January 9, 2009
Category:
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Score one for the smart kids. Don't talk to me about Maryland.
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"The myth that scientists adopted peer review broadly and early in the history of science is surprisingly widely believed, despite being false. It's true that peer review has been used for a long time - a process recognizably similar to the modern system was in use as early as 1731, in the Royal Society of Edinburgh's Medical Essays and Observations. But in most scientific journals, peer review wasn't routine until the middle of the twentieth century"
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"[I]f your goal is to cook and cook quickly, to get a satisfying and enjoyable variety of real food on the table as often as possible, a well-stocked pantry and fridge can sustain you. Replenished weekly or even less frequently, with an occasional stop for fresh vegetables, meat, fish and dairy, they are the core supply houses for the home cook. "
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"Jena Wolfe of The Today Show gives a behind the scenes glimpse of Iron Chef America. She did her story during one episode I [Michael Ruhlman] happened to be judging, along with my fellow haircut (who in fact makes a very good literary point in this 3-minute story)."
Posted by Chad Orzel at 4:00 AM • 0 Comments
January 8, 2009
Category: Academia • Education • History of Science • Physics • Science
A couple years ago, we revised the General Education requirements at the college to require all students to take a "Sophomore Research Seminar" in their second year. These classes are supposed to be writing-intensive, and introduce students to the basics of academic research. The specified course components are pretty heavily slanted toward the humanities-- library searches, primary vs. secondary sources, and so on-- and don't really map that well onto research practices in the sciences.
A colleague in engineering managed to do a really interesting project-based class, though, and since hearing him talk about it, I've been idly thinking of possible ways to do something that fits better with science (usually at times when I really ought to be thinking of something else). This morning, while I was thinking about labs for my modern physcis class, it occurred to me that it might be possible to build a course around the idea of great experiments in the history of science.
In essence, this would be like "The Giant's Shoulders: The Class.
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 12:42 PM • 4 Comments
Category: Academia • Education • Physics • Quantum Optics • Science
Over at the theoretical physics beach party, Moshe is talking about teaching quantum mechanics, specifically an elective course for upper-level undergraduates. He's looking for some suggestions of special topics:
The course it titled "Applications of quantum mechanics", and is covering the second half of the text by David Griffiths, whose textbooks I find to be uniformly excellent. A more accurate description of the material would be approximation methods for solving the Schrodinger equation. Not uncommonly in the physics curriculum, when the math becomes more demanding the physics tends to take a back seat, so we are going to spend quite a bit of the time on what is essentially a course in differential equations, using WKB approximations and perturbation theory and what not. To counter that, I am looking for short and sweet applications of quantum mechanics. Short topics which can be taught in an hour or less, and involve some cool concepts in addition to practicing the new mathematical techniques.
I'm hampered in this by not knowing what's in the second half of Griffiths (the analogous class at Williams was taught out of Park's book, because he's there; I used to have a copy of Griffiths in my office, but it seems to have wandered off). I'm currently teaching a much lower-level version of a similar course, though, so I can suggest a few things:
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 11:22 AM • 6 Comments
Category: Academia • History of Science • Physics • Science
In the "uncomfortable questions" comment thread, Thony C. suggests:
You say you're teaching "modern physics" so how about a running commentary on the stuff your teaching?
That's a good suggestion, and I'll start posting some sketchy reports soon. First, though, Bora asks:
What is un-modern physics?
Roughly speaking, physics gets divided into "Classical Physics" and "Modern Physics," with the dividing line coming right around 1900.
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:20 AM • 6 Comments
Category: Academia • Education • My Lab • Physics • Science
My senior thesis student this year came to my office today to ask a question as he's starting to work on writing his thesis. I've given him copies of the theses of the last couple of students to work in my lab, and asked him to start on a draft of the background sections. He was worried that he wouldn't be able to make the background sections sufficiently distinct from the corresponding sections in the earlier theses.
This is a sort of tricky point when it comes to issues of academic honesty in science. Scientific questions always have definite right and wrong answers, and that limits the range of possible responses. It can be difficult to catch cheaters in science classes, because the right answers will necessarily look pretty much the same. The only unambiguous way to catch people copying off one another is to spot two papers making the same improbable mistakes. (Which happens fairly often, actually. I don't have a problem with students working together on homework-- in fact, I encourage it-- but I do ask that they report who they worked with. Inevitably, though, at least one group won't, and they're always surprised when I write "You worked with X, Y, and Z on this. In the future, please state that clearly on the paper.)
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 8:41 AM • 4 Comments
Category: Links Dump
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"In other words, there is a reference frame in which what is "right under your nose" is far far away, and just seconds after the big bang (let's ignore cosmology for now.) "
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Why are actuaries so popular, anyway?
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Love those recursive acronyms.
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"So, if you want to raise the moral value of a particular action, what you need to do is make sure that the positive aspects of the action are valued in markets where the price is high, and the negative aspects where the market is low. For example, an advocate of the Iraq war can be a virtue ethicist as regards their own heroic standard against Ba'athist dictatorship, a deontologist regarding obligations to punish the criminal behavior of their enemies, regardless of the unintended effects on the millions of people living in the general vicinity, and a consequentialist regarding the necessity to excuse the criminal behavior of their leaders for fear of subsequent bad effects on the polity."
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"Their breakthrough is to have found that the structure of the web is determined by three factors: the number of inbound links to a page, the rate at which pages are created and deleted and the likelihood that somebody visiting a page will link to it."
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"Some of them dealt with major controversies over political interference with science at the Environmental Protection Agency, the teaching of creationism, and women's access to reproductive health services. Others tackled challenges of a networked world, or considered how policy can better harness the talents of a burgeoning scientific workforce."
Posted by Chad Orzel at 4:00 AM • 0 Comments
January 7, 2009
Category: Technology
I get tons of all-campus email, and more and more of these seem to be of the form "Please see the attached Word file, containing a plain text document with minimal formatting that could just as easily have been pasted into the body of the message." Happily, I have my campus email forwarded to my GMail account, and I can opt to view the text as HTML, rather than opening Word to see it, but it's irritating.
Is there some reason why it would be preferable to send campus announcements out as Word files rather than as plain text in an email? Or is this just a case of laziness and technical incompetence?
Is there a polite way to tell people (many of whom outrank me) to knock this off because it irritates me to no end?
Posted by Chad Orzel at 3:26 PM • 24 Comments
Category: Astronomy • Science
In response to the call for uncomfortable questions, Jason Failes asks:
What's the best evidence for the Big Bang theory?
The more I read about it (25 years ago to present), the more contrived, ad hoc, and retro-dictive it seems.
At this point, what would falsify the Big Bang theory?
What would falsify the Big Bang? Jesus Christ his own self turning up at the American Astronomical Society meeting, turning water to wine, and giving a talk titled "What Big Bang? How I Hoaxed You All."
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 11:19 AM • 10 Comments
Category: Religion
In the uncomfortable questions thread, David White asks:
Ever entertained the notion that attacks on true science from the muscular political creationism/ID lobby might be vitiated by exposure of their great and inexplicable theological flaw (gasp!) dating all the way back to William Paley?
Not really, no. Because, you know, there are only so many hours in the day.
I don't mean to be rudely dismissive of David's thesis, which is laid out at length on his own blog, and is detailed and well argued. The thing is, though, the political problem of creationism has relatively little to do with theology. Or, to paraphrase something Brother Guy Consolmagno of the Vatican Observatory said when he visited campus this past fall, young earth creationism is a very particular Protestant heresy, and has nothing to do with me.
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:27 AM • 11 Comments
Category: Economics
In response to my request for uncomfortable questions, Lou asks:
As a private college professor and a new parent, I'm sure you are aware that the current rates of tuition growth are unsustainable indefinitely. When do you expect to see the rates drop back to inflation levels, rather than continuing to grow 3-4% above it?
The short answer is "The minute that students and parents start going elsewhere." The setting of tuition rates is a Black Art, but the essential calculation is striking a balance between "What do we need to improve our operation?" and "What will the market bear?" If people stop putting up with big tuition increases, and application numbers drop, then tuition rates will stop increasing quite so rapidly.
The long answer...
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:30 AM • 23 Comments
Category: Links Dump
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"According to the article almost 40% of the 59 science education specialists, surveyed in the California University system, were "seriously considering leaving" their current jobs and some (20%) were considering leaving the field entirely."
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The paper mentioned in the press release below.
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An amusingly garbled press release about some interesting quantum optics results.
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"After the human race is enslaved by robots, there are going to be small rebel groups hiding out somewhere and Elliot Spitzer's going to be writing op-eds about how "no one could have predicted" that the robots would rebel and overthrow their masters. "
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"NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered 12 new gamma-ray-only pulsars and has detected gamma-ray pulses from 18 others. The finds are transforming our understanding of how these stellar cinders work.
"We know of 1,800 pulsars, but until Fermi we saw only little wisps of energy from all but a handful of them," says Roger Romani of Stanford University, Calif. "Now, for dozens of pulsars, we're seeing the actual power of these machines.""
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"She said that while cc grads who transfer to her university do just as well academically as native students, they don't donate as much back to the university as alums. They only spent two years there, instead of four, so they don't feel the same level of attachment. The university knows that, so it puts a pretty tight lid on transfer admissions. It admits a few students to fill out the numbers in some upper-level courses, but that's it. It doesn't want to jeopardize the future funding stream from donations."
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"The best of colleges' "family friendly" policies may be profoundly unfriendly if you tell new parents about them, but not other key people -- such as those who evaluate those new parents for tenure."
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"I had invited Ms. Corriher [food biochemist] and her husband, Arch, who were in New York from Atlanta for a visit, to dinner to help answer some kitchen curiosities. Cookbooks bark out instructions like boot camp orders -- Add oil to pasta water! Salt the eggplant! Brown meat to seal in juices! -- and legions of home cooks obediently follow them.
I wondered how many of these truisms had a scientific underpinning and how many were but myths."
Posted by Chad Orzel at 4:00 AM • 0 Comments
January 6, 2009
Category: Personal • Steelykid!
In response to my call for uncomfortable questions, Ewan goes for the jugular:
what do you think your biggest failing as a father has been to date?
See, this is the sort of thing I'm talking about...
The answer is "I get frustrated too easily."
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 8:25 PM • 12 Comments
Category: Blogs
I'm feeling kind of uninspired, blog-wise. I've got a few ResearchBlogging type posts in the mental queue, but they're not going to get written before the weekend, and the other obvious topics are things that I've written about N times before, and I'm not fired up for iteration N+1. So, we'll repeat last year's uncomfortable questions experiment, which worked pretty well:
Everyone has things they blog about.
Everyone has things they don't blog about.
Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don't blog about, but you'd like to hear about, and I'll write a post about it.
So, fire away. Ask me a question I haven't talked about before.
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:47 AM • 18 Comments
Category: Academia
Classes started yesterday for the winter term. This is the first time I've had to teach in six months, thanks to juggling my schedule so as to let me stay home for much of the Fall term. I'm always surprised by how much I forget, and how much I remember about the process.
The remembered stuff is pretty obvious-- bits of trivia that aren't in my lecture notes, or old ad-libs that work well to hep make some point or another. The forgotten stuff is stuff that seems like it ought to be obvious, like just how much talking is involved in the process. I came out of yesterday's class and drank the better part of a liter of water immediately, and my mouth was still dry.
The class I'm teaching-- sophomore-level "Modern Physics" (i.e., Relativity and QM)-- necessarily involves a lot of lecturing. This isn't the sort of material that students have good intuition for, so it's really hard to do much with class discussion. Especially at the start, when there's a fair bit of background that they need to learn before anything else.
Of course, I'm forever second-guessing that, especially after reading stories about the effectiveness of "peer instruction". And I will make the usual effort to get more discussion into the class, probably starting with the paradoxes that crop up in relativity, which should be Friday's class. There's enough material to cover, though, and so much of it is factual in nature, that I always end up defaulting to a mostly-lecture format.
Which means that I always forget just how much of the class time is spent talking. There are plenty of things that are worse to forget, of course, but that doesn't cut down on the amount of water I end up drinking.
Posted by Chad Orzel at 9:26 AM • 4 Comments
Category: Links Dump
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"The middle fifth of the income distribution begins at a yearly income of $34,738 per household. Assume they pay 20 percent in total taxes (it's probably a bit higher), and they're left with $27,798 to live on. That's fairly rough if you're raising a family. The top 0.01 percent, by contrast, begins at a yearly income of $20,471,271. Assume they pay, including state and local taxes, 35 percent of their income (they probably pay less), and they're living on a mere $15,353,453 a year. It's hard to imagine the electorate taking much pity on that sort of suffering."
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A scaling argument for why traffice is worse in bigger cities.
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"The case for privatisation had two main elements. First, there was the fiscal argument for privatisation, namely, that governments could improve their financial position by selling government business enterprises. This argument assumed that privately owned firms would have higher levels of operating efficiency, and therefore that the value of those firms would be increased by privatisation. The second argument was a dynamic one, that the allocation of capital between alternative investments would be improved if governments were not involved in the process. Both of these arguments have been fatally undermined by the collapse of the efficient markets hypothesis."
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"Leon Lederman, a Nobel prize winner and a champion of "Physics First," gave a talk at the Minnesota AAPT section meeting this fall, and there he remarked that perhaps we should require all students to take three years of science in high school with an emphasis on the connections between all science disciplines, perhaps even naming the classes Science I, Science II, and Science III."
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What could be simpler than one giant button?
Posted by Chad Orzel at 4:01 AM • 0 Comments
January 5, 2009
Category: Football • Physics • Sports
It's NFL playoff time, which means that sports fans will be treated to the sight of the most high-stakes farce in sports, namely the ritual of "bringing out the chains" to determine whether a team has gained enough yards for a first down. We've all seen this: the play is whistled dead, a referee un-stacks the pile of players, picks up the ball, and puts it down more or less where the player was stopped. Then he tosses the ball into the middle of the field, to a second referee, who tries to replicate the spot closer to the center of the field. Then a guy on the sideline carrying a big stick (connected by a ten-yard chain to another stick held by another guy) tries to put the end of the stick at the same position as the ball.
Three plays later, the spotting procedure is repeated, and then the sticks are bought out to the center of the field, the chain is stretched taut, and they measure the position of the ball to the nearest millimeter. Because, of course, there's absolutely no error in placing the sticks.
The whole ritual is preposterous, and anybody with the slightest scientific inclination has to wonder: "Isn't there a better way of doing this?" So, what would be required to do a better job of this?
Read on »
Posted by Chad Orzel at 10:47 AM • 32 Comments
