As mentioned on Twitter, I spent much of yesterday reading and rating a huge number of grant proposals. As such, I’ve looked at a lot of CV’s and resumes, and the contrast is striking. People who work in industry tend to use a resume format that is mostly just a list of jobs and degrees,… Continue reading What Our CV’s Say About Our Profession
Category: Academia
Can Kids These Days Write?
Via Michael Nielsen on Twitter, a Wired article and a research group website for the Stanford Study of Writing. As the Wired piece reports, the group has done a large study of student writing, and finds that modern college students write more and are better writers than students in the past. This is a little… Continue reading Can Kids These Days Write?
With Polymaths Like These…
It’s hard to say exactly why I found Edward Carr’s article on polymaths so irritating, but I suspect it was this bit: The monomaths do not only swarm over a specialism, they also play dirty. In each new area that Posner picks–policy or science–the experts start to erect barricades. “Even in relatively soft fields, specialists… Continue reading With Polymaths Like These…
A Brief History of Timekeeping
I gave a guest lecture this morning in a colleague’s sophomore seminar class about time. She’s having them look at time from a variety of perspectives, and they just finished reading Longitude, so she asked me to talk about the physics of clocks and the measurement of time. I’ve long considered using “A Brief History… Continue reading A Brief History of Timekeeping
Adventures in OA
The abbreviation here has a double meaning– both “Open Access” and “Operator Algebra.” In my Quantum Optics class yesterday, I was talking about how to describe “coherent states” in the photon number state formalism. Coherent states are the best quantum description of a classical light field– something like a laser, which behaves very much as… Continue reading Adventures in OA
Notes Toward a Master’s Thesis in Sociology of Higher Education
Somebody should look to see if there’s a correlation between the weather on the days of campus visits and the number of prospective students who apply/ enroll at a given school.
Hey to Blind Brook High School, Hickory High School, and Terrill Middle School
It’s Adopt-a-Physicist time again, and I’ve been “adopted” by three classes: Susan Kelly’s class at Blind Brook High School in Rye, NY; Lisa Edwards’s class at Hickory High School in Hickory, NC (insert your own Hoosiers joke); and Suprit Dharmi’s class at Terrill Middle School in Scotch Plains, NJ. So here’s a shout-out to all… Continue reading Hey to Blind Brook High School, Hickory High School, and Terrill Middle School
Many Worlds, Many Comics
The Digital Cuttlefish looks at the Archie comics, and waxes poetic: Two paths play out in a comic book, When Archie walks down memory lane “The road not taken” is the hook; So now, the writers take a look And re-write Archie’s life again, This time with Betty as his bride; Veronica the woman spurned,… Continue reading Many Worlds, Many Comics
Stargate: Universe and the Myth of the Lone Genius
As you may or may not have heard, there’s a new Stargate franchise on the SyFy channel with John Scalzi as a creative consultant. It may have slipped by without you noticing, because John is too modest to hype it much… Anyway, given the Scalzi connection, I checked out the pilot on Friday, and it… Continue reading Stargate: Universe and the Myth of the Lone Genius
A. O. Scott Is an Ignoramus
Via His Holiness, there is an aggressively stupid paragraph in a New York Times movie review today: Did you hear the one about the guy who lived in the land of Uz, who was perfect and upright and feared God? His name was Job. In the new movie version, “A Serious Man,” some details have… Continue reading A. O. Scott Is an Ignoramus