I am an inveterate driver of “back ways” to places. My preferred route to campus involves driving through a whole bunch of residential streets, rather than taking the “main” road leading from our neighborhood to campus. I do this because there are four traffic lights on the main-road route, and they’re not well timed, so… Continue reading Scientific Commuting: When Does It Make Sense to Take Alternate Routes?
Category: Science
Academic Poll: Out of Cite
I’m sending a little pedagogical paper off to a journal today, and spent a while yesterday re-formatting it to meet their standards. This was particularly annoying for the references, as I had to go find a bunch of information that I don’t usually write down. Which seems like a good topic for a poll: A… Continue reading Academic Poll: Out of Cite
The Stupidest Thing You’ll Read Today
Shockingly, it does not seem to involve right-wing politics in any way. It’s this explanation of why swirling wine in your glass clockwise produces different effects than swirling it counter-clockwise. a sample: Like all living things wine cells have a magnetic polarity, just like humans and the Earth. The positive pole is more highly charged,… Continue reading The Stupidest Thing You’ll Read Today
Scientists and Science Fiction
Yesterday was apparently Gender in Science day here, while the theme for today is Tab Clearance– a couple of shortish posts about things that deserve more than just a Links Dump mention, but don’t really cohere into any kind of grand synthesis of deep thoughts, or whatever. This particular link was prompted by an item… Continue reading Scientists and Science Fiction
Economic Astronomy II: Gender Shares of Jobs
The other big gender-disparity graph making the rounds yesterday was this one showing the gender distribution in the general workforce and comparing that to science-related fields: This comes from an Economics and Statistics Administration report which has one of the greatest mismatches between the tone of the headline of the press release and the tone… Continue reading Economic Astronomy II: Gender Shares of Jobs
Economic Astronomy: Gender Gaps in Lifetime Earnings
There are two recent studies of gender disparities in science and technology (referred to by the faintly awful acronym “STEM”) getting a lot of play over the last few days. As is often the case with social-science results, the data they have aren’t quite the data you would really like to have, and I think… Continue reading Economic Astronomy: Gender Gaps in Lifetime Earnings
Outreach vs. Education
An angle I had hoped to get to in last week’s broader impacts post, but didn’t have time for, was this piece questioning meet-the-scientist programs by Aimee Stern at Science 2.0: Over the past several years, a growing number of trade associations, foundations and science and engineering companies have started major efforts to get scientists… Continue reading Outreach vs. Education
A Risky Educational Experiment
It’s that time of year again, when I start thinking about my fall term classes. I would really prefer to put it off for another couple of weeks, and I will put off spending much time on class prep in favor of finishing up some paper-writing and other things, but when the calendar turns to… Continue reading A Risky Educational Experiment
MythBusters to the Rescue (We Hope)
SteelyKid has used a pacifier from very shortly after she was born. We’ve been slowly working her off it– she’s stopped taking it to day care, or using it other than at bedtime or in the car– but she’s resisted giving it up entirely. since she’s now a great big three-year old, we decided it… Continue reading MythBusters to the Rescue (We Hope)
Dog Physics Around the World, and Beyond
When we got home from visiting Kate’s family yesterday, there was a large shipping envelope from my agent waiting for us. This can mean only one thing: author copies of foreign editions! That’s the Czech edition, Jak nauÄit svého psa fyziku, which seems to have used the same glasses-wearing golden retriever as the Brazilian edition.… Continue reading Dog Physics Around the World, and Beyond