Blogs

I was sitting at my desk in the late hours of the night, trying to write a paper and I was absolutely where I did not want to be at that moment. Instead of having to write that paper, I would have preferred to have spent these hours watching a good film,or listening to some music while I read a good book.

Does the following situation sound familiar to you? Your supervisor gave you some papers to start exploring your topic. You start reading, excited to learn more about the subject. Then you start looking up all the references and continue reading from there. You follow a few journals in your field and print out all the recent relevant publications on this topic. Meanwhile, the number of publications you want to look at keeps on growing

Let me begin by stating my biases about for-profit education. I believe in the potential of for-profit education to be a force for good. I believe that the profit motive is not antithetical to the larger societal goals of higher education.

Where I announce THATCamp Kentucky and reflect on my experience at THATCampSE2013.

I am writing this on a bus from Dublin to Belfast. Bill and Ben, my brother and sister-in-law, one of my nephews, and my cousin and her husband are all taking the trip.

What happens when you bring together sixty scientists, engineers, medical researchers, and gender experts in a series of international, collaborative workshops? You get something radically new. That’s the goal of Gendered Innovations. A Stanford startup, Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment adds value to science, medicine, and technology by deploying methods of sex and gender analysis.

I am puzzled and dismayed by all the hostility toward being generally educated these days. Apart from high-profile slams on entire fields of study by a governor who was disappointed by his daughter’s choice of major, so declared it universally useless,there is the fact that in the budget just signed this week, the National Science Foundation has been instructed by Congress to only fund political science research if it benefits national security and the national economic interest. The implication is that advancing knowledge does not make our country more secure or better off.

I’ve been in D.C. for the past few days at a Project Directors’ meeting for several Federal grant programs. The conference was heavy on plenary sessions, which I’ll admit is not my preferred style. Much of the oratory has been of the “hooray for us” variety, which keeps the peace but doesn’t really help us do our jobs better. That said, though, I found a useful breakout session about improving students’ financial literacy. The session was standing-room-only, which I actually took as a good sign; at least there seems to be widespread recognition that this is a real issue.