education
drorzel | April 6, 2009Over at the First Excited State, the quasi-anonymous proprietor laments the tendency of basketball replays to focus on the shot rather than the play that set up the shot, and compares this to a maddening student habit:
Students in introductory physics classes inevitably place too much focus on the final numerical answer of the problem, which in reality is the least important part. I graded a quiz last week where I spent way too much time trying to decipher the numbers the students wrote down, because they placed the numbers in their equations rather than writing them clearly with the symbols…
tqa | April 6, 2009
On Thursday, a Colorado jury found that Ward Churchill had been improperly fired, and awarded him $1 in damages. Right now, I've got very mixed feelings about the verdict. That's not a surprise, of course, since I've had mixed feelings about the entire situation almost since the start.
For those of you who either aren't aware or have forgotten about the case, Churchill was a professor at the University of Colorado who stirred up a bit of controversy when an essay that he wrote about the 9/11 attacks came to national attention. In that essay, Churchill blamed the victims for the attacks,…
evolvingthoughts | April 5, 2009I'm very conflicted about this: An Argentinian professor who put Derrida's works in translation online because the published works were out of print or too expensive (way more than the European editions) has been charged with criminal copyright infringement, according to this page. While I think that publishers, especially academic publishers, who screw their market with exorbitant prices, or simply fail to maintain their catalogue are Bad Guys, I also know that the costs involved in publishing are nontrivial. Also, I tend to think that publishing Derrida is a criminal offense (I joke). But…
bioephemera | April 5, 2009It's just not Google's week. A mob of angry villagers north of London formed human chains and chased off the Google Maps car (no word whether they had torches). Microsoft is all up in Google's business (to be precise, they're funding a team at New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, led by a former Microsoft programmer, which is weighing in on the pending settlement of Google's book-scanning lawsuit). And it's not just Microsoft that's taking aim at Google: the NYT has an overview of the many parties, from librarians to law professors, who have serious doubts about…
grrlscientist | April 5, 2009tags: Ferruginous Hawk, Buteo regalis, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Ferruginous Hawk, Buteo regalis, photographed on the Fort Pierre National Grasslands south of Pierre, South Dakota. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow]
Image: Terry Sohl, 16 February 2009 [larger view].
Photo taken with a Canon 50D, 400 5.6L.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Rick Wright, Managing Director of WINGS Birding Tours Worldwide, writes:
Here's a long-winged, long-tailed buteo with a dull white tail. For many of us, that might have been enough to…
grrlscientist | April 4, 2009tags: mystery bird, identify this bird, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] American Crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos, photographed in Brazos Bend State Park, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 10 March 2009 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/1500s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Another view;
American Crow, Corvus brachyrhynchos, photographed in Brazos Bend State Park, Texas.
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 10 March 2009 [larger view].…
tqa | April 4, 2009
Since I'm currently out of town, original content is going to be in short supply for a few days. Fortunately, there are a few things I've written over the years that I think people might still enjoy (or at least tolerate). Since they didn't get read much when I first posted them, I thought I'd give them another chance. This one was originally posted at the old blog in August of 2005.
I took these pictures, showing the screen of a Sega video game, at a nearby* Chuck E. Cheese today**. I think they definitely help answer Bush's question about education.
*at the time the post was…
tqa | April 3, 2009
I'm heading out of town today, so original content is going to be in short supply for a few days. Fortunately (for me) there are a few things I've written over the years that I think people might still enjoy (or at least tolerate). Since they didn't get read much when I first posted them, I thought I'd give them another chance. Today's entry was first written back on 25 August, 2005. I'd just started work as a teaching assistant, and quickly discovered that I had a lot to learn about teaching and about students.
Yesterday, I got my first chance to TA a lab. I've got a nice deal this…
grrlscientist | April 3, 2009tags: Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Polioptila caerulea, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Polioptila caerulea, photographed in Arizona. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow]
Image: Richard Ditch, 24 December 2008 [larger view].
Date Time Original: 2008:12:24 08:21:25
Exposure Time: 1/200
F-Number: 5.60
ISO: 320
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
rskloot | April 2, 2009
After seven happy years serving as a vice president, I have just finished my second term on the National Book Critics Circle board of directors. While I was on the board, I put together a document of tips for breaking into book reviewing called, Strategies for Breaking in and Staying in: Getting started as a critic, building your reviewing portfolio, going national, and keeping editors happy. It's no longer available on the NBCC's website, and I've gotten quite a few requests for it recently, so I've posted it here for those interested.
I put these tips together a few years ago --…
drorzel | April 2, 2009Physics World this month has a nice article by Robert Crease on the strategies used in popular physics books, drawing on a study of popular books by Elizabeth Leane (Reading Popular Physics, much of which is available via Google Books). He talks about three different strategies that she identifies, and how they're employed in different fields. I was particularly amused by this:
Explaining quantum theory, for instance, seems both to require and to shipwreck metaphors — for what is “down there” just does not behave like what is “up here”. A common tool is to anthropomorphize, personifying…
drorzel | April 2, 2009The spring round of the Adopt-a-Physicist outreach program will begin soon. I did this in the Fall, and it was a good experience, so I've registered myself again.
The program pairs volunteer physicists with high school classes, and provides a web forum in which students can ask questions about physics and careers in physics. Back in the fall, the students I communicated with asked smart and interesting questions, and it was a pleasure to talk to them.
If you have a degree in physics (undergraduate or graduate), and would like to help encourage high school students to consider physics, you…
mikethemadbiologist | April 2, 2009Maybe...biology? Uncharacteristically, I'm going to, in vague terms, talk about my career trajectory because I think it offers an important lesson (maybe. Perhaps not. Fuck it, it's my blog...) An anecdote in a post by John Hawks about the potential overemphasis on bioinformatics in the education of biology students inspired me to answer this question, because it mirrors my experience:
...don't these students understand that in a few years all the software they wrote to handle these data will be obsolete? They certainly aren't solving interesting problems in computer science, and in a…
grrlscientist | April 2, 2009tags: Pied-billed Grebe, Podilymbus podiceps, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Pied-billed Grebe, Podilymbus podiceps, photographed in Brazoria Wildlife Refuge, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 10 March 2009 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/500s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
grrlscientist | April 1, 2009tags: Eastern Screech-Owl, Otus asio, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Eastern Screech-Owl, Otus asio, photographed at the Unitarian/Universalist Fellowship building in Manhattan Kansas [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow]
Image: photographed by Thomas Manney, this image appears here at the suggestion of Dave Rintoul.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
[Mystery bird] photographed at the Unitarian/Universalist Fellowship building in Manhattan Kansas [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow]
Image: photographed by Thomas…
bioephemera | March 31, 2009
My friend John Ohab is hosting a new DoD webcast called "Armed With Science." Sure, it has an over-the-top logo reminiscent of the Syfy Channel (I like to intone "ARMED WITH SCIENCE" with the same cadence as "PIGS IN SPACE!"), but the show turns out to be really well-done and interesting. Each episode is a half-hour interview with a researchers in a scientific field relevant to the military: sometimes that means SONAR or geopositioning, but they also take on general science topics like Brain Awareness Week at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. It's a nice mix of topics, and it's…
drorzel | March 31, 2009This is the final report on my modern physics class from last term, covering the last week of classes, which generally deal with nuclear and particle physics. This was actually three-and-a-bit classes, because I lost one class to a nasty cold a few weeks earlier, and used part of the lab period to make up for it.
Class 28 was actually taught by a colleague of mine (thanks, Rebecca!), because Kate and I were in Boston for her father's wake. She taught off my notes, though, so I'll still report it as if I did the class.
This class opens with a brief return of the historical treatment of the…
drorzel | March 31, 2009In the last course report post, we dispensed of atomic and molecular physics in just three classes. The next three classes do the same for solid state physics.
Class 25 picks up on the idea of basic molecular potentials from the end of the previous class, and uses that to introduce energy bands in a qualitative manner. Bringing two atoms together splits the electron levels into two states, adding a third adds more closely spaced levels, and so on. Every time you add more atoms, you add more closely spaced energy levels, and as you approach truly macroscopic systems, those states run together…
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…
sciencepunk | March 31, 2009
What is a charity? Ostensibly, it's an organisation dedicated to the public benefit, one that does not seek to make profits, and that does not have political goals. So how the heck does something like the Catholic Church qualify as a charity?
In England and Wales, all charitable organisations with an income of more than £5,000 must be registered with the Charities Commission, which acts as a supervisory power. The core rule is that all charities must exist "for the public benefit". There exists a list of 13 purposes that a charity can subscribe to, including advancements of animal…