Physical Sciences
drorzel | March 27, 2006As the number of students taking physics who go on to major in physics is vanishingly small-- something like 3% of students in introductory physics take even one more class-- physics departments end up serving a number of different constituencies. There are students majoring in other sciences, future engineers, and then there are the pre-meds.
For reasons I don't pretend to understand, the MCAT includes a section on physics. As a result, everybody who wants to go to medical school needs to take physics, so we teach a lot of future doctors (along with a lot of people I devoutly hope never to…
evolgen | March 23, 2006Alex Palazzo managed to piss off some people with his taxonomy of biomedical disciplines. We have also learned that there are different types of physics geeks and anthropologists. (By the way, don't ever call me a geek; geeks bite the heads off of chickens. I'm a nerd.) I previously attempted to classify evolutionary biologists and named them after the important names in their particular field. It was actually a satire of the creationist ploy to call people Darwinists, so laugh. Now I'm going to further divide up the evolutionary geneticists (already a sub-set of biologists) into a bunch…
apalazzo | March 22, 2006Evolution biologists, ecologists, epidemiologists, earth scientists, herpetologists ...
I obviously didn't know what I was getting into when I posted the first of many Geek Taxonomy entries. This led to many disgruntled comments and emails from all the non-bench biologists. People wanted to know why I omitted their particular specialty. Look I can only make fun of those I know. Others complained "I'm a geneticist studying biomechanics of Xenopus eye deformation, with an interest in evo-devo". (more below the fold)
Very nice, but you used the word "geneticist" - that term implies a certain…
jstemwedel | March 21, 2006Alex Palazzo at The Daily Transcript has posted his lighthearted take on the disciplines within the life sciences. Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers notes some important omissions while pointing out that the categories are more porous in real life. Meanwhile, Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles sets out a taxonomy of physics specialties.
If you think I'm going to give you the geek chart for chemistry or philosophy of science, you must be daft.
There are good reasons for this. Even though chemists are generally pretty good at sorting themselves and others into the broad categories (organic…
drorzel | March 21, 2006Alex Palazzo offers a taxonomy of biologists, and takes some heat in the comments for leaving people out or mischaracterizing subdisciplines. This reminded me that I did a similar post about physics quite some time ago-- almost four years! That's, like, a century in blog-time...
I'll reproduce the geek taxonomy after the cut, and clean up a few rotted links.
Geek Taxonomy
So, what, exactly, is it that I do for a living? (Other than come in to work every morning and respond to disgruntled emails about the grades I hand out, that is...). Depending on the context, I have a bunch of different…
apalazzo | March 16, 2006Early last year when the whole Larry Summers saga broke out, I posted some data on gender and science that was floating in the public sphere.
Here I've reposted some of this data. THEN I'll tell you some recent data from Harvard ...
From a NY Times article Feb 22nd, 2005Women in Physics Match Men in Success Dr. Ivie said the main reason fewer women made it to the top in physics was simply that fewer started at the bottom. At each job level, she said, the fraction of women matched what would be expected for women advancing at the same rate as men. And at top-tier universities, the percentage…
jstemwedel | March 8, 2006It's Blog Against Sexism Day.
There are those inclined to think that sexism is no longer an issue in science. Yes, it's horrible that in the past women were kept from pursuing science and barred from science jobs. But now, the doors are wide open and anyone who wants to can be a scientist.
Things are surely better than they used to be. But it is not yet the case that a woman's entry to science is just as easy and unproblematic as a man's.
There is data around (Tara provides some here) about how much more leaky the science pipeline is for women than for men. There are those who have…
drorzel | March 8, 2006Next term, I'm slated to offer one of our "Advanced Topics in Physics" upper-level elective classes. I was originally asked to do atomic physics, but looking at the syllabus and available texts, I decided I'd rather take a different tack, and agreed to develop a new course instead.
I call myself an atomic physicist, and I go to the annual meetings of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics (this year in Knoxville, whee!), but most of what falls under that heading these days is not what old-school guys would call atomic physics-- spectroscopy, atomic structure, etc. Most of what…
drorzel | March 2, 2006Dennis Overbye writes about popular NASA programs being delayed or cut in order to fund the Moon-and-Mars initiative and support the Space Shuttle/ ISS. Predictably, people who care about actual science are somewhat dismayed-- Gordon Watts serves as a nice example.
Fellow ScienceBlogger Chris Mooney has carved himself out a nice little niche writing about the Republican War on Science, and it would be really nice to be able to lump the warping of NASA in with that. You could even make a decent case, without having to swing too far into tinfoil-hat territory-- some of the missions that are…
cmooney | February 28, 2006Without a doubt, 2005 was the year that ignited a fierce and lasting debate over the extent to which global warming might be increasing the strength of hurricanes. That's largely thanks to two back-to-back scientific papers, published in the leading journals Nature and in Science, which provided data suggesting that storms have grown considerably stronger over the past several decades:
1. Emanuel, "Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years," Nature, Vol 436, August 4, 2005. (PDF)
2. Webster et al, "Changes in Tropical Cyclone Number, Duration, and Intensity in a…
drorzel | February 20, 2006A couple of science-related items from the New York Times:
1) An article on the Cafe Scientifique phenomenon, in which scientists put on monthly get-togethers for the general public, where recent scientific research is explained in layman's terms. It's nice to be reminded that there's still interest in learning about science-- given the numbe of news stries about people rejecting modernity on the grounds that it's icky, it's easy to forget.
(Again, I'll mention that I was pleasantly surprised that twenty-odd people showed up for my "Weird Quantum Phenomena" talk, several of them taking notes…
tlambert | February 14, 2006
Eli Rabett is working his way through Taken By Storm. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this work, it's a global warming denial book which contains some spectacularly Bad Physics, with the authors claiming that average temperature has no physical meaning. Anyway, Rabett is reading chapter two, and finds he needs to create a EssexMcKitrictionary. Here's an extract:
Doctrine of Certainty - the idea that anyone besides Essex (and maybe McKitrick) can know anything. Obviously false. Often called "The Doctrine" includes items that are "manifestly false or the claim to know it is false…
drorzel | February 3, 2006I realized the other day that since moving to ScienceBlogs, I'm turning into John Scalzi (Does my new body have a brand name?), what with all the posting of cute images (and spending an inordinate amount of time taking pictures with an eye toward posting them), and assigning other bloggers homework. If I had a novel, I'd put it on the web, and make millions! Or something.
Anyway, it's nice to have at least one of those things turned around on me: RPM at evolgen is asking for the "string theory" of other sciences: the most controversial and possibly overhyped fields of study.
RPM has obviously…
pharyngula | January 21, 2006
Orson Scott Card has written a long essay defending Intelligent Design.
Oy, but it is depressing.
It's a graceless hash, a cluttered and confusing mish-mash of poorly organized complaints about those darned wicked "Darwinists". He lists 7 arguments. Then he repeats his list, expanding on them. Then he goes on and on, hectoring scientists about how they should behave. For a professional writer, it's just plain bad writing—I'm struggling with how to address his arguments, but he's written such a gluey mass of tangled ranty irrationality that it's hard to get a handle on it. Ugly, ugly, ugly……
jstemwedel | January 18, 2006The commenters here at ScienceBlogs are da bomb! Just look at the insight they contributed to my previous post on fakery in science. Indeed, let's use some of that insight to see if we can get a little bit further on the matter of how to discourage scientists from making it up rather than, you know, actually doing good science.
Three main strategies emerged from the comments so far:
Make the potential payoff of cheating very low compared to the work involved in getting away with it and the penalty you'll face if caught (thus, making just doing good science the most cost-effective strategy…
evolgen | January 17, 2006Chad at Uncertain Principles, one of my ScienceBlogs siblings, is requesting his co-bloggers suggest the most important experiment or discovery in their field. There are a disproportionate amount of "bio-bloggers" -- though we each have our own niche -- and he's asking us to nominate "the most important experiment or observation in biology". I'm expecting that because of our diverse interests, you'll see some differences in how we interpret "important". This leads me to wonder why we have so many life-sciences types at ScienceBlogs and so few math/physics/chemistry types, but that's a…
razib | January 16, 2006Heredity has two free reviews up, Quantitative genetics: Small but not forgotten, and Evolutionary genetics: Fight or flinch? New fields like genomics and evo-devo get a lot of press, and deservedly so, but I believe that the swarm of data generated by these disciplines is going to revitalize quantitative (biometry) and evolutionary genetics. Ultimately the natural sciences are fundamentally a unity. Even though quantum chemistry, molecular biology and ecology have their own domains of study and tools of the trade, there is a common ontological assumption, that of the physical world around…
drorzel | January 4, 2006Posting has been (relatively) light this week because today was the first day of classes. I'm teaching introductory modern physics (relativity and quantum mechanics), a class that I've taught before, but I've been putting a significant amount of time into revising my lecture notes, to keep the class from getting stale.
This has led to a reduction in blogging because I've been preoccupied with educational matters. Happily, PZ Myers comes along with a post about education. It's one of those chain-letter sort of posts, starting with an op-ed by Olivia Judson with some unkind words about high…
stcynic | December 4, 2005To hear most ID advocates tell it, ID is only rejected by "Darwinian fundamentalists" who hold fast to "atheistic materialism." Laurie Goodstein has an article in Sunday's New York Times that puts the lie to that claim. She shows that many organizations and academics who would be seen as likely supporters of ID have been put off by the lack of actual substance being offered:
The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to…
dmunger | March 2, 2005Take a look at the following movie (quicktime required). The movie will alternately flash a picture of a desk and a patterned block. Your job is to see if anything about the picture of the desk changes each time it flashes. Don't replay the movie when you get to the end; just stop.
Did you notice any changes? Most people won't spot any changes at all when they watch this movie the first time. But watch the image as you press play again, and you'll see that the desk has changed significantly from the beginning to the end of the movie. I actually rotated it by two degrees at each point along…