As I just moved to Germany, I am joining the science communication scene, here. So, I went to a German science communication conference: “Forum Wissenschaftskommunikation” or “Forum Science Communication”. I could only afford one out of three days but I still found out a couple of things.
One of my pet peeves with academia is the treatment of PhD students and postdocs which I feel borders(?) on exploitation. I talked with Maria Pinto, who is from Portugal and is currently PhD student in Austria in marine microbiology for my podcast “Science for Societal Progress”. Looking forward to her final year as a …
Insecurity and Uncertainties for Early Career Academics (SfP podcast episode)
Currently, every scientist with a salary above ca. $24k/yr is exempt from over time pay in the USA – and over time here means everything over 40hrs in a week. Obama now thinks about changing this threshold to ca $50k/yr. This is big, because postdocs make only about $43k/yr on average. So if this comes, …
There was a discussion about postdocs and if and how they would benefit from Obamas plans to increase the salary threshold below which overtime must be payed to a number considerably higher than the NIH average postdoc salary… or… fellowship. I won’t get into details why, but there were different types of postdoctoral positions thrown …
The question about whether neurons perform computations came around several times on twitter, lately and there were at least two spin-off blog posts that came from these discussions: Is the idea that neurons perform ‘computations’ in any way meaningful? from Adam Calhoun (@neuroecology) and then The Diversity of Computation by @mnxmnkmnd So far so good. It …