drorzel | July 26, 2009The del.icio.us automatic blog posting that usually produces the daily links dump posts here has been broken during the recent ScienceBlogs upgrade. The links dump posts from last Thursday on didn't happen, but we've kludged up a way to get that material back. These are the links that should've posted on Thursday the 23rd:
Pimp My Novel: Hammered by Thor
A concise explanation of the infamous Thor Power Tools decision, and what it meant for book publishing.
(tags: publishing business books blogs economics law)
Pimp My Novel: No! Yes! No!: The Schizophrenia of Sell-Through
Why selling too…
drorzel | July 26, 2009Kind of a lazy, sleepy day around Chateau Steelypips, hence the lack of blogging, but we did find time to try out a new baby diversion:
This is going to be an outside-only game henceforth, given the low height of the door frames in this house, but it was a hit while it lasted.
drorzel | July 26, 2009As previously noted, I will be on programming at the upcoming Worldcon in Montreal, including moderating a panel at 10am Saturday with the following title and description:
The Philosophy of Science
To what extent does SF explore the meaning of science for scientists and create the ideas that our culture has of science?
Panelists: Greer Gilman, James Morrow, Jeff Warner, Richard Crownover, and DD Barant
This is a little outside my normal range, so this post is a combination of thinking-out-loud and asking-for help as I try to figure out what sort of discussion ought to go with that panel…
drorzel | July 25, 2009Physicists frequently get laughed at for referring to problems as "trivial" when calculus is required to solve them. "Maybe it's trivial for you, Einstein," people will say, "but it looks pretty hard from here."
It's nice to see that other fields are prone to the same sort of thing. Take, for example, this list of recipes from the Guardian, which they claim is a list of the "all-time quickest and simplest summer dishes" submitted by foodies and noted chefs.
Some of them live up to that billing, like this entry from Mark Bittman:
69. Steamed asparagus wrapped in prosciutto
That's the recipe…
drorzel | July 24, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Dennis Lee, a researcher at a biotech company.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I'm the director of research for a small biotech company based in
Houston. We're developing a new device for high-throughput…
drorzel | July 24, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Pam Korda, a physicist working for a medical device company.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I am a "Lead Scientist" at an R&D subsidiary of a medical
devices company. In practice, this means I oversee a…
drorzel | July 24, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Denise Hills, a government geologist)
1) What is your non-academic job?
My job title is the very descriptive "Geologist II" which really tells you nothing about what I actually DO, now does it? I work for the…
drorzel | July 24, 2009Over at Dot Physics, Rhett wonders about the role of homework in a world that includes cramster:
Then what is the problem? The problem is with my jobs. Yes, jobs. I have two jobs. My first job is to help students learn. I am a learning-faciliator if you like. I do this in many different ways. One way is to assign homework. Oh, my other job is to evaluate how well students understand the material. I have to give them some grade at the end of the semester. One obvious way to do this is with an exam or feats of strength.
Here is the question: Do you grade homework? Oh, I know what everyone says…
drorzel | July 23, 2009It's been a really busy week, so I'm too fried to do anything but a really basic Baby Blogging picture. So here's SteelyKid with Appa and some of her many other toys:
The biggest recent milestone is that she's started eating actual food-- pieces of cereal, little dried banana puffs, and that sort of thing. It gives me hope that someday we will be done with stinky formula...
drorzel | July 23, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Mike Sperry, who works for a planetarium company.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I am a Research Specialist/Scientist for Sky-Skan, a planetarium company. The company focus on everything from the software…
drorzel | July 23, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Sandra Ulbrich Almazan, who works as a scientist in the food industry.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I am an assistant scientist for an enzyme company. I work in the R&D department; I focus on finding…
drorzel | July 23, 2009I've had a few conversations with other small-college folks about how there ought to be some sort of group within DAMOP for people at small colleges, given how many of us there are who do AMO physics. Nothing has ever come of it, because nobody wants to take on the administrative hassle of organizing such a thing.
Fortunately for small-college theorists, they have some people who are more willing to step up, and have formed the Anacapa Society:
The Anacapa Society promotes research in all areas of theoretical and computational physics at primarily undergraduate institutions. The Society…
drorzel | July 22, 2009Worldcon is less than two weeks off, which means that it's time once again for the SF part of blogdom to explode with complaints about the quality of the nominees. There are some reasonable reactions, but it's mostly slightly over-the-top broadsides.
It's worth emphasizing again that the source of the problem is also the solution to the problem: the Hugo Awards are voted on by fans. This means that they tend to skew to the middlebrow, true, but it also means that they can be fixed, in a way that, say, the Oscars really can't.
If you don't like the stuff that gets nominated for the Hugos, buy…
drorzel | July 22, 2009The ScienceBlogs upgrade put a bit of a kink in my plans for monthly book hype, but I didn't want to let the day pass without noting that the official release date for How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is five months from today. (You can pre-order it from Amazon, where they're offering to pair it with a book by some theorist guy).
I don't have any splashy announcements to roll out for the five-month countdown. I have, however, updated dogphysics.com, adding a page for the recent contest winners, and updating the book information page with blurb quotes (actually, three of the four so far-- I…
drorzel | July 22, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of David Warman, a computer game system designer.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
Title: Game System Designer. Function: Computer Systems Generalist. I did not know such a job existed until it found me last…
drorzel | July 22, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Mark Hoddinott, a RF circuit designer.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I design radio frequency (RF) circuitry in wireless modems for a mid-sized company. The modem designs I work on use UMTS/HSPA/GPRS/EDGE…
drorzel | July 22, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Rod Charlton, a retired chemical engineer.)
I've been retired for about 5 yrs; perhaps my responses can
reflect some of my overall experiences during my career.... see below:
Also... in my last decade, my…
drorzel | July 22, 2009
slacktivist: On offendedness
"Taking offense and getting angry aren't exactly the same thing. Anger has to do with the intolerable difference between what is and what ought to be, which is to say, with injustice. Offendedness has to do with my own discomfort with the difference between how I feel and how I'd prefer to feel. Offendedness makes it all about me."
(tags: religion books blogs slacktivist)
Confessions of a Community College Dean: Sunset Grants
"If only there were some sort of short-term stimulus money, something we could apply for to cover the costs of 'teaching out' programs…
drorzel | July 21, 2009ScienceBlogs is getting some back-end work done this evening, with yet another server/ MT upgrade. This is intended to help with the frequent timeout problems that bloggers and commenters have been having. Opinions differ as to whether this will fix the problem, but at least Something is Being Done.
As part of the upgrade process, comments will be shut down starting at 7pm (Eastern) this evening, lasting until whenever the upgrade is finished. We apologize for the inconvenience.
drorzel | July 21, 2009(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Nicole Leuke, a science teacher in Alberta.)
1) What is your non-academic job?
I am a High School Science and math teacher. I teach primarily physics and general sciences (grades 10,11,12). I have been teaching…