Babysteps...

Grein Eiríks Bergmans um takmark HÍ.

Þetta mjakast....

Vonandi gengur þetta eftir

Merkisviðburður

Þó að þetta sé sjálfsagt mál og hefði mátt gerast hraðar, þá er þetta allaveganna komið í gegn.... eh... í frumvarp allaveganna....

Stjórnvöld vilja heimila að nota stofnfrumur til rannsókna

Magn og gæði

Já, magn er ekki það sama og gæði!

Það sem að Guðfinna gat ekki skrifað undir

lokaorð ályktunarinnar: 

The Parliamentary Assembly therefore urges the member states, and especially their education authorities:

19.1.       to defend and promote scientific knowledge;

19.2.       strengthen the teaching of the foundations of science, its history, its epistemology and its methods alongside the teaching of objective scientific knowledge;

19.3.       to make science more comprehensible, more attractive and closer to the realities of the contemporary world;

19.4.       to firmly oppose the teaching of creationism as a scientific discipline on an equal footing with the theory of evolution and in general resist presentation of creationist ideas in any discipline other than religion;

19.5.       to promote the teaching of evolution as a fundamental scientific theory in the school curriculum.

 

 

Sjálfsagt

Guðfinna hefur alls ekki útskýrt nægjanlega vel hvað lág að baki ákvörðun hennar. Nú fer væntananlega Mofi og aðrir spekúlantar á flug um lygalaupana Darwin og Dawkins , sem að var einmitt það sem að ályktunin var gegn, það er að aðskilja vísindi og trú í kennslu í Evrópu og því mikil mistök að samþykkja hana ekki. Guðfinna hefur líka sérstaka stöðu vegna fyrra starfs og gerðar eru miklar væntingar til hennar þegar að kemur að menntamálum.

Ég hef mikinn áhuga á því hvað Guðfinna hefur skrifað undir úr því að hún gat ekki skrifað undir þetta.

Harma afstöðu Guðfinnu Bjarnadóttur

Guðfinna og creationismi

Í fyrradag var lítil frétt á RUV-vefnum (http://www.ruv.is/heim/frettir/frett/store64/item172934/) um að Guðfinna Bjarnadóttir hefði neitað að skrifa undir ályktun Evrópuráðsins um creationisma. Samþykktina er að finna hér: http://assembly.coe.int/ASP/Doc/ATListing_E.asp. og umræðu um málið á þingi Evrópuráðsins hér http://assembly.coe.int/Main.asp?link=/Documents/Records/2007/E/0710041500E.htm.

Þetta finnst mér undarleg afstaða fyrrverandi háskólarektors.  Ég átta mig ekki á afstöðu hennar af því sem hún sagði á þingi ráðsins.  Tekur hún undir efasemdir um þróunarkenninguna?  Eða ekki?  Í framhaldinu má síðan spyrja hvort menntamálaráðherra og forsætisráðherra, sem jafnframt er formaður Vísinda- og tækniráðs, séu sammála afstöðu Guðfinnu?  Er þetta kannski afstaða ríkisstjórnar Íslands?

Eiríkur Steingrímsson

Nobel Prizes in Science 2007

It's prize time.

 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in scientific subjects to th following scientists. 

• Chemistry for 2007 to Gerhard Ertl (Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Berlin, Germany) "for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces". The press release is here.
  
• Medicine for 2007 jointly to Mario R. Capecchi, Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies for their discoveries of "principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells". The press release is here.
  
• Physics for 2007 jointly to Albert Fert (Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS/THALES, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France) and Peter Grünberg (Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany) "for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance". The press release is here.
  

It has been a good Nobel vintage for German science. 

 

Gunnar Guðni Tómasson og Ari Kristinn Jónsson skrifa um gæði og gæðaeftirlit háskóla

http://mbl.is/mm/gagnasafn/grein.html?radnr=1165203

This was posted on Mbl.is on 16 September, but never made it to this blog.

Reverse Age Discrimination in Italian Academia

Every now and then, I read articles about Italian academia. I do this because of the strong ties I have with my country (or in typical Italian fashion I should say "well, actually, with my region Abruzzo" or even "with my home town, Pescara" :-)) , and because I am saddened by the frustration I sense in the Italian colleagues I meet at conferences or I exchange emails with.

The latest installment of the saga of Italian academia I read is the commentary Reverse Age Discrimination written for Nature Physics by Francesco Sylos Labini and Stefano Zapperi, two physicists based in Rome. Their piece paints a rather bleak picture for young Italian scientists and reports on what they call "Lo Tsnunami dell'Universita' Italiana" (The Tsunami of Italian University). I encourage you to read their opinions and to look at the statistics they report on here.

The figures are amazing. Italian universities have an unusually large fraction of old professors. In Italy, 41% of the university professors are aged 60 or older and only 4% are below 40. If we consider full professors only, we discover that overall in Italy more than 47% are aged 60 or older, but for physicists this percentage reaches a hefty 64%!

Add to this picture that Italian universities have a very irregular recruitment flow, with sudden bursts of hiring based on seniority rather than on merit, and you will see that the only option
left for several talented young scientists is to move to other countries. The commentary reports that this year the French National Research Council (CNRS) selected seven young researchers (CR2) in theoretical physics, out of whom four were Italians! If we look at CS, let me go on record once more as saying that Italians in Paris would form a very strong TCS department by any measure.

Let me close by quoting from the last paragraph in the article.

To conclude, we acknowledge that some older scientists are active and productive, and that European countries should do something to keep them engaged. .... The broad question of how to use the experience of older faculty without hindering the advancement of the younger generation remains an important challenge.

I hope that this is a challenge that Italy's academic establishment will face very soon. The future of Italian science depends on it.

Question to the locals: Are there any similar statistics for Icelandic academia? If so, could anyone post them on this blog?

P.S. The ink has not yet dried on the news announcing that the 2007 Nobel prize for medicine has been awarded to Mario R. Capecchi, Sir Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies "for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells". I notice that Mario Capecchi is yet another Italian expatriate who, like Fermi and Segre before him, has become a US citizen