Category: Academia

A Pox on Both Your Cultures

A lot has been written about Steven Pinker’s article about “scientism,” most of it mocking his grandiose overreach in passages like this: These thinkers—Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith—are all the more remarkable for having crafted their ideas in the absence of formal theory and empirical data. The mathematical theories of information,… Continue reading A Pox on Both Your Cultures

Physics Research Survey and Contest

One of my colleagues at Union is doing a physics education research project with a summer student, and is using an online survey to collect data. Obviously, the more people respond to the survey, the more scientific it becomes (subject to the limitations imposed by relying on self-selected Internet samples, of course), so I offered… Continue reading Physics Research Survey and Contest

Baseball and Gender Bias: “Number of Women in Physics Departments: A Simulation Analysis “

Figure 3 from the AIP report discussed in the post.

I’ve spent a bunch of time recently blogging about baseball statistics, which you might be inclined to write off as some quirk of a sports-obsessed scientist. I was very amused, therefore, to see Inside Higher Ed and ZapperZ writing about a new AIP report on women in physics (PDF) that uses essentially the same sort… Continue reading Baseball and Gender Bias: “Number of Women in Physics Departments: A Simulation Analysis “

More Kids and Conferences

There's a WHAT?!? Behind me?

The kids and conferences issue, discussed here a while ago has continued to spark discussion, with a Tenure She Wrote piece on how to increase gender diversity among conference speakers and a Physics Focus blog post on a mother who wound up taking her toddler to a meeting. There are some good points in both,… Continue reading More Kids and Conferences

Dorky Poll: Rorschach Numbers

It’s been a really long time since I’ve done a Dorky Poll here, but I’m pretty fried at the moment, so here’s a kind of mathematical personality test: two numbers that do not uniquely define a sequence, but suggest some possibilities that reveal your innate character type and/or appropriate career path: Personality Test: What number… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Rorschach Numbers

On Mentoring

I forget who pointed me to the Tenure She Wrote piece on mentoring, but it’s something I’ve been turning over for a couple of weeks now. Probably because I became aware of it right around the time my two summer students started work last week. It keeps colliding with other conversations as well, though, so… Continue reading On Mentoring

Think Like a Physicist

Enrico Fermi posing by a blackboard, from http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=439&bodyId=485

There was a flurry of discussion recently on campus about “critical thinking,” and how we sell that idea to prospective and current students. This was prompted by a recent report arguing for the importance of the humanities and social sciences (which I found really frustrating in ways that are neither surprising nor important for this… Continue reading Think Like a Physicist

Science Is Hard?: “A Major in Science? Initial Beliefs and Final Outcomes for College Major and Dropout”

Screenshot of text from the paper discussed.

There was a brief flurry of discussion yesterday kicked off by Matt Yglesias posting People Don’t Major in Science—Because It’s Hard, which more or less says what the title would lead you to believe (either title, since he’s blogging for Slate where they like to give pages titles that don’t match the post titles…). This… Continue reading Science Is Hard?: “A Major in Science? Initial Beliefs and Final Outcomes for College Major and Dropout”