drorzel | February 24, 2009the results from yesterday's poll on reporting exam scores were pretty strongly divided. 47% favored giving histograms, or some very detailed breakdown, while 33% were in favor of statistical measures only (mean, standard deviation, extrema, that sort of thing). 19% were in favor of giving no collective information at all.
My own usual practice is to give the high score, low score, and class mean, and that's it. This has as much to do with student psychology as anything else.
I provide the high score to prevent students with low scores from thinking "Oh, this was just impossible, so nobody…
drorzel | February 24, 2009Tallying up the results of yesterday's poll about formula sheets (as of 8:00 Tuesday morning, 39 total comments), people were overwhelmingly in favor of formula sheets. 72% of respondents reported being allowed to use formula sheets as students, and 69% were in favor of allowing formula sheets as faculty. A substantial number of the "no" responses were in favor of providing important formulae on the test paper.
This is more or less in accord with my own preferences. My general practice is to allow students to make up their own formula sheets in intermediate classes. In the introductory…
drorzel | February 23, 2009
editors / 23 / 02 / 2009 / Views / Home - Inside Higher Ed
Inside Higher Ed has done a comprehensive redesign of the site, including a bunch of new features. The best online academic journal just got better.
(tags: academia computing internet)
The Reality-Based Community: Annals of sexist oppression
"In the middle of a long thread on a writers' list-serv, provoked by my post on fashion models, it occurred to me that one of the unrecognized ways women are kept dependent and threatened is simply denying them pockets. This is more important than one might think, right up there with hobbling…
drorzel | February 23, 2009Inspired by Leigh Butler at tor.com, I've been re-reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books. This happened to coincide with my recent vicious cold, which is good, because they're great sickbed reading.
Most of my re-reading has been done on my Palm, which miraculously came loaded with electronic copies of all the books. These are of, shall we say, variable quality, and riddled with typos, including one hilarious bit in which Rand is pursued by "Trollops." It's a little like reading the Wheel of Time as written by Matthew Yglesias.
As a result, the re-read is also serving as a nice reminder…
drorzel | February 23, 2009No, this isn't a mistake-- I'm doing two quasi-polls on academic issues today, because I care what you think...
I'm handing back last Thursday's exams today. The scores on the test were about what I expect, given the material. As I'm looking at the scores, trying to assess the class as a whole, I'm curious about the issue of score reporting, so I'll throw this out to the general readership:
What information do you think students should be given about exam scores?
You can answer this from either a faculty or a student perspective (please indicate which).
My general practice is to hand back…
drorzel | February 23, 2009In the basement, across the hall from my lab, there are three plastic-covered collages made up of formula sheets from long-ago exams. One of my colleagues let the students in a Physics for Pre-Meds class write whatever they wanted on one sheet of paper to bring into the final, and made art from the collected pages after the test.
I was thinking about this last night as I graded last Thursday's exams, looking at the formula sheets I collected from the students. The range of things that people decide to immortalize on paper is pretty impressive.
Of course, such sheets are not universally loved…
drorzel | February 22, 2009
What will be your Edward Gorey death? - Quiz | Get More Quizzes at Quizilla
"We are all going to die. Why not die in an Edwary Gorey way. Find out how which Gashlycrumb Tinies child you will die like."
(tags: silly literature books internet)
Cocktail Party Physics: when satellites collide, it's really a drag
What colliding satellites have in common with NASCAR cars, and how it's all the fault of sunspots.
(tags: science physics blogs education cocktail-party)
Helping under-prepared students in introductory physics « Confused at a higher level
"Although every class presents its own…
drorzel | February 22, 2009Holding TUH not very neatly done up in pink butcher's paper, whcih was all he could find in a last-minute search before leaving to catch his train for London, Mr Earbrass arrives at the offices of his publishers to deliver it. The stairs look oddly menacing, as though he might break a leg on one of them. Suddenly, the whole thing strikes him as very silly, and he thinks he will go and drop his parcel off the Embankment and thus save everyone concerned a good deal of fuss.
-- Edward Gorey, The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel
I have just now sent off the (hopefully) final…
drorzel | February 22, 2009This week's Science Saturday on bloggingheads.tv features Carl Zimmer and Phil "Bad Astronomy" Plait:
It's a wide-ranging conversation, covering topics in astronomy, why people believe crazy things, how the Internet can help, and the death of newspapers and their eventual replacement by blogs. Plait is really energetic (he spends a couple of minutes talking over Zimmer without even noticing), making it a livelier-than-usual conversation.
I'm not sure I agree with him about newspapers, though. What he rattles off is more or less the standard triumphalist-blogger line-- newspapers are too slow…
drorzel | February 21, 2009
Cocktail Party Physics: science, politics, and getting it wrong
"One surefire way to panic the heck out of people is to mention nuclear bombs and radical Islam in the same sentence. I dunno about you, but I kinda had a mini-freakout when I read about the amount of enriched uranium the United Nations says that Iran has at its disposal for bomb making. It was hard not to, with the alarming headlines: the LA Times said "IRAN HAS ENOUGH FUEL FOR A NUCLEAR BOMB, REPORT SAYS"; the New York Times was a little more low-key: "IRAN HAS MORE ENRICHED URANIUM THAN THOUGHT." Coupled with our mostly…
drorzel | February 21, 2009Maryland 88, North Carolina 85 (WARNING: Auto-playing video):
Greivis Vasquez did something no Maryland player had done since 1987, and the Terrapins pulled off an upset that was almost as remarkable.
Vasquez had a career-high 35 points and 11 rebounds and 10 assists -- Maryland's first triple-double in 22 years -- and the Terrapins rallied from a 16-point deficit to shock No. 3 North Carolina 88-85 in overtime Saturday, ending the Tar Heels' 10-game winning streak.
It wasn't on up here, so I don't have anything else to say.
drorzel | February 21, 2009We are now one week out from the deadline for Hugo Nominations. I'm eligible to nominate this year, and while a couple of past requests for recommendations have failed to generate anything, I thought I'd throw up a preliminary look at my ballot in hopes of bringing in a few recommendations:
Best Novel
Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I don't like his take on Many-Worlds, but it's a terrific book all the same.
Sly Mongoose by Tobias Buckell. A fantastic setting, a great fast-moving plot, and some nice revelations about the universe.
Pirate Sun by Karl Schroeder. Cut-and-paste the comments from the…
drorzel | February 20, 2009
mmcirvin: Some children's music
"We listen to a LOT of children's music these days. Maybe a little too much sometimes. On the other hand, we're fortunate to live in an age of relatively listenable children's music with some adult appeal. Here's some stuff Jorie's been hearing lately:"
(tags: blogs music kid-stuff)
Acephalous: Batman as a Monster in a Classic Horror Film (Batman Begins)
Another of Scott's really interesting shot-by-shot analyses of Batman movies.
(tags: blogs education academia movies humanities)
slacktivist: TF: Inaction Heroes
"For those who did read the first book,…
drorzel | February 20, 2009Over at Making Light, Jim Macdonald has a response to the anti-vaccination movement, taking his cue from the Navy:
There's a manual that every Navy gunnery officer is required to read or re-read every year: OP 1014; Ordnance Safety Precautions: Their Origin and Necessity. It's a collection of stories about, and photographs of, spectacular accidents involving big guns and ammunition. Gun turrets that have fired on other gun turrets on the same ship. Holes in the coral where ammunition ships were formerly anchored. That sort of thing. It's simultaneously grim and fascinating.
Nowadays there's…
drorzel | February 20, 2009I left off last time with a brief introduction to uncertainty, followed by two classes worth of background, both mathematical and Mathematica.
Class 15 picked up the physics again, starting with an explanation of the connection between the Fourier theorem and uncertainty, namely that any attempt to construct a wavefunction that has both particle and wave propertied will necessarily involve some uncertainty in both position and momentum. This is basically Chapter 2 of the book-in-progress, with a bit more math.
After that, I start laying out quantum mechanics in a more formal way, stating…
drorzel | February 19, 2009
Abstruse Goose » How Stuff Works
"Science killed my unicorns."
(tags: science comics silly abstruse-goose)
Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Hugo Nominations
Including a few links to recommended-reading lists.
(tags: movies SF literature books hugos)
Physics and Physicists: What Did Galileo Actually Do? Most People Don't Know
"The name "Galileo" is one of those names that should be familiar with people, especially in light of the historical significance, not only in science, but also in christianity. So 400 years after his courageous work that shows that the Earth…
drorzel | February 19, 2009For this week's Baby Blogging, SteelyKid couldn't decide whether to show off her ability to grab Appa or her ability to touch her toes, so she tried to do both at once:
The color scheme of this outfit is undoubtedly going to lead to some irritating interactions with people in malls ("Why is her outfit blue, if she's a girl?" "Her outfit is actually pink. It just appears blue after the light falls into the immense gravity well created by your stupidity."), but it goes too well with the dinosaur theme of her nursery to pass it up.
drorzel | February 19, 2009A few days ago, Bee put up a post titled Do We Need Science Journalists?, linking back to Bora's enormous manifesto from the first bit of the Horgan-Johnson bloggingheads kerfuffle. My first reaction was "Oh, God, not again..." but her post did make me think of one thing, which is illustrated by Peter Woit's latest (no doubt a kerfuffle-in-the-making).
Bee quotes Bora urging bloggers to keep twirling, twirling, twirling toward the better day when scientists communicate to the general public, without all the hype and exaggeration:
Perhaps if we remove those middle-men and have scientists and…
drorzel | February 18, 2009
slacktivist: Why I'm peeved
"House-of-cards fundamentalism allows for no distinctions between babies and bathwater, between the central tenets of the faith and the adiaphora and error. So once one part of this belief system begins to collapse -- as it inevitably will since young-earth creationism is disprovable -- then it all has to go."
(tags: science politics society culture US religion biology)
Astronomy Science Fiction
"If youâre looking for free science fiction stories featuring a range of astronomical facts and mind-blowing concepts, youâve found the right place. This collection…
drorzel | February 18, 2009I've already mentioned two of the program items I was on at Boskone (global warming and quantum physics for dogs). I should at least comment on the other two, "Physics: What We Don't Understand" and "Is Science Addicted to Randomness?" They both featured me and Geoff Landis, but other than that were very different.
"Physics: What We Don't Understand" took off from a column by John Cramer from ten years ago, laying out seven big problems in (astro)physics that hadn't been solved. We talked about how some of Cramer's items have been more or less solved (gamma-ray bursts, solar neutrinos, and…