Yemen: Protests Continue Away from International Media Eyes · Global Voices "With the entire world watching Egypt as it celebrates the uprooting of its dictator, Yemenis are calling for help and the world's media attention. On Twitter, the calls came loud and clear. A rally started in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, in celebration of the ousting of Hosni Mubarak. Soon, it turned into an anti-Saleh protest, calling for an end of Ali Abdullah Saleh's rule. Police surrounded the protesters, and there were reports of fire shots. Wounded protesters, taken to hospitals, were arrested - at least that…

The always fraught question of student course evaluations has come up again on campus. In discussions, the correlation between "expected grade" and "overall evaluation" has once again been noted-- that is, students who report expecting a higher grade are more likely to give a good overall score to their professors than students who expect a lower grade. Which, of course, does not indicate a causal relationship between those two things, but that doesn't stop us from spinning hypotheses. Thus, a poll question: There is a positive correlation between the expected grade reported and the…

College Inc. - Survey: Community college students prize Internet access over teachers "More than than 70 percent of students surveyed "believe that it is important to have access to high speed Internet in order to succeed at community college," the report states. "In fact, students tend to believe that high speed Internet access is more important for success than having access to advisors or relationships with professors." In other words, today's community college student considers an Internet hookup more important than any human on campus." (tags: academia education internet technology…

Appa appears in all the weekly Toddler Blogging pictures, but he's not the only stuffed animal in Chateau Steelypips. the others were getting a little resentful of Appa's blog time, so here's the full cast of characters: In the back row, from left to right, we have: SteelyKid, Baby, Audrey, Appa, Dolly, Lorax, and Mommy. In the front row: a green bird whose name I don't know, a reindeer left over from Christmas, Dijon the knit giraffe, Bertha the Big Bear, and Emmy. SteelyKid was sent home from day care with a fever today, which has kind of thrown a wrench into everything, and made her…

Barring a major disaster, I am scheduled to teach one of our Scholars Research Seminar classes next winter. I've been kicking the idea for this around for a while, with the semi-clever title "A Brief History of Timekeeping." The idea is to talk about the different technologies people have used to mark the passage of time, from Stonehenge down to modern atomic clocks. There's a lot of good science in there, from astronomy (sundials and the like) to basic mechanics (pendulums and so on) to quantum physics (atomic clocks) and even relativity. And there's plenty of room for side trips into other…

Last night was Syracuse versus Georgetown in basketball, which is THE great historical rivalry in the Big East-- these are the teams that made the league great in the 80's, and while the Hoyas had a down stretch in the late 90's/ early 2000's, they're good again, so it's a huge game. Because of that, even though I'm usually the one to put SteelyKid to bed at night, Kate took her so I could watch the game. So, of course, Syracuse lost. In the most annoying fashion possible, too: they had a small but consistent 4-6 point lead for a big chunk of the second half, and then right after SteelyKid…

Beer Batter Is Better: Scientific American "If you've ever sat down at a pub to a plate of really good fish and chips--the kind in which the fish stays tender and juicy but the crust is supercrisp--odds are that the cook used beer as the main liquid when making the batter. Beer makes such a great base for batter because it simultaneously adds three ingredients--carbon dioxide, foaming agents and alcohol--each of which brings to bear different aspects of physics and chemistry to make the crust light and crisp." (tags: science food chemistry physics) Swans on Tea » Q & A A nice…

I haven't been as relentless about flogging How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (now available in paperback!) as I was last year, because it gets kind of exhausting. I do have a vanity search set up on Google Reader that points me to the occasional review-- this one, for example, so I still see the occasional positive comment, which is good for a boost in a difficult week at work. Of course, the vanity search is world wide, which means it also picks up mentions of the international editions, such as this Italian blog (oddly, it gets my employer wrong-- I should check the Italian edition and see…

The "peer reviewers get worse" item in this morning's Links Dump drew an immediate comment elsewhere to the effect of "of course they do, because they start pawning reviews off on their students. This one was a surprise to me, so here's a quick poll to see if my subfield of physics is really that much more collegial and ethical than the rest of science: Handing a referee report for a grant or paper off to be written by a grad student or post-doc is:customer surveys Refereeing takes place via classical communications channels, so you may only choose one option. My experience is that while I…

The Virtuosi: Life in the Infrared "There's a place where TV remotes are flashlights, Wii's are torches, and Snuggies are translucent. It's our kitchen. We modified a 3 dollar webcam to view in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. We'll show you how, and what you can do with it." (tags: science physics optics experiment pictures blogs virtusoi) Last Man Live :: The Mid-Majority "It's become an annual Mid-Majority tradition. I try to be the last man in America to know who won the Super Bowl, and the last man in America to know the score of the game. Together, these two…

I'm taking some flak in the comments to yesterday's book recommendation request post, so let me illustrate what I meant with an example. Lots of people recommended the Andrew Lang Fairy books, which are freely available online. I looked at the first story in the first book, which is plenty entertaining, but also has this bit that stopped me short: Hardly had [an evil sorceror] reached his own house when, taking the ring, he said, "Bronze ring, obey thy master. I desire that the golden ship shall turn to black wood, and the crew to hideous negroes; that St. Nicholas shall leave the helm and…

Evolution in Science Education - Bill Nye on Evolution in Science Education - Popular Mechanics "Science education: We should support it. Especially elementary school science. Nearly every rocket scientist got interested in it before they were 10. Everybody who's a physician, who makes vaccines, who wants to find the cure for cancer. Everybody who wants to do any medical good for humankind got the passion for that before he or she was 10. So we want to excite a new generation of kids--every generation--about the passion, beauty and joy--the PB&J--of science. These anti-evolution people…

One of the books in SteelyKid's regular rotation of books to read at naptime and bedtime is this book about a girl visiting characters from fairy tales to ask them what makes somebody happy ever after. It's not the greatest, but she enjoys it. It occurs to me, though, that while the book references a couple of classic fairy tales-- the girl in the story visits the princess from "The Princess and the Pea" and the frog prince, and also a fairy godmother-- SteelyKid has never heard any of the original stories, and thus is unlikely to appreciate the references (even accounting for the fact that…

D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger pies and shorter hours and AGAINST more or less everything else "There is always a level of civil unrest that outstrips the capability of even the most loyal and largest regular armed forces to deal with. In all likelihood, as a medium sized emerging market, you will have a capital city with a population of about five or six million, meaing potentially as many as three million adults on the streets in the worst case. Your total active-duty armed forces are unlikely to be a tenth of that. When it becomes a numbers game, there is only one thing that can save you…

I've been watching the Al Jazeera English livestream off and on this week to keep up with events in Egypt. At some point, SteelyKid came in while I had it on, saw shots of the cheering crowds from Tuesday, and said "People dancing!" Sometime on Wednesday, she marched over to me, and demanded to watch a video. I asked what she wanted, and she said "People dancing!" At that point, though, the live video was of people throwing Molotov cocktails off a hotel roof onto protesters below. I didn't think that was really appropriate toddler fare, so I showed her this instead: Three-ish years later,…

Given that the snow banks on the sides of the driveway are taller than SteelyKid, it might not seem like time for golf. If she's going to reach her goal of being the first toddler to win an event on the PGA Tour, though, she can't afford to take time off from practicing: Swing coach Appa says "You might consider holding the club with both hands..." From that range, though, she could hardly miss. Which gets us to the most important part of the game: Jumping up and down after making a shot is the best part of golf.

I make an effort to say nice things about pop-science books that I read, whether for book research or blog reviews. Every now and then, though, I hit a book that has enough problems that I have a hard time taking anything positive from it. I got David Bodanis's E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation from Union's library because I like the subtitle, and plan to reference it in the relevant chapter of the book-in-progress. I figured that, if I'm going to swipe his subtitle, I should at least be able to say something substantive about the book. Bodanis takes pains to say that…

Best Science Books 2010: The top books of the year!!!! : Confessions of a Science Librarian More good science books than you have time to read. (tags: books science blogs confess-science-lib) Locus Roundtable » The Locus 2010 Recommended Reading List More good SF books that you have time to read. (tags: books sf literature review magazines) Republicans Vote To Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed For Earth | The Onion - America's Finest News Source "According to political pundits, the showdown over whether to let the asteroid blast a 150-mile-wide, 20-mile-deep…

Confessions of a Community College Dean: Meritocracy and Hiring "Is academic hiring meritocratic? The author of this piece assumes that it is. As someone whose job it is to actually hire faculty, I can attest that merit is only a small part of the picture. The single most important part of the picture is the existence of a position at all. In this funding climate, we can only afford to staff a few of the positions (whether faculty, staff, or administration) that we need. If the position doesn't exist, then the relative merit of the prospective candidates means exactly zero. That may seem…

the Wall Street Journal, of all places, has a profile of college basketball analyst Bill Raftery and how he prepares to call games. This would be nothing more than Links Dump material, save for the fact that bits of it appear to have been written for the benefit of visiting aliens who have never seen televised basketball before: Over the years, the exercise evolved into the intricate system he uses today. On the far left side of the page, Mr. Raftery writes down each player's name and number. Next are the player's habits and tendencies, as few as three or as many as seven. This season's…