Academia
drorzel | February 16, 2014The outrage of the moment in academic circles is this Nick Kristof column on how academics need to be more engaged with a broader public. And it's really impressive how he manages to take an idea that I basically agree with-- I regularly give talks on the need for scientists to do more outreach via social media-- and present it in a way that's faintly insulting.
This came to my attention via Chuck Pearson on Twitter, who also has a long blog response. There are also good responses from Edward Carr and Corey Robin, and the hashtag Chuck launched, #EngagedAcademics includes lots of counter-…
drorzel | February 12, 2014I didn't advertise it heavily this time, but Rhett and I did another G+ hangout yesterday, and the video is online now:
We talked for a while about the wonders and importance of VPython coding (including some "Oh, I should totally do that..." moments), where we get post ideas (including a discussion of luge physics), briefly about how we put stuff together for posts, and a bit more about physics education research and why it's really difficult.
I had hoped to throw together a quick post about the luge thing for today, but that's probably not going to happen, so you'll have to settle for the…
drorzel | February 6, 2014A couple of days ago, John Scalzi posted a writing advice open thread, asking people to share the best advice they'd gotten on the craft of writing. There's a lot of good stuff in there, much of it fairly specific to fiction writing-- stuff about plotting, the use of synonyms for "said," how to keep track of who's speaking, etc. As someone who's very much an outsider to that side of the writing business, it's interesting to read, but not that directly useful (I do have long stretches of dialogue in the How-to-Teach books, and occasionally needed to worry about the "said" thing there, but that…
drorzel | February 4, 2014This week's hangout with Rhett Allain, in which we talk about how we got into physics, how we find stuff to read, what we enjoyed on physics blogs this week, what we do and don't like about Twitter, and the revenge of the Sith.
The specific blog posts we mentioned:
Frank Noschese's analysis of gravity in Flappy Birds
Ethan Siegel on Hawking and black holes
Bee at Backreaction on what Hawking really said
Timothy Burke on "administrative bloat" and faculty control
Dr. SkySkull on infinite series
Physics Buzz apologizing for starting the infinite series thing
Matthew Francis on polarization in…
drorzel | February 3, 2014There was a flurry of re-shares last week for this article about Yale shutting down a site that aggregated student course evaluations, which is fine as far as it goes, but repeats a stat that really bugs me:
About 43 percent of college letter grades in 2011 were A’s, up from 31 percent in 1988 and 15 percent in 1960, a 2011 study found. Over roughly the same span, the average amount of studying by people enrolled in college declined almost 50 percent, a 2011 study found, from 25 hours per week to 13 hours.
This is less bad than the usual, thanks to including the 1988 point, but it's still…
drorzel | February 1, 2014Kameron Hurley did a blog post on what it took her to become a writer, which I ran across via Harry Connolly's follow-up. These are fairly long, but well worth reading for insight into what it means to be a writer-- and they're both very good at what they do. You should buy their books, right now.
As always, reading these made me feel really guilty. Maybe I ought to add "the writing life" articles to the list of topics I just don't read, with "Let's make fun of religious people!" and "The Higgs boson is the greatest thing since sliced bread!" Except unlike those two, which just irritate me,…
drorzel | January 31, 2014Topping the looooong list of things I would give a full ResearchBlogging write-up if I had time is this new paper on a ultra-cold atom realization of "Dirac Monopoles". This is really cool stuff, but there are a lot of intricacies that I don't fully understand, so writing it up isn't a simple matter.
The really short version, though, is that a team of AMO physicists have created particles that are analogous to magnetic monopoles-- that is, to a particle that was only a "north" or "south" pole of a magnet, not both together like a conventional bar magnet (leading to my favorite social-media…
drorzel | January 29, 2014Last week, a comment I made on Twitter about the annoyance of doing merit evaluation paperwork led to some back-and-forth with Rhett Allain and the National Society of Black Physicists Twitter account about whether blogs can or should count toward academic evaluation. This seemed like a good topic for another video hangout with me and Rhett, which we did yesterday. Unfortunately, there were some technical issues with the hangout, which delayed the start and didn't allow live Q&A, but we did get video:
(The camera appears to be on just me for most of this, so it's largely a hangout…
drorzel | January 28, 2014On the bright side, I'm unlikely to read anything more stupid and insulting today than this Inside Higher Ed article arguing that it would be wrong to shrink graduate programs in English, because the higher education market is Special:
When you shrink graduate student enrollments (the supply side), you inevitably also shrink the size of graduate programs, which means, willy-nilly, that you decrease tenured faculty lines (the demand side) because they are the folks teaching in grad programs. Administrators would be happy to shrink our programs and eliminate some tenured lines through…
drorzel | January 28, 2014The Pip was sick this weekend, I had a deadline for a bunch of administrative crap that I pushed off back in December when I was rushing to finish the book, and I'm giving an exam on Thursday. So, I'm not doing lengthy blogging right now, but two quick notices:
1) A reminder (I think I posted this before) that the Union College Department of Physics and Astronomy is hiring a visitor, for up to three years (contingent on performance). If you're in the market for an academic job, albeit a temporary one, check out the ad. If you know anybody who might be interested, point it out to them.
2)…
drorzel | January 17, 2014About five minutes into my class Wednesday, my cell phone rang. I silenced it right away, but recognized the number as the kids' day care. And I knew right away what it was: The Pip has had a bit of a cough for a while, and wasn't all that happy that morning. Sure enough, when I got back to my office there was a series of emails waiting for me between Kate and the director of the JCC pre-school program, about how The Pip was just feverish enough to need to be sent home.
Wednesday was a particularly inauspicious day for this, as Kate had a court argument in Rochester on Thursday, and I have a…
drorzel | January 13, 2014When I wrote about Benjamin Bratton's anti-TED rant I only talked about the comment about the low success rate of TED suggestions. That was, admittedly, a small piece of his article, but the rest of it was so ludicrously overheated that I couldn't really take it seriously. It continues to get attention, though, both in the form of approving re-shares on my social media feeds, and in direct responses such as a rebuttal from Chris Anderson himself and most recently a long piece by Christiana Peppard at Medium, which are getting their own collection of approving re-shares. So I guess I ought to…
drorzel | January 10, 2014The posts on box-checking and liberal arts teaching generated a fair number of comments that I haven't really had time to address individually, across a few different social media platforms. So I'm going to collect some of the more important stuff here, in one catch-up post.
--A few people, mostly in places that aren't conducive to linking, raised versions of "You never know what will be useful" as a justification for having a list of boxes to check. And I don't entirely disagree with that. I'm not against the idea of forcing students to take a broader range of stuff than they otherwise might…
drorzel | January 9, 2014As a follow-up to yesterday's post about liberal education and the failure modes thereof, I thought I should try to do something constructive and make suggestions regarding how you might go about a "poetry for physicists" kind of thing. After all, one of the things I find intensely frustrating about a lot of "crisis in ____" discussions is the lack of specific suggestions, so throwing out a "here's a problem, good luck with that" post would be suboptimal behavior on my part. This required some reflection on the question of just what I got out of my "liberal arts" classes back in the day--…
drorzel | January 8, 2014One of the many ancillary tasks associated with my job that I wish I was better at is the advising of students. More specifically, the advising of students who aren't like I was at that age.
What I mean by that is that when I was a student, I didn't need to be convinced of the utility of liberal arts education. I had specifically chosen to go to williams in part because of the small size (having grown up in a small town, I found it more congenial), but also because I was never only interested in science. I always enjoyed reading books and discussing history and politics, so I didn't need a…
catdynamics | January 6, 2014You are at university.
Do you like stars, and stuff?
We revisit old ruminations on career paths 'cause it is topical...
Another rehashed blast from the past.
Should you do astronomy as an undergrad? (the following is in part shamelessly cribbed from a colleague’s previous freshman seminar for our majors):
Do you like stars and stuff?
If not, you probably should look for an alternative to astronomy, on the general principle that at this stage of life you should at least try to do things you actually like.
If you do, good for you.
Now, do you have the aptitude?
Professional astrophysics/…
catdynamics | January 6, 2014So, now you’re at university, and you’re thinking about heading for grad school …
A seasonal revisit of some old rumblings*
*NB: this discussion should not be construed to be anything but hypothetical ramblings, they do not reflect in any way the official position of any academic institution, department or graduate program, especially not the one I am part of!
So You Want To Be An Astrophysicist? Part 1.5: thinking about grad school
Posted by Steinn Sigurðsson on January 16, 2012
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aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2014I'm doing the final library work for my Bronze Age book. When working on a big research project, I always find it a little difficult to calibrate the most economical way to schedule my reading. Of course, I have to know early on what's in the literature on the subject I'm working with. But I also like to start writing early. And I'd rather not put too much time into re-reading stuff after I've figured out how it's relevant to my theme. I read some of it before I start writing, most of it while I'm writing, often at the computer, and then I inevitably save some of it until I'm almost done…
drorzel | January 2, 2014This past Monday, a lot of people in my social media feeds were passing around this Benjamin Bratton piece about the problems with TED, blasting the whole phenomenon as "placebo technoradicalism." The whole thing, he claims, is shallow pseudo-inspirational bullshit that makes people feel nice, but doesn't actually lead anywhere. As he notes at the opening, most of the grand promises made in TED talks have yet to pan out: "So much potential and enthusiasm, and so little actual change."
I found this kind of amusing, because a day earlier the link being passed around a lot of my social media…
aardvarchaeology | December 19, 2013The Swedish Higher Education Authority (Universitetskanslersämbetet) has evaluated our basic university programmes in a long series of subjects. The results for archaeology were published yesterday, based on the status 2012. There were 21 BA (3 yrs), Mag.Phil. (4 yrs) and MA (5 yrs) programmes at the country's archaeology departments. The median grade they've received is "high quality", which translates to a pass here. Let's look at the eleven programmes that flunked or passed with distinction.
Gothenburg. Mag.phil. in Mediterranean archaeology. Very high quality.
Gothenburg. BA in…