What are deans thinking when they’re evaluating tenure cases? Apparently, at least one of them is sizing professors up like used cars.

That’s not how you pipet.

I’ve always thought that the actual content of the bulk of TED talks are distilled bunk. I’ve discovered that someone wrote a critique of TED talks of which I am a little jealous because it’s so well done, but grateful because I was never going to write it.

Have you seen the fake TED talks from the Onion?  It’s the best illustration of how a typical TED talk convinces people that boring and well-established ideas are novel and interesting. Maybe people should, you know, read something with substance once in a while.

By the way, the biggest rock is Uluru. You can walk around it in less than a couple hours.

Getty Research Institute has an amazing collection of historic, compelling and often gorgeous artistic images. This week, they released a fraction of them for open content. It’s a good start, considering they’re still living off the legacy of an exploitative oil baron.

Here are a couple posts addressing core issues of small ponds:

• How do you set aside research time in the midst of your busy teaching schedule?
• How do deal with the fact that you just moved from an R1 university to a liberal arts college to solve a 2-body problem?

Don’t like the continued exploitation of contingent instructors in universities? It’s up to tenured faculty to fix the problem.

This has been a challenging week for people who blog about science. It started with the fallout of Scientific American censoring Dr. Danielle Lee, which I’ve already addressed. These events caused an unrelated set of incidents of sexual harassment to become known, with victims providing clear, nuanced and details accounts of their interactions with one central figure in the science blogging and science writing communities. It’s broken out into the mainstream media and a summary of it on one such site is here. What has happened is not a rarity but something that happens every day, everywhere. This moment is different is because a few people had the courage to share their story, and the unflinching support from all parts of the community is heartening.  Here are a few of the reflections on this week that I wanted to share with you:

• Hope Jahren’s The Worst part is not.
• Drugmonkey’s I miss my sisters.
• Mark CC’s It’s easy to not harass women.
• Chris Buddle’s A difficult week (and a way forward).

I haven’t written my own piece about the pervasiveness of sexual harassment in science. I’m not going to, because I don’t think I could come close to matching the efforts above. I intentionally chose three guys’ thoughts, whose perspective on this matches my own, but whose ability to express these thoughts exceeds my own. I’m grateful that they took the time out to show how important this issue it is.

For a link, thanks to Paige Roberts.

As always, feel free to add your own recommended reads, or remarks on anything found in these links.