Science
drorzel | July 9, 2009I'm sitting here finding new and inventive ways to not write the pedagogical paper I'm working on at the moment. This seems like a good excuse for a poll!
The hardest part of writing a paper is:(survey)
As you can tell from the list of elements, I have scientific papers in mind, here, but other sorts of scholarly work are also fair game. The question is really what you find to be the absolute worst part to write when you're working on some sort of scholarly publication.
I'm talking specifically about the writing of the text, here. There are a whole host of headaches associated with…
drorzel | July 9, 2009I got a weirdly hostile comment to my popularization post last night:
You have some chutzpah. You are being paid, probably quite well, to do research! Journalists are paid, not nearly so well, to popularize research. It takes some nerve to take an extra year's salary, and to take time away from your real job---and then to complain about not being well-enough rewarded. If you want something to complain about, become a science journalist and see how well you are rewarded then. I'm sure you think that is beneath you, and that you do so much better a job---but the general audience you aim to…
pontiff | July 8, 2009The arXiv is a game changer for how large portions of physics (and increasingly other fields) are done. Paul Ginsparg won a MacArthur award for his vision and stewardship of the arXiv (something other institutions might want to note when they decide that someone trying to change how science is done isn't really doing work that will impact them.) So...Given: The arXiv is great. But there is something that's always bothered me a bit about the arXiv: transparency.
(Note: those of you who wish to complain about the fact that you can't get endorsed on the arXiv, this article is not for you.…
rallain | July 8, 2009What do you see when you are in a completely dark room with no lights?
That is a great question to ask. It can bring out some interesting ideas. Anyway, here is an easy demo to show the color black. The basic idea is to build a box that has a small opening. Here is what it looks like from the outside:
As you can see, just a basic box. I have a door on the top, and I put a paper towel tube for a window. To make it look pretty, I covered it with black paper (so you couldn't tell where I stole the box from).
To demo this to students, I first go around and let everyone look inside. I ask…
ddobbs | July 8, 2009
Ed Yong, echoed by Mike the Mad biologist PhysioProf asks what the heck investigative science journalism would look like. I hope to write more extensively on this soon. In the meantime, a few observations:
To ponder this question -- and to do investigative reporting -- I think it helps to have a sense of the history of science, which embeds in a writer or observer a sense of critical distance and an eye for large forces at work beneath the surface. Machinations in government surprise no one who has studied the history of government and politics. Likewise with science.
Science -- the search…
pontiff | July 8, 2009Has the arXiv been hacked or is it offline? When I connect to arxiv.org it shoots me to mirror sites which haven't been updated since Oct 08. Via @MartinQuantum. Also nanoscale views reports the arXiv down.
Since this is a blog we can easily spread rumors by including a link to an article today about cyberattacks going on right now possibly originating from North Korea.
Update 9:03 am PST: At lanl.arxiv.org you can now get papers greater than October 2008 by searching, but the "recents" and "new" isn't working. Also the RSS feed seems to only have yesterdays posts. A comment on Secret…
bioephemera | July 8, 2009Opened the July 09 issue of The Scientist to find an article by Steven Wiley on why, contrary to popular belief, you aren't necessarily a failure if it turns out you're not suited for academic research:
There is no disgrace in failing to achieve a career as a scientist. Truly. Some of my students achieved distinction in their graduate work only to walk away from a scientific career with no regrets and with much ensuing success. Life is full of opportunities. The more attuned we are to how we realistically match those opportunities, the more likely we are to find real satisfaction in our…
drorzel | July 8, 2009There's a press release dated a week or two ago from Leiden University headlined "Physical reality of string theory demonstrated," in an apparent bid to make Peter Woit's head explode. The release itself is really pretty awful, with poorly explained and irrelevant pictures, and a really confusing description of what this is really about (in part because English was not the first language of the person writing it, I suspect). You have to go down to the third paragraph to find a sort-of explanation of what this is about:
Electrons can form a special kind of state, a so-called quantum critical…
drorzel | July 7, 2009One of the most interesting suggestions made by Chris and Sheril in Unscientific America is the idea that science needs to play political hardball (page 158, in the endnotes):
Why not form a nonpartisan science political action committee, or PAC, devoted to funding candidates who are either scientists themselves or who make science a strong priority and have good records on science issues? With adequate fundind, the PAC might select, say, five or ten members or candidates to support each election cycle. If there's a desire to be really aggressive (and we have mixed feelings about this…
drorzel | July 7, 2009No, this isn't another "How dare those journalists muddle the explanation of some scientific topic" post. The concept here is journalism itself, as seen in Ed Yong's discussion of different modes of science journalism. Writing about the recent World Conference of Science Journalists, he talks about some controversy over what "science journalism" actually means:
Certainly, the idea that journalism equated to talking or writing about science in any form was unpopular. In the opening plenary, Fiona Fox drew a fine line between science communication and journalism, the latter characterised…
drorzel | July 7, 2009It's been a while since we've had any good, solid physics content here, and I feel a little guilty about that. So here's some high-quality (I hope) physics blogging, dealing with two recent(ish) papers from Chris Monroe's group at the University of Maryland. The first is titled "Bell Inequality Violation with Two Remote Atomic Qubits" (and a free version can be found on the Arxiv); the second is "Quantum Teleportation Between Distant Matter Qubits" (and isn't available on the arxiv because it's in Science, but you can get it from their web site). Both of these deal with the physics of…
drorzel | July 7, 2009Matt Leifer had a good comment to yesterday's post about how the editing function, in my opinion, adds considerable value to a book that you don't get with a blog. I got distracted and didn't reply to it, and since a day in blog-time is like a week in the real world, I'll promote it to a post so it doesn't get buried and forgotten:
Yes, but starting a wiki in order to put together a more coherent version of the ideas from the blog may have been equally effective. Blogging is not the only web publishing tool.
Of course, I realize that you still wouldn't get the benefits of the editorial…
drorzel | July 6, 2009Having repeatedly called for more popular-audience discussion of condensed matter physics (which is not my own field, but is the largest single division within the American Physical Society), I would be remiss if I failed to note a couple of really good efforts in this direction.
The first is last week's NOVA ScienceNOW segment on artificial diamonds and their technological potential. It's really cool to see time-lapse video of honkin' big diamonds being grown through chemical vapor deposition techniques.
The second is this New York Times piece on glass and the science of its use as a…
drorzel | July 6, 2009One of the major problems contributing to the dire situation described in Unscientific America is that the incentives of academia don't align very well with the public interest. Academic scientists are rewarded-- with tenure, promotion, and salary increases-- for producing technical, scholarly articles, and not for writing for a general audience. There is very little institutionalized reward within academia for science popularization.
An extreme example of this is the failure of Carl Sagan's nomination to the National Academy of Sciences:
According to sources within the academy, Sagan was…
drorzel | July 6, 2009Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future is the new book by Chris and Sheril of The Intersection (formerly on ScienceBlogs, now at Discover), and they were kind enough to include me on the list of people getting review copies. It turned up on Friday (after I'd already started Newton and the Counterfeiter). I read it this afternoon, partly at lunch with SteelyKid (who, alas, was woken up by somebody else's ill-mannered child), but mostly in the back yard on a surprisingly pleasant afternoon. It's a quick read-- only 132 pages of text, plus 65 pages of (unmarked)…
oracknows | July 6, 2009Two of the major themes on this blog since the very beginning has been the application of science- and evidence-based medicine to the care of patients and why so much of so-called "complementary and alternative" medicine, as well as fringe movements like the anti-vaccine movement, have little or--more commonly--virtually no science to support their claims and recommendations. One major shortcoming of the more commonly used evidence-based medicine paradigm (EBM) that has been in ascendance as the preferred method of evaluating clinical evidence. Specifically, as Dr. Kimball Atwood IV (1, 2, 3…
drorzel | July 5, 2009This is a rare weekend in which I've completed two serious books-- the aforementioned Newton and the Couterfeiter and Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's Unscientific America (a review copy showed up Friday, thanks guys), about which more later. They're very different books, but both excellent in their own way.
While they have very different subjects, though, they have one unfortunate element in common, one of the most pernicious ideas in non-fiction publishing: the un-noted endnote. Both books are exhaustively researched and contain many pages of notes at the end of the text-- just under…
grrlscientist | July 5, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"How does one distinguish a truly civilized nation from an aggregation of
barbarians? That is easy. A civilized country produces much good bird
literature."
--Edgar Kincaid
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and…
drorzel | July 5, 2009I've been enjoying Tom Levenson's "Diary of a Trade Book" series quite a bit (the latest post is on cover art), so when I say a stack of copies of Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist at the bookstore the other day, I snapped one up.
As the title suggests, it's a little like CSI: London 1697, with a good deal of detail about how Newton built a court case against the notorious "coiner" and con man William Chaloner, who earned Newton's personal enmity by not only passing fake coins, but by spreading stories of incompetence and corruption…
grrlscientist | July 5, 2009tags: science, god, religion, creationism, humor, funny, satire, Edward Current, streaming video
This video provides an unbiased look at whether Earth's favorable conditions for life prove that a loving God planned it that way all along. (Hint: There's no other explanation.) [3:45]