-
"I had a fun conversation with a student this week who had a number of challenging questions about issues to pose to me. The question Iâm still knocking around: if academic cultural critics understand expressive culture so expertly, why canât they create it? Wouldnât it be better to always have experience in creating the cultural forms that you study?
I noted that this is an old and familiar (if legitimate) challenge. It popped up recently in Ratatouille, for example, but this is an old battle littered with bon mots and bitter denunciations. Thinking about it during the conversation, I tried to map out the range of existing answers that scholars and critics have offered at various times. Hereâs what I came up with off the cuff as variant kinds of responses to this issue, quickly sketched. "
-
"In the first study, Nobel laureate Philip Anderson of Princeton University addresses supersolids theoretically. Contrary to present computer models, he claims that supersolidity can be explained as superfluid of atom vacancies in a solid lattice. Moreover, he says that all âbosonicâ solids â those that contain atoms with integer values of spin â should be a supersolid in their quantum ground state.
In the second study, Seamus Davis of Cornell University and colleagues find evidence that supersolid signatures observed in other experiments actually suggest more of a glassy, rather than a crystalline, behaviour. In other words, the supersolids reported might be termed more accurately âsuperglassesâ. "
-
"They say science journalism is in a crisis mode. Many newspapers are cutting their science sections, and even the venerable Scientific American is struggling to find a business model that works in the age of the internet. So why on earth would I decide now is the time to start charging for a bit of rather home-grown science journalism?"
-
"Introducing "How Science Works" into the United Kingdom's science curriculum hasn't been smooth sailing. A vociferous group of science teachers questioned whether standards of science education would decline if science lessons became debates about scientific issues and controversies rather than teaching children how to devise experiments, what scientific laws govern our universe, and sparking an interest in the natural world. But knowing how science progresses and how ideas and evidence are developed should always have been an integral part of science education. At a time when competing views are treated as equally valid regardless of the evidence, students must be encouraged to develop critical enquiry skills and to ask questions of the information they are presented or seek out online."
-
Have recent experiments detected dark matter? Maybe. Bonus: free pdf download of the paper.
-
The whale on the ceiling of the American Museum of Natural History is on Twitter.
Categories
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media » Far from the Peer-Reviewed Journal,Scientists Confront How-Tos of Op-Eds
"So how can scientists strategically convey their messages to a broad audience without losing the nuances of their field? "
(tags: science politics writing journalism)…
PHD Comics: Grading Rubric
Sounds about right. Maybe a little too generous on the lower row.
(tags: comics piled-higher academia education silly)
Producing novel semiconductors en masse - physicsworld.com
"John Rogers, working with colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign…
james_nicoll: In the spirit of Christopher Wren
"How much would it cost to rebuild Port-au-Prince with the infrastructure a modern, first-world city should have? Large sections of it will have to be rebuilt so it might as well be done right."
(tags: economics politics world blogs james-nicoll)…
BOOK EXPO AMERICA LUNCHEON TALK
"The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely...more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.
Please don…
Problem is when there are more questions than there are answers. So, (for instance): it electrical car. In the views of the electrical trains and trolley cars and the autotamponneuses of fair, why t-il has there no cars which would circulate as autoscooters in fairground holidays? With pantographs and catenary (electrified wire nettings). Cars would recharge their batteries to go to places where there is no electricity. Nuclear electricity is cheap faced with oil. Why is it a problem?
Le problème est quand il y a plus de questions qu'il n'y a de réponses. Ainsi, (par exemple): le voiture électrique. Aux vues des trains électriques et tramways et autotamponneuses de la fête foraine, pourquoi n'y a t-il pas des voitures qui circuleraient comme les autoscooters dans les fêtes foraines? Avec des pantographes et caténaires (grillages électrifiés). Les voitures rechargeraient leurs batteries pour aller en des lieux où il n'y a pas l'électricité. L'électricité nucléaire est bon marché face au pétrole. Pourquoi est ce un problème ?