Education

• “Is a Postdoc Worth it?” (SlashDot; 2013.11.25) – http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/11/25/1929203/is-a-postdoc-worth-it
  “In a very funny column, Adam Ruben reviews the disadvantages and, well, the disadvantages of doing a postdoc, noting that ‘The term “postdoc” refers both to the position and to the person who occupies it. (In this sense, it’s much like the term “bar mitzvah.”) So you can be a postdoc, but you can also do a postdoc.'”
• “The Postdoc: A Special Kind of Hell” by Adam Ruben (Science; 2013.11.21) – http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2013_11_21/caredit.a1300256
  • Postdoc positions were established to prolong the awesomeness of graduate school, which everyone loves, while simultaneously postponing the ability to make money, which everyone hates.
  • Many postdocs are foreigners who come to the United States to enjoy the abundant opportunities this country offers for scientific advancement. We reward their enthusiasm with postdoc positions. We hope they forgive us.
  • Postdocs are very small and hard to see. If you encounter a postdoc in the wild, approach with extreme caution! You can frighten away a postdoc by asking, “Shouldn’t you be in the lab?”
  • Despite its masculine undertones, the term “postdoctoral fellow” is actually gender-neutral. This has led to much confusion when female doctoral students have told their friends or family, “I’m planning to become a fellow.”
  • Because tuition is not a factor, a postdoc actually impacts the annual lab budget less than a graduate student. Then again, a postdoc impacts the annual lab budget less than an order of Pad Thai (if Pad Thai were an allowable expense on National Institutes of Health grants).
  • Postdocs have many natural predators, including vapid undergraduate trainees, negligent advisers, erratic funding sources, unsympathetic significant others, and the predator from Predator.
  • The earliest postdoctoral appointment was in 1931. That postdoc hopes to go on the faculty job market sometime in the next couple of years.
• “How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang” by Alexandre Afonso (at his blog: http://alexandreafonso.wordpress.com/; 2013.11.21) – http://alexandreafonso.wordpress.com/2013/11/21/how-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang/
  • The academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders. Even if the probability that you might get shot in academia is relatively small (unless you mark student papers very harshly), one can observe similar dynamics. Academia is only a somewhat extreme example of this trend, but it affects labour markets virtually everywhere. One of the hot topics in labour market research at the moment is what we call “dualisation”[3]. Dualisation is the strengthening of this divide between insiders in secure, stable employment and outsiders in fixed-term, precarious employment. Academic systems more or less everywhere rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of “outsiders” ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail[4].
• “What You (Really) Need to Know” by Lawrence H Summers (NY Times; 2012.01.20) – http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/the-21st-century-education.html
• “Live and Learn – Why we have college” by Louis Menand (The New Yorker; 2001.06.06) – http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110606crat_atlarge_menand
• College physics: two-way engagement vs. one-way lectures (Physics Today; 2011.05.12) – http://blogs.physicstoday.org/politics/2011/05/science-and-the-media-14—20.html#twoway
  • “A Better Way to Teach?” by Jeffrey Mervis (Science; 2011.05.12) – http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/05/a-better-way-to-teach.html
  • “Less Talk, More Action: Improving Science Learning” by Benedict Carey – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/13/science/13teach.html
• “Survey: College Is Unaffordable, and a Poor Value. But It’s Still a Good Investment?” by Brad Tuttle (Time; 2011.05.17) – http://money.blogs.time.com/2011/05/17/survey-college-is-unaffordable-and-a-poor-value-but-its-still-a-good-investment
• “Good Reads: Fancy (but Worthless) Kitchens and College Degrees, and More” by Brad Tuttle (Time; 2011.05.06) – http://money.blogs.time.com/2011/05/06/good-reads-fancy-but-worthless-kitchens-and-college-degrees-and-more/
• “Education: The magic of hard work” by Jim Newton (LA Times; 2011.04.25) – http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-0425-newton-20110425,0,2244970.column
• “Education: The PhD factory” by David Cyranoski , Natasha Gilbert , Heidi Ledford , Anjali Nayar & Mohammed Yahia (Nature; 2011.04.20) – http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472276a.html – The world is producing more PhDs than ever before. Is it time to stop?
• “Column: World View – Reform the PhD system or close it down” by Mark Taylor (Nature 472, 261; 2011.04.20) – http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472261a.html – There are too many doctoral programmes, producing too many PhDs for the job market. Shut some and change the rest, says Mark C. Taylor.
  … Most doctoral-education programmes conform to a model defined in European universities during the Middle Ages, in which education is a process of cloning that trains students to do what their mentors do. The clones now vastly outnumber their mentors. The academic job market collapsed in the 1970s, yet universities have not adjusted their admissions policies, because they need graduate students to work in laboratories and as teaching assistants. But once those students finish their education, there are no academic jobs for them. …
• “Developing world: Educating India” by Anjali Nayar (Nature 472, 24-26; 2011.04.06) – http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110406/full/472024a.html – The country’s vast, education-hungry population could supply the next generation of the world’s scientists — but only if it can teach them.
• “Why College Is Not A Bubble (Except For The University Of Phoenix)” by Anya Kamenetz (FastCompany; 2011.05.02) – http://www.fastcompany.com/1751087/why-college-is-not-a-bubble-except-for-the-university-of-phoenix
• “Lost in the Meritocracy” by Caleb Crain (NYTimes; 2011.04.29) – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/books/review/book-review-in-the-basement-of-the-ivory-tower-by-professor-x.html
• “The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries” by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari (The New York times; 2011.04.30) – http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinion/01eggers.html
• “Why Science Is a Lousy Career Choice” (SlashDot; 2011.04.25) – http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/04/25/164228/Why-Science-Is-a-Lousy-Career-Choice
  “President Obama had a town hall meeting at Facebook’s headquarters last week and said that he wanted to encourage females and minorities to pursue STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). However, Pastabagel writes that the need for American students to study STEM is one of the tired refrains in modern American politics and that plenty of people already study science, but they don’t work in science. ‘MIT grads are more likely to end up in the financial industry, where quants and traders are very well compensated, than in the semiconductor industry where the spectre of outsourcing to India and Asia will hang over their heads for their entire career.’ Philip Greenspun adds that science can be fun, but considered as a career, science suffers by comparison to the professions and the business world. ‘The average scientist that I encounter expresses bitterness about (a) low pay, (b) not getting enough credit or references to his or her work, (c) not knowing where the next job is coming from, (d) not having enough money or job security to get married and/or have children,’ writes Greenspun. ‘Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it.'”
  … It isn’t just that the science grads aren’t good enough, its that the science itself it harder than it’s ever been before. All the low hanging fruit that could be figured out by an individual or small team as already been done: “It was a game, a very interesting game one could play. Whenever one solved of the little problems, one could write a paper about it. It was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do first-rate work. There has not been such a glorious time since. It is very difficult now for a first-rate physicist to do second-rate work.” — P.A.M Dirac, DIRECTIONS IN PHYSICS, 1978, P. 7
• “If you want kids to learn science, you need a better sales pitch.” (Partial Object blog; 2011.04.21) – http://partialobjects.com/2011/04/405/
• “Higher Education Linked to Lower Blood Pressure” (Discovery News; 2011.02.28) – http://news.discovery.com/human/blood-pressure-education-health-110228.html – The finding could help explain the often observed association among people in developed countries.
• “U.S. Risks Creating Uneducated ‘Underclass'” (Discovery News; 2011.04.20) – http://news.discovery.com/human/us-risk-undereducated-underclass-110420.html
• “Outsourcing in Higher Education” by Kirsten Winkler (BigThink; 2011.04.12) – http://bigthink.com/ideas/37851
• “The Real Science Gap” by Beryl Lieff Benderly (Miller-McCune; 2010.06.14) – http://www.miller-mccune.com/science/the-real-science-gap-16191/
  It’s not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It’s a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.
• “Finland’s Educational Success? The Anti–Tiger Mother Approach” by Joshua Levine (Time; 2011.04.11) – http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2062419,00.html
• TechCrunch:
  • “Living the Knowledge Life: A Thiel Fellowship Finalist’s Response” by Dale J. Stephens (TechCrunch; 2011.04.12) – http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/13/living-the-knowledge-life-a-thiel-fellowship-finalists-response/
  • “Friends Don’t Let Friends Take Education Advice From Peter Thiel” by Vivek Wadhwa (TechCrunch; 2011.04.12) – http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/12/friends-don%E2%80%99t-let-friends-take-education-advice-from-peter-thiel/
    • Academic Research/Published Papers (by Vivek Wadhwa) – http://wadhwa.com/research/
  • “Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education” by Sarah Lacy (TechCrunch; 2011.04.10) – http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/
  • “Peter Thiel Has New Initiative To Pay Kids To “Stop Out Of School”” by MG Siegler (TechCrunch; 2010.09.27) – http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/27/peter-thiel-drop-out-of-school/
  • “Why Our Schools Suck, The Movie” by Sarah Lacy (TechCrunch; 2010.09.20) – http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/20/why-our-schools-suck-the-movie/
  • “Got degree envy? No worries, you can still make it big” by Vivek Wadhwa (TechCrunch; 2009.10.24) – http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/24/got-degree-envy-no-worries-you-can-still-make-it-big/
• “The disposable academic” – Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (The Economist; 2010.12.16) – http://www.economist.com/node/17723223
• “Is A College Education Worth The Debt?” (NPR; 2009.09.010 – http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112432364
• The Chronicle of Higher Education – http://chronicle.com/
  • “Goodbye to Those Overpaid Professors in Their Cushy Jobs” by Ben Gose (2010.07.25) – http://chronicle.com/article/Goodbye-to-Those-Overpaid-P/123633
  • “Do All Faculty Members Really Need Private Offices?” by Lawrence Biemiller (2010.07.30) – http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Do-All-Faculty-Members-Real/25897
  • “Why Do They Hate Us?” by Thomas H. Benton (2010.09.26) – http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Do-They-Hate-Us-/124608
  • “Why Do They Hate Us? part 2” by Thomas H. Benton (2010.10.24) – http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Do-They-Hate-Us-Part-2/125066/
• “The Ph.D. Problem (On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal)” by Louis Menand – http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/professionalization-in-academy
• “Women in Science” by Philip Greenspun (2006.02) – http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

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See also: Wasted Generations – https://eikonal.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/wasted-generations/

Expand your mind

Online lectures:

• Archive Grid – http://www.archivegrid.org/web/index.jsp
• Big Think: http://bigthink.com/
• British Academy Portal – http://www.britac.ac.uk/portal/
• BuzzFeedYellow @YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/user/BuzzFeedYellow
• Coursera – online university courses – https://www.coursera.org/category/physical
• DNews – https://www.youtube.com/user/DNewsChannel
• Do Lectures – http://www.thedolectures.com/ – these are all about getting a handful of speakers together in one place, in the hope that they may inspire you to go Do something. To give you the tools and the desire to change the things you care about.
• EDGE – http://www.edge.org – a web site of written and video recorded essays by various thinkers.
  • “To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.“
  • Conversations – http://www.edge.org/conversations
  • Videos – http://www.edge.org/videos
• Google Scholar – http://scholar.google.com/
• Google’s “Solve for X” – http://www.wesolveforx.com/
  Solve for X is a place to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems. Radical in the sense that the solutions could help billions of people….
• Google Talks (at YouTube) – http://www.youtube.com/atgoogletalks#p/u | Authors@Google – http://www.google.com/talks/authors/index.html | Art@Google – http://www.googleartproject.com/
• GRASP (Geometry, Representations and Some Physics) Lectures – http://www.math.utexas.edu/users/benzvi/GRASP.html – a lecture series at the University of Texas at Austin.
• Handheld learning 2008 – http://www.handheldlearning2008.com/home
• Hearsay Culture podcasts (KZSU-FM; Stanford University), hosted by Dave Levine – http://www.hearsayculture.com/: covering modern technology/Internet issues in the intersection of technology and law.
• Ignite’s magazine channel at YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/user/iGNiTe
• Internet Archives Open Educational Resources – http://www.archive.org/details/education
• iTunes U (iTunes University): http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/ – requires iTunes:
  • Brown on iTunes U: http://www.brown.edu/web/itunes/
  • Harvard on iTunes U: http://itunes.harvard.edu/
  • Stanford on iTunes U: http://itunes.stanford.edu/
  • MIT on iTunes U: http://web.mit.edu/itunesu/
  • Texas A&M on iTunes U: http://itunes.tamu.edu/
  • UC Berkley on iTunes U: http://itunes.berkeley.edu/
• Khan Academy – http://www.khanacademy.org/
• Maker movement:
  • The Maker Movement (@ Raising Geeks) – http://www.raisinggeeks.com/blog/maker-movement/
  • Make magazine home – http://makezine.com/ | Make blog – http://blog.makezine.com/ | Make Magazine’s channel at YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/user/makemagazine | Make Magazine @WikiPedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_%28magazine%29
  • Make: Craft magazine home page – http://blog.makezine.com/craftzine/ | Craft @YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/user/craftzine | Craft magazine @WikiPedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craft_%28magazine%29 | Craft forums – http://forums.craftzine.com/
  • Maker Faire – http://makerfaire.com/ | Maker Faire channel at YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/user/MakerFaire
  • Do-It-Yourself @WikiPedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_it_yourself | Do-It-Yourself @WikiBooks – http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Do-It-Yourself
  • Instructables – http://www.instructables.com/
• Mental Floss – http://mentalfloss.com/ | YouTube channel – http://www.youtube.com/user/MentalFlossVideo | at WikiPedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_floss
• MinutePhysics @YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/user/minutephysics
• MissingManuals’s channel at YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/user/MissingManuals
• NumberPhile @YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/user/numberphile
• OpenCourseWare:
  • MIT Open Courseware: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm [USA] | courses – http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/
    • article: “MIT OpenCourseWare: Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds” by Cecilia d’Oliveira, Stephen Carson, Kate James, Jeff Lazarus (Science 30 July 2010: Vol. 329. no. 5991, pp. 525 – 526; DOI: 10.1126/science.11826962) – http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/329/5991/525
  • Athabasca University – http://www.athabascau.ca/ [Canada]
  • Capilano University – http://ocw.capcollege.bc.ca/ [Canada]
  • Center for the Study of the Public Domain – http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/ [USA}
  • College of Eastern Utah’s OpenCourseWare – http://ocw.ceu.edu/ [USA]
  • Columbia Interactive – http://ci.columbia.edu/ci/ [USA]
  • Connexions – http://cnx.org/ [USA]
  • Fulbright School OpenCourseWare – http://ocw.fetp.edu.vn/home.cfm [USA]
  • Gresham College – http://www.gresham.ac.uk/default.asp [UK]
  • Johns Hopkinks’ (Bloomberg School of Public Health) OpenCourseWare – http://ocw.jhsph.edu/ [USA]
  • Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health – http://ocw.jhsph.edu/ [USA]
  • MIT OpenCourseWare – http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm [USA]
  • MSU OpenCourseWare – http://www.msuglobal.com/ocw [USA]
  • Notre Dame OpenCourseWare – http://ocw.nd.edu/ [USA]
  • Open Learning Initiative – http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/ [USA]
  • Open University – http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/home.php [UK]
  • Open Yale courses: http://oyc.yale.edu/ [USA]
  • Open.Michigan – https://open.umich.edu/education/ [USA]
  • Oxford University Mathematics OpenCourseWare – http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/opencourseware/ [UK]
  • Peoples Open Access Education Initiative – http://www.peoples-uni.org/ [UK]
  • Sofia – http://sofia.fhda.edu/gallery/ [USA]
  • Stanford Engineering Everywhere – http://see.stanford.edu/ [USA]
  • TU Delft OpenCourseWare – http://ocw.tudelft.nl/ [USA]
  • Tufts OpenCourseWare – http://ocw.tufts.edu/ [USA]
  • Tufts University Open Courseware: http://ocw.tufts.edu/TuftsOER [USA]
  • UCIrvine OpenCourseWare – http://ocw.uci.edu/ [USA]
  • UMass Boston OpenCourseWare – http://www.ocw.umb.edu/ [USA]
  • UW Online Learning – http://onlinelearning.washington.edu/ol/ [USA]
  • University of Nottingham – http://unow.nottingham.ac.uk/ [UK]
  • University of Southern Queensland – http://ocw.usq.edu.au/ [Australia]
  • Utah State OpenCourseWare – http://ocw.usu.edu/ [USA]
  • Utah State University – http://ocw.usu.edu/ [USA]
  • Webcast.Berkeley – http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ [USA]
  • Weber State University – http://ocw.weber.edu/ [USA]
  • Western Governors University – http://ocw.wgu.edu/ [USA]
  • OCW (OpenCourseWare) Consortium – http://www.ocwconsortium.org/
  • OpenCourseWare (info at WikiPedia) – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCourseWare
  • “The World’s 50 Best Open Courseware Collections” by Linda (who???) (at Sir Learnalot’s Knowledge Blog; 2009.11.15) – http://onlineuniversityrankings.org/2009/the-worlds-50-best-open-courseware-collections/ – this is the source of majority of OCW links presented above.
  • OpenCourseWare Finder – http://ocwfinder.com/
• O’Reilly’s channel at YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/user/OreillyMedia
• Open University at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheOpenUniversity | Learn – http://www.youtube.com/user/OUlearn | Research – http://www.youtube.com/user/OUresearch
• PBS FrontLine programs – http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/view/
• Perimeter Institute talks – http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/:
  • http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/Events/Quantum_Information,_Computation_and_Logic_Workshop/Invited_Talks/
  • Art talks: http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/Events/Event_Horizons/Art_Talks/
  • Plenary talks: http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/Events/The_Clock_and_the_Quantum/Plenary_Talks/
  • PIRSA – Recorded Seminars Archive – http://www.pirsa.org/
• PopTech at YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/user/poptech
  • “PopTech is a global network of remarkable people, innovative projects, powerful ideas, and extraordinary conferences that are accelerating positive impact and changing the world.”
• Repositories of Primary Sources – http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/special-collections/Other.Repositories.html
• Research Channel – http://researchchannel.org/prog/
• RSA (Royal Society Association) – www.youtube.com/user/theRSAorg?feature=watch | RSA Animations – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo&list=PLBC02F9ECEB29F54C
• Science 2.0 – http://www.science20.com/
• SciLearn @Scoop.it – http://www.scoop.it/t/scilearn
• SciShow @Youtube – https://www.youtube.com/user/scishow
• TED Talks: http://www.ted.com/
• TSN (The Science network) – http://thesciencenetwork.org/
• University lectures webcasts/streaming:
  • Buffalo State – http://www.buffalostate.edu/podcasts.xml
  • Core Curriculum Video Lecture Series – http://155.37.7.13/corehtml/coremain.htm
  • Landon Lecture Series – http://ome.ksu.edu/lectures/landon/
  • Lewis & Clark Law School Podcasts – http://lawlib.lclark.edu/podcast/
  • London School of Economics and Political Science Podcasts – http://www.lse.ac.uk/resources/podcasts/publicLecturesAndEvents.htm
  • Pipes – http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=7EB_8_672xGjnxaYe_gC8A
  • Swarthmore News – http://media.swarthmore.edu/faculty_lectures/
  • UCLA Instructional Media Production – http://www.oid.ucla.edu/Webcast/
  • University of British Columbia Podcasts – http://www.ubcpodcasts.blogspot.com/
  • University of Virginia Podcasts and Webcasts – http://www.virginia.edu/uvapodcast/index.php
  • Washington College of Law Podcasts – http://www.wcl.american.edu/podcasts/
• Video Lectures – http://videolectures.net/
• Vsauce @YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/user/Vsauce
  • Collection of links on Mind and Brain – http://www.youtube.com/playlist?annotation_id=annotation_733099&feature=iv&list=PLE3048008DAA29B0A&src_vid=qjfaoe847qQ
• World Lecture Hall – http://wlh.webhost.utexas.edu/index.cfm

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Related at this blog: Physics books online – https://eikonal.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/physics-books-online/