Emptywheel » This Miracle Brought to You by Americaâs Unions "They're calling it a miracle--the successful landing of a US Airways jet in the Hudson and subsequent rescue of all 155 passengers. They're detailing the heroism of all involved, starting with the pilot and including cabin crew, ferry crews, and first responders. What they're not telling you is that just about every single one of these heros is a union member." (tags: blogs politics economics news class-war) â¦My heartâs in Accra » Is ad-supported journalism viable in a pay-for-performance age? "Whatever objections I have to…

A number of people have commented on the big New York Times article about the new intro physics classes at MIT: At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required -- classical mechanics and electromagnetism -- but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers. Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants, the professor makes brief presentations of general principles and engages the students as they work out related…

This week, SteelyKid shows that she takes after her parents: "I like books!" she says. Granted, her liking of books at this stage is not so much about the reading (if you look closely, you can see that she's holding it upside down), and more about the fact that the pages make crinkling noises as she waves them around randomly. But, hey, you have to start somewhere.

Simple Checklist Makes Surgery Safer - NYTimes.com "The researchers reviewed the outcome of 7,688 patients who were undergoing noncardiac surgery at the hospitals. About half the patients had surgery before the checklists were adopted, and half after. At the end of the study, the average death rate dropped to 0.8 percent from 1.5 percent, and the average complication rate fell to 7 percent from 11 percent." (tags: science medicine health-care) Methane on Mars varies with the seasons - The Planetary Society Blog | The Planetary Society "Michael Meyer: "What we have here is not evidence for…

Over at Dot Physics, Rhett is trying to learn his students' names: I have students sitting at tables (in this class and in labs). As they are working on something, I go around and write down who is sitting where. Yes, this means that you have to actually ask each student what their names is (I hate that part). After I have a "seating chart" I just keep practicing while they are working. If a student talks to me, I make sure and use their name. I will look it up on the seating chart if I have to. This just takes a couple of class times of practice till I have them all (well, most of them)…

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean writes: You know what the world really needs? A good book about time. Google tells me there are only about one and a half million such books right now, but I think you'll agree that one more really good one is called for. So I'm writing one. From Eternity to Here: The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time is a popular-level book on time, entropy, and their connections to cosmology, to be published by Dutton. Hopefully before the end of this year! Dammit! Now it's a race to see whose pop-physics book will be out first. The approximately final draft of my…

slacktivist: Gerbils and polar bears "What I'm trying to say here is a bit tricky, because it involves to some extent comparing those Palin supporters to Grandin's neurotic gerbils, and I don't suppose anyone likes being compared to neurotic gerbils. And it probably doesn't help that I'm prefacing this by saying that I mean no offense in comparing them to neurotic gerbils. But I find the comparison illustrative, so here goes." (tags: politics psychology society culture US religion biology slacktivist) FemaleScienceProfessor: In Praise of B Students "When choosing undergrad research…

A few years ago, the after-dinner speaker at the DAMOP conference banquet was Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger. As I wrote at the time, I think it's safe to say that he didn't make a positive impression on the audience. It also sparked a rather lively discussion afterwards, that some people speculated was the reason for the veiled threats we got the next year. The Corporate Masters have just published an exclusive post-election interview with Marburger. I read it with some interest, mostly to see if it would change my impression of him. I have to say, it didn't. Not only does he…

If you've been a student or faculty member at an American college or university in the past twenty years or so, you've almost certainly run across student course evaluation surveys. They're different in detail, but the key idea is always the same: toward the end of the term, students in every course are asked to fill out a questionnaire, usually a bubble sheet, assigning numerical values to various aspects of the course and the professor's teaching. Most schools also provide some option for free-form written comments as well. These course surveys, particularly the numerical scores, figure…

So, a month or two ago, I started occasionally getting an error message from iTunes, saying that it was unable to save the library file because the disk was full. This seemed improbable, but when I checked, the C: drive did, indeed, have very little space left. I deleted some stuff, restarted (which freed up a surprising amount of space by itself), and went back to my usual routine. It happened again, and then I did a comprehensive sweep of old install files and upgrade residue and the like, and freed up 1.2 GB. A couple weeks later, the message was back, in spite of making an effort not to…

Haidinger's brush: the unknown sense "Yes !!! With some effort you can learn to see what remains invisible to most people! Without the help of any instrument you will be able to tell not only if the light you look at is strongly polarized or not, but also if it is linearly polarized or circularly polarized and, moreover, in which direction it vibrates or rotates. Any time that you raise your eyes to the blue sky you will be rewarded by the same clues that guide bees in their flight. Acquire P-Ray Vision ! " (tags: science physics biology optics) EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect…

Over at Built on Facts, Matt Springer is easing his way back into blogging by asking "What is Science?". He offers a simple one-sentence definition: Science is the testing of ideas. That's all. Every technicality I can think of is avoided so long as the person doing the science is honest. Create fair and objective tests, try not to fool yourself or anyone else, don't be wedded to your hypothesis, basic things like that. Be dishonest and I doubt there's a definition in the world that some sufficiently clever pseudoscientist can't wriggle out of. Test your ideas and be honest about it. That's…

The scare quotes in the title are to distinguish "Modern Physics" classes like the one I'm teaching this term from modern physics as a general subject, which, of course, all right-thinking people should study in depth. The question comes from a comment by Coriolis on last week's post about what "Modern Physics" is as a class: Having passed through those classes (I'm now a grad student), I have to say I didn't see much worth in the Modern physics class (and your description of it is pretty much how I remember it, except without the relativity). It's basically in that middle ground trying to…

Or, Brian Greene Writes a Kid's Book... This is a very odd book. It's printed on boards, like a book for very small children, but the story is a bit beyond what I would imagine reading to a normal kid of the age to want books of that format. It's too short and simple, though, to have much appeal to significantly older children, aside from the fact that the story is written over the top of 15 absolutely gorgeous reproductions of pictures of astronomical objects. This is probably one of those objects whose cool appearance is the only real reason for the thing to exist. The pictures really are…

A&M bases bonus on student input | Bryan/College Station, Texas - The Eagle ""I've never had so much trouble giving away a million dollars," Chancellor Mike McKinney said, laughing. That's because he's never spent it like this. McKinney plans to give up to $10,000 bonuses to instructors based on anonymous student evaluations" (tags: education stupid academia) Confessions of a Community College Dean: The Bright Side of Economic Freefall "With faculty (and administrative) searches being cancelled left and right, Iâm thinking that this dropoff might be the final nail in the coffin of the…

This is of interest to approximately eight people in the entire world, but SteelyKid got her first taste of "yellow vegetables" this weekend (step three on the road to solid food, after rice cereal and oatmeal cereal). Which provided a nice opportunity to play with the digital video camera we got for Christmas: Yes, that's right, I now have the ability to embed disgustingly cute baby videos along with the usual still photos. I'm sure there's got to be a way to parlay this into world domination, if I can just find the angle...

There's been a fair bit of press for the article Subtracting photons from arbitrary light fields: experimental test of coherent state invariance by single-photon annihilation, published last month in the New Journal of Physics, much of it in roughly the same form as the news story in Physics World (which is published by the same organization that runs the journal), which leads with: A property of laser light first predicted in 1963 by the future Nobel laureate Roy Glauber has been verified by physicists in Italy. These stories can be a little puzzling, though. After all, Glauber got his…

There was a mix-up in textbook ordering for this term (entirely my fault), and the books for my modern physics course were not in the bookstore when the term started. I made a spare copy available in the interim, and also half-jokingly suggested buying it from Amazon rather than waiting for the bookstore to get them in. After saying that, I went to Amazon, and found that the book in question sells for $150. "That can't be right," I thought. And, indeed, it's not-- the bookstore sells its copies at the list price of $180. I had no idea the books were that expensive, and now I feel guilty about…

Somebody really needs to arrange a game between the Giants and the Titans, so they can have an inept-off. Tennessee thoroughly outplayed Baltimore in just about every way, but coughed the ball up twice on stupid plays (LenDale White carrying the ball like the proverbial loaf of bread, Todd Heap trying to hurdle a defender), keeping them from scoring. And the Giants played an excellent defensive game, but completely blew it on offense, with some of the stupidest play-calling in history. Giants Stadium is famously a terrible place to play on a windy day, and yesterday was a bad day for wind.…

The ScienceBlogs upgrade is now complete, so I'm typing this in an entry box that looks different that it used to, and my text is appearing in an ugly font. There are no clearer indications of progress, at least as defined by the software industry. I had had big plans to get out in front of things by researching and writing some quality blog posts this weekend. Unfortunately, Chateau Steelypips was swept by some sort of stomach flu bug, about which the less said the better. To give you an idea of my condition, though, at one point I started to pick up the Donald Westlake book I'm re-reading,…