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How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Poetry Contest

There once was a dog from Niskayuna... The previous post announced a photo caption contest for a chance to win an advance proof copy of my book, How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, six(-ish) months before it's available for purchase. I thought I should include something for the less visually inclined, though, and I do have two extra galley proofs, so... Announcing the Official How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Poetry contest. The idea is simple: write a short poem involving both dogs and physics in one of the usual short verse forms (haiku, limerick, double dactyl, whatever, as long as it has…

Anonymity and Pseudonymity

Somebody recently asked me whether I had figured out who Female Science Professor is. I truthfully replied that I haven't even tried. That was the first thing that came to mind when some jerk from the National Review revealed the identity of "Publius", kicking off another round of discussion about the etiquette of revealing identities that bloggers have chosen to conceal. This one probably won't be any more revealing than the previous go-rounds. It's worth a tiny bit of effort, though, to fight for correct language in this case. Lots of people, most of them right-wingers, will be referring to…

links for 2009-05-27

Unscientific America: The Table of Contents | The Intersection | Discover Magazine 2009 promises to be a good year for science-y books by people with blogs. (tags: books science social-science society politics intersection culture) Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Is the right book winning the Hugo? "The problem we usually have with arguing about what won awards is that weâre too close to them, or else too far away. 1990 is long enough ago that we should have some perspective, and with these lists, we also have the perspective of the people who were there. Looking at…

Next Weekend at AAAS

As I've mentioned in passing before, I'll be attending the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science next weekend, in order to appear on a panel about the TIMSS Advanced 2008 test. I'm an idiot, and didn't submit an abstract in time (I thought there was a perfectly adequate placeholder abstract there, but I must've imagined it), but I'll be talking about how the physics questions on the test line up with standard curricula and conceptual tests and that sort of thing. The three-hour symposium format is not what I'm used to (presentations at physics meetings are…

Links for 2011-01-08

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium (Ftrain.com) "A medium has a niche. A sitcom works better on TV than in a newspaper, but a 10,000 word investigative piece about a civic issue works better in a newspaper. When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the…

Links for 2010-12-31

Christopher Guest | Film | Gateways To Geekery | The A.V. Club "No comic filmmaker is more intimately associated with improvisation than Christopher Guest, an alum of The National Lampoon Radio Hour and Saturday Night Live who made his name as a filmmaker co-writing, directing, and co-starring in improvised films riffing loosely on show business and music. In his most beloved films as a director, Guest comes up with a loose framework for a film with collaborator Eugene Levy, then has a cast of skilled, veteran improvisers fill in the blanks with their comical genius. " (tags: avclub movies…

Conceptual Physics Costumes for Halloween

It's late October, which means that the thoughts of small children and adults who have never quite grown up turn to selecting appropriate costumes for Halloween. In the spirit of these literary suggestions and these abstract concept suggestions, I thought it would be useful to offer some suggestions for physics-themed costumes, for those who want to dress as something from the greatest science. Of course, there are some really obvious choices for physics-themed costumes (Einstein: rumpled clothes, white hair, distracted manner, German accent; Feynman: black pants, white shirt, brushed-back…

The Physics Bus

SteelyKid, like most toddlers, knows a few songs, and likes to sing them over and over. Her repertoire is limited to "ABCDEFG" (the alphabet song, but that's how she requests it), "Twinkle, Twinkle," "Some man" ("This Old Man," which I only figured out this weekend), and "Round and Round" ("The Wheels on the Bus"). I get a little bored with the repetition, and so tend to make up my own verses, which get sideways looks from her, followed by telling Kate "Daddy's silly!" I've been posting a lot of these on Twitter over the past several days (@orzelc), but for posterity, a few physics-related…

Book Report: What to Tell Your Dog About Einstein

Oddly enough, it turns out that writing a book with a rambunctious toddler in the house is a much slower process than writing a book pre-toddler. Imagine that. Anyway, as I did during the writing stages of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog, I thought I would post occasional updates on the progress of writing Book 2: What to Tell Your Dog About Einstein. In addition to letting my readers know what I'm doing instead of blogging a bunch, it will help remind me that progress is being made, even if there are days when it feels like I'm not accomplishing anything. Chapter 1: Relative motion and…

Links for 2010-09-23

Learning the Rules « Easily Distracted "Today, for a zillion complicated reasons, many of them having nothing to do with the academy itself, the discrete knowledge that constitutes meaningful cultural capital within various professional and social worlds is much more fragmented, as are those worlds themselves. [...]Sometimes you'll get this in college, sometimes you'll get it from friends, and sometimes you won't get it until later. This is fine: I am not one of those pining for the ability to compress the culture back into a tightly canonical straitjacket. What I wonder about is whether…

Links for 2010-09-04

News: Searching for STEM Success - Inside Higher Ed "During the two-decade period from 1985-1986 to 2005-2006, rural community colleges increased the number of women and minority STEM graduates by more than 42 percent. By contrast, urban community colleges boosted these underrepresented groups by just under 24 percent and suburban community colleges by about 10 percent. Breaking down degree production within specific STEM disciplines and then by type of community colleges reveals even more variance. Rural community colleges, for example, bolstered their numbers of female engineering…

Links for 2010-01-21

arXiv.org help - arXiv Support FAQ "This FAQ addresses questions raised in response to Cornell University Library's work to develop a diversified funding model to support arXiv. In a nutshell: We are working with peer libraries to investigate voluntary contributions from institutions that are the heaviest users of arXiv. " (tags: science publishing funding academia) Cherie Priest » Blog Archive » Control Things authors mostly control, things authors may influence in some measure, and things over which authors have virtually no say. (tags: books publishing writing business sf blogs)…

Links for 2010-01-11

Cut This Story! - The Atlantic (January/February 2010) An essay about how newspaper articles are too long. In keeping with the Iron Laws of the Internet, it could probably stand to be cut down a little. (tags: journalism writing media internet politics) Writing About Writers: An article by Bob Thompson | The American Scholar "I spent four years on the book beat, and looking back -- I took early retirement from the Post last summer -- I'm still amazed and grateful for what it permitted me to do. An obsessive reader since childhood, I got paid to read mostly excellent books and have…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog: Obsessive Update

Not a whole lot new, but it's been a few days. Also, it's a challenge to remain ambulatory at the moment, thanks to this cursed cold, so I'm not really prepared to turn out Significant Blogging. -- This morning's vanity search (why yes, I am searching for "How to Teach Physics to Your Dog" on a daily basis. Aren't you?) turned up this Current Geek podcast, which talks about the book. They haven't read it yet, but picked up the BoingBoing mention, and are enthusiastic about the idea. They pretty well nail the thinking behind the book. -- The vanity search also turned up this discussion of my…

I see stupid people

Halloween is coming, and you can enjoy the haunted house theme of the 78th Carnival of the Godless.The Quackometer tells us that we've been very naughty boys and girls, and of course it's perfectly natural at this time of year to hang around in the Boneyard. That's nothing, however, I have something far more terrifying to show you. Yesterday, I naively asked how stupid the Discovery Institute thinks people are. This was a mistake. I suspect the Discovery Institute thinks people are pretty darned stupid. Worse, I'm afraid they might be right. Both Orac and Mark note the recent series of mind-…

Publishers Weekly on How to Teach Physics to Your Dog

In this week's issue of Publishers Weekly there's a short review (scroll down) of How to Teach Physics to Your Dog (which will be released December 22): How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Chad Orzel. Scribner, $24 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4165-7228-2 What do dog treats and chasing squirrels have to do with quantum mechanics? Much more than you might imagine, as Orzel explains in this fun introduction to modern physics based on a "series of conversations" with his dog Emmy. Dogs make the perfect sounding board for physics talk, because they "approach the world with fewer preconceptions than humans, and…

Links for 2009-10-04

Posthumous Novels by Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace and Ralph Ellison - WSJ.com "A new wave of posthumous books by iconic authors is stirring debate over how publishers should handle fragmentary literary remains. Works by Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut will hit bookstores this fall. Ralph Ellison and the late thriller writer Donald E. Westlake have posthumous novels due out in 2010. " (tags: books literature humanities history culture publishing writing) Airborne Laser Burns Things Good - Fine Structure "Boeing has unleashed it's ATL (…

How Hot Is My Tablet?

I had a weird and disturbing shutdown incident on my tablet PC (a Lenovo X61) a week or two ago, which got me many screens of ominous looking text before it finally booted up properly again. Poking at it afterwards, it seemed to be running a bit hot, and it doesn't seem like there's a fan running. This turns out to be a non-trivial problem. It's my personal machine, and out of warranty, so the folks in ITS can't touch it. And the local computer repair place that was recommended says that 1) Lenovo uses several different types of fans, so they can't say what part they would need without…

"Will He Need Oxygen?"

Twenty-five-ish years ago, my father and I went on a fishing trip in the Florida Keys with a very dear friend of the family, who had been going their for years. I've written about him before, because he had a severe case of polio shortly before Salk's vaccine was developed, and needed a good deal of medical equipment to survive. As you might imagine, flying with Martin required a lot of red tape, even in those idyllic pre-9/11 days-- he needed assistance in boarding, oxygen available on the plane, some medical supplies in the carry-on, and all of this stuff needed to be cleared with the…

links for 2009-03-21

weir3 / Instant Mentor / Advice / Home - Inside Higher Ed "Unless youâre a botanist or geologist thereâs no pedagogical reason to teach outside. The first gorgeous day of spring semester will bring a clamor to meet underneath the spreading maple students spy from the window. Donât do it! That hour will pass with female students tugging at short skirts to maintain modesty, men in khakis seeking not to get grass stains on their trousers, fidgeting when everyone realizes the ground isnât as comfy as it looks, attention lapses every time someone walks by, the cupping of ears to hear comments…

Lab Grading Macros

A partial list of phrases I would like bound to a macro key, to save myself typing them over and over again as I mark up student lab reports (not all of these apply to the current crop of students): Not only were you able to [verb] the [noun], you did [verb] the [noun]. Say that directly. You are describing an experiment that you did a week ago. That makes it a little odd to talk about what you "hope to find" in your report. Do not talk about the educational purpose of the lab. Pretend that you did this experiment on your own, because you wanted to learn something, and not because I made you…

Einstein to join Darwin in the pantheon of despised scientists

Physicists, do you feel left out? Some nobody biologist from the Middle-of-Nowhere, Minnesota gets featured in a crackpot movie, but all you get is incoherent dumpster-diving schizophrenics making tirades about your work, and never anybody who has heard of venture capital? Rejoice! Your loons are getting more professional, too! Feature Length Doc "Einstein Wrong" Looking for Executive Producer Two Oscar Winning Distributors Wanting a Rough Cut LONG BEACH, Calif, October 16, 2007 - Bootstrap Productions is currently looking for an executive producer for it's feature-length documentary "…

Science and Sociology of Dark Matter

There's a new paper from the PAMELA dark matter search out that's written up in Physics, including a link to a free version of the PDF. This paper is considerably less dramatic than one that appeared last year, leading Physics World to suggest that they're backing off the earlier claim. What's the deal? Sean Carroll has you covered, with a detailed explanation of what's in both papers, and why the findings have been published and reported the way they have: What happened is that the PAMELA collaboration submitted their second paper (anomalous positrons) to Nature, and their first paper (well-…

Congratulations to Cirac and Zoller

I'm not sure what the BBVA Foundation is, but they've awarded a Basic Science prize to Ignacio Cirac and Peter Zoller: The Basic Sciences award in this inaugural edition of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards has been shared by physicists Peter Zoller (Austria, 1952) and Ignacio Cirac (Manresa, 1965), "for their fundamental work on quantum information science", in the words of the jury chaired by Theodor W. Hänsch, Nobel Prize in Physics. Zoller and Cirac's research is opening up vital new avenues for the development of quantum computers, immensely more powerful than those we…

links for 2009-01-22

Legoland California's depiction of Barack Obama's inauguration | World news | guardian.co.uk (tags: politics news silly pictures toys) Let My Students Drink: College presidents say it's time to lower the drinking age - Reason Magazine "Q: Why lower the drinking age? A: Weâve had a law on the books for 24 years now. You donât need an advanced degree to see that the law has utterly failed. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors have consumed alcohol. Sixty-six percent of high school sophomores have. " (tags: politics stupid academia society culture drugs booze) The Little Unions That…

With Advisors Like These, Who Needs Policy?

A few years ago, the after-dinner speaker at the DAMOP conference banquet was Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger. As I wrote at the time, I think it's safe to say that he didn't make a positive impression on the audience. It also sparked a rather lively discussion afterwards, that some people speculated was the reason for the veiled threats we got the next year. The Corporate Masters have just published an exclusive post-election interview with Marburger. I read it with some interest, mostly to see if it would change my impression of him. I have to say, it didn't. Not only does he…

links for 2009-01-14

Haidinger's brush: the unknown sense "Yes !!! With some effort you can learn to see what remains invisible to most people! Without the help of any instrument you will be able to tell not only if the light you look at is strongly polarized or not, but also if it is linearly polarized or circularly polarized and, moreover, in which direction it vibrates or rotates. Any time that you raise your eyes to the blue sky you will be rewarded by the same clues that guide bees in their flight. Acquire P-Ray Vision ! " (tags: science physics biology optics) EzraKlein Archive | The American Prospect…

links for 2009-01-03

Refuted economic doctrines #1: The efficient markets hypothesis at John Quiggin "I'm starting my long-promised series of posts on economic doctrines and policy proposals that have been refuted or rendered obsolete by the financial crisis. [...] Number One on the list is a topic I've covered plenty of times before (in fact, I was writing about it fifteen years ago), the efficient (financial) markets hypothesis. " (tags: politics economics social-science society) Robert Donoghue - 'This guy gets a blanket' "I discovered Donald Westlake in high school, when I was randomly raiding the local…

This is the Hitchens I like

The debate between Hitchens and McGrath is well worth listening to. Hitchens is cogent and sharp; he makes exactly the same points about the fundamental immorality of religion that he made at the FFRF convention, but in less time, and with fewer distracting digressions. He's on fire. Of course, he also doesn't get sucked into anti-Islamic fervor, but addresses the deplorable universal qualities of religion. McGrath is simply awful. This is his argument in summary: I was an atheist once, but I got better Being religious has health benefits It's the fringe fanatics that give religion a…

links for 2008-12-29

nanoscale views: More about insulators "I've been thinking more about explaining what we mean by "insulators", in light of some of the insightful comments [on the last post]." (tags: science physics blogs materials condensed-matter) Cocktail Party Physics: CSI lies and suspicious science "CSI? Unrealistic? Hate to break it to you kids, but, yeah. At the very least, the speed with which our intrepid heroes get their results would make any cop, ADA, or defense attorney double over in laughter, when they're not crying. DNA rape kits, appallingly, have as much as a six year backlog, according…

Blogging Is Not Complicated

Bora has a post taking issue with the claim made in Slate's blogging guide article that blog posts should be short. At least, I think that was his point-- the post was much too long, and I didn't read it all. I'm constantly amazed by how evergreen the "how to blog" topic is. It's just not that complicated-- pick a blogging system, find a host, and start typing. There is literally no wrong way to do it-- for every rule put out there that you absolutely must follow, there are probably ten blogs that violate it, and are brilliant. Individuality is the point of the whole enterprise. The world…

links for 2008-06-05

Christian Demand: Inflated phrases - signandsight "Texts on art rarely explain what they profess to explain; they simply simulate the explainability of their theories." (tags: art culture humanities) Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2006; Graduation Rates, 2000 and 2003 Cohorts; and Financial Statistics, Fiscal Year 2006 "This First Look presents findings from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) spring 2007 data collection, which included four components: Enrollment in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2006; Graduation Rates, 2000 & 2003 Cohorts;…

Non-Dorky Poll: Beer Pong

The video that accompanies this PopSci.com article is pretty impressive. A bunch of college kids show off their ability to hit trick shots with ping-pong balls, bouncing them off walls, doors, floors, moving skateboards, people, and items of furniture and into beer cups. As the PopSci piece notes, there's a good deal of physics in this-- if every student put half as much effort into learning the material as these guys put into practicing trick shots, the world would be a better place. The title of the piece, however, is "The Physics of Beer Pong," which brings us to today's non-dorky poll…

links for 2008-03-29

Anachronista: The Simpsons Bayeux Tapestry Couch Scene It's missing the comet... (tags: silly television video) Good Math, Bad Math : Introduction to Linear Regression The basics of data fitting. (tags: science math) Quantum Decoherence Reduction by Increasing the Thermal Bath Temperature A counter-intuitive result. (tags: physics quantum science theory articles) Condensate Fraction in a 2D Bose Gas Measured across the Mott-Insulator Transition Some quantum phase transition results from my old group at NIST (tags: physics quantum optics low-temperature science experiment articles)…

links for 2008-03-21

Backreaction: Experimental Traffic Jams More detail on the Japanese simulation of Washington, DC. (tags: physics science experiment video youtube) What is the matter with the universe? - Telegraph An article on CP violation experiments, which is pretty good, but might be dated=-- I thought BaBar was shut down? (tags: physics experiment science) Supersymmetry could be seen in ultracold atoms - physicsworld.com A bit of over-enthusiastic titling-- something analagous to one sort of super-symmetry might be able to be simulated in BEC's at some point in the future. (tags: physics theory…

Buckley

William F. Buckley is dead, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden is glad to see him go. I can't say I'm all that broken up, either. I saw Buckley speak once, when I was in college. I remember very little about the context-- not even what year it was-- but he came to campus at the invitation of the college Republicans (one of whom was a good friend of mine), and gave a short talk to a packed house, then spent a long time doing Q&A. The talk was mostly just him throwin ideas out, and the only specific thing I recall was his suggestion that we ought to legalize the sale of all druge-- alcohol, pot,…

Gender Gap Closing

I missed this the first time around, but now I am "happy" to report that the gender pay gap is narrowing.  On August 31, 2006, just in time for Labor Day, the US Dept. of Labor issued href="http://www.dol.gov/asp/media/reports/workforce2006/factsheet.htm">a report that shows a shrinking of the gender pay gap.  Here are two of the items they chose to highlight: Although women, on average, may earn less than men for a variety of reasons, including differences in work schedules and career decisions to accommodate raising their families or taking care of loved ones, education is a great…

Michigan Civil Rights Commission: Insurance Parity for Oral Contraceptives

The href="http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060821/UPDATE/608210400">Michigan Civil Rights Commission ruled recently that small insurance companies that cover prescription drugs must also cover the cost of href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_contraceptives" rel="tag">oral contraceptives.   Firms with more than 15 employees are already under the jurisdiction of federal law, so the ruling affects only small companies.  But the ruling will have a wide impact: 60% of firms in Michigan are affected. This ruling is consistent with recommendations from major…

Platensimycin: Putative New Class of Antibiotic Medication

Let us hope that this new article in Nature turns out to be as important as it seems. In a recent publication, scientists from Merck report on title="Wikipedia link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platensimycin" rel="tag">platensimycin, which is a previously unknown kind of antibiotic.  It is produced by Streptomyces platensis.  (There were a gazillion authors on the paper, so I did not all include their names.  The first authors, noted to have contributed equally, were Jun Wang and Stephen M. Soisson)   href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7091/abs/nature04784.html…

Nations at War: National Insect Week? National Pollinator Week?

Have you wondered about the buzz in the air this week? Why the world seems to tingle with the excitement of little wings and millions of jointed legs? No? Well, you're probably on the wrong drugs. Anyway. This week is National Pollinator Week here in the U.S., where we take time to appreciate the fact that many plants wouldn't be able to have sex and set fruit if not for the multitudes of animals that visit their flowers. I know. It's June 21-27- the week you've all been waiting for. The Moths! The Flies! The Bees! The Butterflies! Even the Bats, and the Birds! Many local groups are…

Hello ScienceBlogs!

For a second time, that is. Some of you may remember me from Photo Synthesis, where I guest blogged for a bit a year ago. I am happy to be invited back to the borg! Myrmecos is not a new blog. Rather, we have been over at Wordpress since 2007. I say "we", because the blog has evolved to become more of a community. Myrmecologists (= ant scientists) smarter than I hang out in the comments and submit guest posts, and there's a gang of top-notch nature bloggers over at Wordpress carrying on a stream of apparently continuous conversation across blogs of which Myrmecos is but one little part. Kind…

Defending public investment in entomology

Watch beetle guru Anthony Cognato trying to deal with Fox News ignoramus Tucker Carlson: It isn't news that Fox News isn't, um, news. Nor is it news that Fox can't grasp the benefits of public investment in knowledge creation- perhaps because actual knowledge is anathema to their business model. But I digress. I'm going to complain instead that Cognato missed out (or was edited out) on a major talking point to counter Fox's bluster.  Fox pretends Cognato just sidled up to suckle at the stimulus teat while the getting was good. A university welfare queen, or something.  But that's simply…

I was wondering how you could have a Creation Evidence Expo

There was one in Indianopolis, and snarky people attended. I would think that at best they'd have a succession of people standing up at a lectern, looking shamefaced and confused before shrugging and sitting down with nothing to say, but apparently it went on for days. This description of one speaker illuminates the process. I have to say he did not disappoint. It really seemed to be two halves of non-related speeches spliced together. The first half of the speech was talking about how terrible American Society has become since 1963 when the Supreme Court ruled to take God out of schools. He…

Evolution of Genome Size in Ants

Meet Ectatomma tuberculatum. This tropical insect has the largest genome of 40 species of ants measured in a study by Neil Tsutsui et al in BioMed Central. Weighing in at 690 megabases, E. tuberculatum has nearly twice as much DNA as most other ant species, leading the authors to suggest that a whole genome duplication occurred somewhere in the line of Ectatommine ancestry. Tsutsui et al's study, released today, is the first comprehensive genomic survey across ants. What's more, it is open access. You can read the whole thing here: Evolution of Genome Size in Ants Summary: Here, we…

Dinoponera on myrmecos.net

I've got a new series of Dinoponera photographs up at myrmecos.net. Click on the image above to see the gallery. These giant black insects are the largest South American ants, and although there is at least one Asian Carpenter ant (Camponotus gigas) that's a bit bigger, Dinoponera weighs in as the world's largest stinging ant. They would seem to command a great deal of respect for such distinction, but in reality Dinoponera are rather shy animals. Because these ants are so large- reaching over an inch long- they open up an array of photographic possibilities that can't easily be done with…

Failed Photography: the Worst of Myrmecos

I have thousands of absolutely awful photographs on my hard drive. I normally delete the screw-ups on camera as soon as they happen, but enough seep through that even after the initial cut they outnumber the good photos by at least 3 to 1. Here are a few of my favorite worst shots. Thinking that nothing would be cooler than an action shot of a fruit fly in mid-air, I spent an entire evening trying to photograph flies hovering over a rotting banana. This shot is the closest I came to getting anything in focus. That's a nice finger in the background. It's mine, you know. Imagine how…

Friday Beetle Blogging: Adranes Ant-Nest Beetle

Adranes ant-nest beetle California The most exciting finds are often the least expected. I stumbled across this odd little beetle while collecting ants several years ago in northern California. It was tiny, only a few millimeters long, with a little blind nubbin for a head whose sole purpose seemed to be supporting antennae that looked like a pair of cricket bats. The Lasius ants whose nest played host to this strange creature did not appear to pay it any particular attention. Ants are normally rather vicious towards interlopers, so their nonchalance often reveals successful infiltration by…

New Species: Trachymyrmex pomonae

Trachymyrmex pomonae Rabeling & Cover 2007 Arizona Nothing warms the heart more than a new ant species close to home! An all-star team of ant specialists, headed by Christian Rabeling at the University of Texas, describe the Arizonan species Trachymyrmex pomonae in Zootaxa this week. This spiny little red insect is part of a New World evolutionary radiation of agricultural ants, the attines, that cultivate a fungus in underground chambers. Trachymyrmex pomonae is one of several Trachymyrmex species in the United States, with dozens more occurring in Central and South America. New…

Allocation of research time to thinking versus doing. Discuss.

I'm preparing material for this week's class on experimental design and data analysis, and I ran across this paragraph which I thought was very interesting: "The cost of analyzing collected sediment samples usually exceeds that of collecting them. However, the funds for the analysis are wasted if samples are collected at inappropriate locations or do not represent the study area. Further, the proper selection and use of sediment sampling equipment, sample handling, storage and transport are all equally important to the selection of sampling locations. Therefore, about 60% of the time…

Help for connecting women hoping to re-enter science?

Another letter from my inbox: Dear Sciencewoman, I am a mom of 3 just starting my own lab. I have been thinking hard about how to recruit good postdoc talent despite the fact that I have no track record as an independent investigator. And then I remembered an article about an organization to help mentors and mentees who would like to return to science after a break (for taking care of children, family, whatever) to find each other. I was psyched about using such an organization because juggling three kids during my training taught me pretty quickly that productivity is often more about…