Poll of the day

If some throwaway sentence in the Aims page draft I’m looking over for PhysioProffe stimulates my curiosity about a cool model then he is obligated to throw a least a postdoc year at the topic, correct?

Terminated

The Twitt @TellDrTell wondered:

I always wonder, when answering "highest lev. of ed. completed?" whether that is my PhD or my DVM or which is the right answer at the time.

— Rachel Tell (@TellDrtell) August 23, 2013

This brings up the question of what is meant by the “terminal degree“, and this way of phrasing it focuses on one aspect of the concept, namely the “highest” degree.

For many fields of endeavor, some sort of degree that includes the word “Doctor” is the terminal degree. These ones are familiar to my audience.

• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD or DPhil if you are a Brit)
• Doctor of Medicine (MD)
• Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM)
• Doctor of Dental Surgery (DDS)

These terminal degrees happen to predominate in our research fields and in the population of PIs who secure major grant awards. There are also others of potential interest to this audience, including

• Juris Doctor (JD. Did you know lawyers can call themself “Doctor”? Why don’t they?)
• Doctor of Education (Ed.D.; fraught with implications)
• Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)
• Doctor of Pharmacy (PharmD)

If you hold only one Doctoral degree then presumably most folks would agree this is the highest one. But @TellDrTell wondered which to consider the highest one if a person holds two doctoral degrees.

Wikipedia and other sources tend to distinguish research degrees from professional degrees. In our usual pool of Doctoral letters, the Ph.D.s are research degrees and most of the other ones are professional degrees. This is underlined by the fact that most of the dual Doctoral degree subpopulation holds a PhD and one of the so-called professional degrees.

Being a research degree, obviously the PhD is higher, better and/or more terminal.

But wait. The Wikipedia lists a whole other bunch of research doctorates, like Doctor of Management and Doctor of Modern Languages, that you’ve never heard of and sound like some scam to avoid doing a Doctor of Philosophy in the respective subjects. In more familiar terms, there are PhDs in both Pharmacology and Psychology, so the PsyD and PharmD seem like lesser degrees to some folks. More limited.

Obviously those are lesser than the professional doctorates in Medicine, Dental Surgery, Veterinary Medicine and Juris. Wait, Juris? Is that law degree more “terminal” than a Ed.D. that was awarded after 6 years* of painstaking thesis research?

Gaaah!

Okay, let’s just say the Ph.D. is the best, all others are lesser and you should list your Ph.D. as your highest degree if you are also a M.D. or a D.V.M.

Unless you went to a combined M.D./Ph.D. program, in which case I think you are this, but not separately either a M.D. or a Ph.D.. And yes, unsurprisingly, I have heard at least one M.D., Ph.D. speak of how awesomely better this is than those lesser M.D./Ph.D. folks**.

And since it is usually a Doctor of Philosophy in [Subject], and the sciences are the most awesome, I think we can safely say that if you have two degrees in which one is a Ph.D. [Science] and the other is Ph.D. [Philosophy], the latter*** is the higher one. And you win the entire world’s respect.

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*I don’t actually know the duration of Ed.D. programs.
**Gawd, I love academics.

***Because Philosophy squared

Thought of the day

The entire point of being an academic, science or otherwise, is to understand and evaluate different ways of thinking about something!!!!!

Reader Poll

Slightly NSFW so after the jump…..

Question for the domestic terrierists

Why do many urban jurisdictions ban the keeping of a rooster but you think banning established dangers to life and limb (instead of mere sleep/wake cycle) is the equivalent of racial discrimination?

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*having just learned at PhysioProf’s blog that Jack Russell terriers are “statistically” dangerous just like pitbull terriers perhaps we are getting at the real problem. Terriers.

It is always the chemists.

Every year we get an annual safety meeting from our EH&S department and they show us a bunch of instructional slides on how to handle various laboratory hazards around the campus. They always include a few chuckles, like the guy operating plugged-in powertools standing on a ladder immersed in a pool, the guy Lincoln welding the gas tank of a truck propped up on a couple of bricks..that sort of thing.

And of course we go down the list of hazards from the chemical to the radiological to the microbiological. My department is usually in full eyeroll mode most of the time because of a simple fact. You know what never happens on our campus (touch wood)? We never have a Ebola infected African green monkey head for the hills. Nary a hantavirus rodent plague. Maybe someone gets a little sloppy with some low grade radioactive material now and again but that’s rare. We don’t have people getting infected with various nasty viruses and virulent (hmm) strains of bacteria they work with.

But you know what does happen on our campus? Regularly? Like 2-3 times a year?

Some chemist blows up a hood, erupts a waste bottle, causes a fire in the lab bays or otherwise renders a building uninhabitable. In dramatic fashion.

Causing the Fire Department to have to respond and anyone working in the building to lose at least a day.

It is always the chemists.

I have never really understood why.

Observation about OPEN EVERYTHING!!!!1111!! Revolutionaries

They sure do get huffy when they themselves are the ones being subjected to open peer review.

Hey Cat Fans, LOOK! You too can be just as stupid as a dog owner!

Apparently some epic dumbasses decided that the common housecat, bloodthirsty lethal little murder-cat killing machine that it is, wasn’t quite badass enough.

What. Is. Wrong. With. People?

…."what a drag".

For my lovely persecution complex commenters….

NIH Sekrits

It is a little known #truefact of the NIH that every 500 logins or refreshes on your eRA Commons account improves your eagerly anticipated grant score by 1 percentile point.

PSA: Beware the 'nip

ht: @merz @dirk57

Holiday Cheer

One of the most hilarious things on the blogs recently is, as Isis the Scientist put it, PhysioProf vs. iPad.

It took an Apple product to do it but I do believe PhysioProffe is breaking down at last.

Ok, NRA nutjobs, I'm on board with your plan for more guns

I get it. I do.

You think the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution lets you own guns in the event of a need for armed insurrection against a tyrannical government. Frankly, given what happened under Dubya Bush, I’m kinda surprised more of my libbie-leftie friends didn’t join me in this understanding. But whatever.

Most of you, even on the rightwing, tend to reject my argument for equal force- nobody seems to be fond of Michigan Militia wingnuts getting their hands on tanks and F16s and Stinger missiles…so we’re stuck with lack of parity. I mean, I don’t get it…if you think this is what the 2nd means (and I do) then why you are not trying to pick up one of these modest multi-billion dollar weapons systems on the blackmarket is a mystery to me. but….ok. something less than parity with the US armed forces. That’s a first principle.

Second, hunting. Now true, the 2nd Amendment does not seem to guarantee your right to blast small woodland creatures into oblivion but what the heck. Sure. By all means let us justify the sort of weapon that is necessary to bring down a deer or something. And leaves it….well, edible. As opposed to, say, riddled with heavy metal projectiles of a 0.223 calibre.

Third, you seem to think that the solution to gun violence is that we have more guns. More people with more access to guns at any moment in the event we need to put down a mad dog, I mean, defend a movie theatre against a disgruntled neuroscience graduate student, er, nutter. Fine. I agree. If someone is actively shooting up the place, if we could have some calm, cool, collected return fire….well it looks fine on paper to me.

So how can we have more guns, available for hunting, best for accurate shooting and with some inherent features that exert a calming effect on the rate of fire?

The bolt-action rifle. Preferably with the magazine limited to 3 or 5 cartridges.

So here’s what I propose. We ban, and I mean BAN, these stupid penile replacement firearms. Period. No handguns, no AR15 military bullshit. No magazine/clips bigger than 5 in capacity. No goddamn cammo stocks. No. Muppet. Hugging. Grandfather. Clause.

And in exchange you nutjobs can have as many bolt-action rifles as you want and as many long barrel shotguns as you want. You can hunt, grab them out of the rack on your pick ’em up truck in case you happen by a Sikh temple when some shit is going down from a white supremicist and have them under your bed come the armed insurrection.

Good?

In a rare moment of clarity, NRA flack LaPierre makes huge Freudian slip

From this transcript of his remarks:

Isn’t fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?

And there we have it. The full reveal.

For the slower members of the audience, or those reading after too many eggnogs…an explainer from Comradde Physioproffe.

all these delusional right-wing microdicke Republican gun fetishists … we all know that their real goal has nothing to with preventing the slaughter of kindergartners, and everything to do with delusional phallic power fantasies to compensate for their real-world angry white d00d ineffectual dicklessness.

So yeah, LaPierre was talking about videogame fans…but dude. Fruedian slip much? Who the hell would compare GrandTheftAuto to porn unless he was popping a chubbie thinking about blowing people away in a hail of semiautomatic fire from his M-16 imitating AR-15 “sporting rifle”? And you know who those people are?

for Sporting Purposes only.

Honestly. Tell me there isn’t something wrong with these folks.

NIH small business awards per capita by State

hmm. looks just like the political Red State / Blue State division, doesn’t it?

Only in this case the government largesse is going preferentially to the Blue, instead of the Red. (Also see this).

The Blue states are getting more government investment in Small Business, the Red ones more government investment in, well, the dole. Interesting, isn’t it?

via Rock Talk blog.