I bought a bunch of stuff recently, and as is my usual practice, iTunes has been shuffle playing the recent purchases for the last couple of weeks. The albums in question: Janelle Monae, the Arch-Android. Not usually my sort of thing, but I saw a bunch of absolutely rapturous reviews calling it groundbreaking, etc, so I gave it a shot. Verdict: Enh. Not my thing. Some decent songs, but I suspect anything with the drum/bass line from "Tightrope" would sound pretty cool. Gaslight Anthem, American Slang. A post-punk band from New Jersey with the inevitable Springsteen complex (at least they're…

Physics Education Research Group (UMD) / Scientific Community Labs "Scientiifc community labs (SCL) are designed to give students the experience of participating in a model of a realistic scientific community at an early stage in their scientific training. In traditional labs, students often receive very detailed guidance, allowing them to complete the lab and get a reasonable result even if they have no understanding of what is being done or why. Traditional labs often appear to the students to be set up for the purpose of "demonstrating the truth of the theory you were taught in lecture…

There are lots of reasons why Josh Rosenau is one of the few writers blogging about science-and-religion issues that I still read. This morning's post on what you ought to do to determine effective approaches is an outstanding example: Rather than looking at national polls, which are crude instruments and can miss shifts within small subpopulations, I'd think that it would be more useful to do lab work, and to look at the broader literature on communications. Daniel Loxton did a nice roundup of a few useful studies in this realm, and Mike McRae looked at a wider sampling in the context of…

News: Technologically Illiterate Students - Inside Higher Ed "The assumption that today's student are computer-literate because they are "digital natives" is a pernicious one, Zvacek said. "Our students are task-specific tech savvy: they know how to do many things," she said. "What we need is for them to be tech-skeptical." Zvacek was careful to make clear that by tech-skeptical, she did not mean tech-negative. The skepticism she advocates is not a knee-jerk aversion to new technology tools, but rather the critical capacity to glean the implications, and limitations, of technologies as they…

Back in one of the communications skills threads, Karen comments about science and humanities: It's easy enough for a humanities major to avoid doing much science in school. The converse is not true. It strikes me that for those earlier scientists who attended univeristy, both their early education and university years were more suited to focusing on the science. This relates to the communication issue as this often means that the science inclined are often put in a position of being evaluated on their communication in area that are areas of weakness for them, those areas where communications…

I'm kind of curious about how people read the site, in particular the ScienceBlogs front page, so: I look at the ScienceBlogs front page:customer surveys As a bonus, if you feel so inclined, take a look at the front page, and leave a comment letting me know what you think. Is there something they ought to do with it that would make it more useful/attractive to you?

Mightygodking.com » Post Topic » Grading every country's national anthem, part one "Burundi. Sounds more like a movie soundtrack than a national anthem - a really awesome movie, though, about African cowboys looking out over the savannah as the sun sets over the elephants, and then maybe they fight evil white people from some European country bent on exploitation, and of course there would be a good white person, possibly played by a Baldwin. But, yeah, this anthem is not very anthemic. Nice, though. 67" (tags: world music silly blogs) The Analogizer « Tom Scott "Journalists! Do you…

We've been doing weekly Baby Blogging (now Toddler Blogging) for a long time now-- this is week 101-- but it occurs to me that we've been shortchanging someone in all these pictures: Appa. He is, after all, a sky-bison, so it's about time we got a picture of him in flight: SteelyKid says "I could totally do that, if Mommy and Daddy would let me." (We've-- well, all right, I've-- started playing a game where I get Appa across the room from SteelyKid, say "Yip-yip!" and toss him across the room to her. Lately, she's started saying "Yip-yip!" as well, which makes it much cuter.) (Kate is way…

In the comments following the silly accelerator poll, onymous wrote: [T]he point of the LHC isn't to discover the Higgs. No one in their right minds would build a 14 TeV pp collider if their only goal was to discover the Higgs. While it's true that the ultimate goal of the LHC is to discover more exotic particles that may or may not exist (blah, blah, supersymmetry, blah) most of the hype has focussed on the Higgs, which is the one thing they're pretty sure they'll find (comments later in that thread notwithstanding). This is one of the potential problems with the way the machine has been…

If you're in Broome County or environs, the biggest political event of the year is today: John Orzel is officially launching his campaign for the New York State Senate. This will apparently involve a number of events around the 52nd state senate district, ending with a rally and cookout in Scenic Whitney Point: "What does it take," you're thinking, "to obtain the highly exclusive-- rarely granted and even more rarely sought-- Uncertain Principles endorsement?" Well, for one thing, he's my uncle. I'm not saying you have to be a blood relative to get my political endorsement, but it helps.…

Mightygodking.com » Post Topic » What if Bertie Wooster, rather than being a mere layabout, was also Batman? ""Good morning, sir. I have prepared a breakfast of scrambled egg, kippers and bacon, as per your request." "Fantastic, Jeeves! I tell you truly, I've worked up a massive appetite and that's no mistake." "Am I to assume that tonight's excursion went well, sir?" "Well, it started off a bit sticky. My cape got all tangled when I went to punch this one hooligan in the face." "Ah, yes. The cape." "Jeeves, we've had this discussion twice now. The cape is part of the ensemble." "We have…

Via Crooked Timber, there's a silly web site that lets you put in a chunk of text, and does some sort of statistical analysis of it to determine what famous writer's prose it most closely resembles. It turns out, I'm kind of hard to categorize. For instance, when I'm writing about Holy Grails, I apparently sound like Dan Brown. When the subject turns to the size of the proton, though, I sound like Douglas Adams. Maybe it's just that the random variety of topics on the blog throws it off, though. I have, after all, written an entire book explaining quantum mechanics through conversations with…

With the rumors of a Higgs Boson detected at Fermilab now getting the sort of official denial that in politics would mean the rumors were about to be confirmed in spectacular fashion, it's looking like we'll have to wait a little while longer before the next "Holy Grail" of physics gets discovered. Strictly speaking, the only thing I recall being officially dubbed a "Holy Grail" that's been discovered was Bose-Einstein Condensation (BEC), first produced by eventual Nobelists Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell in 1995. Somebody, I think it was Keith Burnett of Oxford, was quoted in the media calling…

I'm not much of a baseball fan, but as a New York resident and Williams alumn, it seems I'm contractually obligated to say something about the death of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner. He was a fixture in New York sports for as long as I've been aware of them, and his impact on baseball and sports in general was gigantic-- Steinbrenner and Al Davis are the template for all the meddlesome modern sports owners (Mark Cuban, Jerry Jones, Dan Snyder, etc.), for good or ill. He could be kind of a crazed asshole-- he was suspended by Major League Baseball for a few years in the early 1990's after…

Can I build an ansible to communicate across the cosmos? "In this week's Ask a Physicist, we answer a question that's on everyone's mind: Can we use quantum entanglement to make a mockery of the speed of light, and create intergalactic communications devices like Le Guin's "ansible"?" (tags: science physics quantum sf education blogs io9) Confessions of a Community College Dean: When Technology Doesn't Help "In most industries, new technology is adopted because it's expected to lower costs and/or improve productivity (which lowers costs over time). It doesn't always succeed, of course,…

we have a summer student seminar series, in which students who are doing summer research give 15-minute talks about their research. These are generally pretty good-- our students are, by and large, very good public speakers. One thing that I always find interesting about this is how many of the students end up sounding just like their advisors. It's not just the content of the talks-- which obviously is approved by the advisor before the talk is given-- but also the style. Some students even pick up the mannerisms of their advisors-- verbal tics, hand gestures, etc. You see the same thing…

Yesterday's poll about "outreach" activities drew 117 responses by this morning. Since PollDaddy stupidly calculates percentages for ticky-box polls based on the number of total selections, not the number of people who vote, the graph you get when you view the results is kind of useless. A better version, using the "CHECK THIS BOX" count, is here: These responses line up reasonably well with my own impressions of the term. I'm a little surprised that "Demo Shows" doesn't get 100%, even if you factor out the three people who clicked "I would not deign to know what outreach is." This probably…

It looks like I may well be getting together with some friends from college in Alabama on the first weekend in October, to go to a college football game. The logistics of getting to Tuscaloosa make this seem like an awfully long weekend, but I would feel guilty taking two days off just for football and college nostalgia. It occurs to me, though, that the state of Alabama contains many fine educational institutions, which must have physics departments and students. If any of them would be interested in hearing a talk from me (I can talk about research (single-atom trapping for radioactive…

Scientists vs. Engineers - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences "In the past, I have heard there was conflict between the "two cultures" of science and the humanities. I don't see a lot of evidence for that type of conflict today, mostly because my scientific friends all are big fans of the arts and literature. However, the two cultures that I do see a great deal of conflict between are those of science and engineering. " (tags: science engineering culture academia) Abstruse Goose » College Friend "The less you know about your doctor the better." (tags: silly comics internet…

Rumors that the Tevatron at Fermilab may have discovered the Higgs boson have escaped blogdom to the mainstream media. This originates in a blog post by Tommaso Dorigo, which I can't read because it doesn't display properly in Firefox, but I'm sure is very interesting. Anyway, this is a good excuse for a dorky poll: If the Tevatron were to discover the Higgs boson before the LHC does, that would be:Market Research There's a 99.7% probability that this poll is completely meaningless. That doesn't mean it's not entertaining, though.