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Career outcome numbers in biomedical sciences
Again from Paula Stephan’s How Economics Shapes Science, p. 179-180: The evidence that problems exist is perhaps even more striking when one studies the over 400 National Institute of General Medical...
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Economics does shape science
Some final observations from Paula Stephan’s provocative book, How Economics Shapes Science (Harvard University Press, 2012): 1) The current incentive structure is creating an inefficient system. The...
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This is terrible career advice:
From Stewart Firestein’s Ignorance: How It Drives Science: The poet John Keats hit upon an ideal state of mind for the literary psyche that he called Negative Capability – “that is when a man is...
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Pursue ignorance, learn science
Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. – Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner Dr. Stewart Firestein, a...
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Keep the Thread
The Damm Family in Their Car, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 1987, By Mary Ellen Mark I got a notice in my inbox the other day that the NIH was implementing a pilot program for us intramural fellows called...
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Boring, soul-crushing routine tasks are unavoidable in science
Aspiring scientists need to know that a science career is not an exception to the universal requirement for routine drudgery that applies to all real jobs: Back in my freshman year of college, I was...
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Good times for those of us trying to make a career out of science
This week’s funding roundup from the AAAS: U.S. R&D Funding Showing Little Recovery. In a recent data release, the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Science and Engineering...
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The Economist weighs in on what’s wrong with science
This week’s Economist is out with a provocative article about how science goes wrong. It’s a good piece, raises some good points, and it reaches a conclusion that is completely the opposite of mine....
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Nature on the PhD Glut
This week Nature covers the online response to Eve Marder’s piece in eLife arguing that we shouldn’t shrink PhD programs. The article mentions my response and adds a few more comments by people with...
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Do we still need science journals? What are the functions of science journals...
In my latest Pacific Standard column, I write about Nature Publishing Group’s new read-only access policy, allowing subscribers and select media outlets to share links that tunnel through the paywall....
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MySciCareer
For the past year and a half, Lou Woodley and I have been running MySciCareer, a website with first person science career stories. It’s not just jobs in research and it’s not just jobs outside of...
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