Academia
jdupuis | August 6, 2014It seems that the American Association for the Advancement of Science has just announced the new publisher of it's flagship family of Science journals:
AAAS CEO Alan I. Leshner today announced the appointment of Kent Anderson, a past president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SPP), to serve as Publisher of the Science family of journals.
Anderson, who in 2011 received the SPP's highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award, will assume the role of Science Publisher as of 3 November.
Currently, he is the CEO and Publisher of STRIATUS/The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery in Needham…
drorzel | August 5, 2014Over at FiveThirtyEight, they have a number-crunching analysis of the number of papers (co)authored by women in the arxiv preprint server, including a breakdown of first-author and last-author papers by women, which are perhaps better indicators of prestige. The key time series graph is here:
Fraction of women authors on the arxiv preprint server over time, from FivethirtyEight.
This shows a steady increase (save for a brief drop in the first couple of years, which probably ought to be discounted as the arxiv was just getting started) from a bit over 5% women in the early 90's to a bit…
drorzel | July 30, 2014In which Rhett and I talk about awful academic computing systems, Worldcon, our Wikipedia pages, and AAPT meeting envy.
Some links:
-- Rhett's Wikipedia entry
-- My Wikipedia entry
-- The 2014 AAPT Summer Meeting
-- LonCon 3, this year's Worldcon
-- My puzzling Worldcon schedule
We have some ideas for what to do next time, when our little hangout is old enough to drink, but you need to watch all the way to the end to hear those.
drorzel | July 28, 2014Given the recent Feynman explosion (timeline of events), some people may be casting about looking for an alternative source of colorful-character anecdotes in physics. Fortunately, the search doesn't need to go all that far-- if you flip back a couple of pages in the imaginary alphabetical listing of physicists, you'll find a guy who fits the bill very well: Enrico Fermi.
Fermi's contributions to physics are arguably as significant as Feynman's. He was the first to work out the statistical mechanics of particles obeying the Pauli exclusion principle, now called "fermions" in his honor (Paul…
drorzel | July 25, 2014I should really know better than to click any tweeted link with a huff.to shortened URL, but for some reason, I actually followed one to an article with the limited-reach clickbait title Curious About Quantum Physics? Read These 10 Articles!. Which is only part one, because Huffington Post, so it's actually five articles.
Three of the five articles are Einstein papers from 1905, which is sort of the equivalent of making a Ten Essential Rock Albums list that includes Revolver, Abbey Road, and the White Album. One of the goals of a well-done list of "essential" whatever is to give a sense of…
catdynamics | July 13, 2014There was an interesting article in the Chronicle a few weeks ago:
The Soul of the Research University by Nicholas Lemann.
Lemann provides a very interesting discussion of the contradiction between the academic ideal of the research university and the political perspective of the vocational school of further education, including some healthy historical perspective on the development of the concept in the US.
"Underlying all of this is the fundamental problem of the country’s having adopted two noncongruent ideals of higher education.
... most of the stakeholders that provide resources to…
drorzel | July 11, 2014We got an email from the people running SteelyKid's summer camp asking for volunteers to speak at a career day sort of event early next week. I said "Sure, I can do that, and talk about the glamorous life of a physics professor and book author." They said "Great, you'll be talking to several groups, ranging from second-graders down to 3-4 year olds."
That's... not quite the audience I was expecting (the camp runs up through 5th grade or so). I don't think they're going to care all that much about physics research, so instead, I'll probably say "My job is to teach people about science" and…
drorzel | July 9, 2014Text of the ad we're running for our searches this fall. This will go live on the usual sites at the start of August, but as a sort of experiment in the power of social media, I'm going to share it here first, and see what that gets us.
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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…
drorzel | July 7, 2014Also coming to my attention during the weekend blog shutdown was this Princeton Alumni Weekly piece on the rhetoric of crisis in the humanities. Like several other authors before him, Gideon Rosen points out that there's little numerical evidence of a real "crisis," and that most of the cries of alarm you hear from academics these days have near-perfect matches in prior generations. The humanities have always been in crisis.
This wouldn't be worth mentioning, but Rosen goes on to offer an attempt at an explanation of why the sense of crisis is so palpable within the humanities, an explanation…
drorzel | July 7, 2014Right around the time I shut things down for the long holiday weekend, the Washington Post ran this Joel Achenbach piece on mistakes in science. Achenbach's article was prompted in part by the ongoing discussion of the significance (or lack thereof) of the BICEP2 results, which included probably the most re-shared pieces of last week in the physics blogosphere, a pair of interviews with a BICEP2 researcher and a prominent skeptic. This, in turn, led to a lot of very predictable criticism of the BICEP2 team for over-hyping their results, and a bunch of social-media handwringing about how the…
drorzel | July 1, 2014The physics vs. philosophy slow-motion blogfight continues, the latest major contribution being Sean Carroll's "Physicists Should Stop Saying silly Things About Philosophy. I've been mostly trying to stay out of this, but when I read through the comments at Sean's post to see if anybody offered any specific examples of problems that could've been avoided by talking to philosophers, I was kind of surprised to find a lot of people talking up Niels Bohr. (Likewise Ashutosh Jogalekar's Philosophy Begins Where Physics Ends....) If you're trying to talk up the virtues of philosophy over "pure"…
drorzel | June 24, 2014A few weeks back, a Union alumnus who works at Troy Prep contacted the college to arrange a visit for a bunch of second-graders, and asked if faculty would be willing to arrange talks and demos for the kids. I said something like "Sure, we could probably make liquid nitrogen ice cream for them," and then basically forgot about it until last week, when I said "Oh, crap, I have to make liquid nitrogen ice cream for 60 seven-year-olds on Monday!"
Fortunately, our students in the Department of Physics and Astronomy are awesome, and I was able to round up a handful of helpers from the summer…
drorzel | June 16, 2014The latest in a long series of articles making me glad I don't work in psychology was this piece about replication in the Guardian. This spins off some harsh criticism of replication studies and a call for an official policy requiring consultation with the original authors of a study that you're attempting to replicate. The reason given is that psychology is so complicated that there's no way to capture all the relevant details in a published methods section, so failed replications are likely to happen because some crucial detail was omitted in the follow-up study.
Predictably enough, this…
drorzel | June 12, 2014A bunch of people were talking about this Nature Jobs article on the GRE this morning while I was proctoring the final for my intro E&M class, which provided a nice distraction. I posted a bunch of comments about it to Twitter, but as that's awfully ephemeral, I figured I might as well collect them here. Which, purely coincidentally, also provides a nice way to put off grading this big stack of exam papers...
Anyway, the thrust of the article is that the GRE is a bad thing to be using as an admissions criterion for graduate school in science and engineering, because it has large…
drorzel | June 10, 2014I had a couple of conversations at DAMOP last week about career issues, and I just want to note that I will never get used to the idea that I'm a respected elder anything, whose advice would be valued. I basically feel like I lucked into my whole career, so I hesitate to advise others as to what they should do. But then, there's a huge element of luck in any tenure-track career, given the tiny ratio of jobs to candidates.
One thing that came up was, of course, the question of how it is I run a blog, which connects to the larger question of work-life balance. One of the people I spoke to…
catdynamics | June 2, 2014yet again I trip across a snarky tweet about a distinguished scientist using comic sans
or some other whimsical and easily read on a screen unprofessional and unserious design choice in a presentation
these theological wars are becoming as bad as PC/Mac or emacs/vi flame wars of yore
anyone care to summarise, rationally, and briefly, why serif or sans matters?
Please avoid references to unrepeatable badly controlled A/B studies, and opinion polls of helvetica-phobic graphics designers.
drorzel | May 28, 2014For the sixteenth episode of Uncertain Dots, we decided to bring in some guests, Andy Rundquist and Kelly O'Shea for a conversation about standards-based grading. This came up because I'm playing around with this using the same tiered scheme I talked about back in January.
This was a fun conversation, and some interesting ideas came up. I remain kind of boggled by the amount of oral exam time Andy puts in, and I find the notion of goal-less problems intriguing, but I'm not sure I could implement it here.
Some links:
Kelly on goal-less problems
Direct Measurement Video
So, anyway, that was…
catdynamics | May 27, 2014Not entirely coincidentally the general topic of misogyny, microaggression and harassment was featured on the Women in Astronomy blog recently:
Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Defining the Problem
Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Survival of the Clueless
Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: The Serial Harasser's Playbook
Fed Up With Sexual Harassment: Power to Speak Up
Fed Up with Sexual Harassment
Harassment from Student
Here are some other useful reads:
Do Women Have an Advantage in Faculty Searches?
Truth Against Humanity - Starstryder
drorzel | May 24, 2014I've had a lot of weird things happen in the time I've been teaching, but the above image is my new favorite message from a student. We gave an exam Thursday night, so a couple of my colleagues canceled class on Friday, but I'm going to be at DAMOP the last week of class, so I want to get a little bit ahead to reduce the amount of stuff other people have to cover for me. So I had a class as usual.
All but two of the students showed up, which either means we terrified them with the exam, or they actually like the class. And, actually, there was only one student who didn't show up at all-- the…
drorzel | May 22, 2014That recent study on active learning continues to generate some press, including a new interview with Carl Wieman about why traditional lectures are problematic. Wieman is pretty blunt about his opinions on the subject, which will come as no surprise to people in the AMO physics community...
Anyway, while most of the rest of the academic nation is into final exams and even graduation parties, we still have two more weeks of class after this one, and we're giving an exam tonight in my intro E&M class. Which means I'm still spending a lot of time thinking about this stuff. Some related…