drorzel | May 6, 2011
Memoirs from Africa: Paring Down a List « Easily Distracted
"In selecting works, I've decided to go for the widest stylistic range I can think of and the widest range of settings, interests and authors. [...] It also provides a surplus of certain kinds of books that I find tedious because they follow such a strong template and are so driven by market fads: memoirs of white women who grew up on African farms that followed on Alexandra Fuller's great memoir of life in Rhodesia and now memoirs of child soldiers and survivors of Darfur. But I think that's an interesting kind of reading in its…
drorzel | May 5, 2011That title isn't a euphemism-- SteelyKid decided to use this week's Toddler Blogging to try to teach an old Appa a new trick. First you go up up up on your head:
Then you flip down:
Ta-daa!!
drorzel | May 5, 2011An academic email list that I'm on has started a discussion of lab writing, pointing out that students in some lab classes spend more time on writing lab reports in a quasi-journal-article format format than they do taking and analyzing data. This "feels " wrong in many ways, and the person who kicked off the discussion did so by asking for alternatives to the journal-article style lab report.
This is a recurring discussion in physics education, because everybody who teaches lab courses struggles with this issue (guess what I'm procrastinating from grading right now...). It's made much worse…
drorzel | May 5, 2011NASA held a big press conference yesterday to announce that the Gravity Probe B experiment had confirmed a prediction of General Relativity that spacetime near Earth should be "twisted" by the Earth's rotation. A lot of the coverage has focused on the troubled history of the mission (as did the press conference, apparently), but scientifically it's very impressive.
The shift measured is very, very small-- 0.04 arcseconds over the course of a year, or 0.000011 degrees-- but agrees nicely with the predictions of relativity. I'm not sure whether to try to work this into the book-in-progress as I…
drorzel | May 5, 2011
The Civil War Isn't Tragic - Ta-Nehisi Coates - National - The Atlantic
"Yesterday, Robert Zimmerman was kind enough to link this podcast on the Civil War, and the reasons soldiers, Union and Confederate, offered up for fighting. It's a good segment which I heartily recommend, especially for those of us in the Effete Liberal Book Club. That said, one thing struck me about the conversation, which inevitably comes through any time smart people gather to discuss the Civil War. The conceded common ground was the following--The Civil War was a tragedy.
I think that ground is generally accepted…
drorzel | May 4, 2011It's been a hectic day here, so I haven't had time to do any substantive blogging. I did want to quickly note a couple of stories presenting marked improvements in experiments I've written up here in the past:
1) In the "self-evident title" category, there's Confinement of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds, which extends last year's antihydrogen trapping to times a factor of 6000 longer than the previous record. That's very good, and a good sign for plans to do precision spectroscopy and other such experiments. As always, Physics World offers a nice write-up.
2) As noted in the comments of Monday…
drorzel | May 4, 2011
Blog U.: 4 Reasons Why Local Meetings Should Be Conducted with Web Meeting Tools - Technology and Learning - Inside Higher Ed
"Adobe Connect, WebEX, GoToMeeting, LiveMeeting, Skype, Elluminate (what am I missing?), these web conferencing tools are not just for meeting at a distance.
Here are 4 reasons why you should hold more of your meetings online, even if everyone meeting works together on the same campus:"
(tags: academia meetings business inside-higher-ed culture)
Princess Masako - "She's Useless" | The Royal Universe
"Crown Princess Masako of Japan turns 47 on 9 December. It'd be…
drorzel | May 3, 2011I recently participated in a survey of higher education professionals about various aspects of the job. It was very clearly designed by and aimed at scholars in the humanities and social sciences, to the point where answering questions honestly made me feel like a Bad Person.
For example, there were numerous questions about teaching methods that just aren't applicable to what I teach-- things like learning through community service. while there is some truth to the old cliche that you never really learn something until you have to teach it, something like turning a bunch of would-be engineers…
drorzel | May 3, 2011Kevin Drum notes a growing backlash against education reform, citing Diane Ravitch, Emily Yoffe and this Newsweek (which is really this private foundation report in disguise) as examples. The last of these, about the failed attempts of several billionaires to improve education through foundation grants, is really kind of maddening. It makes the billionaires in question (Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Eli Broad, and the Wal-Mart Waltons) sound like feckless idiots, but I can't tell if that's just bad writing.
The core of the piece is the finding that the districts these guys put money into haven't…
drorzel | May 3, 2011
A SETI Infographic « Microcosmologist
"And to put things into perspective, I've whipped up this handy infographic, comparing how $2.5 million compares to so many other things that we absolutely must have, and will not hesitate to pay for:"
(tags: science space astronomy politics funding blogs pictures)
Physics Buzz: Hinting at dark matter
We haven't seen dark matter yet. We haven't, right? Sitting in a plenary talk at the APS April meeting today I started to have my doubts.
(tags: science physics particles experiment astronomy)
News Desk: Notes on the Death of Osama bin Laden : The New…
drorzel | May 2, 2011Over in Scientopia, Janet notes an interesting mis-statement from NPR, where Dina Temple-Raston said of the now-dead terrorist:
[O]ne intelligence officials told us that nothing with an electron actually passed close to him, which in a way is one of the ways they actually caught him.
As Janet notes, this would be quite a feat, given that electrons are a key component of ordinary matter. But for the sake of silly physics blogging, let's take this seriously for a moment. Suppose that Osama bin Laden really could make himself utterly devoid of electrons: would that be a good way to hide?
To…
drorzel | May 2, 2011Last summer, there was a fair bit of hype about a paper from Mark Raizen's group at Texas which was mostly reported with an "Einstein proven wrong" slant, probably due to this press release. While it is technically true that they measured something Einstein said would be impossible to measure, that framing is a little unfair to Einstein. It does draw media attention, though...
The experiment in question involves Brownian motion, and since I had to read up on that anyway for something else, I thought I might as well look up this paper, and write it up for the blog.
OK, so what did they do that…
drorzel | May 2, 2011The New York Times ran a couple of op-eds on Sunday about education policy. One, by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari is familair stuff to anyone who's heard me talk about the subject before: teachers in the US are, on the whole, given fewer resources than they need to succeed, paid less well than other professions with comparable educational requirements, and then castigated as incompetents. And we wonder why top students aren't interested in education.
The other by R. Barker Bausell, offers a simple and seemingly objective standard for evaluating teacher performance: measuring their…
drorzel | May 2, 2011
The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries - NYTimes.com
"WHEN we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers. We don't say, "It's these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That's why we haven't done better in Afghanistan!" No, if the results aren't there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.
And yet in education we do just that. When we don't like the way our…
drorzel | May 1, 2011
Acculturating students to science § Unqualified Offerings
"A student with a very enthusiastic yet serious demeanor, and very responsible habits, recently asked if he could work in my research group. He has few relevant skills at this point, and my crew is pretty full, but I want to help him, so we're applying for some programs that support undergrads in research. He isn't a physics major, but he has broad interests, and I think we need more people like him.
In the process of reading drafts of his application essays, he sounded incredibly naive, and his writing skills could stand…
drorzel | April 30, 2011SteelyKid and Kate are down in Boston this weekend, which has given me time to get some work done around the house, and go to some restaurants that they don't like. It's left me a little deprived of cute, though. So, as a counter to that, some cute video of SteelyKid riding her "motorcycle" (her term) down the small hill by Grandma and Grandpa's:
(She can just barely reach the pedals, but can't use them very effectively, so she just scoots it along with her feet, and picks them up once she gets going. The abrupt stop at the end of this was in order to demand another jellybean from Grandma.)
drorzel | April 29, 2011Today's blog silence was the result of travel down to and back from New Haven, where I gave a talk at Southern Connecticut State University. Weirdly, this was also a day full of reminders of my own advancing age:
-- After the talk, I wandered around New Haven a bit, visiting places I used to go when I was a post-doc at Yale. It's been long enough since I lived there that they are now re-renovating buildings that were extensively renovated while I was there.
-- The wandering was to kill time before getting dinner with a friend from college, who is a doctor in the area. We went to a bar near…
drorzel | April 29, 2011
Photonist » Blog Archive » Antihydrogen trapped for 1000 seconds
"A new experiment from the ALPHA collaboration, based at CERN, has created and trapped antihydrogen atoms for 1000 seconds, 6000 times longer than their previous attempts which trapped antihydrogen for 172 ms. Having antihydrogen trapped for this period allows the possibility of studying fundamental properties of antimatter in detail including the possibility of how it is affected by gravity. Although antimatter is believed to fall under gravity, that needs to be checked along with the other basic principles of physics."
(…
drorzel | April 28, 2011Kate and I have spent a lot of this week being thwarted by technology in one way or another, so SteelyKid decided to set us straight about how things work. First, she demonstrated how to work the tv:
Then she showed us how to take pictures on her phone (because, of course, all phones take pictures):
And, finally, she explained to Kate how to view the pictures she had taken on the phone:
We'd be embarrassed at having to be taught how to use common devices by a two-and-three-quarters-year-old, but we're so relieved to have Internet connectivity back in Chateau Steelypips that we can't think…
drorzel | April 28, 2011As previously noted, the Lenovo ThinkPad X61 tablet that I use for my lectures is limping badly these days (it blue-screened this morning, whee). The options for a direct replacement are pretty limited, but in thinking about it a bit, I realized that I hardly use the tablet functions other than to annotate slides during lectures. Most of what I do with it just involves using it like an ordinary laptop.
It's not clear to me whether the hardware is really a problem, but I might very well be able to wipe it, reinstall the necessary programs, then continue to use it as a lecture-only computer,…