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: Science
Dog Physics in Alabama?
It looks like I may well be getting together with some friends from college in Alabama on the first weekend in October, to go to a college football game. The logistics of getting to Tuscaloosa make this seem like an awfully long weekend, but I would feel guilty taking two days off just for football… Continue reading Dog Physics in Alabama?
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
Kids These Days: Is Our Learning Measure Valid?
Kevin Drum has done a couple of education-related posts recently, first noting a story claiming that college kids study less than they used to, and following that up with an anecdotal report on kids these days, from an email correspondent who teaches physics. Kevin’s emailer writes of his recent experiences with two different groups of… Continue reading Kids These Days: Is Our Learning Measure Valid?
Are Communications Skills Holding Science Back?
Over in yesterday’s communications skills post commenter Paul raises a question about priorities: I wonder to what extent good writers, public speakers and communicators are being promoted in science in place of good thinkers – people who can challenge prevailing dogma, invent promising novel approaches to old problems, and who have the intuition needed for… Continue reading Are Communications Skills Holding Science Back?
Communication Skills for Scientists
As I am still getting lengthy comments at the Chris Mooney post accusing me of making unreasonable demands on scientists, I thought I should spell out as explicitly as possible what skills I think scientists ought to have. This probably won’t solve the problem, but it’ll give me something to point to the next time… Continue reading Communication Skills for Scientists
Scientist-Approved Beach Reading
Summer is here, which means vacations for lots of people, which means “beach reading”– trying to read a book or two while kicking back somewhere. The ideal beach read is something that isn’t so heavy as to bring you down or demand too much attention, but is also serious enough that it’s not embarrassing to… Continue reading Scientist-Approved Beach Reading
I Am Baffled Regarding Chris Mooney
The kerfuffle of the moment in the science blogosphere once again relates to Chris Mooney, who is pretty much a kerfuffle looking for a place to happen at this point. This time around it centers around a Washington Post op-ed that is basically the executive summary of a American Academy of Arts and Sciences paper… Continue reading I Am Baffled Regarding Chris Mooney