thecardiganlibrarian:

Alex took his MLS and found himself on an academic trajectory.

1. Can you tell us about your current position?

I’m a PhD student in the School of Information Studies at McGill University, where I also occasionally teach. This past semester (in the States, we would call it Spring 2012, but in Canada, they call it Winter 2012. Sadly, I am not joking), I taught Humanities and Social Science Information, which was a lot like my favorite course when I was doing my Master’s degree, so it was fun to get to teach it.

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danhacker:

Hinode Views the 2012 Venus Transit

On June 5, 2012, Hinode captured these stunning views of the transit of Venus — the last instance of this rare phenomenon until 2117. Hinode is a joint JAXA/NASA mission to study the connections of the sun’s surface magnetism, primarily in and around sunspots. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages Hinode science operations and oversaw development of the scientific instrumentation provided for the mission by NASA, and industry. 

Today, in one of my classes*, we each wrote grocery lists. Then we exchanged lists and wrote poems based on the lists we received. This is the list I got:

Wine
Fish
Eggs
Bread
Chicken
Juice
Milk
Broccoli
Tomato
String Beans
Shrimp
Eggplant

Here’s my poem (be nice, we only had a couple minutes):

Wine is sometimes the only place to start,
and string beans are excellent for the heart,
but ‘juice’ as a term is really quite vague,
and broccoli is gross, no matter your age.

*Yes, this was for a PhD-level class. Sometimes class can be fun.

Richard Smith argues for doing away with pre-publication peer review. He makes some sound observations, but needs data to make his case. Perhaps his paper would have been published more quickly if he had sent it to a more topical journal instead of more general journals like the BMJ and PLoS One. 

Ultimately, I think we need to do away with journals entirely. Let’s just have databases.

The next step is to get a Stephen Fry emulator for the text-to-voice feature.

This is pretty much what I study.

Source

Since it’s initial publication in 1962, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been cited 48,341 times. That’s about once every 9 hrs for 49 yrs.

When I was a child and my family went out to eat, a common game was to race to find the first typo in the menu. In high school, when a student made a grammatical mistake in an announcement at assembly (e.g., using ‘i.e.’ when he or she should have used ‘e.g.’, or, more commonly, using ‘myself’ instead of ‘me’), the meeting would stop and the headmaster would give a brief lecture on grammar. In college, I was a tutor and had to deal with some interesting spelling and grammar choices.

So, when I had to email professors at graduate schools to ask them if they would be interested in taking me on as a student, one of my main anxieties was caused by the advisor/adviser controversy. You can tell I’m serious about spelling and grammar because I promoted what is really more of a confusion to a full-blown “controversy”.

Purdue University has a nice blurb about the controversy here. Their advice (or is it advise?) is to do whatever your institution mandates. They deferred to the Purdue Marketing Communications Editorial Style Guide. For those of us - prospective students, for example - who are not sure if our institution has such a guide, here’s a helpful trick. Google “advisor site:InstitutionURL”, and see how many hits you get. Do it again, substituting ‘adviser’ for ‘advisor’. Here are my results:

site:mcgill.ca adviser  - about 4,470 results

site:mcgill.ca advisor - about 23,400 results

I ended up going with ‘advisor’.

Dear Delicious Day-Old Sushi,

Please do not kill me.

Thanks.

Love,

Alex

Simple question, tricky answer.

According to the US census, 1,754,331 citizens ages 25 and up have doctorates.

This Answer.com Answer states that roughly 1% of Americans ages 25 and up have research doctorates and that, if we were to include “people with professional degrees who are normally referred to with Dr title like physicians, dentists, etc (MD, DDS, etc)”, the number would rise to approximately 2.95%. What the answerer did was add the “doctorate” row and the “professional degree” row together, yielding 5,373,866 or approximately 2.95% of the total US population over the age of 25. The problem with this is that a professional degree is not necessarily a professional doctorate. There are numerous professional masters degrees. I have one - a masters in library and information science. Further, it does not appear that the census table the answer cites differentiates between research doctorates (PhD, EdD, etc) and professional doctorates (MD, PsyD, etc). So the 1.75 million is for any American 25 years and older with any kind of doctorate.

This Wisegeek article (which offers statistics, but does not cite its sources), states that there are 884,974 physicians in the United States, or .48% of the population (Wisegeek says .29%, but using the 182,211,639 figure for Americans 25 years and older, it works out to .48%. It’s possible that the Wisegeek figure includes all Americans or Americans 18 and up.) Subtract that figure from the initial 1% and we get .52% for non-MD doctorate holders. Of course, some doctorate holders have non-PhD, non-MD doctorates…

Another place to look for the information would be the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which states that there are approximately 1.7 million postsecondary teachers in the United States. Going back to the US census, which tells us that there are 182,211,639 US citizens over the age of 25, 1.7 million works out to be about .93%. Of course, not all postsecondary teachers have PhDs - some are graduate student TAs still working on their doctorates, some have MDs (med school professors) or other professional doctorates, and some fields simply do not require the PhD (dance, law, engineering, etc). This information also fails to account for PhD holders who do not work in academia.

So the question is definitely trickier than it would initially appear. There does not seem to be an easily-accessed definitive answer. However, using the information above, I am comfortable estimating that .25 to .50% of the US population ages 25 and older have PhDs.