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Uncertain Principles

Thoughts on physics, politics, and pop culture, by a physics professor at a small liberal arts college, plus occasional conversations with his dog.

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"Uncertain Principles" features the miscellaneous ramblings of a physicist at a small liberal arts college. Physics, politics, pop culture, and occasional conversations with his dog.

Chad Orzel "Prof. Orzel gives the impression of an everyday guy who just happens to have a vast but hidden knowledge of physics." (anonymous student evaluation comment)

Emmy, the Queen of Niskayuna Emmy is a German Shepherd mix, and the Queen of Niskayuna. She likes treats, walks, chasing bunnies, and quantum physics.

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Links for 2010-07-29

Category: Links Dump
Posted on: July 29, 2010 7:57 AM, by Chad Orzel

  • Meet the real victims of Bush-era lawlessness: his lawyers. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine
    "Those who distorted and upended the legal rules during the Bush era have hermetically sealed themselves inside a legal tautology that provides that lawyers cannot be held accountable for merely offering legal advice, and nonlawyers cannot be held accountable because they believed that what they did was legal. But now we are poised to drown in an even more dangerous tautology--first offered up by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey--which holds that the Bush administration lawyers made mistakes because they were the victims of the "difficulty and novelty" of the legal questions before them, and then victimized again by "relentless," "hostile," and "unforgiving" critics who would hold them responsible for their decisions. Under this view there can be no legitimate criticism of the Bush lawyers--no matter how well-intentioned or how well-reasoned, such criticism is partisan and political and vengeful. There is no law. There is only your team versus mine. "
    (tags: law politics US war society lithwick slate evil)
  • Physics - Berry's phase and quantization in topological insulators
    "The excitation of macroscopic quantum matter often occurs in lumps: The amount of magnetic flux that pierces a superconductor can only increase in units of the flux quantum of h/2e; the conductance of a two-dimensional electron gas in a magnetic field is quantized in units of e2/h (the conductance quantum). Now, writing in Physical Review Letters, Wang-Kong Tse and Allan H. MacDonald of the University of Texas at Austin, US, present theoretical calculations that show that the magneto-optical response of a three-dimensional topological insulator--an otherwise nonconducting material with a band structure that gives rise to conducting states along its surface--is quantized in units of the vacuum fine-structure constant, α=e2/ħc=1/137. Their finding is an example of how the exotic properties of topological order in a three-dimensional solid lead to an exactly quantized excitation"
    (tags: science physics condensed-matter materials articles)
  • AAAS - AAAS Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science
    "The AAAS Early Career Award for Public Engagement with Science, established in 2010, recognizes early-career scientists and engineers who demonstrate excellence in their contribution to public engagement with science activities. A monetary prize of $5,000, a commemorative plaque, complimentary registration to the AAAS Annual Meeting, and reimbursement for reasonable hotel and travel expenses to attend the AAAS Annual Meeting to receive the prize are given to the recipient. For the purposes of this award, public engagement activities are defined as the individual's active participation in efforts to engage with the public on science- and technology-related issues and promote meaningful dialogue between science and society."
    (tags: science outreach education politics society culture awards)
  • How Preschool Changes the Brain | Wired Science | Wired.com
    "[T[he Perry Preschool Experiment consisted of 123 low income African-American children from Yspilanti, Michigan. (All the children had IQ scores between 75 and 85.) When the children were three years old, they were randomly assigned to either a treatment group, and given a high-quality preschool education, or to a control group, which received no preschool education at all. The subjects were then tracked over the ensuing decades, with the most recent analysis comparing the groups at the age of 40. The differences, even decades after the intervention, were stark: Adults assigned to the preschool program were 20 percent more likely to have graduated from high school and 19 percent less likely to have been arrested more than five times. They got much better grades, were more likely to remain married and were less dependent on welfare programs."
    (tags: psychology education politics race diversity cog-sci blogs lehrer)
  • DIY Kit Puts Satellites Into Orbit for $8,000 : Discovery News
    "Bringing the do-it-yourself market to a whole new level, a California firm is selling kits to build a personal satellite -- and get it into space -- for $8,000. The program, called TubeSat, is the brainchild of Randa and Roderick Milliron, a Mojave, Calif.-based couple who've been developing a bare-bones, low-cost rocket system for the past 14 years. Selling flights as a package deal with satellite-building kits is proving to be a winning combination, with more than a dozen customers signed up to fly on the debut launch early next year."
    (tags: science technology space news business)
  • Not as Web Savvy as You Think : Northwestern University Newscenter
    "After using Google to get to a website, this interaction occurred between a researcher and a study participant: Researcher: "What is this website?" Student: "Oh, I don't know. The first thing that came up." "Search engine rankings seem extremely important," [Eszter] Hargittai said. "We found that a website's layout or content almost didn't even matter to the students. What mattered is that it was the number one result on Google.""
    (tags: science social-science computing internet news academia education)
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