If you’ve been a student or faculty member at an American college or university in the past twenty years or so, you’ve almost certainly run across student course evaluation surveys. They’re different in detail, but the key idea is always the same: toward the end of the term, students in every course are asked to… Continue reading Building a Better Student Evaluation
Month: January 2009
Why Does Windows Suck So Much?
So, a month or two ago, I started occasionally getting an error message from iTunes, saying that it was unable to save the library file because the disk was full. This seemed improbable, but when I checked, the C: drive did, indeed, have very little space left. I deleted some stuff, restarted (which freed up… Continue reading Why Does Windows Suck So Much?
links for 2009-01-14
Haidinger’s brush: the unknown sense "Yes !!! With some effort you can learn to see what remains invisible to most people! Without the help of any instrument you will be able to tell not only if the light you look at is strongly polarized or not, but also if it is linearly polarized or circularly… Continue reading links for 2009-01-14
Defining Science
Over at Built on Facts, Matt Springer is easing his way back into blogging by asking “What is Science?”. He offers a simple one-sentence definition: Science is the testing of ideas. That’s all. Every technicality I can think of is avoided so long as the person doing the science is honest. Create fair and objective… Continue reading Defining Science
Why Teach “Modern Physics?”
The scare quotes in the title are to distinguish “Modern Physics” classes like the one I’m teaching this term from modern physics as a general subject, which, of course, all right-thinking people should study in depth. The question comes from a comment by Coriolis on last week’s post about what “Modern Physics” is as a… Continue reading Why Teach “Modern Physics?”
Icarus at the Edge of Time, by Brian Greene
Or, Brian Greene Writes a Kid’s Book… This is a very odd book. It’s printed on boards, like a book for very small children, but the story is a bit beyond what I would imagine reading to a normal kid of the age to want books of that format. It’s too short and simple, though,… Continue reading Icarus at the Edge of Time, by Brian Greene
links for 2009-01-13
A&M bases bonus on student input | Bryan/College Station, Texas – The Eagle ""I’ve never had so much trouble giving away a million dollars," Chancellor Mike McKinney said, laughing. That’s because he’s never spent it like this. McKinney plans to give up to $10,000 bonuses to instructors based on anonymous student evaluations" (tags: education stupid… Continue reading links for 2009-01-13
SteelyKid Versus Vegetables
This is of interest to approximately eight people in the entire world, but SteelyKid got her first taste of “yellow vegetables” this weekend (step three on the road to solid food, after rice cereal and oatmeal cereal). Which provided a nice opportunity to play with the digital video camera we got for Christmas: Yes, that’s… Continue reading SteelyKid Versus Vegetables
Subtracting Photons from Arbitrary Light Fields
There’s been a fair bit of press for the article Subtracting photons from arbitrary light fields: experimental test of coherent state invariance by single-photon annihilation, published last month in the New Journal of Physics, much of it in roughly the same form as the news story in Physics World (which is published by the same… Continue reading Subtracting Photons from Arbitrary Light Fields
Textbook Prices: Highway Robbery, or High-Seas Piracy?
There was a mix-up in textbook ordering for this term (entirely my fault), and the books for my modern physics course were not in the bookstore when the term started. I made a spare copy available in the interim, and also half-jokingly suggested buying it from Amazon rather than waiting for the bookstore to get… Continue reading Textbook Prices: Highway Robbery, or High-Seas Piracy?