I watched every Coen brothers movie. – By David Haglund – Slate Magazine "My opinion changed later–not of each of those films (not entirely), but of the Coens’ work as a whole. Before coming to that reversal, though, I think it’s worth sitting for a moment with that earlier reaction. A lot of moviegoers, and… Continue reading Links for 2011-08-11
Month: August 2011
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
Links for 2011-08-10
PhD thesis delight | Turning mirrors "In the beginning vast public funding created heavenly lab-space on earth. Now the labs were formless and empty and the spirited physicists were contemplating over their future experiments. And they said let there be light and they built a grating stabilised external cavity diode laser. And they said let… Continue reading Links for 2011-08-10
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
Links for 2011-08-09
News: The Education/Religion Connection – Inside Higher Ed "For years, a commonly held belief has been that more educated Americans are less likely to embrace religion. But an article forthcoming (abstract available here) in The Review of Religious Research suggests that the relationship between education and faith is more nuanced, and that more education has… Continue reading Links for 2011-08-09
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
Ten Years Before the Blog
While future historians will undoubtedly remember August 7th primarily as SteelyKid’s birthday (it would be irresponsible of me to encourage people to go edit the Wikipedia date page accordingly, wouldn’t it?), there was another locally important event on August 7th, some years earlier: August 7th, 2001, saw my first blog post ever, the inaugural post… Continue reading Ten Years Before the Blog