drorzel | January 25, 2008As promised (threatened?) in the previous post, here's a space for more general commentary in response to the question asked by our Corporate Masters, and modified slightly for blog use:
What non-scientific developments do you fear you'll be blogging or reading about in 2008?
Consider this open to all areas of politics and pop culture. What do you fear to see on blogs in the next year? The election of President Huckabee? The phrase "#1 best-selling author Jonah Goldberg"? A New Kids on the Block reunion album and tour?
Leave your answer in the comments, and do try to keep a civil tone. I…
drorzel | January 25, 2008The questions posed in yesterday's posts about hopes for 2008 were half of what we were asked by the Powers That Be. The other half:
What scientific development do you fear you'll be blogging or reading about in 2008?
As with yesterday's posts, the original question was more general, but I restricted my answer (below the fold) to science stuff, and for the sake of general sanity, I'm going to restrict this post to scientific issues. I'll put up a second post for political fears.
But for this post, what are you afraid to be blogging about (if you're a blogger) or reading about (if you're not…
drorzel | January 24, 2008
Endowment Spending Rate Drops Slightly :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
"Colleges with endowments larger than $500 million spent on average only 4.4 percent in 2007. For colleges with endowments greater than $500 million but less than $1 billion, that's the lowest rate since 1999, and for colleges with endowments greater th
(tags: academia economics politics)
Students seek SEED money for invention -- Page 1 -- Times Union - Albany NY
Not my Corporate Masters, but these students at my college are entering an invention competition with a new medical…
drorzel | January 24, 2008As promised (threatened?) in the previous post, here's a space for more general commentary in response to the question asked by our Corporate Masters, and modified slightly for blog use:
What non-scientific developments do you hope to be blogging or reading about in 2008?
Consider this open to all areas of politics and pop culture. What do you hope to see on blogs next year? The election of President Obama? The dissolution of the Discovery Institute? Britney Spears settling down and finding love at last?
Leave your answer in the comments, and do try to keep a civil tone. I have the keys to…
drorzel | January 24, 2008A little while ago, the Corporate Masters asked us to answer a couple of questions for possible inclusion in the first '08 issue of Seed. I originally posted this back in November, but got asked to take it down because the issue was hush-hush. The street date for the magazine in question was this week, though, and I busted up my wrist playing basketball yesterday, so I'm dragging it back out because typing hurts.
The question is:
What scientific development do you hope to be blogging or reading about in 2008?
The original question was more general, asking us just what we'd like to be…
drorzel | January 23, 2008
Downloading by Students Overstated :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education
The MPAA inflated numbers for student downloading by a factor of three. Gee, and they seemed so honest...
(tags: academia movies computing stupid internet)
blogs | The A.V. Club
Nathan Rabin's Year of Flops
(tags: blogs movies review)
Seismic images show dinosaur-killing meteor made bigger splash
"According to Sean Gulick, a research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences and principal investigator for the…
drorzel | January 23, 2008Over at Biocurious, Phillip has a post on the generic science seminar outline:
1. Introduction of Esteemed Speaker by Local Professor with the largest overlap in research interests. Enumeration of every award Esteemed Speaker has ever garnered is standard issue, and if Local Professor and Esteemed Speaker know each other, humorous story from "well, not THAT long ago" is recounted, though chances are you probably had to be there (unless it involves breaking obscenely expensive equipment, in which case everyone has a good laugh).
2. Esteemed Speaker takes over, and begins with a bunch of overly…
drorzel | January 23, 2008I haven't linked to Inside Higher Ed in a few days, but lest you think I've forgotten them, they have a short piece today about the results of a survey of employers "with at least 25 employees and significant hiring of recent college graduates," regarding the preparation of their recent hires.
It turns out that employers aren't as frustrated with the skills of new graduates as some politicians and policy makers suggest. In a number of areas, employers appear to think graduates are coming out well positioned. And while employers would love to see better assessment tools used in college (as you…
drorzel | January 23, 2008Some time back, Dave Munger and someother folks put together a site called BPR3.org designed to aggregate posts that discuss peer-reviewed research papers in detail. A major weakness of this was that it's sort of difficult to remember what the acronym stands for (every time I try to figure it out, I come up one "R" short...).
They've fixed this problem by relaunching as the more intuitive researchblogging.org, with a spiffy new aggregator and a nice home page collecting the most recent articles in different categories. Dave explains the basics on Cognitive Daily, whose "Peer Reviewed Research…
drorzel | January 22, 2008
In the Fatosphere, Big Is in, or at Least Accepted - New York Times
Tune in to the denialism blog for an explosion in 5... 4... 3...
(tags: medicine food society blogs)
Flagging economy needs science investments
The head of Intel blasts Congress over the science funding debacle.
(tags: education science economics politics)
This Week in Milford
There really is a blog for everything...
(tags: comics blogs silly)
Most Diversity Training Ineffective, Study Finds
"When attendance is voluntary, diversity training is followed by an increase in managerial diversity, ... Most employers,…
drorzel | January 22, 2008In comments to my review of "The Race for Absolute Zero", I promised to try to write up an explanation of BEC on the blog. A bit of preparatory Googling demonstrates, though, that I already did, in the fall of 2006, talking about identical particles, Pauli Exclusion, and BEC. You might've thought I would remember doing that, given that I have a mind like a steel wossname....
Having spent a bit of time thinking about this in the last day or so, though, I don't really want to waste that effort, so I'll repeat a little of the earlier discussion in a slightly different way, starting with an…
drorzel | January 22, 2008In comments to my complaint about the over-identification of physics with particle physics, I noted that this is largely because high-energy physicists have been successful in getting the media and general public to buy into their belief that high-energy physics is the coolest and most important thing in physics, for a number of reasons. Jonathan Vos Post asks:
The reasons being what, in your opinion, Chad?
And, if so, what should we do (as citizens or a physicists)?
I think most of it comes down to the scale of the experiments and the collaborations that run them. There are two components…
drorzel | January 22, 2008I'm not organized enough to make this a regular feature, or to use it to divine the future, but every now and then, I get a really good run of songs on the iTunes shuffle, and make a note. Here's a batch from this weekend (with a smattering of comments):
"White Russian Galaxy," The Crimea
"Be Sweet," The Afghan Whigs
"Ain't Wastin' Time No More," The Allman Brothers Band
"Papa Was A Rodeo," The Magnetic Fields (You gotta love an ambiguously gay cowboy song...)
"Check," Rustic Overtones
"Right Next Door (Because of Me) (live at KBCO)," Robert Cray
"Total Eclipse of the Heart," Bonnie Tyler (…
drorzel | January 22, 2008Well, ok, the final score was really 64-62, but it was 4-2 in the five-minute overtime period after forty minutes of old-school Big East basketball failed to resolve anything. On paper, this shouldn't've been much of a game-- Georgetown is #9 in the country, while Syracuse dresses only eight scholarship players at the moment-- but that's what happens with rivalry games.
The was fairly typical of Syracuse's season so far. They made a really good effort, and actually led by seven late in the game, but were undermined by inexperience and poor judgement. Jonny Flynn in particular forced a lot of…
drorzel | January 21, 2008
Coyotebanjo: Day 03 "In the Trenches" (shout-out Friday edition)
The "Friday Shout-Out," an interesting classroom technique. (via Pedablogue)
(tags: academia education society psychology)
onipress.com
23-page free preview comic for the upcoming Jumper movie.
(tags: books movies SF)
Graphene breaks speed record - physicsworld.com
"Its high intrinsic mobility... means that graphene is the only material where electrons at room temperature can move thousands of interatomic distances without scattering."
(tags: materials physics science news)
Exploding Unicorn: License to Grill
"Under the…
drorzel | January 21, 2008A few more detailed comments on the games leading up to the Chateau Steelypips Showdown in two weeks:
The Patriots looked a little shaky, but again, I was never that worried that they would actually lose. Their defense isn't as intimidating as it was a few years ago, but they did enough to get the job done, holding the Chargers to nothing but field goals.
Tom Brady looked distinctly mortal, which probably had something to do with the lousy weather. He had a number of passes wobble in the air, and got picked off an astonishing three times, but still held it together well enough to score when…
drorzel | January 21, 2008The mysterious Revere looks at school killings today (or, more accurately, looks at a study looking at school killings). He/she/they opens with an arresting factoid:
The second leading cause of death in the 5 to 18 year old age group in the US is homicide. These are school aged children and the first thing that comes to mind are the big names like Columbine and Virginia Tech. But we know there are other school-related homicides that kill only one or two. Moreover there seem to be more of them than we remember from years past. But are there?
You may or may not be surprised to learn that…
drorzel | January 21, 2008The good news:
Kate's New England Patriots beat the Chargers to win the AFC championship
My New York Giants beat the Packers in overtime to win the NFC champioship
The bad news:
They play each other in the Super Bowl in two weeks.
This is perhaps not the most positive sporting development for marital harmony...
drorzel | January 20, 2008I stopped by a Sports Authority store yesterday to buy a couple of whistles before tonight's intramural basketball game (a persistent problem in the last few years has been that the students refereeing the game don't have whistles, and thus fould go uncalled). There were laser-printed signs taped to the front doors saying (approximately):
When the Patriots win on Sunday, we will have official locker-room championship hats and T-shirts for sale after the game.
Now, this is a corporate entity unaffiliated with the team, so I'm not sure if the woofing theorem applies, but if San Diego wins…
drorzel | January 20, 2008Brent Musberger is the single worst announcer in sports.
"That's a bold assertion," you say. "I find that hard to believe. I mean, he's famous."
Allow me to explain: Musberger generally calls games for ABC as part of a two-man announcing team. Musberger is the "play-by-play" guy, and the other member of the team, the "color commentator" is usually a former player or coach. Yesterday, for example, the color guy was former UCLA coach Steve Lavin, the Haircut Who Walks Like a Man.
The job of the ex-jock "color commentator" is to be, well, colorful. They're supposed to provide some sort of…