Academia
drorzel | March 31, 2009I got way behind on my reports from my Modern Physics class-- the last one was over month ago, and the class has since ended. There's enough material left to be really awkward as a single post, though, so I'm going to take my cue from Brandon Sanderson and split it into three parts.
The remaining material is from the sprint-to-the-end "Applications of Quantum Mechanics" portion of the class, and breaks into three roughly equal chunks. The first of these is dealing with atomic and molecular physics.
Class 22 presents the full quantum model of Hydrogen, starting from the Schrödinger equation…
catdynamics | March 30, 2009Questa confusione non mi piace!
Parli piu silenziosamente, per favore.
Seriamente, ho mal di testa.
Si, si, pero avete considerato i campi magnetici?
Fermate, per favore.
Personalmenta, credo che il cafe espresso e disgustoso!
The Clusters09 Guide to Defusing Italian Discussions in the Morning Session (pdf)
For some strange reasons, the above list of romanic pseudo-code appeared on a KITP blackboard a couple of weeks ago.
I think it appeared when we were discussing Y and multiple populations...
Fortuitously, the list was preserved for posterity, so that future generations may have productive…
drorzel | March 30, 2009Today is the first day of Spring term classes, which means there's one obvious question to ask:
What am I forgetting?
I've spent the last few days alternating baby duty with frantic class prep, and I think I've got everything ready. I'm bound to be forgetting something, though. So what is it? What's the thing I forgot to do that's going to lead to a mad scramble just before the class starts at 10:30?
scientificactivist | March 30, 2009Via Tom Holder of Speaking of Research comes news that embattled UCLA scientists have formed their own chapter of the pro-research organization Pro-Test. And, they're already planning their first event:
Following in the footsteps of the Pro-Test group in Oxford, UK, students and scientists at UCLA have pledged to stand up against the lies and misinformation of animal rights groups, and the violence of extremist organizations. They have formed the new group UCLA Pro-Test, which stands for science, reasoned debate and the belief that life-saving medical research must continue without violence…
terrasig | March 28, 2009
Dr John Hope Franklin was a 1935 A.B. graduate of Fisk University in Nashville, TN, then earned his M.A. (1936) and Ph.D. (1939) from Harvard University. [For reference, W.E.B. DuBois also graduated from Fisk (1888) and was the first Black to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard (1895).] Franklin's doctoral dissertation, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860, planted the seed for his classic 1947 work, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (subtitle later changed to "A History of African-Americans"). This book, now in its eighth edition, was written originally during his four-…
khannula | March 27, 2009This month's Scientiae is about overcoming challenges: our worst moments, and how we survived them. I've had trouble deciding which story to tell. Field camp? Running out of food while dropped off by helicopter? Not finding the rocks that were supposed to be in my dissertation field area? Bad dates (geologic, that is)?
I had some disastrous fieldwork in grad school, yeah, but I think my worst experience came from teaching. In fact, my teaching lost me a job. But I'm getting ahead of myself...
I was hired at the last minute for a one-year replacement position at a small liberal arts college in…
terrasig | March 26, 2009
Dr Geraldine P Woods (1921-1999) was inarguably the most influential scientist in establishing and promoting NIH's programs in research and research training for underrepresented groups. Therefore, I have chosen her story for my entry to this month's Diversity in Science blog carnival recognizing Women's History Month.
My interest in Dr Woods was inspired by a recent post by my friend and colleague, acmegirl, who writes the blog, Thesis - With Children. In her post recognizing the work of Duke University behavioral biologist, Dr Erich Jarvis, acmegirl noted that both she and Dr Jarvis are…
drorzel | March 26, 2009I'm teaching the intro mechanics course next term, starting on Monday, and my colleagues who just finished teaching it in the Winter term used WebAssign to handle most of the homework. They speak very highly of it, so I'm probably going to use it next term.
I'm curious to know what other people think, though. The reasons my colleagues give for liking it sound good from a faculty perspective, but I'm not sure how well it would go over with students (for one thing, it's another $15 on the price of the text). Does anybody have experience with using WebAssign, either as a student or as an…
drorzel | March 26, 2009A few days ago I asked people's opinions regarding drop deadlines for students who decide they no longer want to be in a class. As usual, I forgot a few qualifiers, and nobody used the categories I gave, but after sorting the answers into roughly the categories I gave, here are the results:
A drop deadline four weeks into the ten-week term is the clear favorite, with just over half of the votes (I eliminated one "students should never be allowed to drop, ever," which would've made it exactly half). How does this map onto what we actually do?
Amusingly, our actual drop deadline is in the gap…
drorzel | March 25, 2009The Female Science Professor had a nice post about working with someone who was afraid to write a paper:
Out of desperation, I told the graphophobe to meet me at a particular cafe at a particular time, with the latest draft of the manuscript and whatever other notes or references he needed. We met, I copied the manuscript to my laptop, scrolled to the first extremely incomplete section of the text and said "Tell me what you think should go in this section." He talked and I typed.
We worked our way through the manuscript that way, discussing each section. What should go in it? What was the…
terrasig | March 25, 2009My colleague, DrugMonkey, recently wrote an absolutely fantastic post on bigotry in sports and the pioneers other than Jackie Robinson in breaking the so-called color barrier. I had actually forgotten that in the 1970s, Warren Moon spent much of his career in the Canadian Football League because NFL teams wanted him to convert to some other position, you know, because Black players couldn't be quarterbacks. The post is much deeper than that and I encourage you strongly to read it.
But Brother Drug triggered my longstanding intention to write about a related topic; between his post and the…
drorzel | March 25, 2009I fell behind on course reports from my modern physics class a few weeks back, but I do mean to get back to them, when I have more time. The material remaining is the end-of-term sprint through a bunch of topics in modern physics-- three classes on atoms and molecules, three classes on solid state physics, three classes on nuclear and particle physics.
It's a mad dash through a lot of material (as the eventual course-wrap-up post will make clear), which raises one of the eternal questions of academia:
When teaching undergraduate students about a discipline, which is more important, breadth or…
sciencewoman | March 24, 2009It's Women's History Month, and the Diversity in Science Carnival has asked us to profile women scientists. I spend a lot of time thing about the things that affect the lives of today's young women scientists, but I also know that we are preceded by some incredibly strong and brave women who faced much tougher working conditions than we. And some of those trail-blazing women in science were young not that long ago. So I'm taking this post to talk with one of those amazing women and see what has changed and what hasn't.
Over the course of two hours, I had a wonderful conversation with this…
drorzel | March 24, 2009One of the NCAA pools I'm in has a copy of Obama's bracket entered, and the last I checked, I'm a couple of games up on him. This means I'm as qualified as anyone else to offer a plan to fix the financial crisis, and I have just the plan we need.
On the question of the AIG bonuses, I'm pretty much in agreement with the people who say that it's not worth making too much fuss over less than a tenth of a percent of the total bailout funding they're received. Passing laws to punish specific individuals is a lousy precedent, and it's not worth corrupting our principles for such a pittance. Let the…
scientificactivist | March 23, 2009Cells in higher organisms exist in a dynamic environment, requiring the ability to alternately grasp and disengage from the three-dimensional web of their surroundings. One family of proteins in particular, the integrins, plays a key role in this process by acting as the hands of the cell. Spanning the cell membrane, they link the extracellular matrix to the cell's internal cytoskeleton. Integrins are especially interesting, though, because the cell uses them to uniquely pass signals in both directions across the membrane, and an integrin's adhesiveness for the extracellular matrix can be…
drorzel | March 23, 2009I handed in my final grades for the term this morning, and am now on "Spring Break" which is the misleading term for the week of frantic preparation for next term's classes that our schedule allows. Here's a poll question for you, though:
We operate on ten-week "trimesters." How late into the ten-week term should students be allowed to drop a course without special permission?
A) By the end of the second week.
B) By the end of the fourth week.
C) By the end of the sixth week.
D) By the end of the eighth weeks.
E) By the end of the tenth week.
Leave your answers in the comments. If you'd like…
terrasig | March 22, 2009I had the happy pleasure of visiting on Friday with Sheril Kirshenbaum and Bora Zivkovic for a panel discussion in a course at Duke University's Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy.
Directed by Dr Misha Angrist, PubPol 196S "Science in the Media" is described in the course catalog as follows:
Those who write about science, health and related policy matters for a general audience face a formidable challenge: to make complex, nuanced ideas understandable to the nonscientist in a limited amount of space and in ways that are engaging and entertaining, even if the topic is far outside the…
drorzel | March 22, 2009My computer is starting to run slow in that way that indicates that either Microsoft has released an important update, or it's just been on too long without a reboot. Either way, I need to clear some browser tabs before restarting, and there are a bunch of articles that I thought were too interesting to put in a links dump, but where I don't quite have a clear enough opinion to write a blog post. These split into two rough groups, both of which are concerned with definitions.
One bunch of posts has to do with the recent poll about science knowledge, showing that a majority of Americans are…
terrasig | March 21, 2009After writing this post, I came across Alex's obituary and guestbook on Legacy.com. By all accounts, Alex was a great kid - loved and admired by many - an accomplished hockey player and musician with a love for the mountains. This could have been you or I, or worse, one of our own children.
Breaking my heart this morning is news from Boulder that last month's death of 20-year-old CU student, Alexander McGuiggan, was from consumption of "opium tea."
Police department spokeswoman Sarah Huntley said investigators believe McGuiggan and others had acquired poppy plants -- which are available…