I’m putting the finishing touches on Monday’s lecture notes when the dog comes into the library, looking concerned. “Shouldn’t I be doing something to promote the book?” she asks. “Since it won’t be out for another nine months, I don’t think it’s that urgent.” “But aren’t there more Internetty things I could be doing?” “Well,… Continue reading Social Media and the Animal Kingdom
Category: Technology
Contest: Stupidest Word Template?
I needed to generate an electronic recommendation letter for a former student yesterday, and printing the letter on paper and scanning the paper copy seemed a little too… 1998 to be worth doing. As a result, I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling around with Microsoft Word to come up with a template that… Continue reading Contest: Stupidest Word Template?
Why Does Excel Suck So Much?
Yesterday’s bad graphic post spurred me to finally get around to doing the “Why Does Excel Suck So Much?” post I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I gripe about Excel a lot, as we’re more or less forced to use it for data analysis in the intro labs (students who have taken the… Continue reading Why Does Excel Suck So Much?
Good Writing Needs Editing
Inspired by Leigh Butler at tor.com, I’ve been re-reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books. This happened to coincide with my recent vicious cold, which is good, because they’re great sickbed reading. Most of my re-reading has been done on my Palm, which miraculously came loaded with electronic copies of all the books. These are… Continue reading Good Writing Needs Editing
Asteroids Killed Newspapers, GIF at 11
This week’s Science Saturday on bloggingheads.tv features Carl Zimmer and Phil “Bad Astronomy” Plait: It’s a wide-ranging conversation, covering topics in astronomy, why people believe crazy things, how the Internet can help, and the death of newspapers and their eventual replacement by blogs. Plait is really energetic (he spends a couple of minutes talking over… Continue reading Asteroids Killed Newspapers, GIF at 11
Journalists Are Amplifiers
A few days ago, Bee put up a post titled Do We Need Science Journalists?, linking back to Bora’s enormous manifesto from the first bit of the Horgan-Johnson bloggingheads kerfuffle. My first reaction was “Oh, God, not again…” but her post did make me think of one thing, which is illustrated by Peter Woit’s latest… Continue reading Journalists Are Amplifiers
Information Insecurity
I only started using FriendFeed a few months ago because other people at the Science in the 21st Century workshop were documenting the conference on it. I quickly became a fan of the service, which not only added an extra dimension to the meeting, but has also been a continuing source of interesting material from… Continue reading Information Insecurity
Blackboard and WebAssign
Several other people in the department have started using WebAssign to handle homework assignments in the introductory class, because it provides a way to assign and grade daily homework without forcing the faculty member to do a ton of grading (the college has a policy against student graders). WebAssign takes textbook problems, randomizes the numbers… Continue reading Blackboard and WebAssign
Science Is What Makes Us Human
In his inaugural address, President Obama pledged to “restore science to its rightful place.” Following up on that, the Corporate Masters have launched the Rightful Place Project, asking bloggers, readers, and scientists to define the rightful place of science. Many of these responses will focus on narrow matters of policy, but as many have said… Continue reading Science Is What Makes Us Human
Closed Notebook Science
Over at Biocurious, Philip is thinking about digital notebooks, and has found a system that works for him: My computer algebra system of choice is Mathematica, and because of Mathematica’s notebook system, it became extremely straightforward to include sufficient commentary among the analysis and calculations. The important “working” details of my day are recorded on… Continue reading Closed Notebook Science