I wanted to add a couple of things to what Ginny said about SATs. The SATs have been a burr under my saddle since ETS “re-centered” the test in 1994. Mensa* no longer accepts the new SAT because the statistics are now so screwy – they no longer correlate with IQ. The scores had been dropping for a while prior to 1994 and the educational powers-that-be wanted to hide it, so they re-jiggered the baseline. In practice, this meant a 100 – 200 point increase in the composite score – I knew of 2 kids who took both the 1993 and 1994 version (within a few months, and without extra test prep, so extra schooling was not a factor), and that was the difference in their scoring. N of 2, I know, but I have evidence I’ll provide lower down that this is pretty typical.
John Jay
Kolthoff
As the first scientist in the series of geeks you should know, I give you Izaak Maurits Kolthoff. My first introduction to him was at a conference where a student from Minnesota was wearing a t-shirt that read �I.M. Kolthoff � and you�re not.� He was revered, feared, and marveled at during his own tenure, publishing 809 articles until his retirement, after which he published 136 more as an emeritus. Let me repeat that: 945 articles, and 136 peer-reviewed articles as an emeritus! He taught 67 graduate students, and his scientific progeny number in the thousands, now. If for no other reason that that level of publication and educational output, he should be widely known. Instead, he�s Chemistry�s equivalent of Appert.
Academic Prose
As a scientist and teacher, I was often confronted with the task of communicating very complex ideas to people who, while intelligent, did not have all of the relevant information necessary at the forefront of their consciousness to understand the concepts I was trying to convey. For that reason, scientific writing strives (not always successfully) to be as clear, simple and concise as possible. I was fortunate to have good teachers – that article was required reading in our lab.
One of the (many) problems with scientific English is that so many non-native speakers publish in it, and they bring a lot of baggage to it from their native languages. But the main barrier to understanding is that scientific prose is that it is dense with new ideas. If you do not know the precise definitions of the terms the author is using, you will be lost, no matter what your level of skill. If you have not worked out the math before, you will need to do that when you encounter an equation, or the words that follow will make little to no sense. For this reason, simple, declarative grammar is the byword for a scientist – the ideas make things hard enough as it is.
Those Who Can’t…
Since Shannon is blasting Ed Schools and their graduates, I figured I’d put in my 2 cents. I’m not in the Academy anymore, so I don’t have to play the nicey-nice games of pretending that every department’s research is equally valuable to society, and that all Ph.D.s represent the same intellectual effort on the part of the Ph.D. holder. I once I read a comment about how Education Ph.D.s resent that graduate students and professors in other disciplines, especially science, intimate or outright state that Education Ph.D.s are stupid. I’m certainly guilty of that. Where’s my data?
Well, let us get some figures, shall we? Like my advisor used to say, an argument without numbers is a religious discussion. Whom are you trying to convert? Take a look at this, and scroll down to the section titled “How Difficult Is Admission To A Good Program” (the title is on the left-hand sidebar). There is a chart of majors and their average GRE scores. Out of 28 programs reported by ETS in 2002, which one scored #28 in the mean total GRE score? Public Administration. Wow, we give political and bureaucratic power to these bozos? But on topic, which one scored #27? Yep, you guessed it, Education. Education schools were spared the ignominy of last place only by the sheer ineptitude of those wishing to enter government service. And it’s not even as if they had bombed the Qual section, the average Verbal score was lower than any Engineering discipline except for Industrial Engineering. (Engineers, for those who are uninitiated, are reputed to not be able to write worth beans. Unfortunately, this stereotype is often deserved.)
Scientists You Should Know
I fall somewhere in the middle of the camp that looks at the progress of science as a series of spikes precipitated by Great Men (and a few Great Women), and the camp that sees new discoveries as inevitable given the pressing questions of the day and the level of instrumentation available. Most of the time someone was going to discover or explain a given phenomenon anyway, and the horse race included some very smart also-rans who would have arrived at the same conclusions if the front runner were removed from the picture.
However, certain intellects can paint a coherent picture of Nature in a way that most mortals can’t, and when those intellects come along, study hard, and are allowed to apply themselves to what amounts to a metastable collection of old knowledge, the progress of science leaps much further ahead in a much shorter time than if a bunch of less motivated, mediocre intellects were slowly plugging away at the same problems. There are plenty of instances in history where a given civilization had all the tools and observations at hand to discover or explain something, and for some reason just didn’t. The Chinese should have invented and perfected cannons long before the West. They didn’t, and a lot of that has to do with the freeing of individual intellects caused by competition between European states, as opposed to the push to maintain the social and technological status quo in Imperial China.