World Cup Wrap-Up

I missed the first 15 minutes of yesterday’s World Cup final because it was inordinately difficult to find a tv showing the game at BWI airport. There are tvs all over the place, but they’re all locked into playing a pre-recorded loop of CNN programs, without even a news ticker that could give score updates.… Continue reading World Cup Wrap-Up

Links for 2010-07-11

LaserFest | Videos of Lasers in Art & Entertainment A collection of videos showing the use of lasers in art, movies, and television. (tags: lasers science physics video television movies outreach art) Home – emergentuniverse.org A small but well-designed site dedicated to giving the public an interdisciplinary look at the science of emergent phenomena, including… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-11

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Links for 2010-07-10

Energy Secy advances nano science in spare time – San Jose Mercury News “This is Chu’s second such meaty scientific paper in recent months, both published in the journal Nature. The first, published in February, was following Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory and better measuring how gravity slows time. Both were published while he has… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-10

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Categorized as Links Dump

Protons: Even Smaller Than We Thought

The big physics story at the moment is probably the new measurement of the size of the proton, which is reported in this Nature paper (which does not seem to be on the arxiv, alas). This is kind of a hybrid of nuclear and atomic physics, as it’s a spectroscopic measurement of a quasi-atom involving… Continue reading Protons: Even Smaller Than We Thought

Academic Poll: See Longer Blog Post (Forthcoming) for Details

Thoreau offers without qualification some complaints about a paper in a glamour journal, ending with: All of this might have been excusable if the big flashy Glamour Journal paper had been followed up with more detailed papers in other places (a common practice in some fields). However, when I searched to see what the authors… Continue reading Academic Poll: See Longer Blog Post (Forthcoming) for Details

Links for 2010-07-09

Using the General Social Survey | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine Notes on how you, too, can be a social scientist. Or at least noodle around with statistics. (tags: social-science blogs statistics surveys) Science in the Open » Blog Archive » It’s not information overload, nor is it filter failure: It’s a discovery deficit “We… Continue reading Links for 2010-07-09

Kids These Days: Is Our Learning Measure Valid?

Kevin Drum has done a couple of education-related posts recently, first noting a story claiming that college kids study less than they used to, and following that up with an anecdotal report on kids these days, from an email correspondent who teaches physics. Kevin’s emailer writes of his recent experiences with two different groups of… Continue reading Kids These Days: Is Our Learning Measure Valid?