drorzel | October 21, 2006We have a small ornamental pond in the back yard, with a little bubbler in it to keep it from turning into nothing but a stagnant mosquito ranch. Here we find the Queen of Niskayuna contemplating the pond:
(I'm not quite sure what she's looking for, but it was cute. Sometimes she drinks the water, but only very, very carefully, because she hates to be wet. It took some serious GIMPing to make this picture look good, but I'm fairly happy with it now.)
drorzel | October 21, 2006Inside Higher Ed, in their "Quick Takes" points to a new study of teaching evaluations that they summarize thusly:
Students care more about teaching quality than professorial rank when evaluating professors, and professors who receive good evaluations from one group of students typically continue to do so in the future, and to have students who earn better grades than those in other courses, according to new research from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
None of that sounds all that shocking, and the abstract of the paper itself doesn't add much more detail. The key sentences would…
drorzel | October 21, 2006It's not the sort of thing I usually follow, but Ethan Zuckerman is blogging about the talks at the Pop!Tech conference (Pop!Tech 2006 site). There's an impressive variety of topics, and Ethan gives good summaries of the talks (well, at least, the summaries themselves are pretty readable-- I can't speak for the accuracy, as I haven't seen the actual talks...).
Also, ScienceBlogs local favorite Richard Dawkins does a drive-by talk, so people here might be interested in that. (My personal opinion of Dawkins is closer to that in this David Weinberger post that Ethan cites.)
drorzel | October 21, 2006Not a lot of love for the ACC Preview post from earlier this week, and I got buried in work, so I didn't get a chance to write up the Big East and A-10 previews. I'll try to do at least one this weekend, but until then, the three basketball fans among my readers may or may not be happy to know that Jeremy Gold is back with his entertainingly bipolar look at Maryland basketball. His unique take on the roster is up now, and I'm sure there's more to come.
drorzel | October 20, 2006After months and months of nothing, behold! Signal!
Explanation below the fold.
What you're looking at here is a graph showing the signal from our optically excited metastable krypton source prototype. The red dots are fluorescence detected by a photomultiplier tube (PMT) from metastable atoms created in the source, and excited by a probe laser passing through the source region. The black dots show the intensity of another beam from the same laser passing through a plasma discharge in a vapor cell, which creates metastbles that absorb the light when the laser is at the right frequency.
The…
drorzel | October 20, 2006Having made reference to the referee system in my post about a paper being accepted, this seems like a good point to dust off an old post about the peer review system in physics.
Like many of the other Classic Edition posts I've put up here, this one dates from July of 2002. Apparently, I wrote a lot of stuff about physics in July of 2002.
Anyway, the original text is below the fold, if you'd like a look inside the sausage factory that is the scientific publishing process...
I've just been asked to referee a journal article, for the fourth time in the last seven months. Since "peer review" is…
drorzel | October 20, 2006The New York Times today has a story about Web-based classes offering virtual labs, and whether they should count for AP credit:
As part of a broader audit of the thousands of high school courses that display its Advanced Placement trademark, the [College Board] has recruited panels of university professors and experts in Internet-based learning to scrutinize the quality of online laboratories used in Web-based A.P. science courses.
"Professors are saying that simulations can be really good, that they use them to supplement their own lab work, but that they'd be concerned about giving…
drorzel | October 20, 2006From Inside Higher Ed this morning, interesting new results on marriage and academic careers:
A year ago, a graduate student in economics at Cornell University released a study showing that men who are married are more likely to finish doctoral programs than are single men. When Inside Higher Ed wrote about the study, the graduate student, Joseph Price, received numerous questions from readers wanting to know just how far the marriage advantage took men in academe, and where it applied to women as well.
Price went back to his data and now is out with a new study. This one shows that married…
drorzel | October 19, 2006I got word yesterday that the last leftover part of the work I did as a post-doc has been accepted for publication as a Rapid Communication in Physical Review A. It's not up on the web yet, but you can find an old draft on the ArXiV that will give you the basic idea.
"But wait," you say, "You haven't been a post-doc for more than five years. Why such a long delay?"
Well, for one thing, the group moved across the country in 2003 or so, which kind of puts a damper on the paper writing process. And that group isn't fast at getting papers sent out in the best of circumstances-- we managed to get…
drorzel | October 19, 2006Inside Higher Ed has a story about the recent student elections at Penn State, which ended up with the winning candidates being belatedly rejected after making inappropriate comments:
Jay Bundy won a plurality of votes in last week's campus election and was poised to take over leadership of the University Park Undergraduate Association, recognized by university administrators as being the official voice of students. Soon after the election, Bundy and his running mate, Christopher Brink, both juniors, were told by the elections commission that they had won the vote count.
Later in the week,…
drorzel | October 19, 2006I have discovered a marvelous proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, which is too long to fit in the Excerpt box.
Which means that people reading this blog via RSS have no chance of seeing it, as the combined feed is currently showing only the excerpts. It's not clear whether this is a glitch or a poorly-thought-out deliberate action, but either way, several of us are trying to get that fixed.
This would be a good place to put comments about any other technical problems you're experienceing with the site, though. I'll see that they get passed on to the appropriate people.
drorzel | October 18, 2006Well, at least, the physics of the new NBA basketball, at any rate...
For those who haven't heard the story already, the NBA is changing the style of the basketballs used in its games this season. They're moving away from the traditional leather basketballs to a new synthetic material, which is supposed to hold up better to wear and tear.
Predictably enough, most of the players hate the new ball, and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has gone so far as to enlist physicists to look into the situation:
Jim Horwitz is chair of the physics department at UT-Arlington, and Kaushik De is the project leader…
drorzel | October 18, 2006It's fraternity pledging season on campus, which means there are dozens of slightly addled sophomores wandering around being forced to do silly things by upperclassmen. This, combined with the passing mention of cable-making in the college advice post, got me thinking about scientific hazing-- the sort of crap jobs that get given to first-year grad students in research groups.
I suspect this is mostly an experimental phenomenon, as experimental work provides many more opportunities for really unpleasant tasks. There are oil traps on vacuum systems that collect thick, nasty sludge that…
drorzel | October 18, 2006Over at Learning Curves, Rudbeckia Hirta takes a look at the myth of the "real world". A colleague tried to defend a zero-tolerance attendance policy by saying, "If she had a job and missed a meeting, she'd be fired." That's not really how it works, though:
We have people who don't show up to class, people who cancel class for no good reason, and people who don't show up for mandatory meetings, and they (all without tenure!) still work here.
My friends with Real Jobs have griped about enough incompetent fools that they've worked with, that I don't think that zero-tolerance firing is in wide…
drorzel | October 18, 2006It's fall, which means lots of good things: football on tv, college basketball just around the corner, apple cider donuts (mmm.... donuts...), and the leaves turning colors. One of the real highlights of living in New England is the spectacular foliage. Sadly, it tends to bring out the leaf-peepers, people from down toward New York or Boston, who drive around at about six miles per hour looking at the trees, but the trees are certainly worth a look.
Ever wonder why it is that the trees do that? So have a lot of scientists. Carl Zimmer has a round-up of their findings. Short answer: "Beats us…
drorzel | October 17, 2006Ben over at the World's Fair is looking for a house band for ScienceBlogs. He goes on for a while about Phish, which is kind of bizarre-- you can't be stoned enough to appreciate Phish while also retaining the ability to do math. He also suggests a few slightly more obvious nerd bands-- Devo, They Might Be Giants, Weezer-- before ending up with Wilco. Which I also don't really understand, unless it's because Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is about as much fun as vector calculus.
If you want to suggest a "house band" for this mob, the obvious direction to go would for people like They Might Be Giants,…
drorzel | October 17, 2006This post dates from all the way back in July of 2002, and contains a bunch of thoughts on the preparation of different types of scientific presentations. I've re-covered some of this ground in the previous post, but there's enough different material to justify a separate Classic Edition post.
Since posting this, I've given several more Public Lectures, and they're a lot of fun. I've also gotten a lot better at ad-libbing physics lectures with minimal notes, which may or may not be a Bad Thing.
The text of my 2002 post is below the fold.
Having been tiresomely political for the past few days…
drorzel | October 17, 2006For some reason, I was forwarded a link to an old article from the Chronicle of Higher Education about how to give a scholarly lecture. (It's a time-limited email link, so look quickly.)
As with roughly 90% of all Chronicle pieces, it's aimed squarely at the humanities types. The advice given thus ranges from pretty good advice even for science types ("Remember that people who show up to hear you want to believe that you're smart, interesting, and a good speaker"; "Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Then stop"; and "Prepare yourself in advance for questions.") to horror-show glimpses of how the…
drorzel | October 17, 2006Sean Carroll is offering more unsolicted advice (though it is in response to a comment, which makes it borderline solicited...), this time about choosing an undergraduate school. He breaks the options down into four categories, with two small errors that I'll correct in copying the list over here:
Liberal-Arts College (LAC), such as Williams or Union.
Specialized Technical School (STS), such as MIT or Caltech.
Elite Private University (EPU), such as Harvard or Stanford.
Large State School (LSS), such as UCLA or Michigan.
There. That's much better.
I should note two things up front: the…
drorzel | October 17, 2006Both the AIP and the New York Times are reporting that elements 116 and 118 have been discovered by a collaboration between Russian and American scientists working at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna. This is the second time it's been announced that element 118 has been seen, as a previous "discovery" turned out to be fraudulent, but everybody who comments in those articles says that they're confident this one is the real thing.
The elements in question, which nobody has attempted to attach names to yet (have they learned nothing from the Planet Wars? Name one after a tv…