I gave my talk this morning at the Science in the 21st Century conference. Video will eventually be available at the Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive site, but if you’d like to get a sense of the talk, a few people were live-blogging it in the FriendFeed room for the meeting. You get a pretty… Continue reading Talking to My Dog About Science: Weblogs and Public Outreach
Category: Academia
“Quantum Mechanics Is Magic”: The Making of “Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions”
This was the last of the experiments that I did for my thesis (it’s not the last xenon paper I’m an author on, but the work for that one was done while I was writing up), so my memories of it are bound up with the thesis-writing process. My favorite story about this stuff was… Continue reading “Quantum Mechanics Is Magic”: The Making of “Spin polarization and quantum statistical effects in ultracold ionizing collisions”
Adopt a Physicist
No, not me. Not literally, anyway– I’m quite happy with my current family. Sigma Pi Sigma, the APS, and the AAPT are running a program called
Shorter Advice for Hiring Committees
Over at Sciencewomen, they have a list of six things departments should do to make academic job interviews more comfortable. It’s excellent and reasonable advice. Of course, while it is an excellent post, it also contains more words than it really needs to. In the spirit of physics, which always tries to boil things down… Continue reading Shorter Advice for Hiring Committees
Modest Proposals Regarding Underage Drinking
The recent news about the Amethyst Initiative, in which a number of college and university presidents are calling for a lowering of the drinking age from 21, has sparked a bunch of discussion. Jake Young and Mark Kleiman have good contributions. There are two main arguments against lowering the drinking age: 1) Raising the drinking… Continue reading Modest Proposals Regarding Underage Drinking
Make the Right Claims
Chris Mooney has a new Science Progress column on the number of scientists that challenges the claim that there are not enough students earning science degrees. The facts clearly say otherwise, no matter how you slice them. According to the National Science Foundation, in 2006–the last year for which data is currently available–the nation produced… Continue reading Make the Right Claims
Security Theater
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, Union, like most other colleges and universities, installed a new emergency alert system, which they test much more frequently than it can possibly require. This always produces a flurry of emails alerting us to the upcoming test, and then the test message itself (which is also read… Continue reading Security Theater
In Defense of Short Papers
The Mad Biologist points to and agrees with a post by Jonathan Eisen with the dramatic title “Why I Am Ashamed to Have a Paper in Science. Eisen’s gripe is mostly about Science not being Open Access, but he throws in a complaint about length restrictions, which is what the Mad Biologist latches on to… Continue reading In Defense of Short Papers
The Relevance of Relevance
Via Swans On Tea, a ranty blog post titled Sucky Schools – How To Repair Our Education System, which takes its structure and much of its tone from Paul Lockhart’s “Mathematician’s Lament” (which, unfortunately, is a PDF file). I’m fond of ranty posts about education reform, but both of these kind of lose me. Lockhart,… Continue reading The Relevance of Relevance
Journalists Doing Science Right
Via a comment to an earlier post, here’s an example of a journalist doing science right: NPR’s Sarah Varney looks at “cleansing” foot pads, and finds them wanting. She took a set of the pads, tried them out, and then brought used and new pads to a laboratory at Berkeley, where chemists studied the composition… Continue reading Journalists Doing Science Right