Academia
Category archives for Academia
Trickle Down Science
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 2, 2012 A week or so ago, lots of people were linking to this New York Review of Books article by Steven Weinberg on “The Crisis of Big Science,” looking back over the last few decades of, well, big science. It’s somewhat dejected survey of whopping huge experiments, and the increasing difficulty of getting them funded, including…
Bad Reporting About Women in STEM
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 27, 2012 This is apparently my day to be annoyed at the reporting of pieces about gender differences in STEM, because a bunch of people are linking to this PBS NewsHour article about women in engineering, which is linked to an interview with Maria Klawe of Harvey Mudd College, who I ran across a few weeks back…
Historical Interdisciplinarity Examples?
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 25, 2012 For something I’m working on, I’m trying to come up with good examples of interdisciplinarity making a difference in science. Specifically, I’m looking for cases where somebody with training in one field was able to make a major advance in another field because their expertise let them look at a problem in a different way,…
A Brief History of Timekeeping: Final Notes
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 10, 2012 Between unpleasant work stuff and the Dread Stomach Bug wiping out the better part of five days, I only got my student evaluation comments for my winter term class last week, and I’m only getting around to writing the post-mortem now. This was, for those who may not have been obsessively following my course reports,…
Union College in the “Frozen Four”
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 5, 2012 While none of the college basketball teams I root for made the Final Four in their respective tournaments, I probably really ought to note that there is a team that might loosely be termed “mine” that’s playing in the national semifinal. Then again, since they’ve gotten this far without me saying anything about them at…
Two Women-in-Science Notes
Posted by Chad Orzel on April 5, 2012 Two things I was forwarded or pointed toward this week, that interact a little oddly. First chronologically is from the New York Times, which has a story about how Harvey Mudd College has boosted the number of female computer science majors, by committing serious resources to reforming the intro course (which is required of all…
Query for Non-Physicists: Initial Reactions
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 27, 2012 I was thinking about attitudes toward physics the other day, and realized that whenever I meet somebody (not a physicist) for the first time and tell them that I’m a physicist, their initial responses most frequently fall into one of three general categories: “You must be really smart.” “I hated that when I took it…
The Uneasy Balance of Residential Academia
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 27, 2012 I mentioned this in the Links Dump this morning, but Timothy Burke’s post on the inherent tensions in the residential part of small college life is really excellent stuff, and deserves more than the 1000 characters I can quote in Delicious: At Swarthmore this semester, for example, some students were deeply annoyed that the administration…
This Week in the Journal of Previously Solved Problems
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 15, 2012 Over at the Scholarly Kitchen, Kent Anderson complains about the uselessness of comments on journals: Comments in online scientific journals have been notoriously poor — either too much material of uneven quality or too little discussion to amount to a hill of beans. All too often, commenting has to be shut down because internecine and…
It’s Not Finished, It’s Just Done
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 15, 2012 There was a nice piece at Inside Higher Ed yesterday on the myth of more time: A lack of confidence in one’s abilities as a writer, researcher, speaker, etc. is at the root of the myth of more time. When a deadline looms, we become acutely aware of the imminent reception of our work by…
