By . The Athena SWAN charter does advance gender equality in university departments that sign up to it, according to an independent review of the scheme. The study of more than 40 departments found that the initiative, which promotes good employment practices for women in science, had a positive impact on changing the culture and attitudes in those that took part compared with those that did not. More...
By . A committee of MPs has slammed a new government “horizon scanning” programme for not sufficiently utilising the Government Office for Science. An inquiry by the House of Commons science and technology select committee found “substantial weaknesses” in the programme, which was launched last June and designed to flag up the threats, risks, emerging issues and opportunities of the future. More...
By Marc Spooner. How the ‘audit culture’ is ruining the academy and harming society in the process. Over the last year there have been several articles in prominent North American newspapers examining the state of academia, decrying the disappearance of the public intellectual and calling out the rise of the vanity pay-for-publish sham peer-reviewed journal. Each correctly, in my view, attributes these developments to the publish-or-perish culture that overwhelmingly imbues our universities. For example, Lawrence Martin states in the Globe and Mail, “Academia has been overtaken by specialists who are absorbed in their own little world with its imperative to publish", Nicholas Kristof explains in the New York Times that “if the sine qua non for academic success is peer-reviewed publications, then academics who ‘waste their time’ writing for the masses will be penalized”, and most recently, Tom Spears writes in The Citizen: “And some of these, nicknamed predatory journals, offer fast, cut-rate service to young researchers under pressure to publish...” More...
By Arik Ligeti. For computer programmers, it’s GitHub. In the world of computer programming, “It's more important to have a GitHub page than it is to have Facebook or Twitter,” says Adam Tindale, a professor at OCAD University. GitHub is an online network that allows people to share code. Over five-million programmers, and aspiring ones, use the site to show their work and learn and borrow from one another to build the best tools possible. More...
By Rosanna Tamburri. Toronto workshop led by Harvard theatre prof who passes along tools of the trade. The participants stand in a circle and toss a ball to one another. Some fumble and drop the ball while others break out in quiet fits of laughter. This isn’t a group of school children, as you might expect, but faculty members who had gathered at a downtown Toronto hotel for a two-day workshop on how to improve their communication skills. Leading the group is Nancy Houfek, head of voice and speech at the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University. More...
By Jonathan Thon - The Black Hole. I was recently invited to give a keynote address at the Human Disease Mapping conference at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland that was fully coordinated by a small group of the college’s PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. The scope was to share my experience and story of my academic career in a period where the global financial and humanitarian crisis is affecting young scientists’ hopes of doing what they love most – science. Given its length, I have divided the original talk into multiple posts. To read the previous articles in this series please visit the links below:
Media/Politics
Still another very lucrative career option is media. Science communication is of major importance and opens the door to politics, which as a society we desperately need scientists to transition into. Both of my early companies operate in this space, providing scientific consulting for film and television, and arming potential investors with critical insight into the pipelines of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies they are eyeing for investment. Read more...
By Jennifer Polk - From PhD to Life. I was recently chatting with a friend here in Toronto who’s ABD and looking for full-time employment. He told me that when he “buried his degree” on his resume — placed education last instead of closer to the top — that he’d received much better responses from potential employers. Previously, his applications hadn’t resulted in anything; now, he’d been on two interviews in the past month. This is an anecdote, but talking with him got me thinking about my own relationship with my resume. So did a Twitter chat I hosted last week on the topic of non-academic resumes. More...
Thousands of post-secondary programs mean students need to know themselves and their strengths. When busy high school students look to apply for post-secondary studies, it might help to know that Alberta Innovation and Advanced Education recognizes more than 2,500 programs in the province. That number is just the programs and doesn't include the actual number of careers that branch off of each area of study.
The choices can be overwhelming, so if you see someone lean into a student and ask them, perhaps like the irate, resentful father from Twisted Sister's We're Not Gonna Take It video circa 1984, "what do you want to do with your life," you might want to have these numbers handy. More...
By . Programs like Advanced Placement grow in Canada. 
By Jennifer Lewington. Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business has made sustainability a point of differentiation, scoring well on rankings that measure efforts to teach students about the environmental, social and ethical implications of business decisions. Earlier this fall, for example, Molson placed third in Canada in a sustainability survey by Corporate Knights and last year its MBA program ranked 42 nd in the Aspen Institute’s “Beyond Grey Pinstripes” report on the sustainability and social responsibility focus of business schools around the world. Read more.../https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
