links for 2009-05-06

"I had a fun conversation with a student this week who had a number of challenging questions about issues to pose to me. The question I’m still knocking around: if academic cultural critics understand expressive culture so expertly, why can’t they create it? Wouldn’t it be better to always have experience in creating the cultural forms that you study?

I noted that this is an old and familiar (if legitimate) challenge. It popped up recently in Ratatouille, for example, but this is an old battle littered with bon mots and bitter denunciations. Thinking about it during the conversation, I tried to map out the range of existing answers that scholars and critics have offered at various times. Here’s what I came up with off the cuff as variant kinds of responses to this issue, quickly sketched. "

"In the first study, Nobel laureate Philip Anderson of Princeton University addresses supersolids theoretically. Contrary to present computer models, he claims that supersolidity can be explained as superfluid of atom vacancies in a solid lattice. Moreover, he says that all “bosonic” solids — those that contain atoms with integer values of spin — should be a supersolid in their quantum ground state.

In the second study, Seamus Davis of Cornell University and colleagues find evidence that supersolid signatures observed in other experiments actually suggest more of a glassy, rather than a crystalline, behaviour. In other words, the supersolids reported might be termed more accurately “superglasses”. "

"They say science journalism is in a crisis mode. Many newspapers are cutting their science sections, and even the venerable Scientific American is struggling to find a business model that works in the age of the internet. So why on earth would I decide now is the time to start charging for a bit of rather home-grown science journalism?"

"Introducing "How Science Works" into the United Kingdom’s science curriculum hasn’t been smooth sailing. A vociferous group of science teachers questioned whether standards of science education would decline if science lessons became debates about scientific issues and controversies rather than teaching children how to devise experiments, what scientific laws govern our universe, and sparking an interest in the natural world. But knowing how science progresses and how ideas and evidence are developed should always have been an integral part of science education. At a time when competing views are treated as equally valid regardless of the evidence, students must be encouraged to develop critical enquiry skills and to ask questions of the information they are presented or seek out online."

Have recent experiments detected dark matter? Maybe. Bonus: free pdf download of the paper.

The whale on the ceiling of the American Museum of Natural History is on Twitter.