drorzel | July 29, 2010I was initially puzzled by the headline "Research-Assignment Handouts Give Students Meager Guidance, Survey Finds," and the opening sentences didn't help much:
Most research-assignment handouts given to undergraduates fail to guide the students toward a comprehensive strategy for completing the work, according to two researchers at the University of Washington who are studying how students conduct research and find information.
My initial reaction was "If I could give them a comprehensive strategy for completing the work, it wouldn't be research." Then I noticed the last three words, and…
drorzel | July 29, 2010I had intended to write up a recent paper for ResearchBlogging today, but I cleverly forgot to bring either the hard copy of the PDF home last night, which wrecked that plan. And I've got real lab work to do today, so it's not happening at work.
This seems like a good opportunity, though, to ask if there are things I ought to be explaining here that haven't occurred to me for one reason or another. So, as the post title says:
What topics in physics or related areas would you like me to write about here? This could be a recent paper, something from a recent news story ("I heard these guys in…
drorzel | July 29, 2010I'm going to be spending a good chunk of the rest of my day scrounging up adapters to connect two different classes of plumbing fittings. In honor of that, here's a poll question based on something that one research group used to do:
Sending a new graduate student to the lab down the hall to ask for a BNC to Swagelok adapter is:online surveys
Amusingly, I have seen something that easily could have been turned into a Swagelok to BNC adapter (in fact, I might still have one in my lab), that served a serious purpose.
(BNC is a type of electrical connection, Swagelok is a type of plumbing…
drorzel | July 29, 2010My initial reaction to the financial meltdown caused by the housing bubble was "Are our business leaders really that stupid?" Things like this news squib from Inside Higher Ed make me suspect the answer is "yes, they are that stupid":
Business schools -- including such prestigious ones as those of Columbia and Harvard Universities -- are adding courses on social media to the M.B.A. curriculum, Business Week reported. The rapid growth of social media has many companies wanting to know more about how to use various tools, creating an opening for new M.B.A.'s who want to make themselves more…
drorzel | July 29, 2010
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…
drorzel | July 28, 2010Back at the start of the summer, I asked a question about automotive thermodynamics: On a hot day, is it better to open your car windows a crack when making a short stop, or leave them closed? For a long term-- say, leaving your car parked outside all day-- I hope everyone will agree that leaving the windows slightly open is the better call, but the answer isn't as clear for a short stop. There might well be some time during which the open-window car heats up faster as warm air from outside gets in, while the closed-window car holds in the air-conditioned goodness longer.
It occurred to me…
drorzel | July 28, 2010On Twitter, I saw Graham Farmelo link to this Physics World blog post about Ed Witten's Newton lecture, describing it as "Edward Witten's clearest-ever overview of string theory for laypeople (i.e. most others)." Witten's a name to conjure with, so I thought "That might be worth a look."
So I went to the blog post, which has video embeds for the two halves of the talk (~30 min each), each with a single frame frozen as an example. Both representative frames show slides that are nothing but words-- one full paragraph each, starting in the very upper left of the screen, and ending at the bottom…
drorzel | July 28, 2010
The Art of Sleeping in Seminars | Department of Physics at the U of I
"Through long years of experience, we have accumulated the following useful set of rules. These should be helpful to beginning research students. However, we have also observed seasoned veterans making some of these simple errors. For advanced students, these rules can also be applied to regular courses. "
(tags: academia education presentations silly)
Blog U.: Rethinking Research "Productivity" - Library Babel Fish - Inside Higher Ed
"My frustration with graduate training is that from my (admittedly removed)…
drorzel | July 27, 2010We have a summer student seminar series in the science and engineering departments here, running two days a week at lunchtime with three students each day giving 15 minute presentations on their summer research projects to other students and faculty.
The student talks are split almost 50/50 overall on whether to provide an outline at the start of the talk or not. About half of the students put up a slide listing the component parts of their talk ("First, I'll give some motivation for the experiment, then I'll talk about the apparatus, then..."), and about half jump right into the talk,…
drorzel | July 27, 2010When one of the most recent issues of Physical Review Letters hit my inbox, I immediately flagged these two papers as something to write up for ResearchBlogging. This I looked at the accompanying viewpoint in Physics, and discovered that Chris Westbrook already did most of the work for me. And, as a bonus, you can get free PDF's of the two articles from the Physics link, in case you want to follow along at home.
Since I spent a little time thinking about these already, though, and because it connects to the question of electron spin that I talked about yesterday, I think it's still worth…
drorzel | July 27, 2010Via Inside Higher Ed this YouTube video is pretty much a distillation of faculty reaction nationwide to higher education's response to the world economic crisis:
The IHE link gives a little more context to the video, and some of the reaction to it. The arguments here are not all well-founded-- science and engineering will necessarily receive more funding than the liberal arts because teaching and research in science and engineering are vastly more expensive than in the humanities, and many of those central administrative salaries are going to support multicultural and mental health programs…
drorzel | July 27, 2010
slacktivist: To bigotry no sanction
"During Washington's presidency, of course, most Americans did not "possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship." The man who wrote "to bigotry no sanction" also imagined he had the right to own other humans and the authority to vote on Martha's behalf. But yet we can see here in Washington's own words the inevitable, inexorable trajectory leading toward the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments.
Deprive any minority -- whether a religious minority, an a-religious minority, a disenfranchised gender or ethnic group or race or sexual…
drorzel | July 26, 2010A few years ago, we ended up trading some classroom space in the Physics part of the building to Psychology, which was renovated into lab space for two of their new(ish) hires. This turned out to be a huge boon not only for the department (the lab space we got in the swap is really very nice), but for our majors. Most of the psychology experiments on campus use student volunteers, and pay a small amount to boost participation. Since the new psych labs were right next to the physics student lounge, our majors were taking part in four or five studies each, and racking up the study participation…
drorzel | July 26, 2010The subject of the "spin" of the electron comes up again and again, so as pointed out in a comment, I really ought to do a post explaining what it is and how it works. As a bonus, this gives me the opportunity to do the dorkiest thing anyone has ever done with a cute-toddler video, namely this one:
(That's an early version of SteelyKid's new favorite game. I'll put a clip of the final version of the game at the end of this post.)
So, electron spin. Electrons, and all other fundamental particles, have a property known as "spin." This is an intrinsic angular momentum associated with the…
drorzel | July 26, 2010
YouTube - I Will Derive!
Gloria Gaynor, meet Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton. Leibniz, Newton, Gloria Gaynor.
(tags: video math music youtube silly education)
Cocktail Party Physics: the nays have it
"[W]hile browsing the science section on Amazon this weekend, looking for new or overlooked science books, I thought it might be fun to highlight a few of the more entertaining negative reviews of some popular science books."
(tags: science books review silly blogs cocktail-party physics history math)
drorzel | July 25, 2010The vanity search this morning turned up something I hadn't seen before:
That's the Japanese edition of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. I knew one was in the works, but hadn't heard when it would be out.
Of course, I can't read any of it other than my own name (rightmost column of the cover text, from top to bottom). So I turn to Google Translate, which does wonders with the product description:
Dogs have been collected by Professor Chad Emmy physics, quantum physics interested in all of the owner. Amazing ideas of quantum physics, every day, "honoring" significant useless wanted to apply…
drorzel | July 25, 2010
Why tenure won't disappear, just shrink § Unqualified Offerings
"1) Did you notice the part where I said I'd want a higher salary to compensate for having less security? Yeah. See, lots of people are willing to slave away in grad school and postdoc positions and adjunct positions in exchange for a shot at the tenure lottery. Dilute the value of the prize, and suddenly people start wanting more money in return. A lot of smart, highly-educated people will start looking at other white collar career paths if academia doesn't provide a shot at life-long security, or at least higher pay…
drorzel | July 24, 2010It was miserably swampy for most of the day today-- when it wasn't actually raining, it was so humid that you expects water to condense out of the air at any moment-- so I spent a while sitting on the couch watching tv with SteelyKid. The best kid-friendly option seemed to be an episode of the new Doctor Who on BBC America, which was pretty much a perfect distillation of why I can't take the show seriously, despite the rave reviews of many people I know.
It's not just that every single episode introduces an alien menace that the Doctor knows all about already, either because it was featured…
drorzel | July 24, 2010Climate change is a major crisis, don't get me wrong, and it's something that needs to be discussed extensively in both scientific and policy circles. We're pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at rather too high a rate, and getting something done about that is a key priority.
It's possible, though, to take the obsession on climate and CO_2 a little too far, though. Such as this news story from Physics World:
A cosmic gamma-ray burst striking the Earth could be harmful to ocean plankton at depths of up to 75 m, according to a team of Cuban researchers. These organisms account for up to…
drorzel | July 24, 2010
Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 040504 (2010): Room-Temperature Implementation of the Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm with a Single Electronic Spin in Diamond
"The nitrogen-vacancy defect center (N-V center) is a promising candidate for quantum information processing due to the possibility of coherent manipulation of individual spins in the absence of the cryogenic requirement. We report a room-temperature implementation of the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm by encoding both a qubit and an auxiliary state in the electron spin of a single N-V center. By thus exploiting the specific S=1 character of the spin system,…