While I’m still trying not to think about the new academic term that starts in two weeks (yes, the first day of class is Labor Day, grumble mutter grump), it’s beginning to impinge on my consciousness. Thus, this poll on a frequent and annoying phenomenon that recurs with every new academic term: Students who miss […]
Category: Polls
Idiom Poll: Sales
In honor of the people down the street who are trying to unload some excess personal belongings, a poll: When people take a bunch of stuff they no longer want, put it outside their house, and try to sell it to passersby, this is called:Market Research You can only choose one of these terms in […]
Poll: Working Late
Daniel Lemire has a new blog post arguing that working long hours is stupid. This collided with Bee’s Backreaction post on what keeps physicists up at night, included in this morning’s Links Dump. This got me to thinking about academic work habits, which led to the following poll: How long will you keep working, continuously, […]
Live Music Poll
Over at the Whatever, one of Scalzi’s guest bloggers has posted a ginormous list of upcoming live music shows in the DC area. This makes me sad, because when I used to live in the DC area, I was a grad student, and couldn’t afford to go to any of the dozens of great concerts […]
P=???
the hot topic in mathematical sciences at the moment is the draft proof that P≠NP (warning: PDF). This is one of the biggest issues in computer science, and one of the Clay Mathematics Institute’s Millennium Problems, so a proof would be Big News in math/CS, and earn the prover a cool $1,000,000. Reaction among blogging […]
Silly Poll: Pinch Me
I was going to write something serious about physics, but it’s my student’s last day, so we’re taking him to lunch. So here’s a silly poll to entertain you until I get back: If I suspected I might be living in a dream, but couldn’t be sure, I would:survey software You can only choose one […]
Dorky Poll: Experimental Hazing
I’m going to be spending a good chunk of the rest of my day scrounging up adapters to connect two different classes of plumbing fittings. In honor of that, here’s a poll question based on something that one research group used to do: Sending a new graduate student to the lab down the hall to […]
Presentation Poll: Outline or No Outline?
We have a summer student seminar series in the science and engineering departments here, running two days a week at lunchtime with three students each day giving 15 minute presentations on their summer research projects to other students and faculty. The student talks are split almost 50/50 overall on whether to provide an outline at […]
Teleconference Poll
Pretty much what the title implies: for a variety of reasons, I find myself in a position where people keep holding or suggesting conference calls as a way of getting the relevant players together on the phone if not in person. I’m not wild about this, but I’m curious what other people think: Conference calls […]
Cake?
Well? Cake?customer surveys