Academia
drorzel | February 26, 2016It's been a few weeks since my last summary of physics posts I've been doing at Forbes, so here's the latest eclectic collection:
-- Football Physics And the Myth Of The Dumb Jock: In honor of the Super Bowl, repeating the argument from Eureka that athletes are not, in fact, dumb jocks, but excellent scientific thinkers. Of course, the actual game tat night was horribly ugly, not a compelling display of anything in particular...
-- How Can A Laser Make A Plane Turn Around?: A quick post on the optics of lasers, spinning off a news of the weird story about a flight that had to return after a "…
drorzel | February 26, 2016I've been really, really bad about using this blog to promote stuff I have coming up, but I'll be doing two public-ish appearances in the month of March, and I probably ought to announce those here:
1) Next week, on Wednesday, March 2, I'll be giving the Physics Colloquium at the University of Illinois, on public communication stuff:
"Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science"
Modern social media technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity to engage and inform a broad audience about the practice and products of science. Such outreach efforts are…
drorzel | February 19, 2016One of the evergreen topics for academic magazines like Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education is faculty "mentoring." It's rare for a week to go by without at least one lengthy essay on the topic, many of which recirculate multiple times through my various social media channels. The latest batch of these (no links, because this isn't about the specific articles in question) prompted me to comment over in Twitter-land that:
Articles about "mentoring" of faculty are great for reminding me of all the ways I'm atypical for an academic personality-wise.
— Chad Orzel (@orzelc)…
drorzel | February 5, 2016In yesterday's post about the lack of money in academia, I mentioned in passing that lack of funding is part of the reason for the slow pace of progress on improving faculty diversity. That is, we could make more rapid progress if we suddenly found shitloads of money and could go on a massive hiring binge, but in the absence of flipping great wodges of cash, change comes more slowly.
This, naturally, sparked a sort of morbid curiosity about whether the scale of this problem would be quantifiable, and of course, there's the AIP Statistical Research Center offering numbers on all sorts of…
drorzel | February 4, 2016Over in Twitter-land, somebody linked to this piece promoting open-access publishing, excerpting this bit:
One suggestion: Ban the CV from the grant review process. Rank the projects based on the ideas and ability to carry out the research rather than whether someone has published in Nature, Cell or Science. This could in turn remove the pressure to publish in big journals. I’ve often wondered how much of this could actually be drilled down to sheer laziness on the part of scientists perusing the literature and reviewing grants – “Which journals should I scan for recent papers? Just the big…
drorzel | January 21, 2016Over at Scientific American, Amanda Baker has a story about what scientists say they would tell their younger selves.
I reached out to eight of my colleagues who are currently in STEM fields and asked them a series of questions about their childhood interests in science, school experiences, and roadblocks that they faced on their path from elementary school to their current positions. [...]
Their feedback covered not only what drew them to science, but also what had almost pushed them away. Below I have consolidated the feedback into five main points, including the advice they would give…
oracknows | January 20, 2016One of the cool things about being a longtime blogger in the skeptical world with a reasonably high profile is that I've met, either virtually or in person at various skeptic conferences, a wide variety of people from all over the world. One place in particular that has a vibrant skeptic movement is, of course, Australia, and I've been happy to meet skeptics such as Rachael Dunlop, Jo Benhamu, Richard Saunders, Eren Segev, and several others. I know that, whenever I finally manage to make that trip to Australia that I've been meaning to make for years, there will be people I know to meet up…
catdynamics | November 18, 2015Why sex is just like a nice cuppa...
This animation from Emmeline May and Blue Seat Studios is really quite excellent and has been making the rounds, but that doesn't mean everyone has seen it...
"Copyright ©2015 Emmeline May and Blue Seat Studios
Non-commercial use: Video must have copyright information displayed below video, with a live link to original. No alteration to the video may be made, other than translation."
Quite good analogy.
drorzel | November 5, 2015Two positions of possible interest to academic job seekers:
-- First, we're hiring again in the Union college Department of Physics and Astronomy:
We invite applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position starting in September 2016, with a preference for an experimental physicist working in either biophysics or soft condensed matter. We encourage applications from interdisciplinary scientists and those who could make use of the College’s shared instrumentation resources (including AFM, SEM, micro- Raman and micro-FTIR instruments and IBM cluster computer; see http://www.union.…
drorzel | October 29, 2015I got off on a bit of a rant the other day about bad defenses of "the humanities," but there's a bright side. It finally got me to write my own, over at Forbes, which is basically the last piece of a tetralogy of advice for students:
-- Why small colleges are a great place for students majoring in STEM subjects
-- What students planning to major in STEM subjects should make sure to do in college
-- Why non-STEM majors should nevertheless take science classes in college
-- Why STEM majors should take "humanities" classes, and take them seriously
That last one, posted yesterday, is my attempt…
drorzel | October 27, 2015Somebody in my social media feeds passed along a link to this interview with Berkeley professor Daniel Boyarin about "the humanities," at NPR's science-y blog. This is, of course, relevant to my interests, but sadly, but while it's a short piece, it contains a lot to hate.
For one thing, after the dismissive one-two of "so-called 'scientific methods'" (Scare quotes! "So-called"! Two great tastes that taste great together!) in the process of trying to re-brand "the humanities" as "the human sciences," Boyarin offers the following on methodology:
The primary method for the study of humans…
drorzel | October 19, 2015It's been a while since I did it, but on a few occasions in the past, I've done posts here titled "Who Are You People?" asking readers to comment and say something about themselves. This is not remotely scientific, as a survey of blog readership, though.
Happily, an actual scientist is stepping up for this: Dr. Paige Jarreau, known to Twitter as FromTheLabBench and author of a blog by that name is a postdoc at LSU studying science communication, with a focus on social media. She's put together a reader survey and recruited a bunch of bloggers to promote it, including yours truly.
The survey…
catdynamics | October 16, 2015Well, that took longer than expected.
Anyone still out there?
Lots to talk about, eh?
drorzel | September 12, 2015A day or so ago, an essay came across my social media feeds with the title: "Greek Like Me: Confessions of a Florida Fraternity Brother." I clicked through, and saw the subhed: "The frat code held us together—until it kept us from saving a life," and started reading with a resigned sigh, figuring it was bound to be a huge topic of discussion among the faculty, so I might as well read it before I felt obliged to. (I haven't fully internalized being on sabbatical yet...)
This turns out a story that is not particularly well served by that headline, and especially not that subhed. While those…
drorzel | September 2, 2015Slate's been doing a series about college classes everyone should take, and one of the most heavily promoted of these has been a piece by Dan Check urging students to take something they're terrible at. This is built around an amusing anecdote about an acting class he took back in the day, but as much as this appeals to my liberal-arts-school background, I think it has some serious problems, which are pretty clearly displayed early on:
At four-year colleges, there is enough time and space to do something much more interesting: take at least one course in a subject in which you are untalented…
drorzel | August 25, 2015A couple of articles came across my feeds in the last day or two that highlight the truly important cultural divide in academia. Not the gap between sciences and "humanities," but the much greater divide between faculty and administration. This morning, we have an Inside Higher Ed essay from Kellie Bean on the experience of moving into administration:
When I moved into administration after being a professor, a colleague who had made the same move years before told me to brace for the loss of my faculty friends.
Impossible, I argued -- we attended regular Friday cocktail hours, had fought and…
drorzel | August 12, 2015Over in Tumblr-land, Ben Lillie has an interesting post on all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes of a science talk. It's an intimidatingly long list of stuff, in quite a range of different areas. But this is a solved problem in other performance fields:
And that raises and interesting question, since aside from the science section (and not even all of that), all of these apply to any other performance or production. So how do those people master all of those things? The short answer is that they don’t. Almost any production that requires a long, and more importantly disparate, set of…
drorzel | August 6, 2015Last weekend was our APS-funded outreach workshop The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction, held at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland. The workshop offered a three-day "crash course" on quantum physics to 17 science fiction writers from a variety of media-- we had novelists, short-story writers, screenwriters, and at least one poet. The goal was to provide a basic grounding in quantum physics and a look at current research in hopes of informing and inspiring new stories that will, in turn, inspire the audience for those stories to look more deeply into the…
drorzel | July 22, 2015Having mentioned in yesterday's post that I'll be on sabbatical for the next academic year, this would probably be a good time to point out that this means I'm somewhat more flexible than usual in terms of going places and giving talks. And I enjoy going places and giving talks. About lots of different things.
So, if you're at a place that might be interested in a science-y speaker on quantum physics, relativity, science communication, science in general, or something related to those, drop me a line. I'd be happy to talk about the possibility of visiting new places and talking to people…
jdupuis | July 21, 2015One of the central tensions of modern librarianship is how to allocate limited resources to both make the whole world a better place and to serve our local communities by providing them with the services and collections they need to support their teaching, learning and research.
The particular way we try and change the world that I'm talking about here is working to create a fairer and more equitable scholarly communications ecosystem. We do this by both advocating for increased openness in the publishing system and working to actually create that fairer system via our own local open access…