Academia
tfk | January 16, 2009Carl Zimmer Live Blogging The Mars Methane Mystery: Aliens At Last?, reports that:
2:14 Lisa Pratt of Indiana University is talking biology. She is stoked.
2:15 Okay, I mean as stoked as scientists get at press conferences where they talk about photic zones. You can see it in the rise of her eyebrows.
Now, a reporter used to covering press conferences on the steps of a courthouse or a state or federal capitol would not catch that as "stoked." But Carl Zimmer covers scientists, and he knows what we look like when we're excited.
That means his article about this will convey her excitement, and…
drorzel | January 16, 2009A number of people have commented on the big New York Times article about the new intro physics classes at MIT:
At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required -- classical mechanics and electromagnetism -- but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers.
Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants, the professor makes brief presentations of general principles and engages the students as they work out related…
drorzel | January 15, 2009Over at Dot Physics, Rhett is trying to learn his students' names:
I have students sitting at tables (in this class and in labs). As they are working on something, I go around and write down who is sitting where. Yes, this means that you have to actually ask each student what their names is (I hate that part). After I have a "seating chart" I just keep practicing while they are working. If a student talks to me, I make sure and use their name. I will look it up on the seating chart if I have to. This just takes a couple of class times of practice till I have them all (well, most of them)…
terrasig | January 14, 2009Well, PalMD and I have been working tirelessly on putting together a plan of discussion for the upcoming ScienceOnline'09 session on Anonymity and Pseudonymity - Building Reputation Online. Over the last several months, we have had a tremendous outpouring of comments on our own blogs and numerous other blogs that gives us far more fodder than could be discussed in a 75 minute unconference session. (Pal, I foresee a palcast on pseudonymity.).
I still contend in all seriousness that the following 18 October 2008 quote from PhysioProf (cross-posted on his solo site) deserves to be the opening…
drorzel | January 14, 2009If you've been a student or faculty member at an American college or university in the past twenty years or so, you've almost certainly run across student course evaluation surveys. They're different in detail, but the key idea is always the same: toward the end of the term, students in every course are asked to fill out a questionnaire, usually a bubble sheet, assigning numerical values to various aspects of the course and the professor's teaching. Most schools also provide some option for free-form written comments as well.
These course surveys, particularly the numerical scores, figure…
drorzel | January 13, 2009The scare quotes in the title are to distinguish "Modern Physics" classes like the one I'm teaching this term from modern physics as a general subject, which, of course, all right-thinking people should study in depth. The question comes from a comment by Coriolis on last week's post about what "Modern Physics" is as a class:
Having passed through those classes (I'm now a grad student), I have to say I didn't see much worth in the Modern physics class (and your description of it is pretty much how I remember it, except without the relativity). It's basically in that middle ground trying to…
drorzel | January 12, 2009There was a mix-up in textbook ordering for this term (entirely my fault), and the books for my modern physics course were not in the bookstore when the term started. I made a spare copy available in the interim, and also half-jokingly suggested buying it from Amazon rather than waiting for the bookstore to get them in. After saying that, I went to Amazon, and found that the book in question sells for $150. "That can't be right," I thought. And, indeed, it's not-- the bookstore sells its copies at the list price of $180.
I had no idea the books were that expensive, and now I feel guilty about…
catdynamics | January 10, 2009my new office is probably the best office in academia
When I was in my final year as a graduate student, I had what I thought then was the best office in academia.
It had been Prof. Kip Thorne's office - on the ground floor on the north side, with french doors onto a balcony overlooking the Rose Garden on the south side.
Technically I shared the office with two other graduate students, but for technical reasons they were essentially never there, so it was my office.
On thursday afternoons caterers brought a small keg of draught beer and some snacks and left it outside the office on the…
terrasig | January 9, 2009Wishing I was in Hogtown last night and today.
However, my joy and delight is not for Tim Tebow or any of those other youngsters.
Mine is for George Edmondson, Jr.
What a fabulous way to send out Mr. Two-Bits.
We love you George - thanks being an integral part of my Gator experience.
Photo credit: George's MySpace page.
clock | January 8, 2009Michael Nielsen posted today the first part of his look at peer-review: Three myths about scientific peer review:
What's the future of scientific peer review? The way science is communicated is currently changing rapidly, leading to speculation that the peer review system itself might change. For example, the wildly successful physics preprint arXiv is only very lightly moderated, which has led many people to wonder if the peer review process might perhaps die out, or otherwise change beyond recognition.
I'm currently finishing up a post on the future of peer review, which I'll post in the…
catdynamics | January 8, 2009wtf is an impact evaluator???
apparently it is the trendy thing to be
the World Bank tries to explain
it is not convincing...
drorzel | January 8, 2009A couple years ago, we revised the General Education requirements at the college to require all students to take a "Sophomore Research Seminar" in their second year. These classes are supposed to be writing-intensive, and introduce students to the basics of academic research. The specified course components are pretty heavily slanted toward the humanities-- library searches, primary vs. secondary sources, and so on-- and don't really map that well onto research practices in the sciences.
A colleague in engineering managed to do a really interesting project-based class, though, and since…
drorzel | January 8, 2009Over at the theoretical physics beach party, Moshe is talking about teaching quantum mechanics, specifically an elective course for upper-level undergraduates. He's looking for some suggestions of special topics:
The course it titled "Applications of quantum mechanics", and is covering the second half of the text by David Griffiths, whose textbooks I find to be uniformly excellent. A more accurate description of the material would be approximation methods for solving the Schrodinger equation. Not uncommonly in the physics curriculum, when the math becomes more demanding the physics tends to…
drorzel | January 8, 2009In the "uncomfortable questions" comment thread, Thony C. suggests:
You say you're teaching "modern physics" so how about a running commentary on the stuff your teaching?
That's a good suggestion, and I'll start posting some sketchy reports soon. First, though, Bora asks:
What is un-modern physics?
Roughly speaking, physics gets divided into "Classical Physics" and "Modern Physics," with the dividing line coming right around 1900.
"Classical Physics" basically covers fields that were well established before 1900: Newtonian Dynamics, Electricity and Magnetism, most of Thermodynamics, most of…
drorzel | January 8, 2009My senior thesis student this year came to my office today to ask a question as he's starting to work on writing his thesis. I've given him copies of the theses of the last couple of students to work in my lab, and asked him to start on a draft of the background sections. He was worried that he wouldn't be able to make the background sections sufficiently distinct from the corresponding sections in the earlier theses.
This is a sort of tricky point when it comes to issues of academic honesty in science. Scientific questions always have definite right and wrong answers, and that limits the…
awild | January 7, 2009
Birgit Schlick-Steiner, of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, has funding for a Ph.D. student to work on the molecular ecology of the Tetramorium caespitum complex. This research group has produced some top-notch science in recent years, and if you are looking to become a professional myrmecologist this is an excellent opportunity. You'd receive training in some of the most current techniques at the interface of genetics, ecology, and taxonomy. The full announcement is below the fold.
MOLECULAR ECOLOGY, INSTITUTE OF ECOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK
PhD position
The University…
drorzel | January 6, 2009Classes started yesterday for the winter term. This is the first time I've had to teach in six months, thanks to juggling my schedule so as to let me stay home for much of the Fall term. I'm always surprised by how much I forget, and how much I remember about the process.
The remembered stuff is pretty obvious-- bits of trivia that aren't in my lecture notes, or old ad-libs that work well to hep make some point or another. The forgotten stuff is stuff that seems like it ought to be obvious, like just how much talking is involved in the process. I came out of yesterday's class and drank the…
tfk | January 5, 2009Science's policy blog reports:
[T]he House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee has invited not only noted economists Martin Feldstein, Mark Zandi, and Robert Reich [to discuss the economic recovery bill] but also Maria Zuber, a professor of geophysics of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and principal investigator on GRAIL, a NASA mission to measure variations in the moon's gravitational field.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who will kick off the discussion, has made it clear that "investing in technology and innovation should be part of any economic recovery plan," says a…
drorzel | January 4, 2009The posts selected for the 2009 edition of The Open Laboratory, collecting the best writing on science blogs for the year, have been announced. My We Are Science post made the list, which is nice.
Amusingly, this showed up in my inbox at the same time that the ScienceBlogs front page is featuring this Bloggingheads episode featuring George Johnson and John Horgan. Johnson, you might recall, riled everybody up a couple of weeks ago with a bit of a dyspeptic rant about science bloggers compared to science journalists. They spend a good fifteen or twenty minutes on the topic again this week, and…