education
drorzel | June 10, 2006By the numbers:
Exams graded: 16
Mean exam grade: 64%
Mean final grade for Physics 121: B-
Papers assigned: 17
Papers received and graded: 16
Mean final grade for Physics 311: B+
Students receiving grades of Incomplete: 1
Large bottles of Scottish ale drunk while watching "Dr. Who": 1
And another academic year is in the books, but for a few odds and ends (one seriously ill student who needs to get me a final paper, receiving my course comment sheets for the term). This is the last term that will count toward my tenure review on the teaching side, so I'm vaguely apprehensive about the course…
drorzel | June 7, 2006My Quantum Optics class this term is a junior/ senior level elective, one of a set of four or five such classes that we rotate through, offering one or two a year. We require physics majors to take one of these classes in order to graduate, and encourage grad-school-bound students to take as many as they can fit in their schedule.
Students in all majors are also required to take five "Writing Across the Curriculum" classes, which are intended to be courses with a strong writing component that should build their writing skills both in their discipline and out. As you might imagine, the bulk of…
drorzel | June 7, 2006A little while back, Eugene Wallingford wrote about the dumbing-down of cookbooks as a metaphor for computer science education. As we get a fair number of student in introductory calculus-based physics who can barely take a derivative of a polynomial, I have some sympathy with what he describes.
The cookbook thing, though, is interesting from a different angle. The article Eugene linked has some interesting quotes from people in the cooking business, including this one:
"We're now two generations into a lack of culinary knowledge being passed down from our parents," said Richard Ruben, a New…
drorzel | June 7, 2006Over at Gene Expression, Razib responds to my brain drain comments in a way that provokes some twinges of Liberal Guilt:
Second, Chad like many others points to the issue of foreign scientists allowing us (Americans) to be complacent about nourishing home grown talent. I don't totally dismiss this, there are probably many doctors and lawyers out there who could be scientists if the incentives were right (Ph.D. scientists are one of the least compensated groups in relation to how much education they have). But, I would frankly rather focus on tightening labor supply on the low end of the…
apalazzo | June 2, 2006Summers and the Allston expansion. Latest stats on gender and higher education. And free books! Ladies and Gentlemen start your hard drives. (all quotes+links below the fold)
From today's Boston Globe:
As Harvard University searches for a new leader, questions loom over its last president's most ambitious project: turning America's oldest university into the nation's hub for life sciences.
During his 5-year tenure as the university's president, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers worked to put Harvard at the forefront of research on how the human cell works, a question the school'…
apalazzo | May 9, 2006Ah, back to work.
One thing I miss about being at the microscope is listening to NPR. A couple of hours ago there was a good piece on Here & Now about the gap between rich universities and poor universities. And it's not only that the endowment gap has increased, but the composition of the schools has also changed. With every passing year, students from lower income families make up less and less of the freshmen class.
Why?
Tuition, better pre-college preparation ...
We should be alarmed that in this day when education is a good predictor of unemployment and income that it's tougher…
drorzel | May 9, 2006Woke up, got out of bed
Ran a comb across my head...
8:40: Leave home, bike to work.
8:50: Arrive at work, stow bike in lab
8:55: Download electronically submitted papers to be graded. Determine which students haven't handed papers in yet.
9:15: Change into teaching clothes, review lecture notes.
(Continued...)
9:35-10:40: Teach class on basics of quantum computing, logic gates, supeerpositions and entanglement.
10:45: Let class go five minutes late. Run to bathroom.
10:50-11:55: Second class, review for Tuesday's exam. Answer questions about right-hand rules, magnetic fields, and Faraday's…
drorzel | May 4, 2006Dr. What Now? has a nice and timely post about helping students prepare for oral presentations, something I'll be doing myself this morning, in preparation for the annual undergraduate research symposium on campus Friday. Of course, being a humanist, what she means by oral presentation is a completely different thing than the PowerPoint slide shows that we do in the sciences:
She did a run-through, and then we sat down together and reworked the first three pages to set up the project more clearly and helpfully for her listeners, and then we designed a handout to help her audience situate her…
drorzel | May 3, 2006Another set of Quantum Optics notes, dealing with entanglement, superposition, EPR paradoxes, and quantum cryptography. A whole bunch of really weird stuff...
Lecture 11: Superposition and entanglement.
Lecture 12: EPR "paradox," introduction to Local Hidden Variables.
Lecture 13: Local Hidden Variable theories, Bell's Theorem/ Bell's Inequalities.
Lecture 14: Bell's Inequality experiments.
Lecture 15: Cryptography, quantum key distribution.
Also, don't forget to suggest people to fill the Teddy Roosevelt spot on the Mount Rushmore of Science...
drorzel | April 28, 2006We had 45 responses to yesterday's poll/quiz question-- thank you to all who participated. The breakdown of answers was, by a quick count:
How do you report your answer in a lab report?
0 votes A) 4.371928645 +/- 0.0316479825 m/s
3 votes B) 4.372 +/- 0.03165 m/s
18 votes C) 4.372 +/- 0.032 m/s
21 votes D) 4.37 +/- 0.03 m/s
2 votes E) Some other answer that I will explain in comments.
So, it's a narrow victory for D, among ScienceBlogs readers.
The correct answer and the reason for the poll are below the fold.
As far as I'm concerned, the correct answer is D). There's absolutely no…
drorzel | April 27, 2006Imagine that you are doing a physics lab to measure the velocity of a small projectile. After making a bunch of measurements to four significant figures, and doing a bunch of arithmetic, you get a value of 4.371928645 m/s. After yet more gruelling math, you find the uncertainty associated with this number to be 0.0316479825 m/s.
How do you report your answer in a lab report?
(There was talk a while back about getting ScienceBlogs some fancy poll software that would allow me to do this with radio buttons and automatic counting, but I don't know how to do that yet, and I'm curious about the…
drorzel | April 25, 2006Monday is the decision deadline for accepted students to decide whether they're coming here next year, and we've had a slow parade of people getting tours of the department and suchlike over the last few weeks. We've also had a couple "Open House" events, where accepted students and their families are invited to campus to see the school, sit in on classes, and have lunch with members of the faculty.
In talking with the students at these events, I'm always struck by how apparently random the college decision process is. We spend hours and hours and thousands of dollars trying to draw the best…
drorzel | April 24, 2006I've found myself in the weird position of giving career advice twice in the last week and a half. Once was to a former student, which I sort of understand, while the second time was a grad student in my former research group, who I've never met. I still don't really feel qualified to offer useful advice-- I haven't even come up for tenure yet, after all. I might have something useful to say next year at this time-- that, or you'll know not to listen to anything I have to say.
Anyway, since I'm thinking about this, and since I'm otherwise afflicted with motivation-sapping medical crud, I'm…
drorzel | April 21, 2006When I teach introductory classes, I use a somewhat more complicated homework policy than most of my colleagues. As a result, my syllabus tends to run longer than theirs, by at least a page or two. I sometimes worry that this is excessive, but happily, Inside Higher Ed is here to prove me wrong:
By my second semester, I was getting more specific on paper. My attendance policy seemed clear to me -- as did my requirements for rewrites. I had even made up an in-depth course outline, which listed due dates for papers, late due dates for papers which included a 10 percent grade penalty, quiz dates…
drorzel | April 17, 2006For those following along with my Quantum Optics class, here's a bunch of lectures about photons:
Lecture 7: Commutators, simple harmonic oscillators, creation and annihilation operators, photons.
Lecture 8: Coherent states of the electromagnetic field.
Lecture 9: Number-phase uncertainty, squeezed states, interferometry.
Lecture 10: Photon anti-correlation revisited, beamsplitters and vacuum states.
This material, unsurprisingly, produced the most panicked looks from students to this point. One of the homework problems was also to recapticulate a couple of calculations from a Phys. Rev. A…
drorzel | April 11, 2006On a note related to the previous entry, Inside Higher Ed had a longer story about Carl Wieman leaving Colorado for Canada (following in the footsteps of his post-docs?), another guy putting his money where his mouth is:
First, he contributed $250,000 of his Nobel Prize award to the Physics Education Technology Fund supporting classroom initiatives at CU-Boulder. He hoped it would prompt other donations, but the momentum never materialized.
Last year, during his sabbatical, Wieman wrote 35 proposals for funding for teaching projects. All he got was one small grant from the National Science…
drorzel | April 10, 2006Inside Higher Ed takes a look today at a new survey about how students choose colleges. They make an effort to make the results sound surprising, but it's really about what I'd expect:
A survey of 600 students who scored over 1100 on the SAT, half of whom scored at least 1300, found that campus visits, parents -- moms more than dads -- word of mouth, and college Web sites are more influential information sources for college-bound students than rankings, guidance counselors, and teachers.
The report, conducted by Lipman Hearne, a marketing firm with many colleges as clients, found that the…
drorzel | April 8, 2006Since the previous batch of lecture notes were surprisingly popular, here's the next couple of classes worth:
Lecture 5: Stellar Interferometry, coherence, intensity correlation functions, Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment.
Lecture 6: Non-classical light, photon anti-bunching, single-photon interference.
Sadly, this exhausts the notes I had written in advance (what with one thing and another, I haven't written any new lectures this past week), which means I need to write at least three lectures this weekend, on the mathematical description of quantized light, coherent states of the…
drorzel | April 3, 2006If you're wondering about the slow posting hereabouts, it's because I'm spending a lot of time on my classes. Having a day job sucks that way.
I've mentioned before that I'm doing a senior-level elective class on Quantum Optics. This is very much an idiot experimentalist's approach to the material, but if you'd like a look at what I'm doing, here are my notes from the first four lectures (scanned into large PDF files, which I'm posting to the class Blackboard site, but will upload here as well, at least for a couple of classes):
Lecture 1: Dirac notation, state vectors, operators as matrices…