers. Although an investigation turned up no evidence that Schön had committed misconduct while working on his PhD, university officials asked Schön to return his doctoral certificate based on a state law that allows degrees to be revoked when the recipient proves "unworthy." Schön successfully sued the university, and the university appealed. Last week the Administrative Court of Baden-Württemberg in Mannheim ruled in favor of the university. According to the judge, a doctorate degree indicates the recipient is capable of independent scientific research and understands the principles of good scientific practice. When a recipient has violated those basic principles, the title is no longer applicable.

New York Times: Budget cuts in Texas could jeopardize physics programs across the state. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board has implemented a more stringent annual review system that eliminates programs with low enrollment—a chronic problem in physics. Programs that fail to graduate an average of five students per year over five years face being cut, which translates to nearly 60% of Texas’s undergraduate physics programs. According to the American Physical Society, if the same standard were applied nationally, 526 of about 760 programs would be phased out. Critics say that diminishing enrollments at the university level are indicative of a more fundamental problem in the US educational system and more must be done at the secondary school level to promote physics as an academic discipline. Besides, cutting university programs may not result in any meaningful savings anyway: Qualified teachers will still be needed because physics is a prerequisite for many majors, and physicists bring in substantial research monies to the universities where they work.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Carnegie Mellon will become one of the few American colleges that offer degrees in Africa when it opens a branch campus in Rwanda in 2012. Carnegie Mellon is receiving $95 million over 10 years from the Rwandan government to operate the program, which will initially offer master's degrees in information technology and electrical and computer engineering. The university will hire between 15 and 20 faculty members to teach at the new campus; to ensure that courses in Rwanda are of similar rigor to those in the US, the new faculty will first go to the university's home campus in Pittsburgh to familiarize themselves with the institution's curriculum and teaching style. In the future, Carnegie Mellon may also offer PhDs at the new campus, but it has no plans to enroll undergraduates there at this time. It will instead focus on working with local colleges to improve the pipeline of African applicants to the program.

Chronicle of Higher Education: In Canada as in some other countries, universities graduate more PhD-holding researchers than can be employed in academia. Recognizing that gap, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada has created the Collaborative Research and Training Experience Program, which gives research professors money to provide young researchers with professional skills, such as business acumen, communication, and leadership. Jennifer Lewington reports for the Chronicle that even researchers who intend to remain in academia have found the program helpful.

Chronicle of Higher Education: According to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, women tend to value higher education more than men do. Of the approximately 2100 people surveyed, about one-third held a bachelor’s degree or higher. Most respondents agreed that a college education was necessary to get ahead in life and that college was more central to a woman's success than a man's. Women were also more likely to express concern about rising college costs. Since 1992 women have been outpacing men by significant numbers in college enrollment and completion. That increasing prominence of women in higher education seemed to inspire contradictory reactions. Although a majority of people surveyed welcomed the fact that more women than men were graduating from college, almost half of the respondents said it was a bad thing that fewer men than women were attaining college degrees. Racial and ethnic patterns also came into play, with African Americans being more reluctant to say the gender gap in higher education was a good thing.

BBC: The number of students studying A-level physics in the UK has increased for the fifth consecutive year, by about 6.1% from last year, writes Pallab Ghosh for the BBC. Commentators attribute the increase in part to the geek chic image being promoted by such TV sitcoms as The Big Bang Theory. Also, the BBC’s designation of 2010 as the Year of Science resulted in a number of new science programs, such as Brian Cox’s popular Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of the Universe. Other possible factors include the current economy, which may be causing students to think more about their future employment prospects. Nevertheless, Imran Khan, director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering, cautions that people shouldn't get too carried away by those results: "Despite physics breaking into the top 10 A-levels subjects this year, we've only just got back to 2002 levels in terms of entries.” A gap still exists between the number of people with science and tech training and employer demand, according to Neil Bentley, deputy director general of the Confederation of British Industry.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Offers of admission to international students by US graduate schools increased this year by 11% over last year, according to a report by the Council of Graduate Schools. Admissions offers to prospective students from China grew by 23% and to those from India by 8%, the two largest sources of international students to the US. While the largest growth in international admissions offers occurred in business at 16%, the physical and Earth sciences saw a 15% increase, writes Karin Fischer for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Telegraph: “Not many girls appreciate how much fun science can be,” according to 14-year-old Samara Villion, who was participating in a school program at the Royal Institution of Great Britain’s Young Scientist Centre. Although more women are pursuing careers in science, writes Sally Williams for the Telegraph, studies show that men still dominate the field. Williams interviews several women scientists in the UK and highlights British scientific institutions that are working to address the gender disparity.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research argues that deeply discounted tuition fees for in-state students do not serve the interests of his state or his university. Low in-state fees deprive the university of much-needed funding while high out-of-state fees make the university financially reliant on a minority of students. The reliance on out-of-staters, writes Pielke, "creates incentives to favor their admission. That is contrary to the very purpose of in-state tuition, which is to favor Colorado residents." Pielke favors replacing the current tuition fees of $7700 for in-staters and $29 000 for out-of-staters with a single fee of $14 000.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Nancy Linde manages educational outreach for WGBH, Boston's PBS and NPR stations. In a commentary for the Chronicle, she argues that scientists who want girls to become science majors should adopt the practices of professional marketers. WGBH recently teamed up with the Association for Computing Machinery to form New Image for Computing, an initiative to transform the image of computing among girls. Thanks to funding from NSF, Linde and her colleagues worked with New York–based marketing firms and discovered that some of their assumptions about outreach were mistaken. She distills her experience in three lessons:

1. Whether your project is small or large, know your audience. And you don't need to hire a marketing firm from Manhattan. For the price of a round of snacks, you can convene a couple of focus groups and gather a wealth of data.

2. Test every communication document, whether print or online, with your target audience. Then redesign and test, test again.

3. Assume nothing. One of the classic missteps in trying to attract students to computer science lies in the fact that people in the field are often the ones who design and write the communication brochures and recruitment pamphlets. They often assume, misguidedly, that the messages that resonate with them will also appeal to their target audience. That is rarely the case.
   

Following those principles, New Image for Computing created Dot Diva, a website of resources for girls who want to learn about computing. As if to underline lesson 2, the name of the website was not the one Linde and her fellow team members favored. It was the name that girls said they liked the best.

Los Angeles Times: Google has announced the winners of its first science fair—and all three are women. Lauren Hodge (13–14 age group) studied the effect of different marinades on the level of potentially harmful carcinogens in grilled chicken; Naomi Shah (15–16 age group) tried to prove that tweaking the environment indoors can improve air quality and reduce people's reliance on asthma medications; and Shree Bose (17–18 age group) discovered a way to improve ovarian cancer treatment for patients who have built up a resistance to certain chemotherapy drugs. According to the judges, "The unifying elements of all three young women were their intellectual curiosity, their tenaciousness and their ambition to use science to find solutions to big problems." Google has posted video of the event on its YouTube channel.

Chronicle of Higher Education: The Brazilian government has announced that it will fund 75 000 studentships to study abroad, worth $30 000 each. Brazil's university system is successful, but that success is not unqualified; scientific research is highly variable in quality, and there is a shortage of researchers. Student bodies of elite universities tend to be economically homogenous. The Brazilian government recognizes that the country's higher education system will need to expand rapidly while improving in quality if it is to support the country's economic growth: 7.5% last year, with another 4% predicted for 2011 despite the global slowdown.

Nature: In 2001 the Japanese government launched an ambitious plan to build a world-class international research institute and graduate university in science and technology on Okinawa, one of the most southerly and remote islands in Japan. The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), which has no departments and no professorial hierarchy, promises scientists the freedom to pursue their own research. Since OIST is required to find 50% of its faculty and students from outside Japan, the institute’s new president Jonathan Dorfan, former director of Stanford University’s SLAC, has launched the biggest recruiting drive to date: Over three weeks in December 2010, 27 potential recruits visited the institute, 26 were offered positions, and 20 have accepted—11 of them physicists. Dorfan hopes that OIST will earn university accreditation this fall and can start accepting graduate students for 2012. In addition to attracting scientists, the institute has proven to appeal to other scientific professionals, such as Neil Calder, senior adviser in communication at OIST, who has written for Physics Today about the nature of science communication.

Tennessean: Tennessee State University in Nashville has started pruning its lowest-producing degree programs—including undergraduate physics, writes Jennifer Brooks for the Tennessean. Because the university has graduated only 23 physics majors over the past decade, the administration decided to wrap the physics program into an umbrella math-and-science hybrid degree within the College of Engineering. "Mathematics and physics majors take 80% of the same courses," said professor Sandra Scheick, head of the current mathematics and physics department. Instead of two or three physics majors and 10 or so math majors, and maybe one astronomy major every other year or so, Scheick said, there will be two dozen mathematical science majors. The Tennessee Higher Education Commission keeps a running tally of the graduates produced by every degree program at every public institution in the state. To avoid being classified as "low producing," several schools have been forced to terminate programs.

USA Today: More colleges are turning to eco-friendly materials for their graduates’ caps and gowns, according to Wendy Koch for USA Today. Some students, such as Caltech’s 2011 graduating class, wore GreenWeaver gowns made from recycled plastic bottles. More than 250 institutions ordered the attire this year from Virginia-based Oak Hall Cap and Gown, up from 60 in 2010, said vice president Donna Hodges. Another company, Minneapolis-based Jostens, makes gowns from wood fiber from sustainably harvested North American forests. Omaha-based Willsie Cap and Gown sells a GreenGown made of the same resin used in plastic bottles and reuses the fabric if it's returned; sales are up 300% from a year ago, says the company's Steve Killen. Unfortunately, the green gowns can cost more than the traditional polyester ones. And because graduation gowns usually do not get reused (students are usually required to purchase them), some students have suggested a gown swap, which would make the gowns greener yet.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Duke University is building a branch campus in Kunshan, a city of 1.6 million people in East China's prosperous Jiangsu province. Although Kunshan is footing most of the bill, some members of Duke's faculty are skeptical of the prospects for the joint venture. As the Chronicle's Ian Wilhelm reports, doubts have arisen about how Duke will pay for its share of the campus, given that the current recession has forced the university to trim its budget. Also in doubt is whether Duke Kunshan University, as the campus is known, will be able to attract both international faculty and elite Chinese students, who prefer to study in the West. Under the current plan, Duke Kunshan University will begin offering MBAs in 2012 followed by a comprehensive range of graduate and undergraduate degrees.

Daily Mail: Studies conducted by Pierre Pica of CNRS in France and his colleagues suggest that geometry skills are innate in humans, according to their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The group studied 8 children and 22 adults of the Amazon tribe known as the Mundurucu, using 30 French and US adults and children as a control group. All participants were asked questions about lines, planes, angles, triangles, and spheres. The Mundurucu people's responses to the questions were roughly as accurate as those of the French and US respondents; they seemed to have an intuition about lines and geometric shapes without formal education or even the relevant words. The Amazonian tribe test results “suggest Euclidean geometry, inasmuch as it concerns basic objects ... , is a cross-cultural universal that results from the inherent properties of the human mind as it develops in its natural environment,” according to the paper's authors.

Chronicle of Higher Education: It's taken for granted that workers who hold bachelor's degrees earn more than workers who don't. But does it matter what subject a worker's degree is in? Yes, according to a new study by the US Census Bureau. As the Chronicle's Beckie Supiano reports, the bureau correlated earnings data in 2010 with 171 different college majors. The graduates with the highest median income, $120 000 a year, had degrees in petroleum engineering. At the opposite end of the rankings were counseling psychology graduates, whose median annual income was $29 000. Physical sciences majors lay between the two extremes at $69 000.

Chronicle of Higher Education: The usual term for capital borrowing by universities is 30 years, but MIT has issued taxable bonds it plans to repay over 100 years, writes Goldie Blumenstyk for the Chronicle of Higher Education. MIT will pay 5.62% interest on the so-called century bonds and plans to use the proceeds to finance projects in its MIT 2030 plan, which calls for renovations and several construction projects, including a new energy and environmental-studies building, a performing-arts center, and a nanotechnology fabrication center. Universities that borrow by issuing taxable debt often have to pay higher interest rates than they do on tax-exempt bonds, but the bonds allow the issuers more flexibility. The success of the MIT deal could fuel more interest in the use of century bonds by other universities, especially those that are treating debt as a permanent part of their financial management plans. Century bonds aren't common, but MIT is not the first to issue them; Yale and Boston Universities did so in the mid-1990s, albeit for deals about one-seventh the size of MIT's.

New York Times: According to a new study published in Science, undergraduate students learn better through an interactive approach than through the more traditional lecture style of teaching. A team of researchers at the University of British Columbia in Canada led by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Carl Wieman compared results from an introductory college physics course that was taught two different ways, one using the traditional lectures and the other using an experimental, collaborative approach in which students puzzle out problems together during class. The results showed that students in the experimental class did more than twice as well on a multiple-choice test of the material and also tended to have better attendance. Although some have criticized the study, pointing out its limitations and problems with its design, others see it as a long-overdue step toward improving undergraduate teaching and learning.

Daily Star: Bangladesh's first-ever national physics olympiad was held 29 April at Oxford International School in Dhaka. More than 300 students from some 40 schools participated. Ten students won gold medals, six won silver, and four won bronze. The top five gold medalists will go on to the 42nd International Physics Olympiad to be held this July in Bangkok, Thailand. The international olympiad, an annual physics competition for high-school students, began in Warsaw, Poland, in 1967. This is the first time Bangladesh will participate in the event.

New Scientist: Forty-two Nobel laureates have written a letter backing the repeal of a Louisiana law allowing creationism to be taught in science classes, writes Andy Coghlan for New Scientist. Under the Louisiana Science Education Act of 2008, teachers can include their own "supplementary materials" to widen debate on such science subjects as evolution, cloning, and global warming. In the letter, the laureates, which include 17 physicists, 17 chemists, and 8 other scientists, state unequivocally their reasons the law should be repealed:

Louisiana's students deserve to be taught proper science rather than religion presented as science. Science offers testable, and therefore falsifiable, explanations for natural phenomena. Because it requires supernatural explanations of natural phenomena, creationism does not meet these standards.

Nature: Southern Sudan is going to become Africa's newest state this July. As a result, staff and students of the University of Juba, the University of Bahr el Ghazal, and the Upper Nile University's college of medicine and school of nursing must all move from Khartoum, in the north, to Juba, Wau, and Malakal, respectively. The moves could leave the institutions without staff, facilities, or infrastructure and could undermine scientific research in Southern Sudan. The University of Juba will initially move back to its old campus, which was used as a base by government forces during the Sudanese civil war and is now in disrepair. Upper Nile University may be forced to close its college of medicine because Malakal has no laboratories and the hospital there doesn't have the facilities needed to teach medical students. All three universities have extended their summer holidays by three months to accommodate the moves.

New York Times: Even as the US economy fell into a recession in 2008, the cost of attending college kept rising. Although US output has recovered somewhat, unemployment remains near 10%, which means that newly graduated students face mounting burdens of college debt. As the New York Times's Tamar Lewin reports, the financial pressure on some students is likely to become worse if proposed cuts in Pell grants for low-income students become part of the US budget. In general, borrowing to pay for college remains a good investment. However, the prospect of having to pay off $100 000 or so in loans when jobs are hard to come by could dissuade low-income students from going to college.

Science: The Tennessee House of Representatives voted 70–28 yesterday to pass a bill that will protect teachers from discipline if they "help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught, (such as) biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning." While the bill contains verbiage stating that its intent is not to promote any particular religious doctrine, the general consensus among both opponents and supporters of the bill is that it would allow public-school teachers to teach intelligent design as a scientifically valid alternative to evolution. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Bill Dunn, a Republican from Knoxville, said it was designed to promote critical thinking. The Tennessee Science Teachers Association, the National Center for Science Education, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have all expressed opposition to the bill.

Scientific American: A computer scientist at Columbia University has developed a build-it-yourself digital camera, which he hopes to mass produce and market as an educational kit for children. Shree Nayar, chair of the computer science department at Columbia, also worked with several graduate students to produce an educational website promoting the camera. On the website are instructions for building the Bigshot camera and the science and engineering concepts behind it.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Apple's popular tablet computer, the iPad, is (relatively) cheap for a computing device, is easy to use, has a long battery life, and runs several applications that foster communication and teamwork. According to a report by the Chronicle's Ben Wieder, those plusses account for the iPad's growing use in college classrooms. However, a significant set of minuses is also hindering iPad adoption in other classrooms. The devices lack a conventional keyboard, which slows typing. What's more, annotating most online textbooks and some formats of lecture notes is difficult, if not impossible. Still, tablet computers are likely to become more common in classrooms. Wieder quotes Martin Ringle, the chief technology officer of Reed College in Portland, Oregon: "I don't think the institution is going to get to decide about the uptake of these devices." Colleges, and their professors, will have to adapt to their students' choice whether they like it or not. That hasn't happened yet, but as more content becomes available, he is confident it will.

Chronicle of Higher Education: To help close Pennsylvania's massive budget deficit, the state's Republican governor Tom Corbett has proposed cutting the appropriations used to fund the state's university campuses by 50%. If enacted, the cut would be the largest ever to befall a state university system in the US. The state's flagship campus in State College would suffer the least, because it gets relatively little of its funding from the state. Other campuses might have to close, writes the Chronicle's Jeffrey Selingo.

Chronicle of Higher Education: While continuing to battle public-sector unions, the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker (R), has proposed that the University of Wisconsin's flagship Madison campus be split from the state university system. The plan would give campus administrators more freedom to raise and spend money as they choose, cutting red tape. The campus would not, however, receive a boost in state funding. Walker's budget, which is before the state congress, includes a cut of $250 million in Madison's budget for the next two years. The Madison campus is home to one of the largest physics departments in the US.

Chronicle of Higher Education: A report by the European University Association has found that Europe's universities are increasingly turning toward industry and charities to help fund their teaching and research missions. On average, universities in Europe receive 73% of their funding from government sources, which, in the current worldwide recession, are under pressure. Besides seeking alternative funding, universities are also engaged in debates about tuition. In some countries, such as France, tuition is free, whereas in other countries, such as the UK, students pay a significant share.

Las Vegas Review-Journal: Cuts to Nevada's budget proposed by the state's governor Brian Sandoval could trigger the bankruptcy of the University of Nevada system. Under Sandoval's proposal, the system's main campus in Las Vegas must cut $47.5 million from its budget over the next two years. If the cuts, which amount to 10% of UNLV's total budget, were applied uniformly, the university's College of Sciences would see its budget fall by $2.82 million. To deal with the cuts, UNLV's president Neal Smatresk said he would declare "financial exigency," a state akin to bankruptcy, to enable him to reduce expenses and fire tenured faculty.

Chronicle of Higher Education: True to their pre-election pledges, Republicans in the House of Representatives have drawn up a federal budget for the next fiscal year that aims to reduce America's budget deficit. Among the budget-cutting measures is a 15% reduction, equivalent to $845, from the maximum Pell grant. Introduced in 1965, Pell grants are aimed at helping students from poor families attend university. If enacted, the budget plan would not only reduce the grants' value, it would also make it harder to qualify for the grants in the first place. An estimated 1.7 million high-school students would become ineligible for the grants.

Nature: Psychologists Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, recently conducted a study to explore the persistent shortage of women in physics, computer science, and engineering. Their analysis, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contrasts with reports that suggest overt discrimination remains a significant problem. Ceci and Williams conclude, instead, that female researchers lag behind their male counterparts in professional advancement because of a broader set of societal realities, which include raising a family and gender expectations.

Science: In an Issues & Perspectives column, guest contributor Kathy Weston looks back on her career as a molecular biologist and on her decision to leave a tenure-track position at the University of London. Weston frankly acknowledges her own failings, especially her lack of confidence. In retrospect, she wishes she had found a mentor, and "taken more scientific risks, gone for bigger stakes, and thought harder about direction." As for the system, she writes,

It failed too, I think. Scientists are judged almost entirely on research output, measured by papers published in the most prominent journals, and grants are not awarded unless your work is competitive at the highest level. Trying to run a lab full time with small children at home is very likely to result in a drop in research productivity or quality, and yet little allowance is made for those of us, mostly women, who find ourselves in this situation.

Chronicle of Higher Education: In a commentary in the Chronicle, Art Padilla, who heads the department of management, innovation, and entrepreneurship at North Carolina State University (NCSU), recounts the history of the Research Triangle, a zone of science and technology R&D centered on Duke University, the University of North Carolina, and NCSU. The Research Triangle was founded in the 1960s, but began to flourish after the state government chose to support and invest in the zone during the financially troubled 1970s. Faced with greater financial challenges today, other states can learn from the Triangle's history. Padilla asserts

The region's successes and attractiveness are not due to chance. What we see today in the Triangle, including the economic vibrancy and opportunities for young people, reflects choices made decades ago by educational, business, and political leaders. What we will see in the future—and what our grandchildren will inherit—depends on the choices we make now.

Chronicle of Higher Education: The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA has released the survey it conducted last year of freshmen at US colleges and universities. The effects of the economic downturn were evident from the responses. More students than before are living at home and studying at universities within 100 miles of their hometowns. Still, the respondents remain optimistic about their prospects. The survey also revealed two trends that are not directly related to the economic slump: 38.2% of freshmen said they expected to communicate regularly with their professors, presumably through increased use of electronic media, and 31.5% said they intended to study abroad.

Science: US students don't know much about science, according to the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress released yesterday, writes Jeffrey Mervis for Science. The NAEP measures student achievement in reading, math, and science at the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades. The 2009 assessment, which focused on science, found that 40% of high-school seniors perform below the basic level in science, and that younger students did only marginally better. Francis Eberle, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association in Arlington, Virginia, says that a big reason for their poor performance is a 2002 federal law—No Child Left Behind—that has pushed the subject out of classrooms by emphasizing reading and mathematics.

New York Times: Public universities, heavily subsidized by the state, used to provide a less expensive option for undergraduate education in the US. But now the cost is rising because tuition payments, not state appropriations, are covering more of the budget. According to the Delta Cost Project, most of the nation’s public research universities had more than half their costs paid by tuition in 2008, and other four-year public institutions were hovering near the 50% mark. And the burden on students is likely to keep growing. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 30 states face shortfalls of at least 10% of their budgets next year.

Lawrence Journal-World: Physics is among 15 bachelor's degree programs that graduate 10 or fewer students a year at the University of Kansas. As such, it could be eliminated if Kansas's Republican governor-elect, Sam Brownback, follows the example of Missouri's Democratic governor, Jay Nixon, who has urged Missouri's universities and colleges to justify the continued existence of unpopular programs. Faced with that challenge, Kansas University's dean of liberal arts and sciences has pointed out in an interview with the Lawrence Journal-World's Andy Hyland that the number of a program's graduates does not correspond to the program's importance to the university or the state:

Physics, for example, is one of the foundation sciences taught at a university, [Danny] Anderson said, and it shows how a department can house several different degree programs. The department at KU is called physics and astronomy, and it houses three of the listed small degree programs—physics, astronomy and engineering physics.

South Bend Tribune: An informal, local program to help elementary- and middle-school teachers improve science lessons has expanded from its original base in South Bend, Indiana, to cover the entire state of Indiana. As Gene Stowe of the South Bend Tribune reports, the program was started in the late 1990s by two physics professors and a chemistry outreach coordinator. It entails an intensive, three-week training session for teachers. Now, thanks to charitable funding, the program, which began with one school in Mishawaka, now involves 1000 teachers statewide.

Guardian: A scientific paper published today in the prestigious British Royal Society journal Biology Letters reveals that "bumble-bees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from.” According to Alom Shaha in his article for the Guardian, the paper is significant as much because of who wrote it as for the research done—the authors are a class of 8- to 10-year-olds from Blackawton Primary School in Devon, UK. Shaha discusses the students’ work and their adult advisers—their teacher, Dave Strudwick, and a neuroscientist, Beau Lotto.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Earlier this week President Obama and Republican leaders reached a compromise over two fiscal measures that were set to expire at the end of 2010. Under the deal, all the tax cuts enacted under President George W. Bush would be extended, a Republican priority, as would unemployment benefits, a Democratic priority. The compromise also includes a payroll tax holiday—plus a surprise benefit to science: the renewal of a tax credit for corporations that fund university research. The Chronicle's Kelly Field reports on the compromise and its impact on higher education.

Washington Post: The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has just released the results of its third triennial survey of scholastic achievement in a selection of countries in Europe, North America, and East Asia. In reading, math, and science, the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai came out on top. By contrast, the US was ranked 17th, 31st, and 23rd in the same categories—just ahead or just behind the survey averages. The US results were mixed compared with the two previous surveys. Math scores were up since 2006 but little different from scores in 2003. Science scores improved since 2006.

Chronicle of Higher Education: The National Science Foundation reports that the number of science doctorates earned by foreign students fell last year by 3.5% compared with 2008. By contrast, the total number of science doctorates rose by 1.6%. Accounting for the small decline is tricky. Last year's graduates began their courses before the current recession but after the tougher post-9/11 visa rules were put in place. One possibility is that students are delaying graduation until job prospects in the US and, in some cases, their home countries improve.

Globe and Mail: The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics announced on Monday that it had received a donation of CAN$4 million from the Bank of Montreal Financial Group. The donation will fund a chair named after Isaac Newton. The Perimeter Institute, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, was itself founded 10 years ago with help from industry—in the form of CAN$100 million in seed money from Mike Lazaridis of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. Four additional chairs are planned and will be named after Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Albert Einstein, and James Clerk Maxwell.

Marin Independent Journal: In a hands-on lesson in Newtonian dynamics and medieval technology, students at the Homestead Valley school in Mill Valley, California, designed, built, and operated pumpkin-hurling siege engines. The lesson was competitive. The winning team, having catapulted a small pumpkin 33 meters, won lunch at a local restaurant.

Missoulian: Jon Petersen, a physics teacher at Polson High School in Missoula, Montana, has come up with a local way to teach a universal concept. To get his students to understand elastic potential energy, he teamed up with Francis Cahoon, a member of Montana's Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Cahoon made two bows of the same traditional design from different woods: hickory and vine maple. Petersen directed his students to measure the bending moduli of the bows by hanging weights of various sizes from the bows' strings. Shooting arrows from the bows will come later—presumably as a reward.

Los Angeles Times: Iridescent, a nonprofit science and discovery center, opened Saturday near downtown Los Angeles. Another studio is set to open in New York next month, and others already operate in the San Francisco area. President and founder Tara Chklovski, who has studied physics and aerospace engineering, started the Iridescent program two and a half years ago to inspire girls and inner-city children to pursue careers in engineering and the sciences. Among the program's backers is the US Navy, which has given a $2.3 million grant "in hopes of 'developing future engineers and scientists' who will be the technological brains behind the military's brawn in years to come," according to Los Angeles Times writer Scott Glover.

Washington Post: In his Class Struggle blog, Washington Post education correspondent Jay Matthews writes about Ed Linz, a physics teacher at West Springfield High School in Fairfax County, Virginia. Linz believes that his students should have the experience of writing a substantial research paper. Not wanting to grade all those essays himself, he has devised an innovative solution: Require all his students to enter the DuPont Challenge Science Essay Competition. Matthews writes

[Linz] likes the essay contest much better than the science fair. To him, competing experiments mean stacks of liability forms and debates about outside help. “I got tired of judging parents’ work,” Linz said.

Chronicle of Higher Education: South Korea has 17 colleges that offer courses solely online—and not just to Koreans. As the Chronicle's Jeffrey Young reports, the online colleges are increasingly seeking students abroad. Given that South Korea has one of the world's best internet infrastructures, the challenges faced by Hanyang Cyber University in Seoul and the other online colleges are more mundane. To attract international students, the colleges need to offer lectures in English and to be mindful that people in other countries don't have access to the high bandwidths available in South Korea.

Science: In the latest Career Profile, Science reporter Elisabeth Pain describes how Francisca Leite became a management consultant at McKinsey & Co in Lisbon, Portugal. Leite originally planned a career in medicine and biophysics. Before joining McKinsey, she studied the brain using nuclear magnetic resonance and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Now, as a management consultant

Leite helps companies in the banking, media, and health sectors solve strategy, operations, organizational, and finance problems. She interviews client-company employees to figure out what the problem is, presents an analysis to the client company, helps them think their way through possible solutions, and builds models to quantify the impact. "Usually, our job is . . . helping them to frame and solve this problem using the knowledge they have," Leite says. One case she particularly enjoyed was helping a hospital reduce long waiting lists, which were causing patients to leave, the hospital to lose money, and the staff members to become frustrated.

Chronicle of Higher Education: Saudi Arabia's higher education system produces more than enough graduates in the arts and social sciences to fill civil service positions. But, as the Chronicle's Ursula Lindsey reports, the country is not able to fill positions in its private sector. Many of those jobs go instead to foreigners. Now, if new education reforms work as intended, Saudi Arabia will produce more graduates with sought-after technical skills.

Chronicle of Higher Education: An over-arching ideal of the European Union is that citizens of the union's 27 member countries have the freedom to live, learn, and work anywhere within the union's borders. As the Chronicle's Aisha Labi reports, progress toward one aspect of that ideal—harmonizing the EU's higher-education system—has bogged down. In particular, the 11-year-old Bologna Process has not yet led to significant mobility of students within the EU or to significant harmonization across the EU of the various kinds of university degree.

Press Association: A report on the state of teacher training in the UK warns that the UK government faces a difficult choice. Currently, the government provides financial support to university graduates who train to become teachers, but only if they earned a "good" degree—that is, at least a lower second or 2:2. That stipulation, according to the report's authors, Alan Smithers and Pamela of the University of Buckingham, will make it increasingly difficult to recruit teachers for physics, chemistry, math, and languages.

Washington Post: A paper published recently in the journal Child Development reaches an interesting and perhaps counterintuitive conclusion: Children's use of Facebook, computer games, and other online diversions doesn't impair academic progress; on the contrary, in some cases computer use improves children's test scores. The study, which entailed tracking 1000 children who were ages 6–12 in 1997 and ages 12–18 in 2003, was carried out by Sandra Hofferth, a family science professor at the University of Maryland and director of the Maryland Population Research Center.

Science: In her latest Career Advice column, Science's Jacqueline Ruttimann Oberst looks at the pros and cons for young researchers of working at small universities—that is, universities whose annual R&D budgets are no more than $50 million. One of Obert's interviewees is Alex Weiss, a physics professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. On the topic of conducting research, he's quoted as saying

At a smaller university, professors tend to go into niches where they’re not directly competing with big groups. One can’t jump on the bandwagon since one doesn’t have the resources to beat out the MITs, Caltechs, and Cornells. You have to pick your research topics carefully.

Chronicle of Higher Education: The government of Singapore is determined that the island nation should cultivate knowledge-based industries to thrive in the 21st century. To reach that goal, Singapore invests heavily in science and technology and promotes a tech-friendly business environment. It is also adopting wikis and other social media in its university classrooms—with mixed results, as the Chronicle's Jeffrey Young reports.

Chronicle of Higher Education: James Lang, an English professor and veteran of more than half a dozen faculty searches, offers aspiring university professors advice on an important component of an academic job application: the statement of teaching philosophy. Although a teaching philosophy is an abstract concept, Lang urges applicants to be personal, detailed, and specific when they describe their philosophies.

BBC: A poll conducted by ICM for Britain's Royal Society found that two-thirds of the British public were unable to name a single female scientist from Britain. Despite that ignorance, 20% of respondents to the poll picked "Nobel prize-winning scientist" as a roll model for girls. Earlier this year, a panel of female fellows of the Royal Society created a list of the 10 most influential British women in the history of science.

Science: After a year and a half of negotiating and a 29-hour bargaining session that ended early Saturday, the union representing the more than 5000 University of California postdocs reached a tentative agreement on its groundbreaking first contract. Among the decisions were the adoption of the pay scale used for postdocs funded by the National Institutes of Health, wage increases, and layoff protections. If approved, the contract will bring "definite economic improvements and important gains in rights, protections, and working conditions,” according to union spokesman Matthew O’Connor.

ABS-CBN News.com: Two teachers from the Philippines, both of whom hold doctorates in physics, were among the seven recipients of the 2010 Ramon Magsaysay Award, Asia’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Christopher Bernido and Maria Victoria Carpio-Bernido were recognized for their revolutionary science teaching method and "their purposeful commitment to both science and nation, ensuring innovative, low-cost, and effective basic education even under Philippine conditions of great scarcity and daunting poverty."

If that describes you, fine. It's your choice. The important thing is to realize that you're putting yourself at a disadvantage. You'll need to work harder than your colleagues to accomplish as much.

1. Physical sciences

2. Humanities

3. Agriculture/natural resources/environmental science

4. Business

5. Social sciences

6. Medical schools and health professions

7. Biological sciences

8. Engineering/computer science/math/statistics

9. Education

10. Other professions (journalism, law, architecture, etc.)

11. Visual and performing arts

11. (tie) Health and human ecology

As the Chronicle's Kelly Truong reports, professors' perceptions of how subjective the tenure review process is may account for the gap between the physical sciences and the arts.

Science: In a Q&A with Science's Eli Kintisch, Wendell Berry, whose writings address life in rural communities, explains why he has decided to remove his personal papers from the University of Kentucky. As Berry sees it, in striving to become a first-rank research university, the University of Kentucky is neglecting its original mission to teach and serve the people of Kentucky, his home state.

San Jose Mercury News: Stanford University is creating a new "bookless library" from two existing libraries—physics and engineering. The new facility will have a completely electronic reference desk, Kindle 2 e-readers, soft seating, a self-checkout system, and group event space. At the user's fingertips will be 28 online databases and more than 12 000 scientific journals. One reason for going electronic is space: Stanford's campus is running out of room, with nowhere to expand. The new combined library will be half the size of one of its forebears. Another reason is that in the sciences many of the journals and reference works have already been digitized, so users are already accessing them electronically.

Science: In 2000, the leaders of Europe's higher education establishments gathered in Bologna, the site of the world's oldest university. Their goal: to make the higher education systems of Europe's countries more compatible with each other. In personal terms, European students who start their university educations at the same time should be able to graduate, move on to advance degrees, and finish at the same time, regardless of where in Europe they choose to study. Now, 10 years after the Bologna Process was announced, Science's Elisabeth Pain examines its progress.

New Scientist: Every two years in Atlanta, the Gathering for Gardner convention draws mathematicians, magicians, and puzzle enthusiasts. This year’s event, G4G9 (the ninth one), was held 24–28 March. The world’s premier celebration of recreational mathematics honors Martin Gardner, who wrote the mathematical games column for Scientific American from 1957 to 1981 as well as numerous books, including The Annotated Alice, first published in 1960. Gardner died on 22 May at the age of 95.

Hindustan Times: Teaching students the powerful yet abstract concepts of physics is a perennial and universal challenge. The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur is currently holding a six-day workshop for teachers to tackle that challenge. One of the presentations went through a series of 30 low-cost experiments, including the "dancing nut," which helps explain friction.

Science: Carl Wieman shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for making a Bose–Einstein condensate. Yesterday, Wieman, who’s now the associate director for science in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, testified before the Senate Commerce Committee about the possible role of federal agencies in teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Wieman advocated letting NASA and other agencies continue to focus on what they do best. Fixing STEM education, he said, will require improving accountability and adopting methods of proven success.

New York Times: Budget woes have reduced the number of positions available at US schools, creating the worst job market for teachers since the Great Depression. Even teachers qualified in previously sought-after fields, like physics and special education, are facing difficulty finding jobs.

Los Angeles Times: Facing a recession-induced drop in state support, the University of California system aims to trim $500 million from its budget while preserving its research and teaching enterprises. The cuts are expected to come from spending less on energy and from centralizing administrative functions that are currently carried out by each of the system’s 11 campuses.

Chronicle: During the course of a year, researchers at Princeton University create images of their experiments, simulations, and theories. The most artistically appealing of those images are collected and displayed each year in the university’s Art of Science exhibition. This year’s exhibition, the fourth in the series, focuses on energy science.

Nature: In another sign of warming relations between Taiwan and China, the Taiwanese government has announced that its universities will admit up to 2000 students a year from the Chinese mainland. The deal is mutually beneficial. Taiwan's research universities, which were facing a shortage of local students, gain access to a bigger pool of applicants; mainland students gain access to a wider choice of institutions in the Chinese-speaking world.

Chronicle: To save money amid a state-wide budget crisis, the University of California is looking into expanding and enhancing its online teaching. A move online could expand access to oversubscribed courses. Whether it would save money or improve learning is an open question on UC campuses.

TheDartmouth.com: Space is the "primary ingredient of physical reality," and has the same basic properties "everywhere and every when," said Frank Wilczek, 2004 Nobel laureate in physics, in the public lecture "What is Space?" on Thursday.

Nature News: In 2002, bioinformatician Mark Gerstein and his colleagues set up a server to host some commonly used genomics databases to monitor any anomalies in web traffic or surreptitious scans.

Seven months later, the picture that emerged was one of a network under siege. Not all of these visits were attacks, Gerstein notes, but many were.

Protecting research data presents particular challenges. Most information-technology (IT) professionals suggest ensuring that large or sensitive data stores are managed by a centralized IT team that can monitor and administer systems, keeping a close watch over traffic and limiting access.

But this can conflict with the ethos of researchers who need such systems to be accessed by a wide variety of students, postdocs, and collaborators.

OregonLive.com: The conflicting forces that drive the musical Gracie and the Atom, which opened over the weekend at Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, Oregon, are religion and science, or, described more broadly, faith and rationality, writes Marty Hughley. And when one of the songs is titled "Beautiful Math," you don't have a hard time guessing where the show's sentiments lie.

symmetry: Business in the particle accelerator world is booming, as is business at Advanced Energy Systems, where Tony Favale is president. His company is doing research and design work for the next generation of accelerators, which will be employed in electron lasers for the Navy, radiation detectors for the Department of Homeland Security, and more efficient particle colliders at US national laboratories.

But of the seven positions he was advertising in November, three were still unfilled in mid-March because Favale can't find enough qualified accelerator scientists.

Science News: A detailed study of college-level physics courses confirms students’ deepest fears: Homework really is important. Students who regularly copied problem sets earned lower grades and were three times as likely to fail the class, the study found.

“Homework copying is severely impeding students’ learning, and teachers don’t take it seriously enough,” says study coauthor David Pritchard, a physicist at MIT. “It’s a killer for the grades and a killer for the students.” The study appeared March 18 in Physical Review Special Topics–Physics Education Research.

Physics Today: Last night, there was a celebration at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, called Big Bang 2.0 in Switzerland. The event, which had several hundred attendees, was to honor the startup of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

After a series of brief talks on the project, a member of the audience asked how could junior members of collaborations get any credit for what they have accomplished, particularly when there could be more that 1000 co-authors on an LHC paper?

Felicitas Pauss, the coordinator for external relations at CERN, and Ian Shipsey at Purdue University, said that the leaders of the collaboration knew who did what and how well, and are able to give appropriate credit in letters of recommendation.

A counter viewpoint appeared in this week's Nature, in which Julia Lane argues that to capture the essence of good science, academics, universities, industry, and governments must combine forces to create an open, sound and consistent system for measuring all the activities that make up academic productivity.

Outside of the informal assessments mentioned by Pauss and Shipsey, some more scientific methods are used to assess the quality of scientists for tenure or employment—the most famous of which is the h-index. This index was originally developed by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego.

The h-index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other people's publications. When hiring a scientist, some institutions will look at the average h-index for scientists of the same age and, if the scientist being considered has a higher-than-average h number, offer tenure-track position on the basis of it.

However, the h-index has known flaws in assessing academics both in physics and in other fields, which amplifies calls by Lane and others to expand the metrics to include the full range of work done by scientists—including teaching ability and outreach to the public, which are usually only included as supplementary material.

Do you agree?

washingtonpost.com: At colleges and universities across the country, many graduate students who have babies work until their due dates and return soon after giving birth.

If they don't, they risk getting kicked off projects, falling out of favor with powerful faculty members and losing their student status, which is often required for visas, health insurance plans and student loan grace periods.

"Workplace balance is an issue in any workplace, but it can play a huge role in academics," said Lisa Maatz of the American Association of University Women. "They judge your research, but they also judge your collegiality."

Did you have any difficulty juggling the demands of academia and of home? Considering commenting or provide advice below.

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Why so few? Women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics

Physics Today: Updated: 3/29/2010: The Royal Society has unveiled a list of the 10 most influential women scientists in UK history, with Caroline Herschel in first place.

Women scientists have discovered nebulas and the first radio pulsars, developed spray-on skin for burn victims, pioneered cancer-beating therapies, created cutting-edge computer chips, and won Nobel Prizes, but as the Royal Society lauds past women scientists, their contemporaries are still facing a number of difficulties, including being asked to make the tea and take notes at meetings by their male colleagues.

A survey of US science education by the Bayer Corporation reports that "significant numbers of women and underrepresented minority chemists and chemical engineers say they were discouraged from pursuing" a career in science and engineering at some point in their lives"

Some letters were published in the New York Times on the 28 March 2010 on this very issue.

Have you noticed any improvements in how women scientists have been treated at your institution? Physics Today would like to know. Contact us in the comment box below.

WSJ.com: Scientific revolutions are often led by the youngest scientists, and yet such innovation in the US could be at risk, says Jonah Lehrer in the Wall Street Journal, as the number of successful young scientists is dramatically shrinking.

In 1980, the largest share of grants from the National Institutes of Health went to scientists in their late 30s. By 2006 the curve had been shifted sharply to the right, with the highest proportion of grants going to scientists in their late 40s. This shift came largely at the expense of young scientists.

In 1980, researchers between the ages of 31 and 33 received nearly 10% of all grants; by 2006 they accounted for approximately 1%. And the trend shows no signs of abating: In 2007, the most recent year available, there were more grants to 70-year-old researchers than there were to researchers under the age of 30.

Tallahassee Democrat: Florida State University lured Mike Wetz away from the University of North Carolina with the offer of an assistant professor position in FSU’s highly regarded Department of Oceanography.

Wetz’s first day at FSU was 23 December 2008. Less than six months later, in June 2009, Wetz received a layoff notice.

Wetz had done nothing wrong, by all accounts. He was one of five faculty members in his 15-person department whose positions were being eliminated as FSU decided to merge oceanography, geological sciences, and meteorology in the wake of massive reductions in state revenue.

Two of his colleagues being terminated are tenured, which traditionally means their positions are secure.

Geological sciences fared even worse, losing 6 of 13 positions including four tenured faculty. No positions were eliminated in meteorology.

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Recession hits some sciences hard at Florida State University

USAToday.com: Girls may learn to fear math from the women who are their earliest teachers.

Despite gains in recent years, women still trail men in the US in some areas of math achievement, and the question of why has provoked controversy.

Now, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of first- and second-graders suggests what may be part of the answer: Female elementary-school teachers who are concerned about their own math skills could be passing that along to the little girls they teach.

Related link
Female teachers' math anxiety impacts girls' math achievement

Physics Today: A 15-year-old high-school student has discovered a new pulsar through an NSF-funded program called the Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC), which is a joint project of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and West Virginia University.

Shay Bloxton, (left image. credit NRAO/AUI/NSF), a sophomore at Nicholas County High School in Summersville, West Virginia, spotted evidence of the pulsar on 15 October 2009 in data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). "I was very excited when I found out I had actually made a discovery," says Bloxton.

One month later, Bloxton was invited to the GBT to confirm her analysis of the object with NRAO astronomers through a new observation—which proved that the object is a pulsar, a rotating, superdense neutron star.

"Participating in the PSC has definitely encouraged me to pursue my dream of being an astrophysicist," said Bloxton, adding that she hopes to attend West Virginia University to study astrophysics.

The PSC provides training for teachers and students in scientific techniques and in the use of astronomical software. Each student group is given a parcel of data from the GBT to analyze.

Each portion of the data is analyzed by multiple teams. In addition to learning to use the analysis software, the student teams also must learn how to recognize man-made radio interference that contaminates the data. The project is funded through 2011.

This is the second success for the PSC program. In March 2009, Lucas Bolyard, a student from South Harrison High School in West Virginia, discovered a pulsar-like object called a rotating radio transient.

Related link
Pulsar Search Collaboratory

The Observer: Says Robin McKie:

On Wednesday last week, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the the UN's Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, apologized for including, in the organization's fourth assessment report of 2007, the claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. In fact, it will take at least 300 years for global warming to take its toll.

Given that the IPCC's 2007 report had won the panel a Nobel peace prize that year (shared with Al Gore), the error looks egregious, particularly to those who reject the idea that the billions of tonnes of carbon we pump into the atmosphere could possibly have an impact on our climate. Now, every word and line of IPCC's work is being scrutinized by these skeptics in their search for further climate calumnies. If they are lucky, they may even stumble on one or two.

The prospect, not surprisingly, causes many climate change scientists to squirm. Indeed, such is their discomfort that many now argue it is time for a total reorganization of the IPCC, an organization that is now more than two decades old and whose operations are beginning to creak suspiciously.

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Science: When the cash-strapped Florida state legislature recently slashed funds for higher education for the third straight year, big across-the-board cuts spilled down through individual state university budgets. But at Florida State University—one of the "big four" Florida state schools—the fiscal crisis has turned into a ravaging torrent for a few departments, most of them in the sciences.

In the end, unlike at other universities, FSU administrators balanced their budget by firing many faculty members, including many tenured professors. That decimated the geological sciences, oceanography, and anthropology departments.

washingtonpost.com: While students at an all-girls school in Montgomery County were laboring one day last month to build bridges out of popsicle sticks, their teachers were trying to build bridges for them into the male-dominated field of engineering.

The popsicle-stick bridges shattered under 60 pounds of pressure. Teachers at the Holton-Arms School in Bethesda hope their seemingly unique engineering course will make girls' interest in the field last longer.

"It's about taking risks and getting them over the anxiety of always having to be right all the time," said physics teacher Chris Lee, who designed the course four years ago.

San Francisco Chronicle: When physicist Frank Oppenheimer came back to the Bay Area from his Colorado ranch, he had a dream to create a new type of science museum.

It would be a place of wonder, he told a Chronicle reporter, "where human perception and awareness of the natural world" would awaken curious young minds to the phenomena of physics, the structure of chemical molecules, the behavior of living organisms, and the workings of the human mind."

The exhibits—"experiments," Oppenheimer called them—that he and his friends built for their museum—the Exploratorium— would so stimulate the curiosity of viewers that they would want to know more and more, asking the "whys" and "hows" and learning all the time.

Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, the Exploratorium grew to become world famous, but few visitors are aware of its singular role in changing the way teachers teach science—not just in the US, but in many other countries where reforming science education is more vital than ever.

Science: Every autumn when Nobel Prize winners are announced and the world's most populous nation misses out—yet again—the mass media and blogs here blame an education system that values rote memorization over creativity. Widespread disaffection is a factor, Chinese state media observed, behind the National People's Congress's decision earlier this month to sack Education Minister Zhou Ji.

But true change may come only from the bottom up. In September, the government of Shenzhen, a city in southern China, appointed physical chemist Zhu Qingshi as president of the planned South University of Science and Technology (SUST). Zhu insisted on also being appointed the university's Communist Party secretary, making it clear he would be calling the shots.

The Daily Telegraph: The UK has lost its ability to attract the best scientists and its universities must pay academics more to reverse the "brain drain," according to research by economists.
 
Twice as many physicists from a sample of the world's elite left Britain after completing their first degree than 25 other leading scientific countries, the study found.

While Britain was second only to the US as the birthplace of the most highly-cited physicists, it fell below Germany, Switzerland, and Japan when current locations were compared.

BBC News: One of the world's oldest scientific institutions is marking the start of its 350th year by putting 60 of its most memorable research papers online.

The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, is making public manuscripts by figures like Isaac Newton.

Benjamin Franklin's account of his infamous kite-flying experiment is also available on the Trailblazing website.

Society president Martin Rees said the papers documented some of the most "thrilling moments" in science history.

The site will remain free to the public until the end of February 2010.

APS Physics: Most metrics of a scientist’s impact in a field, like the h-index, rely primarily on the number of times his or her papers have been cited, and can miss the more subtle ways that knowledge and credit for this research spread among scientists.

Filippo Radicchi, Santo Fortunato, Benjamin Markines, and Alessandro Vespignani are instead proposing a way to rank scientists that reflects the diffusion of scientific credit in time.

Their method, based on an algorithm similar to Google’s PageRank, takes into account several nontrivial effects such as the fact that being cited by an important author has more influence than being cited by one who is less well known.

Related Link
Diffusion of scientific credits and the ranking of scientists

Science Progress: When Mary Ann Mason was graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, a frequent question she heard from women graduate students was "when is a good time to have a baby?"

For women in academic science careers, the conventional wisdom was that waiting until she had achieved tenure was the best approach.

In 1985, the national average age of scientists winning tenure was 36. But by 2003, it was over 39.

"So it's increasingly poor advice to wait until you get to tenure," she says.

Her belief is that women researchers should be able to have children whenever they want, and her new report, co-authored with colleagues Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, explains the work-family policies that are driving women out of the academic pipeline.

Their data, taken from extensive surveys of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the University of California system, shows that work-life issues, and particularly decisions about when to get married and when to have children, account for the most significant loss of academic scientists in the pipeline between PhD and tenured positions.

"The leak is almost entirely, or least due primarily to family formation," said Mason, who is currently a professor and co-faculty director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security at the UC Berkeley.

Science Progress has a podcast discussing these issues with the authors of the study.

Science: When the Max Planck Society planted institutes across the former East Germany, it recruited scientists from around the world for its ambitious project.

But only two out of more than 60 directors in the newly founded institutes were recruited from the East itself. Today, the society has 267 active directors; only five grew up on the eastern side of the divided Germany. And only one started a career before 1989.

Those statistics are a sign of the mixed blessings that reunification brought for East German scientists.

For many, especially the younger ones, it was a great opportunity. But others were set adrift when entire preexisting eastern institutes were closed or cut to a fraction of their original size.

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WSJ.com: The H1-B visa program that feeds skilled workers to top-tier US technology companies and universities is on track to leave thousands of spots unfilled for the first time since 2003, a sign of how the weak economy has eroded employment even among highly trained professionals.

Last year, even as the recession began to bite, employers snapped up the 65,000 visas available in just one day. This year, however, as of 25 September—nearly six months after the US government began accepting applications—only 46,700 petitions had been filed.

In addition to the weak economy, companies have curbed applications in the face of rising costs associated with hiring foreign-born workers.

While the number of visa holders is small compared with the US work force, their contribution is huge, employers say. For example, last year 35% of Microsoft's patent applications in the US came from new inventions by visa and green-card holders, according to company general counsel Brad Smith.

USA Today: Ever since the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which gave federally funded university researchers the right to license their inventions as a way to spur innovation and economic growth, technology transfer offices have sprung up all over, with steady growth.

In 1991, US universities filed 1,335 patents and received $130 million in royalties. In 2005, they filed 9,306 patents and received $1.8 billion in royalties.

At some universities, the policy on who owns inventions created using university resources required researchers, at some future date, to "agree to assign" ownership rights to the university.

But contracts researchers have with industry may be worded slightly differently and state an inventor "will assign and do hereby assign" his or her rights to the funder, which can lead to court cases arising over who owns the innovation rights.

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Painful lesson on patents Inside Higher Ed

NPR: The Kids' Science Challenge gives elementary school students the chance to work with biologists and engineers on real scientific problems. Jim Metzner, executive producer of the Challenge, discusses with NPR how kids can get involved, from developing low-gravity sports to building hopping robots.

Hindustan Times: An alumnus from Vadodara’s Maharaja Sayajirao University may have given India its latest Nobel laureate, but the department of physics, where V. Ramakrishnan learnt the basics, is struggling to attract students.

“While we are happy that our students has achieved a global honor, the declining interest for basic sciences among students is a cause for worry,” the head of the physics department AC Sharma, head told the Hindustan Times.

Six years back, Sharma said, the department attracted more than 400 applications for 52 seats in MSc Physics. Today, the number has dropped to 150.