drorzel | July 12, 2010I spent this weekend in Baltimore for the summer meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public, held at the Maryland Science Center, which is a really nice science museum. This has left me feeling jet-lagged, a neat trick when I never left the Eastern time zone, but perhaps Saturday's visit to Pub Dog had something to do with it...
We had a number of discussions about the meaning of the word "Outreach" in a physics context, which is one of those Damon Knight/ Potter Stewart, "I know it when I point at it" kind of terms. I'm interested in what opinions people outside the committee have,…
drorzel | July 12, 2010I missed the first 15 minutes of yesterday's World Cup final because it was inordinately difficult to find a tv showing the game at BWI airport. There are tvs all over the place, but they're all locked into playing a pre-recorded loop of CNN programs, without even a news ticker that could give score updates. I did eventually find a spot at the bar in a Mexican restaurant, and managed to watch the middle portion of the game. I missed the last 15 minutes of regular time and all over the extra time because I was on a plane back to Albany.
I was planning to write up a recap of what I did see, but…
drorzel | July 11, 2010
LaserFest | Videos of Lasers in Art & Entertainment
A collection of videos showing the use of lasers in art, movies, and television.
(tags: lasers science physics video television movies outreach art)
Home - emergentuniverse.org
A small but well-designed site dedicated to giving the public an interdisciplinary look at the science of emergent phenomena, including medicine, physics, neuroscience, and computing.
(tags: science education physics biology condensed-matter computing technology internet outreach)
Small changes steer kids toward smarter school lunch choices
"In the school…
drorzel | July 10, 2010
Energy Secy advances nano science in spare time - San Jose Mercury News
"This is Chu's second such meaty scientific paper in recent months, both published in the journal Nature.
The first, published in February, was following Albert Einstein's general relativity theory and better measuring how gravity slows time. Both were published while he has been energy secretary, but started long before he took the job in January 2009. A third study is in the pipeline, Chu said.
None of this is the sort of thing Cabinet secretaries usually read, let alone write. For the Nobel Prize-winning physicist,…
drorzel | July 9, 2010The big physics story at the moment is probably the new measurement of the size of the proton, which is reported in this Nature paper (which does not seem to be on the arxiv, alas). This is kind of a hybrid of nuclear and atomic physics, as it's a spectroscopic measurement of a quasi-atom involving an exotic particle produced in an accelerator. In a technical sense, it's a really impressive piece of work, and as a bonus, the result is surprising.
This is worth a little explanation, in the usual Q&A format.
So, what did they do to measure the size of a proton? Can you get rulers that small…
drorzel | July 9, 2010Thoreau offers without qualification some complaints about a paper in a glamour journal, ending with:
All of this might have been excusable if the big flashy Glamour Journal paper had been followed up with more detailed papers in other places (a common practice in some fields). However, when I searched to see what the authors have done since and whether they've cited that paper, the only places I found them citing their own paper was in papers only marginally related to the work published in the glitzy place. So there was no follow-up, just something that was trendy enough to get into a…
drorzel | July 9, 2010
Using the General Social Survey | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine
Notes on how you, too, can be a social scientist. Or at least noodle around with statistics.
(tags: social-science blogs statistics surveys)
Science in the Open » Blog Archive » It's not information overload, nor is it filter failure: It's a discovery deficit
"We don't need more filters or better filters in scholarly communications - we don't need to block publication at all. Ever. What we need are tools for curation and annotation and re-integration of what is published. And a framework that enables discovery of the…
drorzel | July 8, 2010I got sufficiently engrossed in writing a ResearchBlogging post for tomorrow that I almost forgot today's Toddler Blogging. To make up for it, though, today's post is using those three-dimensional effects that are all the rage these days:
Look out! There's a ball coming right at you!
What's that? The 3D isn't working? Are you wearing the glasses? Well, there's your problem...
As you can tell from the picture, SteelyKid is getting pretty good at throwing things these days. Catching, on the other hand, remains a bit of a problem:
(Alternate caption: "Telekinetic toddler moves balls with her…
drorzel | July 8, 2010Kevin Drum has done a couple of education-related posts recently, first noting a story claiming that college kids study less than they used to, and following that up with an anecdotal report on kids these days, from an email correspondent who teaches physics. Kevin's emailer writes of his recent experiences with two different groups of students:
Since the early 1990's, I have pre and post tested all of my introductory mechanics classes using a research based diagnostic instrument, the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation. This instrument is based on research by Ron Thornton at Tufts that…
drorzel | July 8, 2010I suppose I have to say something about the Great Pepsi Blog Controversy, because it's sucking all the oxygen out of science blogging right now. I'll try to keep this short and self-contained.
At this time, I have no intention of leaving ScienceBlogs over the paid PepsiCo blog. I'm very sorry to hear that several of the other bloggers here have decided to leave, but they have their reasons, and it's their decision.
Ultimately, I suspect that the reason I am relatively unperturbed by this whole mess comes down to a fundamental split between how I view blogging and how they view blogging.
The…
drorzel | July 8, 2010
slacktivist: The Indignant Household Budget
"[T]he pitiable thing is that here in reality -- as opposed to the smug fantasy world of this stock speech -- overtime and second jobs are exactly what many of those poor cheering fools in the audience are actually doing to try to make ends meet. The indulgent spendthrift luxuries the Indignant Politician condemns aren't things his audience ever "cut" from their household budgets, because they weren't things their household budgets had ever been able to afford in the first place. Sure, they know how to cut costs and cut coupons, but in real life,…
drorzel | July 7, 2010Over in yesterday's communications skills post commenter Paul raises a question about priorities:
I wonder to what extent good writers, public speakers and communicators are being promoted in science in place of good thinkers - people who can challenge prevailing dogma, invent promising novel approaches to old problems, and who have the intuition needed for deducing correct theories from just a few observations.
I think of this as the "Weinstein Perelman Theory" because Eric Weinstein on Twitter has been pushing something similar with respect to Grisha Perelman turning down major math…
drorzel | July 7, 2010
Physics - Keeping atoms synchronized for better timekeeping
"Atomic clocks often have a limited coherence time due to the interactions between the constituent atoms. While it is usually very easy to use fewer atoms to reduce the interactions, this leads to lower signal-to-noise and less precise measurements. This tension between strong interactions and noise seems unavoidable and limits the accuracy of the world's best cesium clocks, the keepers of international atomic time. As reported in a paper in Physical Review Letters, Christian Deutsch and coworkers at three laboratories in Paris,…
drorzel | July 6, 2010I was under the impression that the World Cup semifinals didn't start until tomorrow, but I was wrong about that. So here's a hastily-posted Open Thread for discussion of the games. Will Uruguay manage to carry the honor of South America into the final game? Or is South America doomed to be the Big East of FIFA?
I'm not as enthusiastic about today's game, which looks likely to be a dull defensive match, as tomorrow's, which ought to involve some scoring. Unless the loss of Thomas Müller to accumulated yellow cards (the last a puzzling one, given that his alleged handball was more or less…
drorzel | July 6, 2010As I am still getting lengthy comments at the Chris Mooney post accusing me of making unreasonable demands on scientists, I thought I should spell out as explicitly as possible what skills I think scientists ought to have. This probably won't solve the problem, but it'll give me something to point to the next time I get asked.
So, what communications skills should scientists have? The answer depends on what kind of science you're going to do, and what you want to do with it.
First and foremost, though: If you want to be a successful scientist, you need good communications skills. Full stop.…
drorzel | July 6, 2010
YouTube - Look Around You - Maths (With download)
"I happened upon this inspired bit of British comedy after watching Goodness Gracious Me (hit and miss). I was curious why there would be a ten minute show on TV. At first, I actually thought it was a children's instructional science program. Indeed, it is easy to to be fooled. The tone, pacing, narration, are all uncannily like those insipid PBS programs I'd watch when home sick from school or when the teacher wanted a hour off during class."
(tags: nostalgia science education silly video youtube)
And Now We Go to the Mattresses; or,…
drorzel | July 5, 2010SteelyKid has some molars coming in, which led to some intermittent generalized fussiness this weekend. When she gets that way, she can sometimes be calmed down using videos on the computer, such as the "Wheels on the Buss" DVD my mom has. In order to spare the sanity of the adults in her life, though, we supplemented this with kid-friendly YouTube clips, eventually running across this:
I have very distinct memories of this when I was a small child watching Sesame Street-- I hesitate to call them happy memories, because I think I recall being upset when the singers are carried off. But I…
drorzel | July 4, 2010It's Independence Day here in the US, where we spend the day playing with fire (grilling during the day, fireworks at night) to express our gratitude for not needing to give a damn about the British royal family. Or something like that.
Since I'm going to do my patriotic playing-with-fire duty (augmented by a possible trip to the zoo with SteelyKid), there won't be any deep thoughts forthcoming today, but to give those of you in need of web-based entertainment something to do, here's a question for all my readers:
Who are you, and how did you get here?
It's been a while since I did one of…
drorzel | July 2, 2010Summer is here, which means vacations for lots of people, which means "beach reading"-- trying to read a book or two while kicking back somewhere. The ideal beach read is something that isn't so heavy as to bring you down or demand too much attention, but is also serious enough that it's not embarrassing to be seen in public reading it.
Clearly, the best choice for beach reading this summer is How to Teach Physics to Your Dog-- it's got real, solid physics, but also a talking dog. What more could you want?
What if you've already read How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, though? Are there other…
drorzel | July 2, 2010
Bill Simmons: World Cup's 20 questions - ESPN
"Question No. 9: But you'd still love the NBA to incorporate the yellow/red card system for flagrant fouls and technical fouls, correct?
Sure. Much better than an official leaning over a scorer's table and telling them what the technical or flagrant was, then trying to guess what he said. Bring out yellow/red cards and we'd know right away. I also like the concept of an official not having to explain why he called what he called -- like the ref who robbed the U.S. of the winning goal in the Slovenia game and never explained why. It's really the…