Bayblab Blog

Thanks to Pablo (again) for sharing another great blog with me. Bayblab is a far-ranging science blog and podcast that was originally started by grad students in the sciences. The founders are now postdocs. The tone is thoughtful, informed, provocative, funny, and often sarcastic. Just the way I like my science.

Two of my favorite reviews:
"The bayblab is so much better [than Science Friday]. It even has Stephen Hawking. All Ira Flatow can claim is that he’s interrupted people who are talking about Stephen Hawking."

"It's like butter melting over my pancakes good. I especially enjoyed the information on saving my genitals from a zipper accident."

A recent post on gender imbalance in the sciences caught my eye, as it relates well to one of my earlier posts on working moms on the tenure track.

An unrelated (hmmm, maybe not) post on the astonishing and amusing diversity of penises across the animal kingdom contains this bon mot about the bee penis:
"Like any man, the male honeybee climaxes with an explosion. Unlike men, the male bee genitals literally explode and snap off inside the queen. Afterwards, the males do what any of us would if our testes exploded and our penis snapped off - they wander off to the corner and die."

AAPA Symposium Proposal Deadline TODAY

I assume that folks planning on submitting AAPA symposium proposals are aware they are due today, but just in case, well, they're due today!

NIH announces R21 opportunity for funding in women's health research

The National Institutes of Health has recently announced an initiative to fund research in women's health issues, spanning most of the institutes and centers. The mechanism is an R21 which carries $275,000 in direct costs over two years. The R21 mechanism generally supports novel, high risk-high reward research.

"The purpose of this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), issued by the Office of Research on Women’s Health (ORWH) and co-sponsoring NIH institutes and centers (ICs), is to promote innovative, interdisciplinary research that will advance new concepts in women’s health research and the study of sex/gender differences. Recent research reports have established the importance of studying issues specific to women, including the scientific and clinical importance of analyzing data separately for females and males. ORWH is particularly interested in encouraging extramural investigators to undertake new interdisciplinary research to advance studies on how sex and gender factors affect women's health; however, applications in all areas of women’s health and/or sex/gender research are invited."

Alison Doubleday is awesome!

Dr. Alison Doubleday, brand new assistant professor of anatomy at the University of Illinois at Chicago (and my neighbor!) was recently awarded a Curriculum & Instructional Grant through the UIC Council for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. The program provides seed money for faculty initiatives designed to enhance the quality of teaching and learning at UIC. Alison's project is titled Improving Learning in the Human Gross Anatomy Lab; she has enlisted the assistance of several dentistry students to produce prosected cadaver specimens, plastinated organ specimens, and videos documenting the process. These videos will be used to build a series of online learning modules which will incorporate video, animations and static images as well as self-test features to help students learn anatomy. Alison's success is a good reminder to become familiar with similar curriculum initiatives at your own institutions. These institutional grants can be valuable for tenure by demonstrating your commitment to the teaching mission of your school. Way to go, Alison! (Meet you for drinks on the deck later?)

Gwen Robbins is awesome!

Dr. Gwen Robbins, assistant professor at Appalachian State University, has been busy lately. She currently has two articles in early view:

Don't Throw Out the Baby With the Bathwater: Estimating Fertility from Subadult Skeletons, in International Journal of Osteoarchaeology

Estimating body mass in subadult human skeletons, co-authored with Paul Sciulli and Samantha Blatt, in American Journal of Physical Anthropology

In addition, Gwen was recently awarded a Fulbright to return to India for a bioarchaeological project on the skeletons from the Indus civilization.

Congratulations to Gwen on some great work! I know there's more to come....in (spoiler alert!) book form. Stay tuned.

Government Vastly Undercounts Student Loan Defaults

Default rates on student loans are higher than recent federal government estimates, according to this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

"According to unpublished data obtained by The Chronicle, one in every five government loans that entered repayment in 1995 has gone into default. The default rate is higher for loans made to students from two-year colleges, and higher still, reaching 40 percent, for those who attended for-profit institutions."

"By any measure, for-profit colleges account for a disproportionate share of student-loan defaults. Two years into repayment, 11.9 percent of borrowers who attended for-profit colleges have defaulted on their federal loans, compared with 6.2 percent of those who attended public colleges and 4.1 percent who attended private colleges, according to provisional data that the Education Department released in February. Three years out, for-profit colleges' default rate has nearly doubled, to 21.2 percent of borrowers, and the gap between the sectors has widened."

How to run a meeting

Many of us are new to committee work - the cornerstone of the service component of our job - so may not be in the position to run meetings, but these tips serve as a great illustration of how to handle that responsibility when it comes our way. Beyond the departmental and college committees we may serve on, these tips are relevant to running meetings at our professional conferences, lab meetings, collaborator conference calls, etc.