drorzel | October 5, 2007The New York Times has a story on a novel approach to teaching high-school English: assigning homework to parents:
So far, Mr. [Damion] Frye, an English teacher at Montclair High School, has asked the parents to read and comment on a Franz Kafka story, Section 1 of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" and a speech given by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Their newest assignment is a poem by Saul Williams, a poet, musician and rapper who lives in Los Angeles. The ninth graders complete their assignments during class; the parents are supposed to write their responses on a blog Mr. Frye started online.…
drorzel | October 5, 2007Inside Higher Ed has a puzzling opinion piece about science and math education by W. Robert Connor of the Teagle Foundation. It's not his arguemtn that's puzzling, though-- that part is perfectly clear, hard to disagree with:
Public and private funders have spent billions of dollars -- sometimes wastefully -- on education initiatives like those in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines without rigorous assessment and evaluation. Not asking for documented results when so much money is on the line misses a golden opportunity to determine whether such programs are…
drorzel | October 5, 2007
Euler's Constancy
A short biography of and tribute to the mathematician Leonhard Euler, who did a bit of everything
(tags: math academia physics)
Scientists 'weigh' tiny galaxy halfway across universe
Six billion light years away, 1/100th the mass of the Milky Way
(tags: astronomy news science)
nanoscale views: Challenges in measurement
When expensive equipment blows up your samples
(tags: physics experiment)
The industrial space age
A Swedish scientist suggests putting industry in space, and dumping trash on the Moon
(tags: astronomy space science)
U-M research: New plastic is…
drorzel | October 4, 2007At the time of this writing, the Uncertain Principles blog challenge stands in first place on the ScienceBlogs Leaderboard, with just under $2,000 in donations so far. That's almost a third of the challenge goal of $6000 in just three days, which is fantastic. Thank you for your generosity.
Of course, that still leaves $4,000 to go, which means more donations are definitely wanted. The hip thing to do appears to be to offer incentives for donations, and who am I to pass up a good idea. So, here you go:
For a $30 donation to the DonorsChoose challenge, you can buy this blog.
Details, terms,…
drorzel | October 4, 2007I got a rather odd email yesterday, with the Subject: header Help me identify a youtube video and solve my grandfather's mysterious death. That's eye-catching, to say the least, and the text of the message was also interesting:
There's a youtube video involved in my grandfather's odd circumstances of death. Please take a look at the attached picture and pass it along.
This frame belongs to the video I'm looking for and it's the only evidence that I have so far: it's a snapshot of the computer screen he was seeing when he died. If you ever saw the entire footage or recognize any detail of this…
drorzel | October 4, 2007The Institute of Physics is the UK's main organization of physicists (sort of like the American Physical Society), and yesterday, they announced their awards for 2007. The full list of winners is only available as a Word file, for some odd reason, but it's a distinguished group.
The prizes are headed by the brand-new Isaac Newton medal, which was awarded to Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna for his pioneering work on the uses of quantum entanglement:
His achievements include the first demonstration of quantum communication based on the entanglement of photons in 1995, the first "…
drorzel | October 4, 2007
Stopping atoms
A "coil-gun" method for slowing atomic beams without lasers, from the Raizen group at Texas
(tags: physics low-temperature science atoms)
Confessions of a Community College Dean: An Open Letter to Mayor Richard M. Daley
The Dean Dad is less polite to Hizzoner than I was
(tags: academia stupid education)
Finance Blog - Market Movers by Felix Salmon: Blogonomics: RSS Feeds - Portfolio.com
The economic case for full-text RSS feeds. Cory Doctorow has been pushing this for years.
(tags: blogs economics RSS)
Next steps for physics graduates - Physics World - physicsworld.com…
drorzel | October 3, 2007Inside Higher Ed has an article about a HHMI initiative to encourage more students to pursue science careers:
Until now, calls for action to bolster Americans’ science aptitude and increase the number of graduates who move on to scientific research have focused on nurturing individual students, improving teacher education and collaborating with industry, among other approaches. The Hughes initiative, called the Science Education Alliance, is a more coordinated effort aimed at piquing the interest of students who might not otherwise consider science as a career, inculcating skills that can…
drorzel | October 3, 2007So, in a fit of procrastinatory behavior, I've spent a bunch of time over the last few days playing with Facebook. I have to say, I can understand how this would get to be addictive-- I'm inordinately amused by the fact that I can go to a web page and get a little message telling me that a division chief at NIST has removed a commercial jingle from his list of favorite music. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with that information, but it amuses me.
I'm still sort of wondering whether there's a point to this stuff beyond more efficient procrastination, though. I've got access to this...…
drorzel | October 3, 2007The new issue of Physics World is out, and features a bunch of Sputnik-anniversary stories. Among them is a long piece on science on the International Space Station:
Exponentially over budget, plagued by technical glitches and some seven years behind schedule, critics have always found the International Space Station (ISS) to be an easy target. Since NASA first began discussing the station's forerunner some 25 years ago, many astrophysicists and planetary scientists have viewed the ISS as an orbiting "white elephant" siphoning funds from more scientifically adventurous space missions.
But…
drorzel | October 3, 2007You may notice, a couple of posts down, a post with the title "Links for 2007-10-03," with a bunch of, well, links in it. This was auto-generated by del.icio.us, and is the main reason why I started using that service this week-- the idea is to give me a way to collect together the sort of almost-bloggable links that I run across every day and end up leaving as open blog tabs for a week before deciding that they don't really have enough meat to be a full post, and it's too much work to cut and paste a lot of them together for a Links Dump. This will tend to include a bunch of EurekAlert press…
drorzel | October 3, 2007This is more Bora's thing than mine, but I should note that the new open access journal PMC Physics A has published their first articles as freely available PDF's. They also have a video interview with the editor up on the site.
Of course, with titles like "Dilaton and off-shell (non-critical string) effects in Boltzmann equation for species abundances," I'm not likely to be reading (or understanding) this particular journal much. But that's OK, they have an AMO physics journal coming soon, and if you act quickly, they'll publish your paper for free (submit by December 1).
They also have the…
drorzel | October 3, 2007
School cheating scandal divides New Hampshire community - International Herald Tribune
At some point, wouldn't it actually be easier to learn stuff, rather than breaking into the school to steal the exams?
(tags: stupid education)
PhysMath Central takes off with a big bang
(tags: physics journals academia open-access)
Are women being scared away from math, science, and engineering fields?
(tags: academia physics psychology gender)
Menace in a bottle
An NMR-based method for distinguishing shampoo from scaaaary liquids that can't go on planes.
(tags: stupid science physics travel)…
drorzel | October 2, 2007Speaking of cryptic particle physcis results, noted rumor-monger Tommaso Dorigo has a rather long post about the ongoing Higgs search. It basically boils down to "There are new results due to be released soon, and I'm not going to talk about them," which wouldn't seem to require 2000 words, but there you go.
Anyway, if you're anxiously following the search for the Higgs boson, he's hinting away about the upcoming update to the small signal that created a bit of a stir back in January. If there's anything to it, that would be really exciting, but for now, only people within CDF know, and they'…
drorzel | October 2, 2007I've got a bunch of EurekAlert feeds in my RSS subscriptions, that I use to keep up with recent developments, because I need blog fodder. One of the really striking things about these is how extremely variable the quality of the releases is.
Take, for example, the release headlined New particles get a mass boost, describing results from extremely precise measurements at Jefferson Lab:
A sophisticated, new analysis has revealed that the next frontier in particle physics is farther away than once thought. New forms of matter not predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics are most…
drorzel | October 2, 2007Natalie Angier has a piece in the Times this morning about the loss of a beloved pet cat:
Cleo was almost 16 years old, she'd been sick, and her death was no surprise. Still, when I returned to a home without cats, without pets of any sort, I was startled by my grief -- not so much its intensity as its specificity.
It was very different from the catastrophic grief I'd felt when I was 19 and my father died, and all sense, color and flooring dropped from my days. This was a sorrow of details, of minor rhythms and assumptions that I hadn't really been aware of until, suddenly, they were…
drorzel | October 2, 2007Via Inside Higher Ed, a brilliant new approach to the problem of high tuition costs, coutesy of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley (whose highly impartial Wikipedia entry is a hoot):
The runaway cost of a college education has been on the mayor's radar screen for some time. Last year, Daley suggested a fifth year of high school to address a crisis that he warned threatens to reduce the American birthrate.
On Friday, he suggested that colleges clean up their own act.
"They should cut half the courses. It would cut the cost down tremendously. What are the basic courses that you need in college? Cut…
drorzel | October 1, 2007A little while back, I asked for help identifying some anime recommended by a Japanese fan. I have subsequently found the business card on which he wrote the titles:
The first one looks like it is "Gurren-Lagann, so a shiny gold star for commenter Patrick.
the second one is a total mystery to me. I get "Ba Bu Ru squiggle GO!!" from that, and I'm not too sure about the "Bu." Anyway, any guidance you can provide would be welcome in comments.
drorzel | October 1, 2007I missed the New York Times article about Rutgers professor William Dowling, who is campaiging against college sports, and has written a jeremiad on the subject and gotten it published by-- slight irony alert-- Penn State University Press.
There are a lot of things to dislike about big-time college sports, starting with the rank hypocrisy of the NCAA, and continuing on through the lack of a meaningful championship in college football. I have to say, though, that Dowling kind of puts me off the book when he describes it to the Times:
"I wanted this book to be a monument," Dr. Dowling, 62, said…
drorzel | October 1, 2007As you may or may not remember from last year, a number of us at ScienceBlogs participated in a charity drive, raising $34,000 for the educational charity DonorsChoose. It's back again this year, and better than ever: we've got our own dedicated leader board, and the event this time out will be a full month, starting today, October 1.
To get to my challenge, follow this helpful little graphical link, which will be appearing all over the blog this month:<.p>
Once you're there, you'll be presented with a list of proposals that you can donate money to. These are funding requests from…