Yesterday’s poll about “outreach” activities drew 117 responses by this morning. Since PollDaddy stupidly calculates percentages for ticky-box polls based on the number of total selections, not the number of people who vote, the graph you get when you view the results is kind of useless. A better version, using the “CHECK THIS BOX” count,… Continue reading What People Think “Outreach” Is
Category: Polls
Dorky Poll: Accelerator Slap-Fight
Rumors that the Tevatron at Fermilab may have discovered the Higgs boson have escaped blogdom to the mainstream media. This originates in a blog post by Tommaso Dorigo, which I can’t read because it doesn’t display properly in Firefox, but I’m sure is very interesting. Anyway, this is a good excuse for a dorky poll:… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Accelerator Slap-Fight
Poll: What Is “Outreach”?
I spent this weekend in Baltimore for the summer meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public, held at the Maryland Science Center, which is a really nice science museum. This has left me feeling jet-lagged, a neat trick when I never left the Eastern time zone, but perhaps Saturday’s visit to Pub Dog had… Continue reading Poll: What Is “Outreach”?
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
World Cup Update and Poll
The dogphysics karma joke is pretty much dead, as countries with current or future editions of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog have gone a dismal 1-3-0 in the first round of elimination play. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did, honestly. The big story of the World Cup at the moment… Continue reading World Cup Update and Poll
Cathedral-Building in Science
Tommaso Dorigo has an interesting post spinning off a description of the Hidden Dimensions program at the World Science Festival (don’t bother with the comments to Tommaso’s post, though). He quotes a bit in which Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru both admitted that they don’t expect to see experimental evidence of extra dimensions in their… Continue reading Cathedral-Building in Science
Summertime Thermodynamics: Car Windows Open or Closed?
This may be a job for the MythBusters, but I’ll throw this out as a puzzle for interested blog readers. I don’t know the answer to this (though it wouldn’t be all that hard to determine experimentally), I just think it’s sort of interesting. There’s a poll at the bottom of this post, but it… Continue reading Summertime Thermodynamics: Car Windows Open or Closed?
Irritating Poll: Stuck at Work
Today is Memorial Day in the US, which is a holiday to honor the dead of our various wars. It’s also the traditional start of summer-type activities, and most people spend it at cookouts and parades and that sort of thing. I say “most people,” because our trimester calendar means that we’re still in session,… Continue reading Irritating Poll: Stuck at Work
Non-Dorky Polls: Travel Day
I’m going to be spending the bulk of today in transit between Albany and Houston, with a layover in Orlando (whee!), so here’s a pair of related poll questions for you to consider: The most enjoyable way to travel between two cities in the continental US is:customer surveys The least enjoyable way to travel between… Continue reading Non-Dorky Polls: Travel Day
Dorky Poll: Analogies
I’m home with SteelyKid today, because Shavuot is important enough to close the JCC for two days. This will mean essentially no Internet for me, as it’s difficult to type when you’re lying on the floor being jumped on by a toddler. As a filler post, let me take a cue from Making Light and… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Analogies