Over at Confused on a Higher Level, Melissa has been thinking about undergraduate research: As a member of the Physics and Astronomy Division of the Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR), over the past few months I’ve gotten several e-mails about the effort by CUR, the Society of Physics Students, the American Astronomical Society, and the… Continue reading Should Undergraduate Research Be Required?
Month: June 2009
Math and the Teaching Thereof
Firday’s quick and sarcastic post came about because I thought the Dean Dad and his commenters had some interesting points in regard to high school math requirements, but we were spending the afternoon driving to Whitney Point so I could give a graduation speech. I didn’t have time for a more detailed response. Now that… Continue reading Math and the Teaching Thereof
links for 2009-06-30
Physics Buzz: A day at the International Submarine Races "Last weekend, travelers at a rest stop in Minnesota became alarmed when a group of college kids pulled up in a U-haul truck, carefully unloaded a large, sleek object from the back, and set to work on it with power tools. About the length of a… Continue reading links for 2009-06-30
Total Proposal Security
The National Science Foundation uses a computerized proposal-and-report submission system called FastLane. When I first submitted a proposal, this required three things to log in: your last name, your Social Security number, and a password of your choice. Sometime in the last year, they stopped using the SSN, and switched to a randomly generated nine-digit… Continue reading Total Proposal Security
Academic Autonomy: How Much Freedom Do Post-Docs Have?
I’m not entirely sure why I keep responding to this, but Bruce Charlton left another comment about the supposed dullness of modern science that has me wondering about academic: The key point is that a few decades ago an average scientist would start working on the problem of his choice in his mid- to late-twenties… Continue reading Academic Autonomy: How Much Freedom Do Post-Docs Have?
Death by Black Hole by Neil deGrasse Tyson
While I’ve seen him on tv a bunch of times (both on NOVA and on the Comedy Central fake-news shows), I have somehow managed not to read anything by Neil deGrasse Tyson before. I’m not sure how that happened. After his appearance on The Daily show last year, and especially after the Rubik’s Cube thing… Continue reading Death by Black Hole by Neil deGrasse Tyson
links for 2009-06-29
Cocktail Party Physics: dial-a-scientist "It all started Wednesday, when I got an email from Brandon Webb, who handles PR for the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at UT Dallas. He wanted to know if I could talk to a reporter who wanted to know whether a Styrofoam cup could break a windshield. (That’s an… Continue reading links for 2009-06-29
How Not to Break Into Publishing
One of the fun thing about being at home for a weekend is that I get to see a close-up view of the death of the American newspaper. When I was a kid, Binghamton had two daily papers, the Sun-Bulletin and the Evening Press, published in the morning and evening, respectively (bet you couldn’t’ve guessed… Continue reading How Not to Break Into Publishing
Graduation Speech: Think Like a Scientist
The following is the (approximate) text of the speech I gave Friday night at the Whitney Point High School graduation. Or, at least, this is what I typed out for myself Thursday night– what actually comes out of my mouth on Friday might be completely different. That’s why they do these things live, after all…… Continue reading Graduation Speech: Think Like a Scientist
links for 2009-06-27
Hacker News | I was a theoretical physicist for 13 years, and struggled a lot with this questi… "One unusual but very useful style was to set a goal like reading 15 papers in 3 hours. I use the term "reading" here in an unusual way. Of course, I don’t mean understanding everything in the… Continue reading links for 2009-06-27