drorzel | June 21, 2007That's shocking mostly in a Claude-Rains-in-Casablanca sort of sense ("I am shocked--shocked!"), but there are a couple of stories in Inside Higher Ed this morning presenting new findings that seem like they ought to be really obvious.
The first is a new study of the University of California system that finds that different majors are different:
Among the 58,000 undergraduates on eight campuses who participated in the survey, students who majored in the social sciences and humanities reported higher levels of satisfaction with their undergraduate education over all as well as better skills in…
drorzel | June 21, 2007I've never really understood the distinction between "Novellas" and "Novelettes"-- I know it's a length thing, but I don't have a good feel for where the dividing line is, and I can never remember which is longer. And, as far as I can tell, the only place this ever comes up is in SF awards.
Anyway, there are two Hugo categories for really long short fiction, and this is one of them. The nominees are:
"The Walls of the Universe" by Paul Melko
"A Billion Eves" by Robert Reed
"Inclination" by William Shunn
"Lord Weary's Empire" by Michael Swanwick
"Julian: A Christmas Story" by Robert Charles…
drorzel | June 21, 2007The mysterious saga of "supersolid" helium continues this week. If you recall, there were some new results a little while back showing that the effect depends on disorder in the samples, followed by neutron scattering studies that didn't show the expected distribution of states in the sample. These results suggest that something else is going on in these samples, and the explanation of the observed effects isn't all that simple.
Now, Moses Chan and co-workers at Penn State, who made the initial discovery, have returned with a new paper in which they see "supersolid" behavior in single…
drorzel | June 20, 2007The video link I posted earlier appears to require some plug-in to play, which is a pain in the ass. I'm going to try posting it via YouTube, then, and see if that's better behaved.
drorzel | June 20, 2007Tara's post about science journalism has sparked a lively discussion, with John Wilkins, Chris Mooney and Carl Zimmer joining Jennifer Ouellette in defending science journalists. Interestingly, this all sprang up yesterday, on a day when I wound up appearing on tv.
Yesterday morning, while I was running around dealing with my summer research students, one of my colleagues came into the lab, and asked me if I wanted to be on tv. There had been a call from one of the local tv stations, looking for someone to talk about the expansion of gases, and the request had been passed down the power…
drorzel | June 20, 2007Today's Inside Higher Ed has a story about growing resistance to the US News rankings:
In the wake of meetings this week of the Annapolis Group -- an organization of liberal arts colleges -- critics of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings are expecting a significant increase in the number of institutions where presidents pledge not to participate in the "reputational" portion of the rankings or to use scores in their own promotional materials.
A majority of the approximately 80 presidents at the meeting said that they did not intend to participate in the U.S. News reputational…
drorzel | June 19, 2007My friend Paul, the Official Middle East Correspondant of Uncertain Principles, has been doing another rotation in Baghdad, and has sent an update on the "surge." This latest dispatch describes some... reliability issues with the Iraqui police forces who are supposed to be stepping up to provide internal security. There's a certain Monty Python element to some of this:
The police were mostly stretched out in a building near the mosque, taking a nap, wearing mismatched bits of camouflage. Their sergeant looked like he'd just woken up and said he had no idea how those flags got all over the…
drorzel | June 19, 2007One of my colleagues raves about David Lindley's Where Does the Weirdness Go? as a basic introduction to odd quantum effects, but somehow, I've never managed to get around to reading any of his books until now. I recently had a need to know a bit more about the historical development of quantum theory, though, and ran across Lindley's Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science in the library, which promised to contain the information I was after, so I checked it out.
As you can guess from the title, the book deals with the early development of quantum…
drorzel | June 18, 2007In response to a question about "Other aspects of the instructor's teaching," one student in my recently completed E&M class wrote:
Prof. Orzel gives the impression of an everyday guy who just happens to have a vast but hidden knowledge of physics and the course was taught in that slightly utilitarian approach.
I've been looking for something to replace "Ramblings about life as a physicist on the tenure track at a small liberal arts college" in the left sidebar (now that I have tenure), and "[A]n everyday guy who just happens to have a vast but hidden knowledge of physics" might be just…
drorzel | June 18, 2007It's the first day of the summer research session today, which means I'm going to be run ragged getting my three (!) summer students started with their various projects. So, here's a pop-culture post inspired by the wedding Kate and I went to over the weekend:
What's the most inappropriate song you've heard played at a wedding?
This came up because while we were waiting for dinner, they were playing miscellaneous songs, one of which was "Lost Cause" by Beck. Which is a great song and all, but not so much the sort of thing you really want to play at a wedding...
In fact, I'd say that a good…
drorzel | June 18, 2007Lots of people are down on physics or physicists these days:
Cosma Shalizi is down on power-law fits, or, more precisely, annoyed at people who misuse power-law distributions. He's written a paper about how to use them correctly, and provides a handy list of take-home points on his blog.
Travis Hime is down on the academic job market, and cities that aren't San Francisco. I think he's a little too harsh on academia, but then it's well established that I'm an optimist with a rosy outlook on these matters. I can't help with the Bay Area thing.
Dave Bacon has gotten so down about quantum…
drorzel | June 17, 2007Via Jeff "jefitoblog" Giles, who wrote the Editor's Notes, the collaborative review site Rotten Tomatoes has generated a list of the top 100 science fiction films, based on their user ratings. It's split over 100 individual pages, and tarted up with lots of slow-to-load graphics, so here are their top twenty films:
20) Mad Max
19) Frankenstein (the 1931 version)
18) 2001: A Space Odyssey
17) Solaris (the 1972 version)
16) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 1956 version)
15) The Terminator
14) Brazil
13) Galaxy Quest
12) Bride of Frankenstein
11) The Road Warrior
(The top 10 are after the…
drorzel | June 17, 2007Today is, at long last, Commencement at Union. At around the time this is posted, I'll be parading around in academic robes, or possibly listening to a variety of boring speeches.
Of course, I can't really claim that I don't enjoy this. After all, Kate and I drove back here from Boston last night after a weeding down there, specifically so I could make it to this morning's ceremonies, bad knee and all. Some faculty complain about having to attend commencement, but I get a kick out of it. Not so much the speeches, but seeing the students go through the ceremony-- the dazed look they get when…
drorzel | June 15, 2007Inside Higher Ed has an opinion piece today in which a a provost and a professor talk about service, which is the catch-all category of faculty activities that aren't teaching and research. As the title of the piece says, this is a particularly unloved area:
Yet this is the area that is least discussed in graduate school, for which no training is typically provided, and that the interview process rarely brings up. Furthermore, while tenure and promotion evaluations pay homage to the trinity of "Teaching, Scholarship and Service," service surely gets the least amount of attention. It is very…
drorzel | June 15, 2007As Kate and I will be attending the Worldcon in Japan, we're eligible to vote for the Hugos this year. In an effort to be responsible voters we downloaded the electronic version of the short fiction nominees that are available from the official nominations site, and I've been working my way through them. To this point, I've finished the Best Short Story nominees:
"How to Talk to Girls at Parties"Neil Gaiman
"Kin" Bruce McAllister
"Impossible Dreams" Tim Pratt
"Eight Episodes" Robert Reed
"The House Beyond Your Sky"Benjamin Rosenbaum
If anybody would like to make a passionate argument in…
drorzel | June 15, 2007I'm turning in my grades today, which means another year has come to an end. Also, I'm on sabbatical next year. Woo-hoo!
To celebrate, here's a silly random songs post. In honor of the end of the term, iTunes chose to serve up a set of songs with lyrics that are either completely insipid or ridiculously self-important. #10 in particular might as well be an instrumental, for all the sense the lyrics make. And you have no idea how hard it was to find a line in #19 that doesn't give the whole thing away.
Anyway, these are off the four-and-five-star playlist, and I don't think they're all that…
drorzel | June 14, 2007As several of you know very well, Kate and I were married five years ago in Massachusetts, near where her family lives. Which, of course, means that our marriage was totally cheapened and rendered meaningless by today's vote against an anti-gay-marriage amendment to the state constitution.
Or-- wait, let me check-- no, no it wasn't. Nope, pretty much still happily married, and happy to be married. And probably happier than ever to have been married in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Some horse trading was apparently required to get the votes lined up, but the Legislature eventually managed…
drorzel | June 14, 2007Since it seems to be a good day for posting things that may be unwise, I'll throw this out. In the middle of a news release dump from the APS, there's a story about a new study of physics pedagogy that found gender gaps persisting in spite of "active learning" techniques. This is in contrast to a previous study from Harvard.
What moves me to post, though, is a sentence from the middle of the news squib:
On the bright side, both male and female students performed better in the interactive classes than students laboring in traditional lecture-based classes. Overall, however, male students…
drorzel | June 14, 2007According to Inside Higher Ed, that's what sociologists found when analyzing data from a longitudinal study of more than 10,000 young Americans. Those who went to college were more likely to remain religious than those who didn't attend college, with 76% of the non-college group reporting a decline in attending religious services, compared to only 59% of those who attended college. As one of the authors notes, this goes against conventional wisdom:
"Actually we've just been wrong about this for quite a while," said Mark D. Regnerus, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of…
drorzel | June 14, 2007According to Inside Higher Ed, a new report about the Virginia Tech shooter puts the blame on college lawyers:
"Throughout our meetings and in every breakout session, we heard differing interpretations and confusion about legal restrictions on the ability to share information about a person who may be a threat to self or to others," states the Report to the President on Issues Raised by the Virginia Tech Tragedy, released Wednesday and compiled by the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Justice. Fears of violating state privacy laws, statutes designed to prevent…