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The Quirks of Scientific Public Speaking

As previously noted, I spent most of last week at the 2013 DAMOP meeting, where I listened to a whole bunch of talks. At some point, I was listening to a talk, and said "I bet this guy hasn't given a lot of these before." What was the give-away? The fact that he almost never said "Um." To the dismay of many students entering science majors, public speaking is a very significant part of being a professional scientist. Scientists are expected to give talks of a variety of different lengths-- 10-15 minute "contributed" talks at big meetings, 25-30 minute "invited" conference talks, 45-60 minute…

Doctor, doctor, give me the news*

I've been having this 3:30 am (EST) insomnia for about the last two months, so I often pull the laptop up and survey the blogosphere in the still of the night. A simple look at the Last 24 Hours at ScienceBlogs and elsewhere in the blogosphere tells me that some knuckleheads in the mainstream press have taken issue with Dr Jill Biden, doctor of education, using the honorific, "Dr." Keep in mind that the article in question comes from the L.A. Times - the very same paper that graces my e-mail account weekly humping their fishwrapper's science and environment coverage. I did just look up some…

Another creationist serial litigator goes down in flames

Larry Caldwell has a history of suing in California courts for creationist causes. Mike Dunford has some material on the latest attempt to claim that leaving out Christian myths was "viewpoint discrimination", and in particular on their interesting choice of a star witness. The Christian schools hired Dr. Behe (for $20,000) as an expert in "biology and physics." (That second part should make Chad and Rob's heads explode, given that Behe has absolutely no physics experience of any kind.) To earn his fee, Dr. Behe prepared a report that said, basically, that the Christian textbooks are…

Teaching, Teaching About, and Learning

ZapperZ (at Physics and Physicists) recently had a post about Chad (from Uncertain Principles). It was sort of a review of Chad's book How to Teach Physics to Your Dog. In this post, ZapperZ makes a very Feynman-like distinction between "teaching physics" and "teaching about physics". This is a really good point - that to learn physics you have to do physics. I completely agree. It is just like riding a bike - you have to ride a bike to learn to ride a bike. So here is the question. What do I do here on this blog? I don't know. Do I talk about physics? Yes? I do not teach physics -…

This is The Patriarchy: When Talking to the Master, Speak in a Civil Tone

Earlier this summer, a famous cheesesteak purveyor here in Philadelphia put up a sign in his establishment that read "This is America: When Ordering, Speak English", thus touching off a controversy that raged for weeks. Owner Joey Vento was eventually served with a complaint claiming he was in violation of two sections of the city's anti-discrimination laws. Vento's sign was just one manifestation of the xenophobia sweeping the nation these days, politely euphemized as "immigration controversy". It's also a stark illustration of how the dominant group (in this case, moneyed Republican…

ring-a-ling

Ringlike dark matter paper is out. But Chad explains the essence of the issue much better

What are science blogs for? - another round

Blake wrote a long and excellent post about the question. Brian, swansontea, SciCurious, PZ Myers and Chad have more. What they say....

Why do Academics do this blogging thing?

A number of my SciBlings (and their commenters) try to explain: Janet Chad Martin PhysioProf DrugMonkey Brian Switek Alice Jeremy Bruno Grrrrrl

tenure collection

Tenure doesn't help you if you are dead - not funny, actually. Advice for junior faculty at a research university Chad started it

High school teacher guilty of telling the truth…oh, and Chad Farnan is an idiot

I guess we have our own little anti-blasphemy principle operationally at work in the US. Look what can get you in trouble with the law now: A Mission Viejo high school history teacher violated the First Amendment by disparaging Christians during a classroom lecture, a federal judge ruled today. James Corbett, a 20-year teacher at Capistrano Valley High School, was found guilty of referring to Creationism as "religious, superstitious nonsense" during a 2007 classroom lecture, denigrating his former Advanced Placement European history student, Chad Farnan.  I am astounded that Corbett was…

bwa ha ha!

Fame! At last! World of Physics is mine, all mine. Hey, look at this interesting thing I just came across... Is that really the impression I give? 'cause it is only true for things I come across between morning coffee and lunch, honest. Anything lengthy is usually written between midnight and 2 am, movable type has a "scheduling" function for delayed publishing for those who like to play audience fishing with the sciblog front page. Physics World actually gave me heads up about the article some weeks ago. I knew the skate would get them. Bonus, is that now I will no exactly how many of me…

Uncertain Dots 23

Our semi-regular video hangout returns. In this episode, I'm wearing a tie, because I gave the department colloquium this week, and for psychological reasons I always dress up a bit to give talks. This was recorded under an hour after my talk, which probably explains why I'm a little more punchy than usual... I'm not sure what Rhett's excuse is. Topics include a bunch of failed attempts to walk back an early cheap shot at computer scientists, where Rhett and I rank in terms of Google searches for our first names-- I have to go six pages deep to find myself (I'm on the first page of "Orzel"…

Back from Lagos, Nigeria. They made it home!

Recently, I took out three of my colleagues for lunch. These were folk who were brave enough to take the plunge and participate in an opportunity to travel to Nigeria. Here, they would teach a course on molecular genetics to burgeoning Ph.D students, Faculty and the like in the vicinity of Lagos. Although, the collaboration between the institutes in Nigeria, and my own lab is informal at best, it's something that I felt a lot of responsiblity towards, particularily to these three individuals, so basically I had that breath of relief when they recently returned to Canada. It's funny, they'…

Getting along vs. fixing the problem.

There's been a marked difference of opinion between two of my fellow ScienceBloggers about what ought to be done about the "pipeline problem" in physics. Chad suggests that there may be a substantial problem with high school level physics instruction, given that "[e]ven if high school classes are 50/50 [female to male], the first college physics class is already 25/75". I take it that the worry about what's happening in the high school physics classroom isn't going to spark much controversy in these parts. (However, I do recall hearing, when I was still in high school, that at some colleges…

...but we like to!

Chad he says: Scientists Don't Have To Do Everything Do as he says. This is another episode of linking: because linking is an inherent public good.

Skip calculator = win

First, where does Chad come up with these links? Oh, I am talking about Chad from Uncertain Principles. In his latest links of the day, I found this: Skip Class Calculator What a great idea. Basically, you enter some info about the class - like how often it meets, how many classes you have skipped, when is the next test and stuff. The calculator then tells you if you should go to class or not. Brilliant. Actually, this seems like the academic version of Run Pee. Yes, I said run pee. Run Pee is an app for your iphone that tells you at what point during a movie you can go to the…

stand together

never cross a picket line PZ on strike see also Chad 1/4 of the blogs on Sb have shut down and several are on strike or hiatus waiting to see what happens.

Thursday Toddler Blogging 061911

Kate here while Chad is at DAMOP, with this week's Toddler Blogging. What, you may ask, is SteelyKid counting on her fingers? In fact, she is counting down to . . . Takeoff!

For Your Weekend Enjoyment

Or, "Stealing Chad's Ideas: First in a Series". When you write 'log', do you mean base 10 or base e? What field do you work in? Update: Or base 2 for you CS-types.

Biology is what you study, not how you study

Chad's response to Dave Ng's meme attempt asking people about their own field and relationship to other fields included this: I'm particularly not envious of biology, in which every result seems to be messy and contingent. Everything has a hundred confounding factors, and all the results seem to be statistical. Clean and unambiguous results are rare, and that would drive me absolutely crazy. They're one small step removed from social science. Chad admitted in the comments that he was just trying to foment some conflict for entertainment value. But I'll bite because this is a "teachable…

DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge 2008: some BIG incentives.

In a lot of ways, the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge is a community endeavor. It is all about what you, our community of readers, can accomplish together for public school students and teachers in need. Also, it's a great example of how citizens of the blogosphere think about community -- not just a group of people clustered geographically, but people we're connected to by common interests and values. While you're working together to make things better for school kids in classrooms across the fifty United States, you can also work together toward what Chad calls a 'big incentive'. Chad…

Who?

Apparently I write like David Foster Wallace... Say what? Oh, that David Foster Wallace. Er. Cool. Now you go play with "I write like" h/t Chad - who apparently has dissociative writing disorder or something...

Grad Skool Rulez

Total Drek: Unhelpful Hints 5! and 6!! 15 - you're ALL smart 20 & 21 ignore 22, obviously. But 3 is the one you really need to think about as a first or second year h/t Chad, again

AIT: The party line

You can read the party line on the AIT 9 "errors". I think its too kind; e.g. on SLR and Katrina Gore is misleading; on evacuation he is simply wrong. But the lake Chad bit was interesting.

dub-i-dub-i-dum-dum

Thanks to Chad I will now be humming this for the next two weeks. Stop the Cavalry! With added bonus inadvertent political symbolism! Jona Lewie Ah well, maybe it will flush "Silver Bells" from my brain for a while.

Eureka: Signing, Q&A, Canadian Review

A few items for Sunday morning: -- First and foremost, in just a few hours from now, I'll be signing books at the Open Door. If you're in Quebec or central Pennsylvania, you better leave now; Boston or NYC, you can have a cup of coffee first. Farther than that, you might try calling them around 11am ET to see if they'll ship you one... -- The Albany Times Union did a short Q&ampA with me about the book. This ran Thursday, apparently, but didn't show up on Google, so I only found it this morning when I went to the Times Union site directly. -- There's a good, thoughtful review in the…

Poll on Science Blogs Commenting

Help out Chad with his latest data collection effort: Of course, I can't very well ask people to leave comments about how messed-up the comments are, so I've been forced to resort to something higher-tech... A POLL!!

this is a test

Chad spreads contagious concepts. if this were a real meme you would now be getting ideas Acephalus wants data on meme propagation speeds through blogs for the MLA. Read, link and accelerate. Don't want to be a deadender, now do we.

The Creamy Baileys Nobel Peace Prize for Science, 2008

Over at The Poor Man Institute voting is underway for the 2008 Wingnut Awards. The nominees for The Creamy Baileys Nobel Peace Prize for Science, 2008 are Chad Myers, Camille Paglia, Charlie Daniels, Gregg Easterbrook and James Inhofe. Hmmm...

On Heffernan: For Me, ScienceBlogs Isn't Supposed to Be a Newspaper's Science Section

I had been considering, over the weekend to write a navel gazing post about The State of ScienceBlogs and Its Relationship to the Mad Biologist. And then Virginia Heffernan of the NY Times wrote a quote picking article about ScienceBlogs, thereby screwing up my weekend blogging (so much stupid, so little Mad Biologist). At the end of the post, I'll describe how I see ScienceBlogs, but, first, let's talk about Heffernan's arrogance. From Heffernan: I was nonplussed by the high dudgeon of the so-called SciBlings. The bloggers evidently write often enough for ad-free academic journals that…

It's not the subject, it's the teaching

Over the summer, a few ScienceBloggers were pondering the question of why students disappear from science courses, never to return. James Hrynshyn wrote that we're teaching youngsters the wrong thing. Zuska boldy pointed out the things that many of us think but don't say out loud. Chad Orzel noted that science is hard and shared his thoughts about why students leave. Stein Sigurdsson, on the other other hand, proposed that students leave because science is not hard enough. Just this week, ScienceBlogger Mike Dunford provided part of the answer to the disappearing student question, when…

The New OPERA faster-than-light Neutrino Test: Results!

Q: "Why don't physicists shield themselves from neutrinos?" A: "Because they never see them coming." #neutrinojokes Over the past two months, we've talked more about neutrinos than ever before thanks to an extraordinary claim that neutrinos have been observed to move faster-than-light! And as you well know, no particle is allowed to travel through spacetime faster than the speed of light in vacuum, no matter how much energy you put into it! (Unless, that is, you count what happens in video games.) Here's a brief refresher for you as to what's been going on. CERN, the home of the world's most…

Blogging Doesn't Have to Be a Career

Last week, I gave my evangelical talk about science blogging to the Physics department at Wright State, and also a lot of education students who came to the talk (which made a nice change in the sort of questions I got). It's basically this talk that I gave at Cornell a couple of years ago, with a few updates to the slides that don't require a new upload to SlideShare: Talking to My Dog About Science: Why Public Communication of Science Matters and How Social Media Can Help from Chad Orzel The pitch that I make, if you don't want to flip through the slides, is that communicating to a…

What's your favorite MTV memory? (redux)

Thanks to all for coming over and sharing your MTV memories earlier this week. Our SciBling editor and cat-herder, Katherine, came across with a very vivid list of great memories and Orac was able to bitch about being ever so slightly older than me. Then, Karmen surprised me by intimating that cable TV actually existed in Colorado in 1981, at least at her Grandma's house. I said I was going to tell you some of my general recollections of MTV, but I have very specific memories of this very week 25 years ago thanks to my personal archivist, number one fan, and all-around keeper of my life…

Announcing The Open Lab Finalists!

It's here! After more than a month of reviewing, I am pleased to announce the list of posts that will be included in this year's edition - the fifth - of The Open Laboratory! In no particular order: Givin' props to hybrids by DeLene Beeland The decade the clones came: Beware the mighty Marmokrebs! by Zen Faulkes Can seabirds overfish a resource? The case of cormorants in Estonia by Hannah Waters The Data Speak by Andrew Thaler Testing the flotation dynamics and swimming abilities of giraffes by way of computational analysis by Darren Naish Shark week! by EcoPhysioMichelle Size really does…

Science loses out, once again

Note: I originally wrote this post in a bit of frustration, and so I've drawn a line through much of the latter half that has more to do with science education and not the list. I still find it a bit strange than not one science book made it to the list when there were, in my opinion, some "notable" science books out this year, but some of my reaction to this was more of a rant than anything else. I'm not saying that there should be X number of science books on the list, but it's hard to believe that in a list of 50 books (being that half the list was fiction) not one science book was picked…

Off with her head!

I stand with the other science bloggers in encouraging everyone to do what they can to oust the Creationist on the Ohio School Board. More from Ed Brayton, Chad, John, Bora, Kevin and Tara. If you lose enough small battles the big war is lost.

Fight Night at the Laboratory

Hot on the heels of Chad's project to find the greatest physics experiment ever (see, also, his call for the greatest experiment or discovery in other fields), The Science Creative Quarterly settles the debate the only logical way possible: a single elimination cage match tournament.

Academic Pleasures

What are your true, academic, pleasures? Sean is disgusted at the lameness of academic guilty pleasures Chad gets in on the action also... I'm not into guilt, and there are real academic pleasures; emotional states that come with the job. We should revel in them. The rarest and greatest pleasure: the rush of comprehending in an instant, finally, a very very hard previously unsolved problem. Realising later that there are some technical details to work out, does not detract from that momentary pleasure. Sometimes the details can become a life's work. Observing something new, interesting and…

The Real Genius of Science in the Movies

I'm going to agree with Tara, Evil Monkey, Steinn v2.0, and Chad on this week's Ask a Science Blogger: What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally. The answer: Real Genius, starring a young Val Kilmer (pre Top Gun) as the hotshot undergrad (Chris Knight) and the annoying EPA agent from Ghostbusters as his slimy advisor. Plus, it's got Uncle Rico as the guy that lives in Knight's closet and Stacey Peralta as, well, I'm not quite sure, but he's listed on the first…

Pink toys

Not much to say myself, I just find the diversity of opinions in posts and comments fascinating: Dr.Isis: Careful, Girls! That's Too Much Power! Arikia: Gendered Color Dichotomies-R-Us PZ: The powerlessness of pink Cori Kesler: My Droid is Pink Mareserinitatis: Pink Chad: Does Pinkification Fool Anybody?

"I call rule 34"

XKCD 505 This is both frighteningly funny, and shockingly profound. The really worrying thing is how few people in the world will ever get it. h/t Chad ok, I will show mercy: 34: internet rule 34 wolfram's rule 34 Wolfram classified cellular automata rules - some of which are interesting and support universality.

Lightning Bolt vs. Charge

The Pip is nuts about superheroes, so when he and his speech teacher made a book, naturally, it introduced a new super hero: Lightning Bolt. It's only a couple of sheets of paper folded in half and stapled, and the text and illustrations were done by his teacher, but the contents are 100% our Little Dude, so I'll reproduce it here. LIGHTNING BOLT by [The Pip] Orzel [Illustration: Lightning bolt's Mask] Alternate Identity Len Boom Occupation: Scientist Speciality: Studying super powers. In his lab there's a computer that can communicate with Lightning Bolt. Home Town: Lightning Bolt City…

John Orzel for New York State Senate

If you're in Broome County or environs, the biggest political event of the year is today: John Orzel is officially launching his campaign for the New York State Senate. This will apparently involve a number of events around the 52nd state senate district, ending with a rally and cookout in Scenic Whitney Point: "What does it take," you're thinking, "to obtain the highly exclusive-- rarely granted and even more rarely sought-- Uncertain Principles endorsement?" Well, for one thing, he's my uncle. I'm not saying you have to be a blood relative to get my political endorsement, but it helps.…

The perfect post on the Myers eucharist issue.

Apparently, Chad's dog has at least some of the issues surrounding the PZ Myers/Eucharist desecration issue figured out. I'm not sure, but I think she understands them much better than some of the folks who have been commenting here. And she expresses things with so much more grace and panache than I usually manage.

Another look at evaluating teachers

The first thing that I saw was this article from nola.com (The Times-Picayune) "New teacher evaluation method being proposed in Jefferson Parish". Let me summarize this article. Basically, one of the local School Board wants to use a learning tool (Interval Testing) as a teacher evaluation tool. The Interval Testing program gives students spaced out evaluations through out the year to help them (and teachers) assess the preparedness of the students. These are non graded assessments and have been shown to help students. Note - the purpose of the implementation of Interval Testing is to…

linky goodnesses

AAAoAAAoA Harvard's many diverse mattresses (h/t IP Unintended Consequences I: NSF - 2 and out Unintended Consequences II: Italy - shortening the holding pattern for scientists In some other universe I am writing an erudite blog response on multiple universes and the paradox of quantum mechanics; but in this universe I have paperwork to catch up on so I leave it to Chad'n'Dave...

Now I guess I must vote for Obama

It was pretty much a given anyway, but now that James Dobson has given his screeching purple anti-endorsement, I cannot fail to punch that chad for Obama. Another interesting bit in that article: Dobson also will not vote for McCain. It would be wonderful if the fundagelical right would simply recuse themselves from all elections henceforth in that way.

You've gotta start somewhere

Evil Bobby (with a name like that, he should know) tells me that Darth Vader's little brother Chad Vader is working as a night manager at a grocery store in Madison. I'm going to have to suggest to my son that he look the place up and toss a tangelo down one of the ventilation shafts, just to see what happens.

Elves and the Internet

The internet sure can bring some awesome stuff. Chad at Uncertain Principles has a great post about the vision of elves. He refers to a part of The Two Towers where Legolas can count the number of riders of Rohan from a great distance. Not only is the post great, make sure you read the comments also. Very impressive discussion.