Well, on video over the web, anyway… If you look at the Featured Videos on the National Geographic Channel web page, or, hopefully, in the embedded video below: You’ll see a short video clip of a program about quantum physics, that includes me and Emmy among the experts on camera. I’m pretty psyched, though I’m… Continue reading How to Teach Physics to Your Dog On TV
Month: May 2011
Is College Worth It?
As I noted the other day, we’re entering graduation season, one of the two month-long periods (the other being “back to school” time in August/September) when everybody pretends to care deeply about education. Accordingly, the people at the Pew Research Center have released a new report on the opinions of the general public and college… Continue reading Is College Worth It?
Short Story Club 2: The Locussing
For both of the readers who enjoyed last fall’s Short Story Club, there’s another round starting up soon, this time run by Locus, featuring award-nominated works. I’m busier now than I was in the fall, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to participate in all of these, but then, I’ve already read two of… Continue reading Short Story Club 2: The Locussing
Links for 2011-05-17
Generalist’s Work, Day 5 « Easily Distracted “In humanistic writing, I’m struck by the sometimes uncomfortable mixing of a romanticist vision of authorship with the value of scholarship as a collaborative, collective and accumulative enterprise. In peer review, tenure review, grant applications and other venues where we set the benchmark for what counts as excellence,… Continue reading Links for 2011-05-17
“Supersolids”: The Saga Continues
Several years ago, now, a group at Penn State announced a weird finding in helium at extremely low temperatures and high pressures (which is what you need to make helium solidify): when they made a pendulum out of a cylindrical container with a thin shell of solid He toward the outside edge, twisting about its… Continue reading “Supersolids”: The Saga Continues
Active Engagement Works: “Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class”
Physics is a notoriously difficult and unpopular subject, which is probably why there is a large and active Physics Education Research community within physics departments in the US. This normally generates a lot of material in the Physical Review Special Topics journal, but last week, a PER paper appeared in Science, which is unusual enough… Continue reading Active Engagement Works: “Improved Learning in a Large-Enrollment Physics Class”
Links for 2011-05-16
Beta Readers: Best Practices » Inkpunks “The author-beta relationship is a strange one. The author exposes a vulnerable, still-in-the-works thing to the beta, a fleshy little newborn fiction coated in soft bits. The author is pleased. The author thinks this is an Excellent Thing which they are giving to the beta. The beta takes this… Continue reading Links for 2011-05-16
Identifying the Real Source of Student Entitlement
College graduation season is upon us, at least for institutions running on a semester calendar (sadly, Union’s trimester system means we have another month to go). This means the start of the annual surge of Very Serious op-eds about what education means, giving advice to graduates, etc. The New York Times gets things rolling with… Continue reading Identifying the Real Source of Student Entitlement
Problematic Tigers
SteelyKid is, as I have noted previously, half Korean, a quarter Polish, and an eighth each Irish and German. Her parents are irreligious, the extended family is Catholic (more so on my side than Kate’s), and she goes to day care at the Jewish Community Center. In other words, a thoroughly American sort of upbringing.… Continue reading Problematic Tigers
Links for 2011-05-14
Against Craft « Booklife “”Craft” today is not a counter to the Romantic vision of an artistic elite chosen by the Divine, it is a quasi-proletarian flinch often designed to protect one’s work from being compared to art, thus protecting it (and one’s ego) from its near-inevitable failure to stack up to the idea of… Continue reading Links for 2011-05-14