Real Women Talk About Their Careers in Science

in Biology, Education, Science | June 14th, 2013

A year ago the Euro­pean Union launched a cam­paign to attract more young women into the sci­en­tif­ic pro­fes­sions. In Europe, women lag behind men in sci­ence and engi­neer­ing, mak­ing up only a third of sci­ence researchers. But the video the EU made was laugh­able.

You may recall. It was called, Sci­ence: It’s a Girl Thing! and fea­tured three young fash­ion­istas parad­ing around in high heels while a male sci­en­tist peers quizzi­cal­ly at them over his micro­scope.

Along comes sci­ence jour­nal­ist Ker­stin Hop­pen­haus to set the record straight. Hoppenhaus’s new series for the Ger­man sci­ence site SciLogs is called Sig­nif­i­cant Details: Con­ver­sa­tions with Women in Sci­ence. The inter­views are fresh, infor­ma­tive, and acces­si­ble.

It’s inspir­ing to see such a range of women explain their research and walk us through their process for doing it.

A recent inter­view fea­tured Dr. Kris­ten Pan­fil­io (above), an Amer­i­can biol­o­gist on fac­ul­ty at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cologne. Panfilio’s work focus­es on insect extraem­bry­on­ic devel­op­ment, which means she stud­ies how insect tis­sues devel­op into the bug’s ulti­mate shape by com­par­ing the process in two insects: the milk­weed bug and the red flour bee­tle.

Each con­ver­sa­tion begins with a “sig­nif­i­cant detail” of the woman’s work. With the wry humor and pre­ci­sion of a true sci­en­tist, Pan­fil­io demon­strates how she pre­pares her favorite tool, a glass stick, by soft­en­ing the end with a cig­a­rette lighter.

Panfilio’s spe­cif­ic field is evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­men­tal genet­ics. Along with her lab assis­tants she stud­ies how embry­on­ic cells know what role they should play in form­ing a spe­cif­ic organ­ism shape. How does a bone cell know it’s a bone cell?

The inter­view is about as much like Sci­ence: It’s a Girl Thing! as Meryl Streep is like Lind­say Lohan. This is a real per­son talk­ing about how she has built her career (she want­ed to be an artist when she was a teenag­er and stud­ied ancient Chi­nese his­to­ry at a small lib­er­al arts col­lege) and explain­ing her high­ly spe­cial­ized work.

She also touch­es on one of the most won­der­ful things about sci­en­tif­ic research: Some of the most excit­ing moments are when the results don’t align at all with expec­ta­tions.

Best of all, it’s just one of the won­der­ful inter­views in Hoppenhaus’s series.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

MAKERS Tells the Sto­ry of 50 Years of Progress for Women in the U.S.

No Women Need Apply: A Dis­heart­en­ing 1938 Rejec­tion Let­ter from Dis­ney Ani­ma­tion

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Fol­low her on Twit­ter @mskaterix and vis­it her web­site to learn more.

 

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David Byrne’s Graduation Speech Offers Troubling and Encouraging Advice for Students in the Arts

in Art, Education, Graduation Speech, Music | June 10th, 2013


How could David Byrne nev­er have giv­en a com­mence­ment address before? As an expe­ri­enced pub­lic speak­er, a well-known cre­ator who has carved out his own cul­tur­al niche, an advo­cate of things (such as cycling) beloved among world-chang­ing young peo­ple, the founder of a band with a sur­pris­ing mul­ti-gen­er­a­tional appeal, and a man with no small com­mand of Pow­er­point, he’d seem to make an appeal­ing choice indeed. His first com­mence­ment address ever came this year at the Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty School of the Arts, and, view­able from 1:17:00 in the video above, it has cer­tain­ly made an impact in the inter­net. The mes­sage some grads and fans have tak­en away? “If you chose a career in the arts,” as the New York­er’s Rachel Arons puts it, “you are, basi­cal­ly, screwed.”

“A pie chart, based on 2011 data, showed that only three per cent of film and the­atre grads, and five per cent of writ­ing and visu­al-arts grads, end up work­ing in their areas of con­cen­tra­tion,” she writes of the visu­al aids deliv­er­ing Byrne’s grim ini­tial mes­sage. “A sub­se­quent bar graph showed that, accord­ing to those stats, four­teen writ­ing and four­teen Colum­bia visu­al-arts grad­u­ates will go on to careers in their fields, and eight the­atre and eight film grads will go on to careers in theirs.” But first­hand reports from the cer­e­mo­ny don’t describe a too ter­ri­bly shak­en Colum­bia grad­u­at­ing class, and even Byrne took pains to empha­size, or at least emphat­i­cal­ly imply, that tru­ly worth­while careers — such as, I would say, his own — lay out­side, or in between, or at the inter­sec­tion of, defin­able fields. And why would you want to work in the same field you stud­ied, any­way? To para­phrase some­thing Byrne’s friend and col­lab­o­ra­tor Bri­an Eno said about tech­nol­o­gy, once a whole major has built up around a pur­suit, it’s prob­a­bly not the most inter­est­ing thing to be doing any­more.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Byrne: How Archi­tec­ture Helped Music Evolve

David Byrne: From Talk­ing Heads Front­man to Lead­ing Urban Cyclist

David Byrne Gives Us the Low­down on How Music Works (with Neu­ro­sci­en­tist Daniel Lev­itin)

How David Byrne and Bri­an Eno Make Music Togeth­er: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Allen Ginsberg’s “Celestial Homework”: A Reading List for His Class “Literary History of the Beats”

in Education, Poetry | May 20th, 2013

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“Argh, you’re all ama­teurs in a pro­fes­sion­al uni­verse!” roared Allen Gins­berg to a young class of aspir­ing poets in 1977 at the Jack Ker­ouac School of Dis­em­bod­ied Poet­ics. Their offense? Most of the stu­dents had failed to reg­is­ter for med­i­ta­tion instruc­tion. The sto­ry comes to us from Steve Sil­ber­man, who was then a 19-year-old stu­dent in that class­room and a recip­i­ent of Ginsberg’s genius that sum­mer.

Only three years ear­li­er, in 1974, Gins­berg and poet Anne Wald­man launched the Jack Ker­ouac School at Naropa Insti­tute (now Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty), in Boul­der, Col­orado. The Institute—founded by Tibetan teacher Chö­gyam Trung­pa Rin­poche—was mod­eled on ancient Bud­dhist learn­ing cen­ters in India and described by Wald­man and poet Andrew Schelling as “part monastery, part col­lege, part con­ven­tion hall or alchemist’s lab.”

Gins­berg taught at Naropa until his death in 1997. The class in which he had his out­burst was called “Lit­er­ary His­to­ry of the Beats,” at the start of which he hand­ed his stu­dents a list called “Celes­tial Home­work” (first page above, sec­ond and third pages here and here). Sil­ber­man describes the list thus (quot­ing from Gins­berg’s descrip­tion):

This “celes­tial home­work” is the read­ing list that Gins­berg hand­ed out on the first day of his course as “sug­ges­tions for a quick check-out & taste of antient scriven­ers whose works were reflect­ed in Beat lit­er­ary style as well as spe­cif­ic beat pages to dig into.”

It’s a par­tic­u­lar­ly Gins­berg-ian list, with a healthy mix of gen­res and peri­ods, most of it poetry—by Ginsberg’s fel­low beats, to be sure, but also by Melville, Dick­in­son, Yeats, Mil­ton, Shel­ley, and sev­er­al more. Sad­ly, it’s too late to sit at Gins­berg’s feet, but one can still find guid­ance from his “Celes­tial Home­work,” and you can even lis­ten to audio record­ings from the class online too.

Sil­ber­man has done us all the great ser­vice of com­pil­ing as many free online ver­sions of Ginsberg’s rec­om­mend­ed texts as he could. You’ll find them all here, with author bios linked to each pho­to. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, some of the links have gone dead, but with a lit­tle bit of search­ing, you can work your way through most of Ginsberg’s list. Sil­ber­man reports anoth­er Gins­berg epi­gram from his 1977 class: “Poet­ry is the real­iza­tion of the mag­nif­i­cence of the actu­al.” The works on the “Celes­tial Home­work,” Sil­ber­man com­ments, “are gates to that mag­nif­i­cence.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Allen Gins­berg Reads His Famous­ly Cen­sored Beat Poem, Howl

Allen Gins­berg Record­ings Brought to the Dig­i­tal Age. Lis­ten to Eight Full Tracks for Free

W.H. Auden’s 1941 Lit­er­a­ture Syl­labus Asks Stu­dents to Read 32 Great Works, Cov­er­ing 6000 Pages

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

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Ken Robinson Explains How to Escape the Death Valley of American Education

in Education, TED Talks | May 15th, 2013

Right now, you can find 1,520 TED Talks com­piled into a neat online spread­sheet. That’s a lot of TED Talks. And the most pop­u­lar one (in case you’re won­der­ing) was deliv­ered by Sir Ken Robin­son in 2006. If you reg­u­lar­ly vis­it our site, then chances are you’re among the 20 mil­lion peo­ple who have viewed Robin­son’s talk on why Schools Kill Cre­ativ­i­ty. There’s also a good chance that you’ll want to watch his new­ly-released TED Talk, How to Escape Edu­ca­tion’s Death Val­ley. Filmed just last month, this talk takes aim at Amer­i­ca’s test-cen­tric edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem, a sys­tem that increas­ing­ly treats edu­ca­tion as an indus­tri­al process and bleeds cre­ativ­i­ty and curios­i­ty out of our class­rooms. You get that prob­lem when you put tech­nocrats and politi­cians, not teach­ers, in charge of things. And you’re only going to get more of it (sor­ry to say) as com­put­er sci­en­tists start putting their stamp on Amer­i­ca’s edu­ca­tion­al future.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.

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Watch the Finals of the Poetry Out Loud Competition, Live Tonight

in Education, Poetry | April 30th, 2013

“Hav­ing oth­ers’ poems in our minds and hearts means we’re nev­er real­ly alone.”
—Karen Kovacik, Indi­ana State Poet Lau­re­ate

Youssef Biaz, recit­ing here, was 16 years old when he was named Poet­ry Out Loud Nation­al Cham­pi­on. Biaz won a $20,000 award and $500 worth of poet­ry books for his high school in Auburn, Alaba­ma. He went on to recite poet­ry at the White House along with Rita Dove, Com­mon, and Bil­ly Collins. His favorite poet, Sharon Olds, just won the Pulitzer Prize for Poet­ry.

This past week­end, kids across the coun­try packed their bags and head­ed to Wash­ing­ton, DC, to recite poet­ry in the eighth con­sec­u­tive year of the nation­al com­pe­ti­tion, Poet­ry Out Loud. The recita­tion com­pe­ti­tion, pre­sent­ed by the Poet­ry Foun­da­tion and the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts, brings fifty-three Amer­i­can high school stu­dents to the nation’s cap­i­tal to com­pete for the title of 2013 Poet­ry Out Loud Nation­al Cham­pi­on. It will cul­mi­nate tonight in an evening of recita­tion com­pe­ti­tion at 7pm EDT.

If you can’t make it to DC for the free event this year, which fea­tures host Anna Dea­vere Smith and singer-cel­list Ben Sollee, view the live web­cast of Poet­ry Out Loud, or host a view­ing par­ty and bid a cel­e­bra­to­ry adieu to Nation­al Poet­ry Month.

Kristin Gecan is the media asso­ciate at the Poet­ry Foun­da­tion, which is the pub­lish­er of Poet­ry mag­a­zine and an inde­pen­dent lit­er­ary orga­ni­za­tion com­mit­ted to a vig­or­ous pres­ence for poet­ry in our cul­ture. The site also fea­tures an archive of more than 10,000 poems. Fol­low the Poet­ry Foun­da­tion on Twit­ter, Tum­blr, Face­book, or Pin­ter­est. 

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Enrich Yourself with Free Courses, Audio Books, eBooks, Movies, Textbooks & More

in Audio Books, e-books, Education, Film, Online Courses | April 18th, 2013

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How’s that New Year’s res­o­lu­tion going? You know, the one where you promised to make bet­ter use of your free time and learn new things? If you’re off track, fear not. It’s only April. It’s not too late to make good on your promise. And we can help. Below, we’ll tell you how to fill your Kin­dle, iPad, com­put­er, smart­phone, com­put­er, etc. with free intel­li­gent media — great ebooks and audio books, movies, cours­es, and the rest:

Free eBooks: You have always want­ed to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks col­lec­tion you will find 400 great works by some clas­sic writ­ers (Dick­ens, Dos­to­evsky, Shake­speare and Tol­stoy) and con­tem­po­rary writ­ers (F. Scott Fitzger­ald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asi­mov, and Kurt Von­negut). The col­lec­tion also gives you access to the 51-vol­ume Har­vard Clas­sics.

If you’re an iPad/iPhone user, the down­load process is super easy. Just click the “iPad/iPhone” links and you’re good to go. Kin­dle and Nook users will gen­er­al­ly want to click the “Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats links” to down­load ebook files, but we’d sug­gest watch­ing these instruc­tion­al videos (Kin­dle –Nook) before­hand.

Free Audio Books: What bet­ter way to spend your free time than lis­ten­ing to some of the great­est books ever writ­ten? This page con­tains a vast num­ber of free audio books, includ­ing works by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writ­ers — Ita­lo Calvi­no, Vladimir Nabokov, Ray­mond Carv­er, etc. You can down­load these clas­sic books straight to your gagdets, then lis­ten as you go.

[Note: If you’re look­ing for a con­tem­po­rary book, you can down­load one free audio book from Audible.com. Find details on Audi­ble’s no-strings-attached deal here.]

Free Online Cours­es: This list brings togeth­er over 700 free online cours­es from lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing Stan­ford, Yale, MIT, UC Berke­ley, Oxford and beyond. These full-fledged cours­es range across all dis­ci­plines – his­to­ry, physics, phi­los­o­phy, psy­chol­o­gy and beyond. Most all of these cours­es are avail­able in audio, and rough­ly 75% are avail­able in video. You can’t receive cred­its or cer­tifi­cates for these cours­es (click here for cours­es that do offer cer­tifi­cates). But the amount of per­son­al enrich­ment you will derive is immea­sur­able.

Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 525 great movies. The col­lec­tion hosts many clas­sics, west­erns, indies, doc­u­men­taries, silent films and film noir favorites. It fea­tures work by some of our great direc­tors (Alfred Hitch­cock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stan­ley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch) and per­for­mances by cin­e­ma leg­ends: John Wayne, Jack Nichol­son, Audrey Hep­burn, Char­lie Chap­lin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thou­sands of hours of cin­e­ma bliss.

Free Lan­guage Lessons: Per­haps learn­ing a new lan­guage is one of your res­o­lu­tions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 40 lan­guages — Span­ish, French, Ital­ian, Man­darin, Eng­lish, Russ­ian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yid­dish and Esperan­to. These lessons are all free and ready to down­load.

Free Text­books: And one last item for the life­long learn­ers among you. We have scoured the web and pulled togeth­er a list of 150 Free Text­books. It’s a great resource par­tic­u­lar­ly if you’re look­ing to learn math, com­put­er sci­ence or physics on your own. There might be a dia­mond in the rough here for you.

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Creative Commons Announces “School of Open” with Courses to Focus on Digital Openness

in Education, Law, Online Courses, Wikipedia | March 15th, 2013

Just in time to cel­e­brate Open Edu­ca­tion Week, here comes a new ini­tia­tive, the School of Open, a learn­ing envi­ron­ment focused on increas­ing our under­stand­ing of “open­ness” and the ben­e­fits it brings to cre­ativ­i­ty and edu­ca­tion in the dig­i­tal age.

Devel­oped by the col­lab­o­ra­tive edu­ca­tion plat­form Peer to Peer Uni­ver­si­ty (P2PU) with orga­ni­za­tion­al sup­port from Cre­ative Com­mons, the School of Open aims to spread under­stand­ing of the pow­er of this brave new world through free online class­es.

We hear about it all the time: Uni­ver­sal access to research, edu­ca­tion and culture—all good things, with­out a doubt—made pos­si­ble by things like open source soft­ware, open edu­ca­tion­al resources and the like.

But what are these var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties and what do they mean? How can we all learn more and get involved?

School of Open has rolled the con­ver­sa­tion back to square one so that under­stand­ing the basics is easy. Through a list of new cours­es cre­at­ed by users and experts, peo­ple can learn more about what “open­ness” means and how to apply it. There are stand-alone cours­es on copy­right, writ­ing for Wikipedia, the col­lab­o­ra­tive envi­ron­ment of open sci­ence, and the process behind mak­ing open video.

These free cours­es start March 18 (sign up by click­ing the “start course” but­ton by Sun­day, March 17):

These free cours­es are open for you to take at any time:

The approach at P2PU encour­ages peo­ple to work togeth­er, assess one another’s work, and pro­vide con­struc­tive feed­back. It’s a great place to learn how to design your own course, because the design process is bro­ken down step-by-step, and course con­tent is vet­ted by users and P2PU staff. The tuto­r­i­al shows you how the process works.

P2PU is also a place to learn more about what is open con­tent and what is not. Par­tic­i­pants in the ongo­ing course Open Detec­tive learn to iden­ti­fy open source media and then demon­strate mas­tery by mak­ing some­thing of their own using only open con­tent. What if you’re real­ly, real­ly proud of the resource you cre­ate in Open Detec­tive? Take it to the next lev­el and get a Cre­ative Com­mons license to make your work avail­able with­out giv­ing up full copy­right. You guessed it, there’s a course for that too.

Open Edu­ca­tion Week is in full swing (through Mon­day the 18th). There’s a full sched­ule of webi­na­rs to check out, includ­ing dis­cus­sions about the impli­ca­tions of open access for polit­i­cal struc­tures like the World Bank, and the impact of open, glob­al teach­ing in Syr­ia.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Total Noob to Learn­ing Online? P2PU’s Peer-to-Peer Cours­es Hold Your Hand

700 Free Online Cours­es

A Meta List of MOOCs

What Entered the Pub­lic Domain in 2013? Zip, Nada, Zilch!

Noam Chom­sky Spells Out the Pur­pose of Edu­ca­tion

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Vis­it her web­site at .

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David Foster Wallace Breaks Down Five Common Word Usage Mistakes in English

in Education, English Language, Writing | March 7th, 2013

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What advan­tage, I recent­ly asked a trilin­gual writer, could you pos­si­bly find in using such an impro­vised, con­fus­ing, irreg­u­lar patch­work of a lan­guage as Eng­lish? She replied that this very impro­vi­sa­tion, irreg­u­lar­i­ty, and even con­fu­sion comes from the vast free­dom of expres­sion (and of inven­tion of new expres­sions) that Eng­lish offers over oth­er Euro­pean tongues. This goes even more so for Amer­i­can Eng­lish, the vari­ant with whose com­bi­na­tion of care­ful­ly shad­ed nuances and smash­ing col­lo­qui­alisms David Fos­ter Wal­lace so daz­zled his read­ers. Like many writ­ers, Wal­lace also taught writ­ing, but those of us not lucky enough to receive his direct instruc­tion can still behold his teach­ing mate­ri­als, archived online at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin’s Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter.

See, for instance, Wal­lace’s hand­out on five com­mon usage mis­takes, from his Fall 2002 sec­tion of Eng­lish 183A at Pomona Col­lege (an advanced fic­tion writ­ing class, taught last Spring by Jonathan Lethem). “The prepo­si­tion towards is British usage; the US spelling is toward.” Fair enough. “And is a con­junc­tion; so is so,” he con­tin­ues. “Except in dia­logue between par­tic­u­lar kinds of char­ac­ters, you nev­er need both con­junc­tions.” Handy to know! Then, things get more tech­ni­cal: “For a com­pound sen­tence to require a com­ma plus a con­junc­tion, both its con­stituent claus­es must be inde­pen­dent.” As Wal­lace goes deep­er, I feel even more sym­pa­thy for those who learn Eng­lish as a sec­ond lan­guage, as I did when I read “Tense Present,” his Harper’s review of Bryan A. Gar­ner’s A Dic­tio­nary of Mod­ern Amer­i­can Usage. If the hard­core gram­mar talk tires you, feel free to peruse the Ran­som Cen­ter’s oth­er arti­facts of Wal­lace’s time in the class­room—which we cov­ered in a post last week—such as his syl­labus for Eng­lish 102: Lit­er­ary Analy­sis, his guide­lines for papers, and the mar­gin­a­lia in his copy of Car­rie.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

30 Free Essays & Sto­ries by David Fos­ter Wal­lace on the Web

David Fos­ter Wal­lace: The Big, Uncut Inter­view (2003)

David Fos­ter Wal­lace’s 1994 Syl­labus

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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