Fridays: 3:30-5:00,
J. W. Gibbs Lab 263.
September 3: Decadal Survey. The
Astro2010 decadal survey for astronomy
entitled "New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics" has just been
released. The
committee report, the
presentation slides, and the individual subpanel reports are all online. Interesting
commentary and comments can be found
here,
here,
and
here, among other places. There's a huge amount of material - please familiarize yourself with the basic
recommendations of the survey and at least one interesting comment or detail prior to the meeting.
September 10: Undergraduate Teaching. There's much more to say on this topic than can be covered in one
session. We'll go over the list of introductory courses offered by our department, and then focus on
two recent studies of introductory classes. The first looks at
math instruction at the Airforce Academy, concluding that popular instructors correlate with
good student achievement in their own courses, but poor student achievement in subsequent follow-on
courses. This has prompted some fairly
intense commentary. The other is a
recent study of student achievement in introductory astronomy classes, and the implications for
grade inflation in various disciplines - commentary
here. It's all pretty provocative stuff - take a look before the
meeting.
September 17: Department Jamboree (2-4) and picnic
September 24: Ethics I: Data Rights, Authorship & Collaborations. This is the
first of our sessions on ethics, as required by the NSF. General information
about what Yale thinks we are supposed to be doing can be found
here. Our goal is to make this interesting, and avoid the
typical scientist's reaction to requirements of this kind.
In our first session we will be discussing issues related to
data rights.
There are lots of
official statements from various agencies and journals, including
NOAO and
HST. The situation with
Kepler data has recently prompted
considerable controversy. An interesting example (with some local flavor)
of how things can go wrong is discussed
here and
here.
October 1: Astro Careers I
October 8: Astro Careers II
October 15: (skipped)
October 22: Writing Proposals
October 29: (YCAA talk)
November 5: Ethics II: Hostile and Friendly Work Places. The term "Hostile Work Environment"
is a
legal term. There can be
serious legal consequences for hostile work environments, not just for an individual who creates such
an environment, but for supervisors and institutions that allow the situation to go unchecked. Some
legal scholars argue that the current scope of law in this area is so broad as to
violate first amendment prohibitions on government regulation of free expression. There are situations
that are
clearly illegal , but the law is fairly restrictive - it is not illegal to be a jerk. That raises the
question of
what to do about jerks, and more generally, how to promote a friendly working environment as opposed
to simply avoiding a hostile one. These are purely ethical (as opposed to legal) questions.
November 12: Ethics III: Peer Review, Conflicts of Interest, Mentoring
November 19: Writing Papers
Thanksgiving
December 3: Ethics IV: Fraud, Misrepresentation & Bias continued