Academia
drorzel | February 4, 2015Probably the dumbest person I've ever met in my life was a housemate in grad school. I didn't do my lab work on campus, so I wasn't living in a neighborhood where cheap housing was rented to students, but in a place where folks were either genuinely poor, or in the market for very temporary lodgings while they looked for something better. There were low-income housing units across the street, and also an apartment building full of families who didn't quite qualify for welfare.
This particular guy rented one of the other rooms in the house, and worked a series of unskilled jobs-- assistant on…
jdupuis | February 3, 2015As I mentioned last week, I did a presentation at the recent Ontario Library Association Super Conference using my work on Canadian science policy as a case study in altmetrics.
Here's the session description:
802F Altmetrics in Action: Documenting Cuts to Federal Government Science: An Altmetrics Case Study
The gold standard for measuring scholarly impact is journal article citations. In the online environment we can expand both the conception of scholarly output and how we measure their impact. Blog posts, downloads, page views, comments on blogs, Twitter or Reddit or Stumpleupon mentions…
catdynamics | February 3, 2015Bee at Backreaction has been busy over the last few months, here is my backlog reading list:
A Thousand Words
Do we live in a computer simulation?
Consciousness and Physics from Scratch
10 things I wish I had known 20 years ago
Science changed my life and yours too
Do we write too many papers?
Frequently Asked Questions
No, the long sought-after link between the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity has not been found
Does the scientific method need revision?
It is a good starting point, if you're not reading Backreaction already.
drorzel | January 29, 2015Math with Bad Drawings has a post about "word problems" that will sound very familiar to anyone who's taught introductory physics. As he notes, the problem with "word problems" for math-phobic students is that it requires translating words into symbols, and then using the symbols to select a procedure. It adds a step to what at a lower level is a simple turn-the-crank algorithm: given this set of symbols, do these abstract operations, and write down the answers.
This is a very familiar problem in intro physics, where I regularly have struggling students tell me "I can do the math just fine, I…
drorzel | January 28, 2015Over at Curious Wavefunction, Ashutosh Jogalekar offers a list of great surprising results in physics. This is fairly comprehensive, but leaves out one of my favorites, which is the discovery of the muon. Muons are particles like electrons, but a couple hundred times heavier. When they were first detected in cosmic ray traces in 1936, physicists briefly thought they were the mesons that Hideki Yukawa had predicted as the carriers of the strong nuclear force. It quickly became clear, though, that while the mass was about right to be Yukawa's particle, the muon didn't have anything to do with…
jdupuis | January 26, 2015I'm doing a presentation at this week's Ontario Library Association Super Conference on a case study of my Canadian War on Science work from an altmetrics perspective. In other words, looking at non-traditional ways of evaluating the scholarly and "real world" impact of a piece of research. Of course, in this case, the research output under examination is itself kind of non-traditional, but that just makes it more fun.
The Canadian War on Science post I'm using as the case study is here.
Here's the session description:
802F Altmetrics in Action: Documenting Cuts to Federal Government…
drorzel | January 21, 2015Having made several mentions here of the two tenure-track faculty positions we were trying to fill, I feel like I ought to at least note the completion of the search. As of last Friday, all the papers have been signed with properly dotted i's and crossed t's, and we have two new tenure-track assistant professors on board to start next fall.
It feels a little weird and possibly inappropriate to go into much detail about the folks we hired, though, given that this isn't an officially official sort of blog, and it would definitely be wrong to go into details of the process. I will say that it…
drorzel | January 15, 2015"Daddy, ask me a math problem."
"OK. What's 18 plus 6?"
"Ummm... 24."
"Correct."
"See, I just keep the 18 and then add 2 from the 6 to get 20. That leaves 4 from the six, and 20 plus 4 is 24."
"Right. Good work."
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"Hey, SteelyKid. What's 120 plus 180?"
"Ummm... 300."
"Very good!"
"I just added the hundreds to make 200, and then 80 plus 20 is 100, and then I add them all together to get 300."
"Nice work."
"It takes a little while, though."
"Yes, but you keep practicing, and getting faster."
"Practice makes perfect!"
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"That would take ten minutes, which is... six hundred seconds."
"…
drorzel | January 13, 2015Yesterday's Open Letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson struck a chord with a lot of people, and has spread a good distance on social media, which is gratifying. Given the delocalized nature of modern social media, though, it means I'm having essentially the same argument in five different places via different platforms. In the interest of consolidating this a tiny bit, then, let me post some follow-up stuff here.
-- The most charitable interpretation of the tweet I objected to is that it's meant as praise for good students. The idea being that good students will learn in the absence of good teaching…
drorzel | January 12, 2015Dr. Tyson:
(I find the faux-familiar thing people do with "open letters" really grating, so I'm not going to presume to call you "Neil" through the following...)
First of all, I should probably say "Thanks," because I'm using some of your material in my class this term-- I had them read Stick in the Mud Astronomy, and contrast it with wacky Ancient Alien stuff, and gave them a second assignment based on Manhattanhenge, so that stuff's great. And I'm psyched to hear you've gotten your own talk show. So, you know, that stuff's awesome. Thanks.
And I should also note that while I haven't always…
drorzel | January 12, 2015I've decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the "standard" academic science track.
The fourteenth profile of this round (after a short hiatus for relentless book promotion) features the founder of a new crowd-funding platform for physics.
1) What is your non-academic job? I am the Founder and President of Fiat Physica, the world’s premiere physics fundraising platform.…
drorzel | January 8, 2015I've been intermittently profiling people with STEM degrees and non-academic jobs since 2009, as it turns out. One of the questions in the profile asks "What’s the most important thing you learned from science?" These have been some of the most interesting responses, so I thought it might be interesting, while I sit here and wait out a two-hour delay in the opening of the kids' schools, to compile those answers through the years.
These are in roughly chronological order, and I've left the names off because... Well, mostly because I'm being lazy, but I can invent a principled reason about how…
drorzel | January 7, 2015I've decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the "standard" academic science track.
The thirteenth profile of this round (after a short hiatus for relentless book promotion) features Twitter's own Dr. Mathochist, a mathematician turned software engineer.
1) What is your non-academic job? I'm a software architect at a small company working on a mixture of contracted and…
drorzel | January 6, 2015(When I launched the Advent Calendar of Science Stories series back in December, I had a few things in mind, but wasn't sure I'd get through 24 days. In the end, I had more than enough material, and in fact didn't end up using a few of my original ideas. So I'll do a few additional posts, on an occasional basis, to use up a bit more of the leftover bits from Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist...)
One of my very favorite stories about a famous physicist concerns a young man of about 19, arriving at Cambridge from the University of Edinburgh. While being introduced around the college, it…
catdynamics | January 4, 2015One of the joys of the holidays and the University turning off the heating and locking us out, is that it provides time to catch up on things: papers, refereeing, recommendation letters, grading, syllabi, proposals, all the stuff one can rarely get to during actual working semester hours.
And, sometimes, there is time for real life: casual reading, family, catching up online...
One of the ye olde blog things I like to look over occasionally is Scott Aaronson's shtetl-optimized, for the latest on P!=NP news, or polemic on quantum computing.
This time, what caught my eye was his take on the…
drorzel | December 11, 2014Last week Kate pointed me to this post about heroic stories of science saying "This seems relevant to your interests." And, in fact, a good deal of the post talks about Patricia Fara's Science: A Four Thousand Year History, the Union library's copy of which is sitting on my desk, where I had looked something up in it just that morning. (Specifically, the part where Fara notes that the distinction between "science" and "technology" is largely a class-based fiction, dividing high-status philosophers from grubby practical mechanics.)
There are a bunch of things going on in this, and most of them…
drorzel | December 11, 2014I've been trying to keep to a roughly chronological ordering of these stories, but this slow-motion snow storm that was waiting to greet us on our return from Florida made the schools open on a two-hour delay today, which eats the time I usually use for blogging and books stuff. So I'm going to jump forward three hundred years, to a story that I can outsource.
To set the stage, in the aftermath of WWII, Richard Feynman took up a faculty job at Cornell, but between working on the Manhattan Project and the death of his beloved wife, he found that he was completely burned out, and not able to do…
drorzel | December 3, 2014I've decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the "standard" academic science track.
Ninth in this round is a physics major turned semiconductor engineer.
1) What is your non-academic job? I am a Plasma Etch Process Engineer at Avago Technologies, which is a semiconductor/MEMS company that produces Wireless semiconductor devices.
2) What is your science background? I…
drorzel | December 2, 2014I've decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the "standard" academic science track.
Eighth in this round is Grant Goodyear, who started life as a theoretical chemist, and now does nuclear physics in the oil industry.
1) What is your non-academic job? These days I'm a nuclear physicist who works on the design and characterization of nuclear well-logging tools that are used…
drorzel | November 24, 2014I've decided to do a new round of profiles in the Project for Non-Academic Science (acronym deliberately chosen to coincide with a journal), as a way of getting a little more information out there to students studying in STEM fields who will likely end up with jobs off the "standard" academic science track.
Fourth in this round is a Union alumn (another nice bonus of this is getting to promote some of my college's former students...) who prefers to remain anonymous, but is a computer engineer turned web developer for a public relations firm.
1) What is your non-academic job? I'm a web…