Links for 2010-05-07

  • I’ve seen more terrible slide presentations in my life than good ones, but that stat isn’t necessarily an indictment of the program–I’ve also encountered a lot more terrible books than terrific ones, and I’ve certainly seen more ugly Web sites than pretty ones. Yes, PowerPoint–and slide software in general, a category that includes Apple’s Keynote–can be heroically misused. But if you use it correctly, slide software can help you captivate and inform an audience in a way that a speech alone could never manage.
  • “While 77 per cent say that teaching and research are equally important and only 7 per cent say that research takes precedence, when asked to select a candidate for a role involving both duties, 48 per cent chose a star researcher with no significant teaching experience.

    The report says that the respondents believe that this is the appointment their institution would want them to make, adding that despite missions to educate, most top-level universities are “far more interested” in pursuing a research than a teaching agenda.

    It notes that such institutions tend to “direct more funding, awards and job security to outstanding researchers than outstanding teachers”.”

  • “In a rubidium atom, just one electron occupies the outer valence shell. With precisely tuned lasers, the researchers excited this electron so that it moved 100 times farther away from the nucleus of the atom, which classified it as a Rydberg atom. That valence electron in this case is so far away from the nucleus that it behaves almost as if it’s a free electron.

    To trap the Rydberg atoms, the researchers took advantage of what’s called the “ponderomotive force” that allows them to secure a whole atom by holding fast to one electron—the sole valence shell particle in the rubidium Rydberg atoms. The optical lattice, formed with intense, interfering laser beams, is what provides the ponderomotive force.

    “The laser field holds on to the electron, which behaves almost as if it were free, but the residual weak atomic binding force still holds the atom together. In effect, the entire atom is trapped by the lasers,” [Michigan’s Georg] Raithel said.”

2 comments

  1. To be fair, everything else being equal a star researcher will pull in money for a dozen other people at the department. A star teacher, no matter how good, will only ever pull in money to cover themselves.

    So of course a department will prefer somebody with a proven grant-writing record over a teaching record. After all, if the star researcher is a dud at teaching you can spend one part-time salary for somebody to cover their teaching duties and still come out way ahead. But you can’t adjust for a star teacher that doesn’t get any grants; they won’t cover their part of the grad student and post-doc costs no matter what you do.

  2. The Lord. / Niels Bohr./
    Does Modern Physics never strike you right?

    Mephistopheles. / Wolfgang Pauli./
    No, Lord ! I pity Physics only for its plight,
    And in my doleful days it pains and sorely grieves me.
    No wonder I complain – but who believes me?

    / The Blegdamsvej. Faust. 1932./
    =============================.

    The Electron’s puzzles.

    The electron is not a point.
    It is forbidden to electron to be hard as a steel, it must be elastic.
    The electron doesn’t have really orbit . . .
    It is a reason of a standing wave of fantastically high frequency.
    It can be a corpuscular and a wave at the same time.
    On the one hand, in interaction with aether all its parameters
    becomes infinite, but on the other hand, it is the reason
    of electromagnetic waves and a density in the aether.
    The electron has a negative twin brother – positron.
    #
    1900, 1905
    Planck and Einstein found the energy of electron: E=h*f.
    1916
    Sommerfeld found the formula of electron : e^2=ah*c,
    it means: e= +ah*c and e= -ah*c.
    1928
    Dirac found two more formulas of electron’s energy:
    +E=Mc^2 and -E=Mc^2.
    Questions.
    Why does electron have five ( 5 ) formulas ?
    Why does electron obey three Laws ?
    a) The Law of conservation and transformation energy/ mass
    b) The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle / Law
    c) The Pauli Exclusion Principle/ Law
    #
    What is an electron ?
    Now nobody knows .
    In the internet we can read hundreds theories of electron.
    For example.
    More than ten different models of the electron are presented here. (!!!)
    More than twenty models are discussed briefly. (!!!)
    Thus, the book gives a complete picture of contemporary theoretical
    thinking (traditional and new) about the physics of the electron.
    / The book “What is the Electron?”
    Volodimir Simulik. Montreal, Canada. 2005. /
    http://redshift.vif.com/BookBlurbs/Electron.htm
    All of them are problematical.
    So, why we call an electron a simple elementary
    particle if it looks not very simple ?
    We can read hundreds books and magazines about philosophy of physics.
    But how can we trust them if we don’t have the real model of Electron ?
    =====================.
    Best wishes.
    Israel Sadovnik Socratus
    ==================.

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