Links for 2010-02-10

  • “Students’ relatively small dedication of time to out-of-class studying has remained about the same since the survey was first conducted in 2003. In 2008, students in the physical sciences and engineering averaged 15.1 hours each week on out-of-class academic work; while students in the biological sciences reported spending 13.7 hours on academic work; students in the arts and humanities, 11.9 hours; and students in the social sciences, 11.5 hours.

    In average weekly study time, the difference between a 3.60 GPA and a 2.79 or lower GPA is only about an hour a week, with high-GPA students averaging about 13 hours a week of studying while students with GPAs of 2.79 or lower reported studying for a little less than 12 hours each week.”

  • “[T]his caused me to ponder what other words with funny origin physicists like to use. (Both funny ha-ha, and funny peculiar.) Why, for example, is the recombination in the early universe called recombination if there was no prior combination? Not that I was the first to ask that question. Sean offered the explanation that the word is borrowed from nuclear physics. But then why don’t nuclear physicists call the fragmentation refragmentation?

    There are more interesting nomenclatures though than presence or absence of prefixes.”