NYU Carter Journalism Institute, ProPublica Team Up to Enhance an Essential Form of News Coverage-- "The Explainer" "New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and ProPublica, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative journalism non-profit, have formed a joint project to enhance the genre of "The Explainer," a form of journalism that provides essential background knowledge to follow events and trends in the news. The project aims to improve the art of explanation at ProPublica's site and to share what is learned with the journalism community." (tags: journalism society…

The JCC, where SteelyKid goes to day care, is having a book sale, so the lobby has been full of books for sale the last few days as we've headed out. Getting SteelyKid away from the books is pretty difficult, as you would expect from our daughter. We've mostly avoided getting anything, but yesterday, I caved and bought the Curious George board book with pull-out flaps that she latched onto. Why? This page: The book is a collection of pages showing various places George goes to be curious, and has pull-out tabs showing a person associated with the place, and a thing associated with the place…

I hadn't heard anything about Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation before it turned up in my mailbox, courtesy of some kind publicist at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, otherwise I would've been eagerly anticipating it. Anton Zeilinger is a name to conjure with in quantum optics, having built an impressive career out of doing laboratory demonstrations of weird quantum phenomena. He shared the Wolf Prize earlier this year with John Clauser and Alain Aspect, and the three of them are in a small set of people who probably ought to get a Nobel at some point in the near future…

Slate's 80 Over 80: The most influential octogenarians in America (2010). - - Slate Magazine "For the second year in a row, Mormon President Thomas S. Monson stands atop the list. As the divine prophet, seer, and revelator for 5.5 million Americans and more than 12 million people around the world, he's the most powerful 83-year-old we could find. Look for Monson to stay on top for years to come--at least until Boyd K. Packer, octogenarian president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, succeeds him as the alpha Mormon." (tags: politics religion slate society culture lists silly) A Mailing…

At least, that's the obvious conclusion from the Royal Society's Science Sees Further page. The introduction touts it as "a series of articles on some of the most exciting areas of science today," but what's striking to me is that none of the twelve topic listed (Ageing Process, Biological Diversity, Cognition and Computation, Cultural Evolution, Extra-Terrestrial Life, Geoengineering, Global Sustainability, Greenhouse Gases, New Vaccines, Stem Cell Biology, Uncertainty in Science, and Web Science) includes any of the most obvious exciting developments in physics. Many of them have some…

Somebody asked a question at the Physics Stack Exchange site about the speed of light and the definition of the meter that touches on an issue I think is interesting enough to expand on a little here. The questioner notes that the speed of light is defined to be 299,792,458 m/s and the meter is defined to be the distance traveled by light in 1/299,792,458 seconds, and asks if that doesn't seem a little circular. There are actually three relevant quantities here, though, the third being the second, which is defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the light associated with the transition…

What correlates with problem solving skill? | Casting Out Nines "About a year ago, I started partitioning up my Calculus tests into three sections: Concepts, Mechanics, and Problem Solving. The point values for each are 25, 25, and 50 respectively. [...] I did this to stress to students that the main goal of taking a calculus class is to learn how to solve problems effectively, and that conceptual mastery and mechanical mastery, while different from and to some extent independent of each other, both flow into mastery of problem-solving like tributaries to a river. It also helps me identify…

I'm a big fan of (American) football, but a lot of people are surprised to learn that I never played organized football. It was largely a matter of timing-- the coaches when I was in junior high were not people I'd've been interested in playing for, and when they hired a good guy to run the program when I was in high school, I was already playing soccer. And in college, I played rugby One of the lingering consequences of not having played organized football is that I really haven't internalized all the rules. Which means that, when I watch the game, the one major weakness I see is that it…

Our Boring Future | Mother Jones A variant on Joe Fitzsimon's comment on Twitter: "How to be a futurist in 1 easy step: confuse logistic curves for unbounded exponential growth." (tags: society social-science politics blogs kevin-drum) Making Light: "We live underground. We speak with our hands." "Somewhere in our brave new century, somebody actually pays nearly $1,000 a foot for speaker cable. And somewhere else, people toil anonymously to write things like that review. One can see the rough emerging outlines of Eloi and Morlocks--but not which is which." (tags: sf blogs making-light…

TopatoCo: Dinosaur Comics Dry Erase Whiteboard (Temporarily Out of Stock) Something to get for that person who has always wanted to write their own dinosaur comics, but is too lazy to PhotoShop their own text in. (tags: comics internet silly gadgets) Surviving the World - Lesson 813 - One View Of The Afterlife Know your afterlife destinations. (tags: silly comics internet religion) Are you writing an tenure-track job application? "WINNING Research statements less than 3 pages long. Trust me, your work is not so complicated that it requires 8 pg of single-space type to get the point…

Why hasn't the war against terrorism produced any great First Amendment cases? - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine "There seems to be no one answer to why there hasn't been a single important First Amendment protest case in the last decade. It's certainly not that the court is reluctant to rule on First Amendment issues altogether. The Supreme Court has taken up a surprising number of speech cases recently. But right now the court is more interested in crush videos, gay marriage bans, anti-Hilary Clinton movies, violent video games, corporate speech, and funeral protests than in the…

Today is "Black Friday," the semi-ironic name given to the day after Thanksgiving when major retailers roll out Incredible! Deals! to draw shoppers in at an ungodly early hour. Personally, I don't plan to come within a mile of a mall today, but if that's what floats your boat... Of course, if you're thinking of gifts for a person interested in science (and if you're reading this, you ought to be...), you could do a lot worse than to look at this list from GeekDad at Wired, which I'm sure you'll be shocked to notice includes How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. If your holiday shopping takes you…

The first rule of Short Story Club is that you must talk about Short Story Club... So, the Short Story Club run by Niall Harrison over at Torque Control is finished, and Niall's asking for concluding thoughts. I meant to write this up last night, but SteelyKid had a major meltdown just before bedtime, so everything got scrambled. A perennial topic of discussion in science fiction and fantasy fandom is "the death of the magazines," with lots of hand-wringing about how nobody reads short fiction any more, and short fiction is where the novelists of tomorrow hone their craft, etc. This never…

Gender gap in physics exams reduced by simple writing exercises, says CU-Boulder study "Women are underrepresented and on average perform more poorly than men in introductory physics. But a recent study finds that this gap arises predominantly from differential preparation prior to college and psychological factors, rather than differences in ability. And the effects of these psychological factors can be largely overcome with a brief writing exercise focusing on important values, such as friends and family, learning or even music. This simple "values affirmation" writing exercise generally…

Today is Thanksgiving, and while we're not doing the full glutton thing until Saturday (it's more convenient for family members to travel up here then), it's still a good time to reflect on the things we're thankful for. Right at the top of the list, of course, is SteelyKid, who is bright, curious, generally cheerful, and speaking in more or less complete sentences these days, as seen here: She's sternly instructing Kate is not to knock over the Lego blocks on the desk shelf. Emmy is saying "Dude, I can't believe you guys let this puppy boss you around like this." Of course, after a busy…

It's Thanksgiving here in the US, so blogging will be light to nonexistent. For the sake of those looking for a quick escape from the chaos of a family gathering, or, you know, those poor benighted souls in other countries for whom this is just another Thursday, here's a thematically appropriate poll about science: What are you most thankful for?online surveys Have a great holiday/ Thursday.

Surviving the World - Lesson 811 - Thanksgiving Parenting "Thanksgiving is the perfect time of year to evaluate how well you have done as a parent..." (tags: comics internet silly holiday) John Scalzi - Saying Thanksgiving Grace, the Science-fictional Way - Filmcritic.com Feature "We also thank you for once again not allowing our technology to gain sentience, to launch our own missiles at us, to send a robot back in time to kill the mother of the human resistance, to enslave us all, and finally to use our bodies as batteries. That doesn't even make sense from an energy-management point of…

Given that I'm currently working on a book about relativity, I'm spending a lot of time idly thinking about various relativistic effects. Many of these won't end up in the final book, but they're fun to think about. One thing that occurred to be earlier, while thinking about something else entirely, is the Doppler shift. In particular, I was thinking about the detection of planets around other stars, which is often done using the Doppler shift due to the orbiting planet's tug on its star. If the orbit is more or less aligned with our line of sight to the star, then the star wobbles back and…

From the Editor's Desk: Quantifying Outreach to the Cult of Science | Deep Sea News "Science needs a reality check too. It has tried to exist in an academic vacuum for much of its existence. The OCD nature science needs behavioral therapy, to be forced to confront its discomfort of engaging with non-scientists. Science also needs to acknowledge that there is value in this engagement. That it is not only the public that benefits from engagement (i.e. science literacy/appreciation), but science benefits just as much. Very few academic institutions wholly recognize this and science's ability…

I've probably gotten a dozen pointers to Gregory Petsko's open letter in support of the humanities, addressed to the President of SUNY-Albany, over the last couple of weeks (the link is to a reposting of the letter at Inside Higher Ed; it was originally on Petsko's own blog). I haven't linked to it or commented on it here, mostly because while I'm broadly sympathetic with his position, after the second use of "[Famous Writer] said [interesting thing] which I'm sure your department of [humanities field] could tell you about, if you hadn't eliminated them," my reaction had shifted significantly…