education
drorzel | February 28, 2009One of last year's physics majors is spending the year in rural Uganda working at a clinic/ school there. He's keeping a blog, which is intermittently updated by western standards, but remarkably up-to-date given where he is.
This week, he blogged about putting his physics education to use:
I have been doing a lot of electrical work the last two days. I connected a laboratory and rewired the whole system so that some safety switches would be in place and so that I would be the sole person with the knowledge and ability to decide who will have light. Actually, it is to break it up so that we…
grrlscientist | February 27, 2009tags: Blue Grouse, Dusky Grouse, Dendragapus obscurus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Blue (Dusky) Grouse, Dendragapus obscurus, photographed in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow]
Image: Terry Sohl, 18 August 2008 [larger view].
Photo taken with a Canon 50D, 400 5.6L.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
gregladen | February 26, 2009This week we touched on the adviser/advisee relationship between faculty and students in class, and by coincidence blogger k8andcat has posted a very insightful and useful post on this topic. If you are a student (grad or undergrad) or a potential mentor, please read it.
It is here.
drorzel | February 26, 2009ScienceWoman offers a good discussion question:
You are in a room with a bunch of other female faculty/post-docs/grad students from your university. You know a few of them, but most of them are unfamiliar to you. The convener of the meeting asks each of you to introduce yourself by answering the following question: "What is one aspect of your professional life that you are good at?"
It's a good topic that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with gender or the academy, so I will shamelessly steal it re-pose it without that frame:
What is one thing in your professional life that you do…
grrlscientist | February 26, 2009tags: American Goldfinch, Carduelis tristis, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] American Goldfinch, Carduelis tristis, photographed in Buffalo Bayou in West Houston, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 15 February 2009 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/320s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso40.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
bioephemera | February 26, 2009
The Cheerful Cricket and Others (1907)
Children's Digital Library
The Children's Digital Library doesn't have a sleek interface and it can be a bit hiccupy, but if you poke around you'll find a surprising number of vintage children's books like The Cheerful Cricket and Others (1907) or The Illustrated Alphabet of Birds (1851).
Best of all, several of the Oz books illustrated by John R. Neill are here in their entirety! I remember checking these out of the library when I was sick as a child. I think my mom must have charmed the librarian because I remember taking literally stacks of books at…
rallain | February 25, 2009I overheard this high school student complaining about a teacher. Here is essentially what she said (about a class her friend is in):
"This teacher is crazy. He said we have a test the next day and he gave them a study guide. But he didn't give the answers to the study guide. My friend and her mom stayed up till midnight looking up the answers on google."
I am pretty sure this was regarding a math class. So, what is the problem? I think there are a couple, but it mainly has to do with the nature of assessment. What is the point of assessing if students know (memorize temporarily) stuff…
grrlscientist | February 25, 2009tags: Anna's Hummingbird, Calypte anna, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Probable Anna's Hummingbird, Calypte anna, photographed in Seattle, Washington. "[T]his [bird] has almost a yellow stripe from behind the eyes, down the side of the head and down the back. [A]lso the same yellow appears on about the center of the outer wing. It is much smaller than the Anna's that usually come [to the hummingbird feeder]", writes the photographer.
Image: Julie, 23 February 2009 [larger view].
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery…
drorzel | February 25, 2009Over at Dot Physics, Rhett is taking another whack at photons. If you recall, the last time he did this wasn't too successful, and this round fares no better:
So back to the photon. In my original post I made the claim that the photoelectric effect is not a great experiment to show photons. Maybe that is not how it came off, but that is what I meant. The photoelectric effect can be explained quite well with the classical electromagnetic waves model and a quantum nature of matter. Of course there is a quantum nature to light as well.
I think the biggest problem with the photon is that the…
drorzel | February 24, 2009the results from yesterday's poll on reporting exam scores were pretty strongly divided. 47% favored giving histograms, or some very detailed breakdown, while 33% were in favor of statistical measures only (mean, standard deviation, extrema, that sort of thing). 19% were in favor of giving no collective information at all.
My own usual practice is to give the high score, low score, and class mean, and that's it. This has as much to do with student psychology as anything else.
I provide the high score to prevent students with low scores from thinking "Oh, this was just impossible, so nobody…
grrlscientist | February 24, 2009tags: White-tailed Kite, Elanus leucurus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] White-tailed Kite, Elanus leucurus, photographed in Sacramento, California. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow]
Image: John del Rio, autumn 2007 [larger view].
More images by this photographer can be seen on the front page and in the gallery.
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
drorzel | February 24, 2009Tallying up the results of yesterday's poll about formula sheets (as of 8:00 Tuesday morning, 39 total comments), people were overwhelmingly in favor of formula sheets. 72% of respondents reported being allowed to use formula sheets as students, and 69% were in favor of allowing formula sheets as faculty. A substantial number of the "no" responses were in favor of providing important formulae on the test paper.
This is more or less in accord with my own preferences. My general practice is to allow students to make up their own formula sheets in intermediate classes. In the introductory…
drorzel | February 23, 2009No, this isn't a mistake-- I'm doing two quasi-polls on academic issues today, because I care what you think...
I'm handing back last Thursday's exams today. The scores on the test were about what I expect, given the material. As I'm looking at the scores, trying to assess the class as a whole, I'm curious about the issue of score reporting, so I'll throw this out to the general readership:
What information do you think students should be given about exam scores?
You can answer this from either a faculty or a student perspective (please indicate which).
My general practice is to hand back…
grrlscientist | February 23, 2009tags: Costa's Hummingbird, Calypte costae, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Costa's Hummingbird, Calypte costae, photographed in Arizona. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow]
Image: Richard Ditch, 15 May 2008 [larger view].
Date Time Original: 2008:05:15 07:47:40
Exposure Time: 1/30
F-Number: 8.00
ISO: 320
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
drorzel | February 23, 2009In the basement, across the hall from my lab, there are three plastic-covered collages made up of formula sheets from long-ago exams. One of my colleagues let the students in a Physics for Pre-Meds class write whatever they wanted on one sheet of paper to bring into the final, and made art from the collected pages after the test.
I was thinking about this last night as I graded last Thursday's exams, looking at the formula sheets I collected from the students. The range of things that people decide to immortalize on paper is pretty impressive.
Of course, such sheets are not universally loved…
grrlscientist | February 22, 2009tags: Juvenile Yellow-crowned night-heron, Nycticorax violaceus, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Juvenile Yellow-crowned night-heron, Nycticorax violaceus, photographed by Crab Road, Surfside, Texas. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow]
Image: Joseph Kennedy, 12 February 2009 [larger view].
Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope with tsn-pz camera eyepiece 1/1250s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Adult Yellow-crowned night-heron, Nycticorax violaceus, photographed by Crab Road, Surfside, Texas.
Image:…
grrlscientist | February 21, 2009tags: Red-necked Grebe, Podiceps grisegena, birds, mystery bird, bird ID quiz
[Mystery bird] Red-necked Grebe, Podiceps grisegena, photographed in Kearny, Arizona. [I will identify this bird for you tomorrow]
Image: Richard Ditch, 23 November 2006 [larger view].
Please name at least one field mark that supports your identification.
Review all mystery birds to date.
drorzel | February 20, 2009I left off last time with a brief introduction to uncertainty, followed by two classes worth of background, both mathematical and Mathematica.
Class 15 picked up the physics again, starting with an explanation of the connection between the Fourier theorem and uncertainty, namely that any attempt to construct a wavefunction that has both particle and wave propertied will necessarily involve some uncertainty in both position and momentum. This is basically Chapter 2 of the book-in-progress, with a bit more math.
After that, I start laying out quantum mechanics in a more formal way, stating…
bioephemera | February 19, 2009For my DC peeps: I've been helping one of my colleagues with an event for college journalists, to be held next Friday at NIH (Bethesda, MD). It's a roundtable discussion on the challenges of covering addiction issues; scheduled guests include Lisa Stark of ABC News, Lauran Neergaard from the AP, and Jacqueline Duda of the WaPo, as well as scientists from NIH, NIDA, the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan. The event is free and open to college students at regional institutions of higher learning.
There is still some space left, so if you know any DC-area college students who…
cmooney | February 19, 2009Man, Copernicus has been kicking my butt. All the star tables, geometry, etc were turning me in to a pumpkin. So I pulled down a secondary source--Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution--and night became day. I honestly think one of the reasons that Kuhn's later and more famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, had such a dramatic impact is that the author wrote and expounded so clearly.
I don't know what I was expecting from Copernicus, but Kuhn's book (so far) helpfully explains the relationship between the highly technical and the broad and general in the Copernican Revolution. As…