Academia
drorzel | November 21, 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.
Third in this round is a physics teacher turned developer of physics education technology at Vernier.
1) What is your non-academic job? Title: Physics Education Technology Specialist
Dept: Tech Support and R&D
Responsibilities:
Support teachers using Vernier sensors, interfaces, and…
drorzel | November 19, 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.
First up in this round is a CS major turned IP lawyer.
1) What is your non-academic job? I am an intellectual property attorney. I work for a "boutique" law firm, which means it specializes in one area of law (that being intellectual property, naturally). I work on all areas of IP,…
drorzel | November 19, 2014Back in August, I gave a talk in Stockholm at the Nordita workshop for science writers, about precision measurement searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. There's now video of this online:
The video quality isn't great, but if you'd like a clearer look at the slides, I've posted them on SlideShare. The talk was divided into two parts, though the video is not:
Part 1:
High Precision, Not High Energy: Using Atomic Physics to Look Beyond the Standard Model (Part I) from Chad Orzel
Part 2:
High Precision, Not High Energy: Using Atomic Physics to Look Beyond the Standard Model (…
drorzel | November 16, 2014I've been quieter than usual here, partly because I've been crushingly busy, but primarily because most of the things I want to talk about, I can't. Not yet, anyway. But I'm still alive, and this murderous term will be over soon, at which point blogging will pick up a bit.
I will throw in a quick teaser for something coming up in the future, though, by way of a thank-you to the folks at Schaffer Library who let me take some photos of the rare books collection:
An 1845 edition of "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," published anonymously but now known to be the work od Robert…
drorzel | November 3, 2014Blogging will continue to be light to nonexistent, as it's crunch time in a lot of ways at the moment, including our double tenure-track search. Which it would be inappropriate to talk about in any more detail than "Wow, this is a lot of work."
There are, however, two academic-job-related things that I probably ought to mention briefly. One is this Inside Higher Ed Essay about metaphors for the academic hiring process, which rightly points out a lot of the problems with the "lottery" analogy that lots of people like to use. In fact, Gerry Canavan argues, it's best understood as a game:
But…
drorzel | October 28, 2014As mentioned last week, I was the on-hand expert for the Secret Science Club's foray into Massachusetts, a screening of the movie Particle Fever held at MASS MoCA. This worked out nicely in a lot of respects-- it gave me an excuse to visit the newly renovated Clark Art Institute in Williamstown and check out the spiffy new library at Williams (where they have my second book on the shelves, but not my first; I may need to send them an author copy in lieu of a check this year...). I also did some random nostalgia things like grabbing dinner at Colonial Pizza (now in a strip mall halfway to…
drorzel | October 23, 2014Over at Backreaction, Bee has a nice piece on our current age of virality. Toward the end, she discusses some of the ways this applies to science, specifically a quote from this Nature article about collaborative efforts to measure "big G", and a story about a Chinese initiative to encourage collaboration. She writes of the latter, "Essentially, it seems, they’re giving out salary increases for scientists to think the same as their colleagues."
And I agree that this can be a problem-- there's a famous paper I can never find looking at the evolution of the accepted value of some physical…
drorzel | September 30, 2014Two language-related items crossed in the Information Supercollider today: the first was Tom's commentary on an opinion piece by Robert Crease and Alfred Goldhaber, the second Steven Pinker on the badness of academic writing.
All of them are worth reading, and I only have small dissents to offer here. One is that, unlike Tom and Crease and Goldhaber, I'm actually just fine with the popular usage of "quantum leap" for a particularly dramatic change. Yes, I realize that the canonical "quantum jump" is the smallest possible change, but I think that's putting too much emphasis on only one aspect…
drorzel | September 22, 2014The AV Club had a Q&A last week asking "What would be your entrance music?" As a music fan and a sports junkie this is, of course, a nearly irresistable question, though a lot of other things got in the way before I could get around to typing up an answer.
I've always kind of thought that Superchunk's "Hyper Enough" would be fantastic entrance music for somebody:
Of course, that somebody wouldn't really be me, as I'm not especially hyper. If I were going to be running out onto a stadium floor for some sporting purpose, I would need something more in line with my actual speed. Maybe a…
drorzel | September 18, 2014The London School of Economics has a report on a study of academic refereeing (PDF) that looked at the effect of incentives on referee behavior. They found that both a "social incentive" (posting the time a given referee took to turn around the papers they reviewed on a web site) and a cash incentive ($100 Amazon gift card for meeting a 4-week deadline) worked to increase the chance of a referee accepting a review request, and improved the chances that they would meet the deadline. The effect of cash was a little smaller for tenured faculty, but they were slightly more susceptible to the…
drorzel | September 17, 2014There was a article in Scientific American about diversity in STEM collecting together the best demographic data available about the science and engineering workforce. It's a useful collection of references, and comes with some very pretty graphics, particularly this one, showing the demographic breakdown of the US population compared to the science and engineering fields:
Demographic breakdown of general population vs. science and engineering, from the Scientific American post.
This is a very professionally made graphic, but also misleading in the worst way. When I first looked at this, I…
drorzel | September 15, 2014Steven Pinker has a piece at the New Republic arguing that Ivy League schools ought to weight standardized test scores more heavily in admissions. this has prompted a bunch of tongue-clucking about the failures of the Ivy League from the usual suspects, and a rather heated concurrence from Scott Aaronson. That last finally got me to read the piece, because I had figured I would be happier not reading it, but I wanted to see what got Scott so worked up.
Sadly, my first instinct was correct. It starts off well enough, taking down an earlier anti-Ivy League piece by William Deresiewicz for being…
drorzel | September 13, 2014Two very brief notes about high-profile scandals in academia:
1) While it involves one of my faculty colleagues, I have no special insight to offer into the case of Valerie Barr's firing by the NSF over long-ago political activity. I know and like Valerie as a colleague, and she did some really good stuff as chair of the CS department, but that's all I know.
As reported by Science, the government's actions in this case seem like that very special kind of stupid that you get in extremely large organizations, where this probably isn't really about her at all. Either somebody in a position to…
drorzel | September 12, 2014Via a whole bunch of people on social media, there's a new study of gender roles in academia, which the Washington Post headlines "Study: Male scientists want to be involved dads, but few are". This is not inaccurate. Some quotes that jumped out at me:
“Academic science doesn’t just have a gender problem, but a family problem,” said Sarah Damaske, a sociology professor at Penn State and one of the report’s authors. “We came to see that men or women, if they want to have families, are likely to face significant challenges.”
The study, Damaske said, showed there was potential for change, in…
drorzel | September 10, 2014Matt "Dean Dad" Reed has a post about the issue of academic conference travel, which is expensive and often the first thing cut out of college budgets. Which leaves faculty either disconnected from their field, or paying out-of-pocket to attend meetings that they need to demonstrate their scholarly productivity. This, in turn, tends to skew research meetings even more toward those at elite schools with big budgets.
This is a hard problem to crack, because the issue isn't just money but time. Reed suggests dropping "the charade of the last half day" because it requires an extra night in a…
drorzel | September 9, 2014One of the weirder experiences I had at the Nordita Workshop for Science Writers a couple of weeks ago was having people ask me "How are you so productive?" (or the equivalent). That caught me off guard, because I don't feel like I'm especially productive-- in fact, I tend to feel like I'm falling behind on things I would like to get done.
And yet, this image is kind of at odds with objective reality, a sort of tenured-white-guy version of Impostor Syndrome. I mean, I'm not Neil de Grasse Tyson, but I've actually got a pretty nice career going as a C-list public intellectual. And, of course…
drorzel | September 8, 2014The new academic year starts this week-- first day of classes is Wednesday-- and I'm dealing with the usual chaos associated with the influx of a new class of students. Who now look to me only a tiny bit older than SteelyKid and the Pip in the above picture (and if you think that sharing that extremely cute photo is part of the motivation for this post, well, you're not wrong...).
This year, the madness of the new term is complicated by having been away for essentially all of August, and by the fact that I'm teaching an entirely new class this term: Astronomy 052: Relativity, Black Holes, and…
drorzel | September 3, 2014I've posted this before, but a reminder can't hurt: We're hiring two tenure-track faculty this fall. The targeted research fields:
We invite applications for two tenure-track Assistant Professor positions starting in September 2015, one in any area of theoretical physics or astrophysics, the other with a strong preference for biophysics or soft condensed matter (either experimental or theoretical). 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…
drorzel | September 3, 2014Having just returned from a long trip where I gave three talks, one of the first things I saw when I started following social media closely again was this post on how to do better presentations. The advice is the usual stuff-- more images, less text, don't read your slides, and for God's sake, rehearse the talk before you give it-- and it's generally very good. Given the two very different types of presentation I gave over the last few weeks, though, I think it's important to add one note about the design of the visuals, which is this: when you're putting a talk together, keep the final…
catdynamics | August 22, 2014Science had a very interesting special section this spring: The Science of Inequality - basically doing a summary and review of issues related to the stuff in Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century
The section has a series of very interesting articles on a range of related topics:
"Inequality in the Long Run" by Piketty and Saez
"The ancient roots of the 1%" by Pringle
"Our Egalitarian Eden" by Pennisi
"Physicists say it's simple" by Cho
"Tax man's gloomy message: the rich will get richer" by Marshall
"A World of Difference" by Underwood
"Can Disparities by Deadly?" by…