Academia
drorzel | January 17, 2011Part of this past weekend's meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public was to evaluate 100+ proposals for "mini-grants" of up to $10,000 for new outreach activities. It wouldn't be appropriate to go into detail about any of the proposals or what we decided (the PI's of the proposals we decided to fund will be notified soon), but there was one issue that came up again and again that I think is appropriate for the blog, which is what should be considered as a successful effort, particularly in the online world.
A large number of the proposals we were considering had "new media" components…
drorzel | January 16, 2011I was at a meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public of the American Physical Society at the tail end of last week, so it seems appropriate to post a couple of APS-related announcements here on my return:
1) The APS has just created a Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public. You may have read about this in the monthly APS News, but in case you missed it, there is a new organization with APS to bring people interested in outreach together:
"The forum provides a venue for people to congregate, provide best practice manuals...and disseminate things that work so people don't have to…
drorzel | January 11, 2011It occurs to me that I'm kind of dropping the ball on my shameless self-promotion because I haven't mentioned that one of my posts made the cut for this year's fifth edition of the best-of-science-blogging anthology The Open Laboratory. The post included is Science Is More Like Sumo Than Soccer, a discussion of the importance of avoiding jargon.
I was a little surprised at that one, but re-reading it to copyedit the text for publication, I guess it is pretty good. It wasn't one of the top posts of last year, traffic-wise, but I think it's useful, and am happy to have it included.
(It's…
jdupuis | January 10, 2011
Research intelligence - Rip it up and start again
David Thornburg on Open-Source Textbooks
"Beginnings Are Always Messy": Thoughts on Transliteracy and Inquiry from a Learning Advocate
Student Blogging about Physics
Follow-up: Transliteracy, Theory, and Scholarly Language
Lib-Value Website Now Available
The Rise of 'Convergence' Science
How Will Students Communicate?
Study: Labour market outcomes of Canadian doctoral graduates
Predictions 2010: The Growth of Intimacy
'Saturday Night Live,' Floor Wax, and the Life of the Mind
10 Things Facebook Won't Say
Going beyond a single scientific…
tfk | January 7, 2011This week's Nature has a great report on efforts to get scientists more active in policy discussions. It starts with an ecologist who got some media training, which gave her the courage to go on the Colbert Report and defend a paper she co-authored about the dangers of mountaintop removal. From there, we get a survey of recent attacks on science, and efforts to push back.
Nancy Baron quotes the late and lamented Stephen Schneider, "Staying out of the fray is not taking the 'high ground'; it is just passing the buck," and she adds this useful trick for dealing with the boundary between…
drorzel | January 6, 2011Not an exhaustive list, but since I'm noodling around with my calendar, I might as well note some of the stuff I'll be doing this year:
I'll be on a panel about international science testing at the AAAS Annual Meeting in February. This will be a different experience-- not only have I never been to a AAAS meeting before, the whole thing appears to be organized in a different manner than any meeting I have been to. I'm doing a bit of a drive-by for this-- coming in Friday afternoon, leaving Sunday evening-- but I have classes to teach.
I've been invited to give a Saturday Morning Science…
drorzel | January 5, 2011Kate and SteelyKid have colds (well, they're sharing the same cold), so SteelyKid is waking up a lot during the night. Since Kate needs rest as well, she put earplugs in last night (she's a much lighter sleeper than I am), and I took baby-soothing duty. So I was up half the night.
I come in for my 9:15 class, turn on the projector so I can project my slides, and the projector is dead. A bunch of fiddling with it reveals that it's not just a blown bulb (which happened Monday morning), but a broken projector. So, no lecture slides.
"All right," I say, "I'll just do a chalk-talk using my…
drorzel | January 5, 2011Back in the fall, I got an email from my UK publisher asking me if I'd be willing to read and possibly blurb a forthcoming book, The Four Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality by Richard Panek. The book isn't exactly in my field, but there really wasn't any way I'd turn down a request like that. Coincidentally, I received an ARC of the book a few days later from the US publisher. They weren't asking for a blurb, but I'm always happy to get free books.
From the title, I expected this to be another book laying out the now-standard model (if not…
drorzel | January 4, 2011There was a faintly awful essay by Melissa Nicolas at Inside Higher Ed yesterday, giving MLA job candidates advice on how to dress:
Let's start with your shoes. Anyone who has been to MLA knows that it is a big conference, and whether you are on a search committee, attending sessions, or interviewing, you are most likely going to be doing a lot of walking. In a city. Often in the cold (though not this year!). While it is certainly inappropriate to come in your Wellies, teetering into the room on heels that are as stable as a university's endowment sends the message that you might not be a…
drorzel | January 3, 2011The clock in my classroom for this term appears to be set five minutes slow. Which is an improvement over the one in the hall that's ten minutes slow, but kind of plays hell with starting and ending class on time. It is, however, a great excuse for a poll:
Clocks in academic buildings should be set:survey software
Combine the odd clock settings with our daft class schedule (to make our ten-week terms nominally equivalent to standard semester classes, we teach in 65-minute blocks instead of the more typical 50-minute blocks. This means that classes start and end at odd times, which I've…
drorzel | December 29, 2010Most of what would ordinarily be blogging time this morning got used up writing a response to a question at the
Physics Stack Exchange. But having put all that effort in over there, I might as well put it to use here, too...
The question comes from a person who did a poster on terminology at the recently concluded American Geophysical Union meeting, offering the following definition of "data":
Values collected as part of a scientific investigation; may be qualified as 'science data'. This includes uncalibrated values (raw data), derived values (calibrated data), and other transformations of…
drorzel | December 24, 2010Our final science-themed Christmas ornament is this Santa and friend:
What does walking a dog have to do with science? If you have to ask that, you're reading the wrong blog. Dog-walking is essential to science-- that's where we get some of our best ideas!
In a broader sense, this one can be said to represent the importance of maintaining some balance between science and the rest of your life. No matter how important the problem you are working on may be, your dog still needs walking, your kids need to be read to, and your family needs you to spend time with them. Especially at the holidays…
jdupuis | December 17, 2010For those that haven't heard about the NASA/arsenic bacteria story that's been exploding all over the science blogosphere over the last couple of weeks, I like the summary over at Jonathan Eisen's Tree of Life blog:
NASA announced a major press conference
at the conference they discussed a new Science paper claiming to show the discovery of a microbe that could replace much/some of its phosphate with arsenic
initial press coverage of the paper was very positive and discussed the work as having profound implications for understanding of life in the universe - though some scientists in some of…
omnibrain | December 14, 2010Just in case you're looking for something to write on your course evaluations. Or perhaps you are the instructor and you hope you don't get something like this (especially if you are young!)
Via Texts From Last Night:
I had to do a class evaluation today & the girl beside me didn't fill in any bubbles she just wrote in huge letters RETIRE across the whole sheet
drorzel | December 13, 2010A bunch of smallish items that have been failing to resolve into full-fledged blog posts for a little while now, thrown together here because I don't have anything better to post this morning:
-- When is doubt, start with self-promotion: Physics World includes How to Teach Physics to Your Dog in their holiday gift books guide, and says wonderfully nice things about it:
Chad Orzel talks to his dog about quantum physics. It is not clear what the dog gets out of this arrangement, but the rest of us ought to be grateful for it, because Orzel's book about their "conversations" is sure to become a…
omnibrain | December 13, 2010Just be warned - there's a teensy (tinsy, teensie?) weensy bit of crude language.
See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.
drorzel | December 9, 2010Over at Backreaction, Bee runs through the pros and cons of different presentation methods for academic talks. As she quite correctly notes, both PowerPoint presentations and chalk talks have strengths and weaknesses. You can give a good talk with either, and a bad talk with either.
This does suggest a topic for a reader poll, though, namely, if you have to sit through a bad presentation, which sort of bad presentation would you prefer:
What sort of bad presentation would you rather sit through:survey software
Please note that "I'd tune it out and watch good presentations on the TED website…
jdupuis | December 9, 2010...Instead of a different Creative Commons license, such as CC-BY? Or just with normal copyright restrictions?
(You can get an explanation of CC0 here: it implies relinquishing all rights and essentially means releasing something into the public domain.)
A good question, one that I attempted to answer as part of my Exploring Open Science session at Brock University several weeks back. While I was talking about the importance of Open Data within the Open Science movement, one of the audience members very properly pressed the point of why it's important for data to be open.
I think I gave…
drorzel | December 8, 2010The great British physicist Ernest Rutherford once said "In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting." This is kind of the ultimate example of the arrogance of physicists, given a lovely ironic twist by the fact that when Rutherford won a Nobel Prize, it was in Chemistry. (He won for discovering that radioactive decays lead to transmutation of elements, causing one contemporary to quip that the most remarkable transmutation ever was Rutherford's change from a physicist to a chemist for the Nobel.)
Of course, there's a little truth to the statement-- not the part about…