Out in Minnesota, Melissa expresses some high-level confusion over the preference for people with a small-college background: In the past few months, I have been involved in several conversations where someone mentioned that a particular faculty member or administrator was or was not an alum of a small liberal arts college (SLAC) in a manner… Continue reading What Advantage Do “Insiders” Offer?
Category: Education
PNAS: Carl Knutson, Online Education Developer
(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Carl Knutson, who works for a company making online learning systems. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.–post-doc–academic-job track.) 1) What is… Continue reading PNAS: Carl Knutson, Online Education Developer
The Manga guide to Relativity by Nitta, Yamamoto, and Takatsu
Right around the time I sent in the manuscript for my own book explaining relativity to Emmy, I got an email offering me a review copy of The Manga Guide to Relativity, part of a series of English translations of Japanese comic books explaining complicated concepts in a friendly way. That was clearly too good… Continue reading The Manga guide to Relativity by Nitta, Yamamoto, and Takatsu
Practice Matters: “The effect of curriculum on Force Concept Inventory performance: A five thousand student study”
A few years ago, we switched to the Matter & Interactions curriculum for our introductory classes. This has not been without its hiccups, among them the fact that there has been a small decline in the conceptual learning gains measured by the Force Concept Inventory, the oldest and most widely used of the conceptual tests… Continue reading Practice Matters: “The effect of curriculum on Force Concept Inventory performance: A five thousand student study”
The Central Conundrum of Physics Education
Over at Dynamics of Cats, chief herding theorist Steinn has a post on what we know about how to teach physics: To teach physics well, you provide an intensive, mathematically rigorous in-sequence series of classes. You need at least two different parallel classes per term, each class a prerequisite for the succeeding class and coordinated… Continue reading The Central Conundrum of Physics Education
PNAS: Jennifer Saam, Medical Science Liason
(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Jennifer Saam, who translates between different departments at a medical diagnostic laboratory. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.–post-doc–academic-job track.) 1) What… Continue reading PNAS: Jennifer Saam, Medical Science Liason
PNAS: Matthew Schlecht, Freelance Translator
(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Matthew Schlecht, a chemist by training who runs his own technical translation service, Word Alchemy Translation. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default… Continue reading PNAS: Matthew Schlecht, Freelance Translator
More on Divided by Infinity
I had intended last Wednesday’s post on the Many-Worlds variant in Robert Charles Wilson’s Divided by Infinity to be followed by a post on the other things I said when I did a guest lecture on it for an English class. What with one thing and another, though, I got a little distracted, and I’m… Continue reading More on Divided by Infinity
PNAS: Richard Lobinske, Hazardous Waste Manager
(This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Richard Lobinske, a Hazardous Waste Manager (meaning he handles chemicals, such as these decades-old pesticides, not particularly noxious low-level employees). The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options… Continue reading PNAS: Richard Lobinske, Hazardous Waste Manager
The Test(ing) of Time: Measuring the Performance of a Stopwatch
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m schedule to teach a class on “A Brief History of Timekeeping” next winter term as part of the Scholars Research Seminar program. Even though I have a hundred other things to do, I continue to think about this a lot. One of the goals of the course is to introduce… Continue reading The Test(ing) of Time: Measuring the Performance of a Stopwatch